Andrew's Brain

by E. L. Doctorow

  But after that terrible event of the baby’s death you did get onto a bus to western Pennsylvania. Didn’t you? Or are you saying now you dreamt the whole thing?

  No, what actually happened is the way I’ve described it.

  Well, then, in your waking life as in your dreams, weren’t you running away? That doesn’t sound like someone numb to his guilt.

  You can have such moments but they’re not characteristic, they’re incidental to the predominant state of mind. Remnants of whatever humanity I may have once had.

  I see.

  Because the truth is, I just shrug and soldier on. As kind as I am, as well-meaning and helpful as I try to be, I have no feelings finally, for good or ill. In the depths of my being, no matter what happens, I am left cold, impenetrable to remorse, to grief, to happiness, though I can pretend well enough even to the point of fooling myself. I am trying to say I am finally, terribly, unfeeling. My soul resides in a still, deep, beautiful, emotionless, calm cold pond of silence. But I am not fooled. A killer is what I am. And to top things off I am incapable of punishing myself, taking my own life in despair of the wreck I’ve made of people’s lives, helpless infants or women I love. And that’s what Martha’s large husband the opera singer failed to understand when he condemned me, perhaps in the hope that I would see the light and off myself. [thinking] Of course I would never do that.

  So now Martha had a baby after all, a replacement for her lost child.

  I hadn’t thought of it that way. I didn’t mean to give her the baby outright. I just needed some help. For a year or two. I was still in shock from Briony’s death. But Martha took possession of the kid as if she was the rightful parent.

  Did that bother you?

  I was in no position to argue. Do I have to spell it out? Are you that dense? I’d killed one baby. Did you want me to kill another? Anyway, I’ll reconnect someday. She has Briony’s pale blue eyes. The same fair coloring.

  Was Martha’s large husband correct that you bore a responsibility for your wife’s death?

  Not entirely.

  What does that mean?

  It was indirect—not directly causal.

  So what happened? You mean in childbirth?

  No, I do not mean that.

  How did she die?

  I don’t want to talk about it. [thinking] I can tell you that after killing his baby with Martha, Andrew took a low-paying adjunct professorship at a small state college out west that he’d never heard of.

  Why?

  Why do you think? Because it was far away. Because after she divorced him Martha liked to be seen standing outside his apartment building when he came home from work. She would take a drag on her cigarette, drop it on the ground, step on it, and walk away.

  So in her eyes only you were to blame—you and only you.

  Who else?

  What about the pharmacist? Did you think of suing?

  Oh, God, you have no idea, do you, of the obliteration of social reality in the aftermath of something like this. The brain all lit up with the realization that what you did is unchangeable. To sue someone? Was there redemption in that? What would you gain—money? Jesus, I don’t know why I talk to you. Would suing someone bring the infant back? And whom should we have sued? The pediatrician who phoned in the prescription? the druggist who filled it? the delivery boy who brought it? Where had the thing gone wrong? Whom should we have sued? I could have read the label. I could have sued myself. I had administered the medicine. That’s all Martha could see, that I had done the thing, finally, I and no one else.

  And you agreed with her.

  I did. It was me, all over.

  And now here was Andrew, self-exiled to this state college in the foothills of a mountain range called the Wasatch. At first I liked the mountains. I got there early in September, a still-warm summer’s end with traces of the old winter’s snow on the mountaintops. That gave me a sense of the nonhuman world we live in. You get that when you’re out of the city. Americans like to catch rides in that world.

  What is this you’re saying?

  Skiing down a mountain—that’s one of the free rides. Sea combers, white-water rivers. A wind to hang in. Free rides of the planet. They’re all there for you to get on or get off or get killed.

  I see. So it turned out to be a good change of scenery for you.

  Not really. I don’t suppose you’ve ever lived under a mountain. Wasatches ruled that town. After a day or two the truth dawned on me. You got up in the morning, they were there. You pulled into a gas station, and they were there. They were there in their stolid immensity, and that was that. You were colonized. They negotiated the light, they had to pass on it before it got to you.

  I don’t understand.

  They took in the light, they’d bounce it down or suck it up as was their wont. It was a kind of mountain bureaucracy, and nobody could do anything about it, least of all the sun. The college had a deal for visiting faculty with a local suite motel. Formica countertop kitchenette. Laminated furniture. And turquoise-and-rust curtains to suggest the Native American heritage. That was also what the mountains did—invite a corporate culture. I was the college’s halfhearted attempt to expand its offerings. I was the one-man Department of Brain Science. I had no one to talk to. My colleagues, if that’s what they were in their polite and distant way, were bores. I was lonely and miserable.

