Andrew''s Brain by E. L. Doctorow
I am.
But it wasn’t funny. We were very intense, it was something we’d gotten into and couldn’t get out of. She became pregnant in our junior year. We discussed that for a few furtive, dismaying months. But then she miscarried. This happened one evening when I was with her in her rooms. She called to me from the bathroom. The water in the bowl was plum-colored, and floating huddled with his knees drawn up was my tiny replica. Smaller than a mouse but unmistakably of family, with my same domey head and bunched brow in a frown, everything coming to a point in the chin. Not pleased at all, my heir, looking inward of course.
I KNOW THAT WHEN women have their babies the husband takes second place, it’s to be expected that the mother-infant bond prevails and the husband finds himself usurped.
Yes, that sometimes happens.
Well, that did happen in a gentle kind of way with Briony and our baby, that maternal fixity of attention, but it was enough to worry me. What if it was more than that? I noticed that whenever I left things of mine scattered about—newspapers, books—she’d pick them up and put them where she decided they belonged. She had this alarming sense of order. Surely as time went on our different ways would add up. I began to think of the future—how with the passing years the disparity of our ages would become more pronounced. I decided to join a gym and work out.
Not really.
Yes, I entered the world of abs and pecs and quads. No two-syllable words in that crowd. I hated the place, all these heroes with weight lifter belts around their waists, heaving bars loaded with metal plates the size of sewer covers and grunting, and shouting, popping their muscles and then strutting around in display of their magnificence. I couldn’t bear it there for more than a few minutes—working this or that machine for fifteen reps—not repetitions, reps, and why fifteen was the sacred number I never did learn. But Briony approved—thought it was a good idea that I perform exercises, get up from my desk and fit myself to those machines. Cheers your brain, don’t you know, she said in the closest thing to flippancy that I had ever heard from her. As if I hadn’t taught her about the brain-body nexus.
Do you think, Andrew, you may sometimes overreact?
In the nineteenth century, work was physical. Blacksmiths, capenters, hod carriers, farmers, dam builders, ditch diggers, layers of railroad track, slaughterers of cattle. People didn’t have to find ways to exercise. Do you know what the New York Marathon is?
Of course.
If I ever were to decide to do serious research in neuroscience—well, it would have to do with the communal brain. As with ants, as with bees.
Why?
The brain of an ant colony is the colony. The brain of a beehive is the hive. And we have our popular delusions and the madness of crowds. Fellow who wrote that knew more than he knew.
You mean the tulip bubble?
Why do schools of fish change direction instantly, as one? Why do flocks of birds, leaderless, fly in changing patterns with more precision than a ballet company? Think of wars. How they become unavoidable and once begun grow bigger and bigger. Or the bizarre indigenous practices of any religious group no matter what god it attests to. And people going to the park on Sunday. Why should the day for the park be Sunday?
Families are together for the day of rest and so on. We have cities and we put parks in them for sound and obvious reasons.
No, Doc, it’s only a true park on Sunday, it needs a large amount of people to find its definition as a park, because a park is only a park when it organizes a human colony, and the fact that that is temporary shouldn’t blind us to the fact that it is repetitive.
Andrew—
The collective brain is a powerful thing. But we can’t compare to the ants, the bees. They have pheromonal cloud brains—chemical instructions for everything—sex, war, foraging. Millions or billions of years from now when the planet is long crisped and the human race is extinct, ants will reign, or maybe fruit flies, or maybe both, and they’ll be archaeologically inclined, they will crawl over the ruins of our cities, arrange our bones, display our remnants in museums of natural history, they will fly into the open windows of our skeletal apartments, rise up our elevator shafts, explore our long underground tunnels in their effort to understand who we were and what we were up to with our stacked caves of steel and stone and on the streets and runways our rusted-out prosthetic devices to move us from one place to another.
You’re suggesting they will survive us?
The collective brain of the ant colony is outside the body of any individual ant. It is the gaseous chemical identity of a colony that governs every ant’s behavior. So that looking at them you might think they know what they’re doing. Or why they’re doing it. Or it’s possible that the colonial brain invests each ant with an intelligence he or she might not otherwise have. That interests me. And the chances of survival are improved exponentially.
I seem to recall your quoting Mark Twain about the stupidity of ants.
That was of a particular ant who’d individualistically wandered off on his own. Nevertheless he, the ant, was capable of carrying three or four times his own weight. I didn’t see the equivalent from the grunts lifting sewer covers in my gym.
Why are we having this discussion?
We do pale emulations of the group brain as if in envy. We give ourselves temporarily to a larger social mind and we perform according to its dictates the way individual computers cede their capacities to their network. Perhaps we long for something like the situation these other creatures have—the ants, the bees—where the thinking is outsourced. Cloud thinking, a chemical ubermensch. Which brings us to politics.
I’m not sure you’re serious.
