Andrew''s Brain by E. L. Doctorow
I see his frail grasp of life at those moments of his prose, his after-dinner guard let down and his upwardly mobile decency become vulnerable to his self-creation. And the woman he loved, gone, and a child he loved, gone, and he looks in the mirror and hates the pretense of his white hair and mustache and suit, all gathered in the rocking-chair wisdom that resides in his bleary eyes. He despairs of the likelihood that the world is his illusion, that he is but a vagrant mind in a futile drift through eternity.
See the ant, he says, how stupid and incompetent he is, dragging some fly’s wing hither and yon, hauling it over pebbles because they are in his way, climbing leaves of grass because he doesn’t know not to, and where does he think he’s going, says MT, nowhere, that’s where.
Another morning. I am down on the beach as the osprey hovers pulsingly over the sea, and the sanderlings tiptoe along the ocean’s foamy edge while the shadowing blue-fish waits for the tide to flip them into its razored maw.
This is you, God. And who did you say it was, Jonah, riding the struts of the leviathan? With the tons of fish washing beneath him into the digestive caldron, as he plants one foot on one beamy rib, the other on the other, and it would be dark except for the luminescence of the electric fishes looking to find their way out, against the tide, against the moon-rock slurp of the ocean tide, against the diurnal twist of the rumbling planet that cups the ocean, that nods the mountains back and forth in metronomic rhythm …
… this earth we find ourselves gravity-stuck to, me and MT and my flaxen-haired fairy-tale beauty, my darling who read to me, by the light of a flashlight, as I drove us at night across the continent, read to me of the imperial outrages annotated by MT in the last years of his life, when the truth of his humor turned green and bilious, when he saw by the light of the moon with the night heron humpslunk between its shoulders that the impossible world was not effectively met any longer by satire or mockery.
So, Doc, I write to tell you that I agree: Life—in being irresolute, forever unfinished though the deaths are astronomical—is not a movie. I do not see in my mind a white-robed D-cup empress facing down a phalanx of centurions looking like me in their spiked helmets and shields and spears and leather-striped calves, those extra-filled movies that drip their Technicolor effusions over the ghosts of the ancient empire so like our own.
Ah, but when they didn’t make a sound, how uncanny they were with the title cards doing the talking, the written-out words blocking our view to make things clearer. A mysterious intervening translation agency connecting us in our own language to a shadow world where humans like us were speaking to one another in their spiked helmets and shields, in their black ties and cigarette holders and ass-clinging white satin evening gowns, but from such otherwordly distances that you could not hear them, though they seemed to hear themselves.
How goddamn awful, so much of life having been a wasteful expenditure of time, of living not bravely or at home on the planet of delights, of thunderous icebergs calving, tsunamis rinsing away the seacoasts, of drought withering the cornfields, not at home in any of that, or atop mountains or on the sea but in cities only, a person seated in the subway car amid a carful of subway persons, or running under an umbrella to the available cab, or going to the theater or listening to Mahler or reading the news and not doing anything about it … that news that always seemed to happen to other people in other places. Except when it happened to me. When it finally happened to me …
Very interesting, Andrew. Surprising.
Yeah, well, I’m another man when I’m alone in a cabin.
I had almost given up on you.
I don’t know what I’m doing here.
I can tell you that, as a boy one winter afternoon, Andrew appeared at the door of his little girlfriend to return the doll he’d stolen from her. His mother had insisted that he do this, knock on the door and not give any excuse, or suggest he’d found it in the street or anything that wasn’t the truth, but just to say he’d taken the doll when she wasn’t looking and he was sorry and would never do anything like that again. Andrew did as he was told. The little girl took the doll out of his hands and slammed the door in his face. On the way home he slipped on a patch of ice and broke his eyeglasses.
This was where?
Montcalm, New Jersey. A town not as well-to-do as Glen Vale, its neighbor. Old two- and three-story houses, some with glassed-in porches and most with patchy un-tended front yards and needing paint jobs behind the worn-out trees lining the streets. You can tell you’d passed over into Glen Vale when everything was brighter, the front yards groomed, the trees full and rich-looking, the homes bigger with more space between them. America will always tell you how much money people have.
Why did you steal the doll?
For a physical examination. It was a girl doll and I needed to confirm what I suspected.
You wore glasses as a child?
I’ve always been nearsighted. Why are you asking these questions? I’m trying to tell you something. My life was discordant. I was usually in one sort of trouble or another. Do you know what belly flopping is? You hold the sled in front of you, start running, and when you’re up to speed you fling yourself down on the sled and you’re off.
On your Flexible Flyer.