  One day, as Andrew walked past the college gymnasium, a building much like an airplane hangar, he saw through the open doors a population of gymnasts and track and fielders: broad jumpers, high jumpers, hurdlers, shot putters, pole vaulters, pommel horsers, steel ringers, balance beamers, trampoliners. The intensity, the concentration of each of them on what they were doing, everyone moving in a differentiated self-absorbed effort while ignoring everyone else, put him in mind of a culture of squiggling DNA molecules, so that if he waited long enough all these jumping and vaulting and circling squiggles would assemble themselves into the double helix of a genetic code. He was particularly attracted to one of the gymnasts working out on the high bar, a blond girl swinging to and fro in what could have been a one-piece swimsuit. She seemed more human than the rest of them, as if she were actually reveling in the exercise. But this swinging maneuver was preparatory—once she had the velocity, up she rose to a handstand, holding herself upside down and straight as an arrow, only to lazily begin to fall backward into another sequence of three-hundred-and-sixty-degree suspensefully-pausing-at-the-top rotations. And then to fall into another spin, but forward this time, like a clock hand gone crazy. Andrew, not wanting to be seen staring, quickly walked on when she completed her routine with a final spin around and a leap through the air with a perfect landing in a half crouch, arms outstretched.

  Which reminds me, once I saw a woman do a complete somersault in the air, launching herself into an in-flight three-hundred-and-sixty-degree head-over-heels maneuver before landing nimbly on her bare feet. You’d think that was impossible.

  Where was this?

  She leapt into the air not from any platform but from the floor of what I took to be some sort of dance studio, and then grabbed her ankles and curled into her remarkable airborne spin. She wore a man’s ribbed sleeveless undershirt and a pleated billowing pair of bloomers and did not look at me for approval once the maneuver was completed. A short plain dark-haired little woman but with good round calves and slim feet that widened at the metatarsals. But the man, her putative manager, a big bulky fellow who had gotten me to come see this, said, What do you think? And I had to tell him the act needed beefing up. Her trick had taken only a few seconds. That’s not enough for an evening’s entertainment, I told him. Why would I have said that? What business was it of mine?

  Bloomers? Was this a dream?

  Later, I was informed that the fellow habitually forced himself on this somersaultist. For proof I’d been taken to look through the window of an adjoining bedroom as he pressed down upon her, flattening her out.

  This was your dream
, then.

  You’re eager for it to be a dream. If it was, it might have occurred after I saw Briony on the high bar. If it occurred before that, before I was even situated out west, it might not have been a dream. I’ve spent time in Eastern Europe, but how would you know that? I studied for a year in Prague. They had no money, the Czechs. They had mountainous Russia looking down at them. Their own secret police used to pop out of the bushes in powder blue jumpsuits and take your picture as you sat on a park bench. I spent time also in Hungary, in Budapest. There is a street there that World War II came through, first one way as the Germans advanced and the Russians retreated and then the other way as the Russians advanced and the Germans retreated. That one street for the war to flow back and forth through. And in a big lot there, near a high school, was a mass unmarked graveyard, skulls and femurs just under the sod. So it may not have been a dream. On the other hand I don’t remember this somersault as you remember things in a specific context. Exactly where and when. So maybe it was a dream. All I can say is that I remember it as having a dark impoverished quality, like a flickering silent movie, and occurring in a shabby room with splintery floors and dirty windows, and so not something to have occurred even as a dream in the wide-open big-sky spaces of the democratic Far West. But the gymnastic linkage to Briony reminds me how far apart we were, not only in age and social position but in how we thought of our lives or, more exactly, our expectations of what life offered according to its nature as we understood it.

  Who are we talking about now?

  It was peculiar, to see something like an interior light on the face of this lovely brilliantly alive young college student, as a means of understanding my own shadowed existence some of which may have taken place in a shabby dance studio years before where I was taken to watch some woman in bloomers and undershirt turn herself into a flying missile.

  Then you saw her again, the athletic college student?

  She had a name, you know.

  Briony.

  My wife-to-be.

  On the first day of his elementary Brain Science class, Andrew was writing his name on the blackboard when the chalk snapped in two. “And—” was as far as he’d gotten, and when he turned to look for the errant piece of chalk that had flown past his ear he knocked his lectern awry so that the books he had placed on it slid to the floor. He heard student laughter. And then Briony, in this bright fluorescent classroom with mountains watching through the window, rose from her chair in the first row and picked up the books and the piece of chalk. She was not bluejeaned like the others, she wore a long pale-yellow frock with shoulder straps and the running shoes they all wore. The combination made him smile. She was a slender wheat-haired beauty with the fairest skin, as if a property of it was sunlight. Andrew thanked her for her kindness and proceeded with the lecture. She sat with her running shoes pointed at each other under that long dress and her head bent over her notebook computer as she typed her notes, a serious student, listening with her head bowed over her chair-desk. He thought of her legs under that dress.

  And then he realized this was the girl on the high bar.

  Good morning, class. Good morning, pale-yellow shift and running shoes. Today we begin our exploration of consciousness, the field of all meaning, the necessary and sufficient condition of language, the beginning of all good mornings. Consciousness—not what that heavy-lidded lout slumped in the chair next to you confronts the world with, but what is left when you erase all presumptions, forgo your affections, white out the family, school, church, and nation in which you have couched your being … cast off the techno clutter of civilization, cut the wires of all circuits, including connections to your internal mechanisms, your bowel conditions, your hungers, what itches, what bleeds or produces tears, or the cracklings in the joints when you rise from a sitting position, abandon, however reluctantly, your breathless lips-apart contemplation of me, how my voice resonates in you, how my glance lases your netherness, and float free and unconnected in your own virtual black and starless space. And thus you have nothing to fix on, nothing for your thought to adhere to, no image, no sound, no smell, no physical sensation of any kind. You are not in a place, you are the place. You are not here, you are everywhere. You are not in relation to anything else. There is no anything else. There is nothing you can think of except of yourself thinking. You are in the depthless dingledom of your own soul.

