Andrew's Brain

by E. L. Doctorow

  You needn’t go into details, Andrew.

  It may begin as devotional, your lovemaking, but the brain goes dark, as a city blacks out, and some antediluvian pre-brain kicks in that all it knows to do is move the hips. It is surely some built-in command from the Paleozoic Era and may be the basis of all drumming.

  Drumming?

  What I mean to say is you’re not at your most observant at these times. As if what remaining human mind you have, whatever dim consciousness, has located itself somewhere in the depths of your testicular being. That’s why I didn’t hear its engine and why I did not immediately understand why the beach seemed to be flying away in the sandstorm around us. But then I looked into her eyes: They were blinded white in terror—of me, or of the unnatural blazing light above us? I have wondered about this ever since—surely it was the searchlight, the whoop whoop air-scything of the helicopter rotors. But given what was later to happen, I’ve never been able to convince myself that it wasn’t in terror of me, of the emblazoned Paleozoan she had lain down with. But in any event I knew instantly that the situation was antithetical. I held my hand over her face, hiding her from them, keeping her hidden with my body, while with my other hand I essayed to pull my trousers up. Perhaps you know about the beaches at night, in Southern California, how they were patrolled.

  I think I may have heard something of the sort.

  Yes. And the loudspeaker coming over the roar of the rotors—you cannot believe how low they had settled in the sky just above us—the operators of this black buglike monster, punishing us with flying sand, hovering over us as we scampered to our feet and ran, I holding my shirt over her head, and they keeping us in their beam, accusing us of unspecified but monstrous misdemeanor, of blaspheming civilized life, of contaminating a precious sanctuary of innocent children and players of volleyball.

  And then the light went out and the damn thing swooped up and away, kicking sand in our faces as we stood there with our arms shielding our eyes. A few moments later it was as if nothing had happened, the night was quiet, and then Briony laughed and she looked at me and laughed some more, shaking the sand out of her hair and tossing her head, dealing with humiliation as women particularly learn to do, with resigned laughter and a kind of shrug and comic raising of the palms.

  We had run all the way to the end of the beach where there was a jetty of piled stone, and in a hollow at the land end of the jetty bodiless eyes in multiple array glowed out from the darkness. Briony said it was a clutch of feral cats who’d lived here as far back as she could remember. They skulked and hissed. We had come too close and the hiss enveloped us like the spun web of a spider. Maybe that was when I began thinking once more about something besides myself.

  Like what?

  Like this country of eternal sun and midget populations and sky police.

  The next morning, when we were about to leave, I was standing out by the car and saying goodbye and Betty was holding my hands, gently bobbing them up and down as indication of her fondness. We’re so happy she has found you, Andrew. We want everything for our girl. We love her beyond words. She is the triumph of our life.

  I admit I was hoping these were Briony’s adoptive parents. Why do you suppose that was? I was still recovering from the night on the beach, and standing now under the oppressive sun I had a sick feeling trying to accommodate the bizarre facts of my true love’s life. These were her founding circumstances, they marked her, they were hers, she had been made from them, and what I had made of her before now—my glorious student in the long sunlit frock and running shoes—had been incomplete if not illusory. Yes, she was, in the great American tradition, working her way through college—a financial aid package here, a bank loan there—obviously Bill and Betty were not of much help and so Briony was truly out of the nest, her own person. But I didn’t want her to have grown up in this household, in this town, among these people, and walking out of the front door every day of her girlhood to see this unchanging street of the little stucco homes and seashelled flower pots in the little front yards, and with the pale paved streets with no shadows. Everything so clearly the life to bake away a functioning brain. I imagined her as a child going down to that beach and playing in the sand, and picking shells at the water’s edge, day after day, year after year. It was the shameful feeling of just a moment, before I drove it from my mind—that all this of California was a fraud. Briony came out the door with her backpack and smiled, gorgeous as ever, and I felt that somehow I had been taken in.

  Well, I’m reassured. For a while there, love was making you a dull fellow.

  Try to understand. I know it’s hard for you, but pretend you are me. This whole thing had been a shock. Wouldn’t you feel somehow negated? Was it me she loved, or something about me that was all too familiar to her? Had she intuited it the first day of class when I was writing my name on the blackboard and the chalk broke in my hand and I knocked my books off the lectern? She had picked up everything and smiled with understanding. Grown in this endless sun, amid these awful flowers, her parents, face it, freaks of nature, she’d been nurtured to the weird, the unnatural. It was what she knew, her normal social reality. So who would she find for herself, whom would she be morbidly attracted to, but someone as adorable as a freakishly depressive cognitive scientist klutz, whom she was soon enough comforting after the nihilistic despair of his lectures?

  I hear self-loathing.

  You do?

  Another version of your unworthiness as the lover of this girl. First there was Andrew the anachronism on the football campus, and now the opposite, the all too appropriate proto freak fitting right in.

  I said this was the feeling for a moment. We have momentary feelings that don’t turn into action, don’t we?

  We do.

  You don’t think I’d be stupid enough to give up the love of my life because of some momentary suspicion that was actually a ritual self-denigration do you?