Good, Doc, so you’re in this world after all. There weren’t any real hills in Montcalm, my street went along as a gently descending tilt, and so we used our driveways for momentum, that was our practice, taking advantage of their slight elevation, belly flopping halfway down the driveway and twisting the sled handle to make a right turn once we cleared it. If you turned too sharply the sled went over on its side and dumped you. So I didn’t make too sharp a turn this time I’m speaking of, but did it by degrees till I was still in my turn halfway across to the other sidewalk. The other thing to mention, it was dusk, the time you should have been home. Your cheeks were red, your nose was dripping water, snow clung to your eyebrows, snow was under your sleeves and inside your boots. A horn blew. I looked up into the toothy grille of a Buick sedan. The guy had braked, and the car spun in a neat circle around me backward, three hundred and sixty degrees. It was like an act of some sort, first he was behind me then he was in front of me, all the time spinning around backward. Then I heard a big bong, as the car slammed into a light pole down the street. All this time the man had been pounding on his horn, it was a brassy tritone horn, as if to announce a festive event, but now with the car crashed it was an anticlimactic continuous blare, very unpleasant. I saw that he had hit the light pole hard enough for it to be slightly askew. I got off my sled and went closer. He had hit the pole on the driver’s side, and what was blowing the horn was his head, resting on the steering wheel while his hands hung down beside him. OK?
OK.
We moved to New York, Greenwich Village. My father said it was because we’d be closer to his job at NYU. But I knew it was because our family was persona non grata in Montcalm after that crash. I said as much and my father said, Son, lots of kids were sleigh riding and it could have been any one of them in the path of that car. It just happened to be you. He didn’t believe this any more than I did. He knew that if any kid was likely to cause a fatal crash it would be me.
You father was an academic?
He did science. Molecular biology. He said science was like a searchlight beam growing wider and wider and illuminating more and more of the universe. But as the beam widened so did the circumference of darkness.
I thought Albert Einstein said that.
I was lonely in the city and had no friends and so my parents got me a dog, a dachshund. They said it was my responsibility to care for it, walk it, train it to obey. That was interesting, trying to see what kind of a brain it had. Not much was the answer. It had a nose that seemed to serve as a brain. The nose/brain’s primary function of course was to process smell. Because I had that dog I noticed all the other dogs in the park and they all went around smelling one another and the urological codes they left at the base of water fo
You sound like a confirmed New Yorker.
My puppy with its short legs tried to get into the game on that run. It was funny to see him waddling after some big dog who turned and ran past him the other way before he could turn his sausage of a body around.
What did you name your dog?
I hadn’t gotten around to that. I was finding out that I didn’t respect him all that much. I mean, you couldn’t insult him, which was a sign of his mental deficiency. He would never take offense no matter what I said to him or how I yanked on the leash. So in this time I’m speaking of, I was walking him home one afternoon through the park—we had a university apartment on the west side of the Square. More trees on that side, which made it darker, quieter, there were fewer people. This is not a Tom Sawyer episode I’m about to relate.
I rather thought that.
I saw something under a bench that looked like a Spaldeen, a valuable pink rubber ball. I wasn’t sure. I got down on my knees to investigate, poking my hand under the bench, and that’s when I must have let go of the leash. Next thing I knew my dog let out a cry, a tenor squeal—a weird unnatural sound from a dog—and when I looked around I saw his leash waving about in the air. I didn’t question why but grabbed for it—an automatic reflex—and felt transmitted to my arm, as if it was my own pounding pulse, the wing beat of the hawk that had him. That’s what it was, a red-tailed hawk. You would think I could have yanked the dog loose, maybe bringing the hawk down too unless it released the creature, but its talons were dug into the dachshund’s neck and for a moment I was given to understand implacable nature. [thinking] Yes, I was in touch with an insistent rhythmic force, mindless and without personality. For a moment I held the hawk suspended, as it beat its wings while unable to rise. I won’t swear to it but I think I was actually lifted to my toes before I let go and watched the bird shoot up to the top of a tree, the leash hanging down like a vine, my dachshund immobile in shock as the bird pressed its neck onto the branch and pecked at its eyes.
Why did you let go, was the hawk too strong for you? How old were you at this time?
Seven, eight, I don’t know. But I try to remember at what point I felt it was no use. Was I too frightened to hold on? Did I understand it was all over for the dog the moment those talons curled into him? I’m not sure. Perhaps, deferential to God’s world, I had merely conceded. I stepped back to get a better view of what was happening up in the tree. The hawk didn’t look down, our struggle had been of no consequence to him, he was tearing into the little dog as if I didn’t exist. I can remember the thrill of feeling the pulse of those wings in my skinny little chest. Nevertheless, I ran home crying. It was all my fault. There you have it. Early Andrew. I’m presuming you like childhoods.
Well, they can be instructive.
The day before we took off for California, Briony found a stray mutt and insisted on taking it with us. Speaking of dogs.
When was this?
Lots of dogs on the campus whose student owners let them run loose and finally forgot them. She said this one looked so appealingly at her that she couldn’t resist. A big black-and-white dog, with floppy ears. It stood with its paws on the back of my seat and its wet nose nuzzled my neck as I tried to drive.
Why were you going to California?
She named it Pete. He’s a Pete, don’t you think?, she said. She had turned around, her knees on the front seat, as she leaned over my shoulder to pet the damn thing. Yes, she said, that’s your name all right.
