Andrew''s Brain by E. L. Doctorow
Your brains are looking good, he told them. Like a promising field for oil drilling.
They were not loath to show their irritation. In their eyes the president was a kind of dauphin who they felt lacked gravitas, to say nothing of a reasonable attention span. Their belief in their intellectual superiority was at odds with the fact that he was of the historically elected and they were not. He could affect a presidential strut walking to his helicopter, but he was not the real kingly thing as they felt they would be were they in his shoes. [thinking] In other countries it was men like these who mounted coups.
You saw all that?
When you’re in a room with the president of the United States you become very observant. My presence enraged the two men. So much so that I thought I would go along with the president and run a thought experiment. They believed I was putting them under the microscope, so why not? When in the history of the United States had a private citizen ever had a chance like this? But it had to be quick. It could work only until the president lost interest. That didn’t give me much time.
Chaingang and Rumbum had made their careers in government. Their minds were wired into well-established neuronal circuits that found expression in the vocabularies of war, detention, physical torture, political power, social gossip, sex, and money. So I cleared my throat and gave them each a pad and a pencil, and explained the cog sci prisoners’ dilemma game to them. Of course I didn’t send them out of the room as I had the high schoolers, I just told them each, privately, outside of the hearing of the other, to imagine that the president knew of their conspiracy to overthrow the government because his co-conspirator had betrayed him. He could say nothing or he could betray his colleague in turn. Their decisions would have greater or lesser punitive consequences in the hands of the attorney general. They were to write down the decision to betray or not to betray their co-conspirator.
They put up with this?
Like children given a task. They sat at opposite ends of one of the Oval Office sofas, their backs turned as they bent over their pads—with frowns, a closing of eyes here, a rubbing of forehead there—in the performance of heavy thought. I had warned them not to look at each other, but that was unnecessary. This was game theory, after all. Betray your co-conspirator and you’re in trouble, for you’ve admitted your guilt, but if you don’t betray him and he betrays you, he goes free and you’re headed for the slammer big-time. Only if neither of you betrays the other is the case against you dropped.
And what happened?
These men had served in various capacities over several administrations. Now they were at the very top. How had they gotten there? Who more than they knew how politics worked? So of course each of them, figuring the best possible outcome for himself, had no choice but to betray.
How the president laughed when I handed him the pads on which they’d written their decisions. A no-brainer, he said.
You made yourself known there, didn’t you.
I had no illusions, though. He needed a sidekick, a familiar, but for how long? He gave me one of those little lapel flags they liked to wear, so you knew they were patriots.
Yes?
Pinned it on me as you would a medal. I was now one of the good guys. Though as it turned out, my job as the director of the phantom White House Office of Neurological Research lasted not quite three weeks.
But a lifetime, as it were.
Yes. One afternoon, before I left for the day, the president showed me the Lincoln Bedroom on the second floor. Lincoln never slept there, of course, it wasn’t even a bedroom when he lived there. What was it, a study? But anyway the heavy Victorian furniture and swooping draperies looked as if Lincoln might have slept there. I said hello to the tenants—
The tenants?
Well, you know, this is where the president put up big-time donors for an overnight thrill. A calm enough couple they were, not at all overwhelmed to be in the president’s company, the man some decades grayer than the woman. They were in the act of unpacking. When you look at money it doesn’t seem anything but human. We all huddled over the desk where a copy of the Gettysburg Address was under glass.
So you were getting around in the White House.
I noticed of the young wife that she was tall with a good figure, but the face was as if ceramicized, somehow, the eyes glancing at me without seeming to realize I was there. A golden fall of hair as shiny and stiff as if shellacked. If Briony had been with me she would have felt cowed, my poor innocent, but just for a moment. This was an entire aspect of American life she knew nothing about. On the other hand, looking at Briony’s simple face-washed beauty, and the pure being that shone from her blue eyes, this woman would have felt her heart sinking for having spent her life affecting a sophistication she did not feel.
You knew all this from looking at her?
Thoughts of Briony gave me all sorts of perceptive advantages. It was as if something of her mind was still alive in me.
Is that cognitive science?
Not really. It’s more like suffering.
HE DID KEEP a neat desk, the president, a few papers aligned under a little snow globe that served as a paperweight. You shook the globe and the snow drifted over a child sledding down a hillside. I had begun to feel sorry for my old roommate. He lived with his ineptitude. From my basement window I could see a more or less constant procession of limos driving up: generals and admirals, diplomats, cabinet members, visiting foreign dignitaries, all of whom he had to see because he was said to be the leader of the free world. He seemed more relaxed in those arts awards evenings where performers sang and medals were given out to film directors, playwrights, and actors. I was invited to one of those and sat in the rear where no one noticed me.