  I guess not.

  She had gotten away, hadn’t she, and now as we drove off, her parents waving from their front door, she wept. It was as if she’d said goodbye to them for the last time. I suppose I was responsible.

  Why?

  With me there she couldn’t pretend anymore that she hadn’t grown away from them. She could love them, be grateful to them, but not deny that they were from a world no longer her own.

  What had you done?

  I had met them.

  Briony was a superb athlete but without the sinew, the female musculature. She was a slim slip of a thing. Her limbs were firm and shapely but not tightly knotted, as even a dancer’s are. So that all this physical life seemed to me not natural, given her build, but more in the nature of a determination, a self-invoked discipline. So where it came from, why she had found it necessary to top a pyramid of cheerleaders, flip herself around on the high bar, run, jump, train for a purpose other than an intensely physical joy of being, I doubt if she even knew. When she had the baby she did her jogging while pushing the carriage. [thinking]

  Yes?

  Only one time did her determined athleticism fail her. Back in the shadow of the mountains. To show her I was not totally foreign to sports I bought us a couple of tennis racquets and we went over to the college courts to hit. I had played a bit at Yale—not for Yale, at Yale. I never took any lessons but I somehow knew what was involved and in my loose-limbed ambling way I could run around and get to the ball, I had a pretty good forehand and a less reliable backhand, I could hit a topspin lob and I had a nice drop shot if I needed it. The game was new to Briony, but when I offered instruction, how to grip the racquet, how to position your body to hit a forehand, a backhand, and so on, she wasn’t interested. She thought she could get the hang of things by herself. When she couldn’t—overhitting, knocking the ball over the fence, or netting it, or missing the ball completely, running frantically this way and that—though I tried always to hit where she could hit it back—she finally lost her temper, slammed the racquet down, and walked off the cou
rt, sulking. It was the first time in our life together that I saw her lose her composure.

  There were others?

  Carrying the baby. I forget what month. She was staining, and that frightened her. She was biting on her knuckles as I called the doctor. It turned out to be nothing. But that one time on the tennis court—I’ve since wondered if, to show off, I hit some shots I knew she couldn’t get to.

  [thinking]

  I’ve never told you about my time in the army. When I was in the army, at the end of basic training there were nighttime maneuvers. I fell asleep in my foxhole while I was supposed to be guarding the perimeter. A cadre officer woke me up. I was given a hundred push-ups with an M1 on my back, but my platoon sergeant, who was responsible for me, was RA, Regular Army, and he lost his stripes. He was two months from retirement. [thinking] I was once at an academic cocktail party expressing myself effusively in this crowded room, flinging my arms out to make some point or other. The back of my hand slammed into the jaw of a woman professor standing off to the right of me. She screamed and sank to the floor. All conversation stopped. I ran to the host’s kitchen, and was feeling around in the refrigerator freezer for some ice, lifting aside and holding a couple of liters of vodka. The woman’s husband had come after me, shouting, and when I turned I was so startled that I dropped the vodka bottles and broke his foot. In the space of a minute I had taken out an entire family. [thinking] I was an undergraduate biology major at Yale. One day in the lab we were doing an experiment with sea anemones—

  Andrew, stop.

  What? Stop what?

  I CAN TELL YOU: Last weekend Andrew decided to see his child.

  Really!

  As you know I’ve been holding back, holding back, and the fact that you’ve never brought up the subject, never once urging me to go see her or even asking oh so casually if it had ever occurred to me—

  This is something you had to come to out of yourself, your own thinking, your own feeling.

  Fine.

  After all, you’ve never even told me her name.

  Willa. Her name is Willa. I had left her birth certificate with Martha so there would be no mistake about that. Briony chose the name to honor her father. It’s lovely, isn’t it? Willa.

  Quite lovely.

  But think of the difficulties. What would I say? Why would I have come, for what purpose? I didn’t know. Did I want her back? And if I did, would that be best for her? And if she was with me, would Andrew the Pretender kick in and somehow put her in harm’s way? His child? And if he had just come for a visit, what would she think, could she relate to him in any way, think of him as her father who hadn’t seen her since she was an infant in a car seat? A man who would say Hi and leave again? To say nothing of Martha, who was as likely as not to slam the door in my face.

  There are certain legalities it seems to me you could rely on. I’m not a lawyer, but the blood relation always prevails. Parenthood rules unless it can be proven that you’re not fit. A drunkard, a homeless man, a criminal, that sort of thing.

  That sort of thing?

  You just don’t give children away in this country as if we were back in the medieval world. When you left Willa, was there anything written? Did you consult a lawyer, sign anything, you and Martha?

  I was in despair. I needed help. I had considered suicide.

  Oh? That’s new.

  I was at the point where I talked to Briony as if she was alive. Taking her instructions—how to heat the formula, I would read these things but ask her if I had understood them correctly. She would tell me. Put the little thing over your shoulder to burp her after feeding. She will need something warmer for the coming winter. And when it’s time for her shots, off to the pediatrician she goes. She’d laugh, my Briony, to see me in my domesticity, I’d have hallucinations where she’d appear beside me, as in life, and then a moment later be a tiny figure doing cartwheels and handstands and somersaults on the kitchen table. Oh, God. And you want me to consult a lawyer?