Here I was in a state of such possessive love that I couldn’t bear to share Briony with anyone else, not even a stupid mutt. I wanted her exclusive attention. I didn’t say anything but I felt resentful, as if I had been invited to accompany her with no more thought on her part than she had impulsively bestowed on the dog.
Why were you going to California?
And it didn’t help that the lout bid us goodbye, or bid her goodbye, there on the sidewalk in front of his dorm.
Did the lout have a name?
I don’t know. Duke something. What else could it have been? She kissed him lightly on the mouth and touched his cheek and got in the car and closed the door and looked back and waved as I drove off. A voice in my mind said, “Step on it!” What the hero says to the cabbie in every 1930s movie. That voice in my head defining the moment: I was not of this generation. I was not of their time. I did not have this girl by any legitimate right.
Surely she had some choice in the matter.
I’m telling you how I felt. Briony knew I was divorced but no more than that. I had wanted to be completely open with her but I couldn’t bring myself to tell her everything. Clearly, I had become her project.
Her project? So you still didn’t understand how taken she was.
I sensed her interest. I felt indulged. I couldn’t believe more than that. Not that I was without guile. The gloomier I was the more attentive she was. This had gone on through the semester. I could affect my nihilistic despair, making a lie even of that, I could wear the appropriate face while inside of myself I was smiling like an idiot. It was all I could do to keep my hands off her. But she was picking up my language, she was reading the course work, so that every boldly thoughtful sentence that came from her I could credit to my teaching. Briony had the intellectual assertiveness of the young, who make the learned ideas their own. She even mentioned the brain’s limbic system and looked at me with a question in her eyes. I had instantly to get her off of that.
Why?
Damage to the limbic system inhibits feeling, among other things. There’s indifference, coolness. You’re half alive. People who’ve been traumatized show limbic system dysfunction.
Do you believe you suffered such an experience? Had you been traumatized?
Only by life. Listen, when I was with Briony there was nothing wrong with my limbic system. My hippocampus and my amygdala were up and running. Whistling, applauding. Doing back flips. Fortunately, my course syllabus included readings from William James, Dewey, Rorty, and then the French existentialists, Sartre, Camus. She dove into all that.
For a course in elementary brain science?
Well, it was over most of their heads. And what they understood they didn’t like. I wasn’t aware of any particular religiosity among these kids, it was more that God was an assumption, like something preinstalled in their computers. But if there was a philosophy that was appropriate to the study of the brain, of the material of consciousness, I maintained it was either pragmatism or existentialism. Or maybe both. No God in either, you see. No soul. No metaphysical bullshit. Briony got it. But for her, a little more drama and human exaltation was in the idea of a painful freedom. So she opted for the existentialists. And applied her knowledge like a pragmatist to me. The evidence was clear that I was of the existentialist school. That I was outside the realm of psychology—I had an historic identity. That seemed to make fast the connection between us. She was happy with Andrew the Existentialist. She could kiss me on the cheek. She could find me in my office and come in with two coffees. I wanted to get down on my knees and kiss the hem of her frock. This clean lovely creature of the West had found in what she decided was my existentialism the resurrection of the nineteenth-century Romantic—Andrew poised at cliff’s edge with the back of his hand pressed to his brow.
It was just a matter of time before we became lovers. The first time, it was in her dorm room. She took her clothes off and lay down and turned her face to the wall while I undressed. Migod, to hold this tremulous being in my arms. After that she always rode her bike to my place.… And I remember when she woke me up one dawn, dragging me out o
So as I understand it, you were going to California with the girl of your dreams and what with one thing or another you managed to feel miserable about it.
We were off to see her parents. How would you feel?
Briony directed Andrew to a little seaside town about an hour south of Los Angeles. He turned off the Coast Highway to a street lined with small-scale homes in pastel colors. The predominating building material was stucco. In front of each home, a garden patch stuffed with ridiculously exorbitant tropical plants in flower. Perhaps he was tired from the two days on the road. Even Briony’s excitement as she pointed him to one of the narrow driveways that separated each house from its neighbor he found annoying. And who was this running up to the front door, flinging it open and disappearing inside—certainly not the spectacular spandexed handstander on the high bar, nor the lovely creature demurely submitting to a brain scan in the elementary cognitive science lab, nor the lover of an older man. Coming home for someone her age was a regression to childhood. Andrew stood by the car with his hands on his hips and looked over the neighborhood. It was shadowless. Heat shimmering from the white pavement. He couldn’t admit to himself how nervous he felt, how out of place, squiring this child like some vile seducer.
I can understand this was a difficult moment for you.
Yes. I didn’t want to follow her. The house was just a short walk from a retaining wall at the end of the street. I found myself looking down a vine-covered hillside to a beach covered with people—a brueghel of people, sunning themselves, playing volleyball, children picking up shells along the water’s edge. More of them were out in the blue water drifting patiently on their surfboards. Beyond was the Pacific, flecked with sailboats. Above it all, in a smoggy sky, was a bloodstained sun clearly intending to set over the sea. The whole scene seemed unnatural. Where I come from the sun sets over the land.