You know Emerson? It’s what Emerson, thinking of his own kind of creature, mistakenly calls the oversoul. He romanticizes it, makes it a constituent of ethical thinking suggesting God. When all he is aspiring to is a kind of universal pheromonal genius.
Seriously, Andrew, are you planning to do this research?
And then, of course, fashion. Even Briony wore jeans. Even I. And then our slang, the way a phrase will catch fire and go through all of us, all at once indispensable, ubiquitous, until it dies out as quickly as it arose. [thinking] What?
Your plans for the future.
Don’t make me laugh, Doc. I’m telling you about the end of my life.
We were getting ready to go out. A Sunday morning, a beautiful May morning, and we were to have brunch at this little French place on Sullivan Street. Briony was well into her eighth month and moving somewhat slowly, and while I waited I turned on our new TV I had bought to certify us as a family. And as it happened there was this documentary about the New York City Marathon. And there were the marathoners, in full color, streaming across the Verrazano Bridge by the thousands. For a moment I had the illusion that Briony was among them. But she appeared beside me, materialized as if from the screen.
All thoughts of leaving for our brunch were put aside, so rapt was she.
It is, after all, a remarkable sight, this legion of runners advancing like a tidal wave over the silver bridge, these thousands all doing the same thing at the same time, a great swath of humanity putting itself to the test of running twenty-six or so miles without falling down dead. I have to admit there is something so clean and spare about it, with its ancient allusions. How it exalts people to do this thing that has no reward except for having done it. There are purses, of course, for the world-class long-distance runners who come from other countries to breast the finish line, a man, a woman, gender indistinguishable in their running shorts and their numbered ribbed shirts and running shoes and sinewy bodies, crossing the finish line hours before the masses. [thinking] She hadn’t known about it, my wife. So it was as if all those runners were about to sweep us up, carry us along, engulf us in the tide of them.
Was this so portentous, people running?
I knew it before she said it, Briony right then and there swearing to run in the coming marathon. With a resolute nod t
This wasn’t the first time Briony could sound like the willful child who fixes her mind on something and won’t listen to reason. Made me think Bill and Betty must every now and then have had their hands full.
She couldn’t take her eyes off the screen. And when the camera cut away from the leaders to the main body, people on the sidewalks holding out cups of water and cheering, a runner here limping, a runner there gasping for breath, the strain on some faces, the concentration so that you understood they saw and heard nothing but the pavement in front of them, the robotic pounding of their own feet—well, when I looked at Briony I was chastened to see the tears running down her cheeks. She sat there on the couch leaning forward, as if something religious was going on. And so I wasn’t about to argue. When the program was over I hugged her and said not a word about how unrealistic it was there in June to think, the baby coming momentarily, that she could recover quickly enough and turn herself in the few months till November—that’s when they have it—into a long-distance runner through five boroughs and twenty-six-some miles over bridges and up hills and down avenues. I said to her only that the baby and I would be waiting for her at the finish line in Central Park.
Willa thoughtfully chose to be born just a few days later. How long was it before Briony was doing her jog those summer mornings with the baby carriage flying before her? Sometimes I took them in a cab to Central Park and sat with the carriage while Briony ran around the reservoir. I would do my reading, holding the baby when she fretted, giving her her bottle—I was fearless. And after a while there would Briony be, gleaming with health, laughing, her arms shining, her shirt stained with sweat, and as she drank from her water bottle, head tilted back, I studied the loveliness of her neck, the peristalsis of her throat. And then right there on the bench in the sun she would unbutton her nursing bra and give the baby her breast, and there were mother and child, a sacrament of nature in the green park among the families drifting by, dogs barking, kids on scooters, the wandering seller of balloons.
You’re describing an idyll.
How is it that first mothers instantly have the knowledge of mothering? Something that’s always been in the brain is called into play. And the organization. Somehow she found time for everything—the baby, her tutoring, seeing after the old lady who lived next door. Into July and August on the hottest of days she would leave the house at dawn for a serious run and do her miles, seven, ten, by the time people were going off to work. She would head downtown to where the offfice buildings were, and find one where she could run the stairs, run up twenty, thirty flights of stairs for strength training.
I assume you approved all of this.
Of course. Wasn’t I working out at the gym? We were a team, including Willa out to see her mother run the marathon. Briony bounded off from our doorway and her feet barely touched the ground. Her legs seemed to grow longer, it was like the levitation you see in classical ballet. [thinking]
Yes?
I had also bought us a phone with an answering machine. “Hello, Briony? Bri, are you there? It’s Dirk! I got your number from your folks.”
Her old boyfriend? The football player?
Briony was out. She was tutoring.
Did you tell her?
Of course I told her. She called back and agreed to meet him for lunch. She told me he’d gotten a job at a brokerage downtown.
No more football?
Said he would never make the pros. He was a business major and his father knew people in New York.
How did you feel about this?