  You didn’t hire anyone to help you?

  I had no help, I couldn’t think of hiring anyone, I had Briony. I took a leave of absence from my job—an unpaid paternity leave. And then the madness dissolved, and I did go to get help. I was desperate for help. I went to Martha.

  Actually it was an impulsive decision on Andrew’s part, coming upon him as a kind of blown fuse of the endless thinking as to whether or not he should see his child. He was in his study reading yet another paper theorizing on how the brain becomes the mind. Here the proposition was offered that a brain-emulating artifact might someday be constructed whose neural activity could produce consciousness. This assertion, coming not from a pulp science fiction story of the kind he had read as a teenager but from an esteemed neuroscientist in a professional journal, so startled Andrew that he snapped back in his chair as if from an electric shock, and realized that his radio was tuned to the Saturday afternoon broadcast of the Metropolitan Opera. He now listened and understood that the Boris, of Boris Godunov, was dying. The czar calling out, singing out his lament, his prayer, and at last dying with the whispered word in Russian that sounded like rascheechev, ras-chee-chev, and then the thump indicating that he had hit the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House. Then this beautifully plaintive leitmotif to indicate yes, Boris the czar was kaput.

  Later, Andrew didn’t remember if he heard the bells of Moscow in celebration of the tyrant’s death, because he was out of there, slipping into his jacket as he ran and catching a cab to Union Station and getting on a Metro-liner.

  In New York, he walked crosstown to Grand Central and in a shop there bought a toy animal for his Willa, a funny, eye-rolling mechanical puppy who could be wound up and set down to wobble along on his little legs. He thought an animal was the safest thing to give his daughter, who would be three years old by now. Any child from one to ten would enjoy a toy animal.

  You see, Doc, it all came back to me in a rush—Martha’s house, Martha’s large husband—not that I thought he was the Boris who had died that afternoon—I had the impression that he was no longer top-drawer in the opera world—but the house, the scene, Martha walking up the staircase with my baby in her arms. It was as if not a moment had passed and I was still at their front door rubbing the snow from my glasses. And as the commuter train rocked its way to New Rochelle I was no longer afraid how my visit would turn out, no longer adrift in indecision, creating ominous scenarios in my mind. I was going to see my daughter! I felt love for Martha and for Martha’s husband, I was overflowing with gratitude to these people who had taken my baby with Briony under their wing. And I found I was even happy with the rickety train ride.

  You’re going to tell me this didn’t end well.

  Of course.

  When Andrew arrived at Martha’s house he knew immediately something was wrong. The snow had been cleared from all the other driveways and front walks on her street, but Martha’s property had not been touched. Andrew paid the cabbie and stood with his feet in six inches of snow. The thing about Martha, one of the definitive things, was her impeccable home management. If something didn’t work, no matter how incidental, she must have it fixed instantly. She brought forth gardeners, plumbers, electricians, carpenters, painters, roofers, tilers, cleaners, glaziers, and repairmen with esoteric specialties. She tended with solemnity to such details as brass door keyhole covers. It was now eight in the evening of a grim November day. Lights were on in the neighborhood, but the house in front of him was dimly lit as if some sort of séance was going on. I don’t know why Andrew thought that. He trudged up the path to the front door and found it ajar. [thinking]

  Yes, go on.

  He called me The Pretender.

  Who?

  Martha’s large husband. That was his greeting. Ah, he said, here’s The Pretender. That was the name he’d devised for me when we’d had that drink the day I brought the baby to their door. That I only pretended to be a nice human being generously disposed to my fellow man when in fact I was a da
ngerously fake person, congenitally insincere and a killer—that’s how he characterized me. Andrew the Pretender. And, as I told you, he was not far from the truth. But now when he called me The Pretender I realized whose portrait was up there over the mantel of the living room. It was Martha’s husband in his greatest role when he was still active—Boris Godunov. Now, you of course know the story of Boris Godunov.

  I’m ashamed to say—

  Boris is a kind of Russian Richard the Third. Kills the rightful heir to the throne, the czarevich Dmitry. Slits the kid’s throat and declares himself czar. Thereafter, he’s tormented by what he has done. Post-traumatic stress disorder.

  OK.

  So the years pass and an opportunistic monk, Grigoriy, seeing that he’s about the same age as the dead czarevich would have been, goes off to put together an army on the Polish-Lithuanian border. He will advance on Moscow announcing himself as the czarevich Dmitry, the rightful heir to the throne. Boris Godunov is assured that the man is a pretender—that the real czarevich is still dead. But afflicted with guilt, and riddled with religious superstition, Boris can’t convince himself that this is so, and he dies. That’s the story.

  Interesting, but why—

  Except for some Holy Fool at court who is heard lamenting Russia’s fate as the curtain comes down. Lots of Holy Fools in Russia in those days. You get Fools in Shakespeare too but they’re not particularly holy. A Russian Fool is automatically holy. He was drunk, of course.