I had begun to savor my role there in the White House, having accepted a lieutenancy in the little war between the president and his closest advisors. It was as if right there in the Oval Office the prevailing contentiousness of the world outside had to be honored. It was as if the wars they were conducting were to be symbolized in their own relationships. I thought how contention makes us human. How every form of it is practiced religiously, from gentlemanly debate to rape and pillage, from dirty political attacks to assassinations. Our nighttime street fights outside of bars, our slapping arguments in plush bedrooms, our murderous mutterings in the divorce courts. We had parents who beat their children, schoolyard bullies, career-climbing killers in ties and suits, drivers cutting one another off, people pushing one another through the subway doors, nations making war, dropping bombs, swarming onto beaches, the daily military coups, the endless disappearances, the dispossessed dying in their tent camps, the ethnic cleansing crusades, drug wars, terrorist murders, and all violence in every form countenanced somewhere by some religion or other … and for its entertainment politicidal, genocidal, suicidal humanity attending its beloved kick-boxing matches, and cockfights, or losing its paychecks on the blackjack felt and then going back to work undercutting the competition, scamming, ponzi-ing, poisoning … and the impassioned lovers of their times contending in their own little universe of sex, one turgidly wanting it, the other wincingly refusing it.
Have you left anything out?
So I had been brought here, I thought, to give my old roommate some measure of satisfaction in his peculiar struggle with Chaingang and Rumbum. But there was a country to be run and they were the president’s two closest advisors, and after all he needed them just as they needed him. So after a few more of Android’s reports of neurological developments around the world, I detected a shift in the dynamic: I’d been there for a couple of weeks. At a certain moment one day they all had the same look on their faces, an effort not to laugh, and I understood that a new alliance in the great diplomatic tradition had been effected. I was alone versus the triumvirate and the joke was on me—the three of them in collusion to put me in a foolscap with bells—and all this while the world waited for the next civil war, the next tanking of the market, the next suicide bombing, the next
So there came that moment of realization and it was time to let them know who they were dealing with. I gave them Android’s last lecture on neurological developments around the world. I told them the great problem confronting neuroscience is how the brain becomes the mind. How that three-pound knitting ball makes you feel like a human being. I said we were working on it, and if they valued their lives, or life as they knew it, they would do well to divert whatever government funding there was for neuroscience and add it to the defense budget. More rockets, landmines, jet fighters—all those things you love, I said. Because if we figure out how the brain gives us consciousness, we will have learned how to replicate consciousness. You understand that, don’t you, Doc?
I do.
So what, you mean computers who talk back?, Chaingang said. I’ve seen that in the movies. Computers, of course, I said, and animals genetically developed to have more than the primary consciousness of animals. To have feelings, states of mind, memory, longing. He means like in Disney, Rumbum said, and they laughed. I laughed as well. Yes, I said, and with all of that the end of the mythic human world we’ve had since the Bronze Age. The end of our dominion. The end of the Bible and all the stories we’ve told ourselves until now.
Andrew, you really think that?
How insulated these men were. They were imperial in their selfhood, these corporate culturists running a government. They lived, heedless, infallible. They understood contention and expected nothing else. I told them it depressed me to be in the same room with them. The president looked at me—did I mean him as well? You all live unquestioningly inside the social reality—war, God, money—that other people invented long ago, I said, and you take these things for raw existence. It was quite a speech I gave them.
Apparently.
They were careless of life, I said, they were prime examples of human insufficiency, I said, and I told them I spoke as an authority on the subject. Then I took a deep breath and did a handstand.
A what?
It just came over me, I was up on my hands almost before I realized it. Perhaps it was the image of Briony on the high bar—my first glimpse of her—that animated me, my brain having decided that this was the thing to do, a mimetic act to bring her into resolution there in the White House. At least that is my interpretation now. At the time it was possibly no more than an act of inspired madness. Or maybe it was just my brain saying if it’s a fool they want it’s a fool they will get. Or maybe I just wanted to be out of there.
So you actually did that?
What I’m saying. I’d never done a bona fide handstand before. I was another man in the Oval Office.
I can tell you that as Andrew wavered there, his arms aching, his feet moving to and fro like the shuttles of a loom, he found himself weeping, either from the effort or from the image in his mind, Briony smiling, her clear blue eyes in their sturdy innocence assessing him. What was she saying? I heard her voice, her soundless voice: Going for a run, Andrew. For her morning snack, Willa likes the applesauce.
And the door closes and then the arc of her balletic leap into the fire.
I think I groaned, the blood pounding in my head, but it seemed to me a matter of honor to remain upside down as long as possible. They, the president and Chaingang and Rumbum, had risen from their chairs, Chaingang stepping behind the president’s desk and shouting into a phone. I collapsed then, landing not the way you’re supposed to, but painfully, with a thud, and I think now that almost simultaneously a pair of marines in dress uniform were yanking me to my feet and twisting my arms behind my back. So one way or another it was a very physical day for me.