I felt in bed at night that she pressed herself to me as she always had. I felt that our baby that we’d made was in her crib next to the bed. I felt Briony’s heartbeat in my chest as my own. Why do you ask these questions—that the love of my life would not be trustworthy, is that what you think? Or that I would think? It was all in her fine honest lovely young face without guile, without secrets, that she had made up her mind, and she had her family now. But they were old friends, and why not? We didn’t even talk about it.
So it was no problem.
The day was the problem. It was the day. It was the morning of the day that they were to have lunch that was the problem. [thinking] You might say that. She got up later than usual because Willa had had a fretful night. So it was almost eight when she went out for her run. It was to be a busy day. When she had done her miles she’d shower, put on something appropriate for lunch in a restaurant, see that the old woman next door was OK, and after her lunch with Dirk she had two hours of afternoon tutoring. So it was a busy day. [thinking] She kissed my cheek: Willa likes the applesauce for her morning snack, she said, and set off over the route she had worked out for herself: down along the Hudson to the Esplanade, across Liberty Street, with maybe a stop at the WTC to run some flights of stairs, and then turning north up Broadway.
“Briony, it’s not to be. I have to cancel.” Here a laugh becoming a sob. “I wouldn’t mind so much if I could see you one last time. But then you’d have to be up here and I wouldn’t want that. Wouldn’t want that. Or just to talk to you— Are you there, Bri? Hello? Oh, God. It’s their machine.”
Andrew, what is this?
Giving you Dirk on the answering machine: “Okay, Professor, I’m leaving a message. That’s your voice, isn’t it? Am in the window frame now. Far as I can go. High altitude. Heat is something.… Standing on the bare steel.… Isn’t it neat that your machine is getting this because it is surely the end of me. So I am finished but everything else will go on including you, especially you, Professor.… We don’t hear as good as bats, see as well as hawks. You remember saying that? We can know only so much. You remember? So I wanted to ask then, how can you be so fucking sure there’s no God? Hear your bullshit answer.”
He was that conversational—that he could think of that?
I’m giving you his words. There were pauses when the sound of unimaginable catastrophe took over. Then his voice would return as from a distance. “My understanding of jumping from high places is that I will be dead … before I hit the ground. I surely hope so. I surely do hope so. Won’t I be like flying? I’ll be flying, I’ll be in free flight. It will be cool because it’s hot as hell here. I think it is time now, steel—yi!—melting my shoes. Just step off, why not, why not. I’ll put the phone in my pocket and he will hear my flight, and keep it for posterity, deliver it as a lecture: How Bri’s lover died. Professor, you old fuck, you stole her from me with your smart-ass talk. But hear me: You make a good life for her, live for her, or I will come back and haunt you. I will inhabit your goddamn brain.”
Good lord—
And then I heard the flame behind him like a whoosh of a monstrous breath and think now, as I have listened to the point where I don’t have to listen to hear it, I hear too the voices of the others on the ninety-fifth floor with him as they burned to death, their cries the last organic traces of their enflamed bones, a weird awful chorus finally indistinguishable from the roar of the oil fire and the cringe and screech and squeak of the tortured steel and from the oily smoke of flames that refueled from the smoke and blew out again to flame. And then I hear air in its resistance to a falling body, it is like the sound of a jet engine louder and louder in higher and higher pitch and it lasts but a few seconds before it ceases to be sound, before I hear only the absence of sound followed by a beep of the answering machine terminating the call.
So it was that morning.
Yes.
What did you do then?
Nothing.
I don’t understand.
Nothing! By the time I came back in and noticed the light bli
Oh, Andrew …
Or was she trapped there! I went back to the apartment and found a neighbor who would stay with the baby. And then I ran downtown. Of course I couldn’t get near anything. One of the towers had sunken in on itself. People staggered by me to get away, people covered in ash, as if cremated but the form of them not yet collapsed. I thought I saw her. Briony! I stopped her—these eyes looked out at me from a gray mask, bright terrified eyes as the only living part of her, this woman. I actually tried to brush the ash from her face. What are you doing? she said. Get away! It was useless—the lines were up, the stanchions, police, fire, ambulances, lights strobing, the squawking of their radios. I waited at a corner, waiting to see her among the fleeing faces. And then I knew that was hopeless and decided that if I ran home she would be there.… But it was just the light flashing on the machine.
Had she instinctively run toward the disaster, leaping into the firestorm, by nature a first responder? I didn’t know. Only later, haunting the police stations, was I deranged enough to think it was Dirk she wanted to rescue, to climb ninety-five flights of stairs to pull to safety, catastrophically, insanely, passionately. In my bad moments I thought it was that. But she might not even have known where he worked. They were to have lunch in the neighborhood down there. Anyway, what difference did it make? He broadcast his death, but her silence was what connected them in my mind. It was as if their simultaneous deaths, each unknown to the other, could be construed as a peculiar coalescing of their fates—their transformation into star-crossed lovers. But that is only if I put me in the picture.