  O lovely acrobat, it is true we may be immaterial presences in our beings, mere currents in the ocean of our molecules. But take heart! Let your wild desires bring you back to earth, to culture, to citizenship, to your bodily needs. To me. I have so much to teach you! And love is the blunt concussion that renders us insensible to despair.

  This doesn’t sound like the Andrew I know.

  I’m another man in front of a class.

  So you were smitten.

  Well, I admit I was vulnerable. But she was truly glorious. Something happens in the heart, you know. You recognize life as it should be. And so what you thought of as life were only the shadows in the cave.

  What cave?

  You’ve never read your Plato, Doc. Where most people live, most of us, imagining it to be the real sunlit world when it is only a cave lit by the flickering fires of illusion. Briony was out there in the sun. I began as a horny lecher, instantly evolved into a worshipful adorer, and then, as it turned really bad, I felt that I couldn’t live without her.

  Good morning, class. Good morning pink knee and peek of cursive underthigh in her short denim skirt today. You may have assumed from our last lecture that my argument was only theoretical, that of course there is no existence without the world, and thus no mind apart from its engagement with the world. Consciousness without world is impossible, just as there is no sight without the light to see by. Is that your objection, my darling? Bent over her notebook, her face framed in the fall of hair. Well, then, let’s look at this solid real world of yours. It has a platform in space and that platform has a history of animate life. So far so good. But notice, there does not seem to be a necessary or sufficient condition for animacy, it occurs under any conditions. You would think it needs air, but it does not, you would think it needs to see or hear or lope, or swim or fly or hang by its tail from a tree branch, but it does not. It requires no particular shape or size or any particular supplies from the mineral universe in order to be life, it can make itself out of anything. It can live underwater or on a mote of dust, in ice or in boiling seawater, it may have eyes or ears but may not, it may have the means to ingest but may not, or the means to move about but may not, it may have a procreative organ but may not, it may be sentient but may not, and even when it has intelligence may not have it in sufficiency, as for example the nodding sloth who always manages to be sitting next to you—who when he yawns his eyes disappear, have you noticed that, my loganberry? So life is taxonomically without limit but with one intention common to its endless varieties—be they fish, fly, dung beetle, mite, worm, or bacterium—one intention to define it in all its minded or mindless manifestations—its pathetic intention to survive. Because of course it never does, does it, my bosky babe, for if life is one definable thing of infinite form then we have to say it feeds on itself. It is self-consuming. And that is not very reassuring if you mean to depend on the world for your consciousness. Is it? If consciousness exists without the world, it is nothing, and if it needs the world to exist, it is still nothing.

  These were my preparatory thought experiments—to begin from a basic philosophical hopelessness before looking for rescue from the first responders, Emerson, William James, Damasio, and the rest. But I must have given myself away as nothing more than a depressive.

  Who was the lout?

  He was no contest, really. Long, lean, indolent, with black hair combed back wet, like Tarzan. The school’s star quarterback. He didn’t stand a chance once I entered the picture.

  And “bosky babe”?

  Yes, that was a momentary lapse, a lingering thought of my high school
girlfriend who was the bosky babe down there. Not Briony. Briony, for comfort’s sake as she did her spandex-suited gymnastics, kept her mons trimmed.

  There were a lot of western blondes at the college but mostly of the blaringly self-indicative kind, with an empty-headedness or cunning about them, or perhaps their faces too clearly anticipated cosmetic collapse. Briony was fine-featured, her looks were modestly aristocratic, you would think she belonged at a country house in the Cotswolds or perhaps in a Polish shtetl. For some reason I kept seeing her around the campus. Riding her bike, standing in the cafeteria line, talking with friends. Didn’t that mean something? Each time she arrived for class she smiled hello. I asked her if she would volunteer to be a subject for the lab work and she said yes. And so, one morning, as I placed the electrode net on her pretty head—didn’t shave it, of course, this was not medical science, just a way to show the electric busyness of our brains—I had reason to tuck her long hair behind her ears. I inhaled the clean freshness of her. I felt I was in a sunlit meadow. I did a basic brain graph using an old EEG machine I had brought west with me. Something like a lie detector, very primitive, but useful for Brain Science 101. Flashing pictures at her, seeing where the graph spiked, where she was frightened, where she remembered something, where she was hungry, where a sexual innuendo lit her up. The exercise was illustrative, this was elementary stuff, nothing about localizations. The other students stood around and watched and made jokes. The lout was there with a stupidly superior smile on his face. I decided I would flunk him, not that it would matter. But I saw things the students couldn’t have. I saw things more intimately Briony’s than if I had seen her undressed. This wasn’t mere voyeurism, it was cephalic-invasive, I admit, but, after all, less legitimate scientific inference than professorial fantasy.