Apparently it was.
What did you say?
I was agreeing.
But it was more than that. I doubt if anyone had ever done a handstand in the Oval Office before. Really it was a triumph. I had for a moment risen out of my characteristic humility, my ordinary citizenness, and in one upside-down gesture achieved equity with these governors of my country. I knew the future whereas they didn’t. You might not have known from all I’ve spoken of my life that I was not without a keen political awareness. As I stood there, functionally disabled by the two marines, Chaingang and Rumbum were deciding what would be my fate. They ordered my arrest. Rumbum saying I had threatened the life of the president. Get this fool out of here, he said.
Make that a Holy Fool, I said.
Is that what you felt you were?
What else could I be if my old roommate was The Pretender? Because that’s what he unquestionably was. And never again would I be another man according to the situation. I could feel my brain becoming me—we were resolved as one. As I was led to the door, I turned and said what a Holy Fool would say: You are only the worst so far, there is far worse to come. Perhaps not tomorrow. Perhaps not next year, but you have shown us the path into the Dark Wood. I suppose that was Dante I was doing right there. My roommate didn’t like to hear it. Oh, come on, Android, he called, lighten up. Was he asking me to retract? Was he expecting my blessing? But how could I? What makes a fool holy is that he mourns for his country.
I stood tall, nodded to my guards, and they led me away.
So, Doc, how long have I been here?
It’s been a while.
And you won’t tell me where this is?
I can’t.
It’s not home.
How do you know that?
The air. There’s a softness to it. It gives one a settled sweet earth taste of the spring air. I’ve never experienced that in the New World. I think this is a countryside of low hills and wildflowers and grape arbors. I can’t see over the walls, but in the exercise yard I hear birds and they’re not the birds of home. Also it stays light long into the evening. I think this is Mediterranean Europe you people have dropped me into, and it’s not bad—the torture is not exquisite but only in my reflection of what has happened to me—apart from talking to you I have no one and no lawyer has been appointed and I’m being held without trial and it’s already been indefinitely. That’s celestial time, you know. I’m sentenced to roll round with the planet, to count the suns, the moons, the seasons.… Do you think I threatened the life of the president?
No, actually.
Yet I won’t accuse you of following orders and being a nullity. You know why?
Why?
Without you to talk to I’d be even worse off than I am.
You don’t have to worry.
Although I have my collected MT on the shelf I think how can I keep my mind from going? And if my mind goes can the country be far behind?
So you’re saying there’s a connection?
My mind is shot through with visions, dreams, and the actions and words of people I don’t know. I hear soundless voices, phantoms loom up out of my sleep and onto the wall, lingering there, cringing in anguish, curling up in visible contortions of pain and crying out wordlessly for my help. What are you doing to me!, I shout, and fall back into bed only to stare at the black ceiling and my room is a darkened movie theater where another silent horror show is about to begin. I speak of a broached integrity. Only by hoping that there is a science behind this am I able to endure it. Perhaps I’m carrying in my brain matter the neuronal record of previous ages. I know you haven’t gone through anything like this, you’re too accepting of your own experiences. They thrive in you, maxing out to your brain’s capacity. But when you’re as unfeeling as I am—
Ah, we’re back to that?
—there may be an opportunity for the dormant genetic microtraces from earlier times to express themselves in dreams.
So is this cognitive science?
Not quite yet. It’s still only suffering.
Tell me, Doc, am I a computer?
What?
Am I the first computer invested with consciousness? With terrible dreams, with feelings, with grief, with longing?
No, Andrew, you’re a human being.
Well, you would say that.
I see you’ve let your beard grow, your hair. You could indeed be the Holy Fool. But it needs something.
What’s this?
A Yankees baseball cap. Your wardrobe needed refreshing.
How old is Willa now?
Twelve.
And where are they all living?
We’ve been through this—
Where?
They’re in New Rochelle.
In their old house?
Yes.
Martha and Martha’s large husband.
Yes.
And they need my agreement? Why? A judge will rule in their favor—Martha has raised her since she was a baby. And I’m an enemy combatant.
You’re not an enemy combatant.
Whatever I am I haven’t much legal standing, have I?
It’s for the child’s sake. Here are the papers.
So my daughter will have Boris Godunov, that drunk, that Pretender, for a legal father.
He’s in AA. Doesn’t drink anymore.
When did they get back together, the loving couple?
A few years ago, I think. Three or four.
And where did she take my child when she disappeared?
As I’ve told you, Martha settled in a small town in western Pennsylvania. A farm inherited from an aunt and uncle.
Do they have the finances to keep my daughter as she deserves?
They are not without resources. She teaches piano again and he has a master class in voice. They are both at Juilliard.
It says here Willa is not to be told about me. It says I may never approach her, reveal myself to her as her father—