Andrew's Brain

by E. L. Doctorow

  What about the screen door?

  Oh, I fixed that. The mesh wasn’t the problem, it was one of the hinges, the top hinge where it pulled away from the frame. But I took the whole thing down and did a job, new hinges, new mesh. Then of course the door frame is soft, spongy, so the real problem is termites. In due time, in due time. I’ve got my work cut out for me. Where the windows stick, where the floor squeaks. You don’t know how good it is to concentrate on these things, the satisfaction of using your hands, figuring things out small-scale.

  So you’re planning to be there for a while. I was wondering where you were.

  Something about this place. You know how some places stick in your mind for no reason? I mean, this is not a schloss in the mountains. It’s not a finca under the palm trees. They’ve given me a room behind the kitchen with a mattress on the floor, and have otherwise ignored me. Totally incurious as to who I am, where I’ve come from. I can tell they don’t look at me even when my back is turned. So I have every reason to feel safe here. No reason not to—I mean, I can’t possibly bring harm to people with whom I have no relationship.

  Do they ever thank you?

  Listen, I’m calling to ask you something. She draws. I think I told you that.

  What?

  The kid, the little girl. She gets off the bus on the two-lane, comes running down the dirt road, flings her book bag on a kitchen chair, and sits down at the table with her colored pencils, her crayons, and her drawing pad, and she draws. It’s all she wants to do. The old lady brings her a glass of milk and she’s too busy drawing to drink it. Are you listening? Can you hear me?

  Like we’re in the same room.

  When she senses that I’m looking at her through the screen door she scribbles over her drawings that she’s worked on so carefully—puts the pencil in her fist and destroys what she’s done.

  So maybe you shouldn’t watch her. Kids get shy about things that are meaningful to them. Do you say anything to her?

  I’ve never said a thing. There’s very little conversation in this farmhouse. Theirs is a relationship of mimes, the old woman and the kid. They seem to understand each other and what has to be done in any given moment—when to leave for school, when to go to bed—without talking about it. I’ve gotten to be just like them. I know when to come in for morning coffee, I know when to work on a project, I know when we have dinner, I know to nod good night. It’s like a silent movie in this house.

  You said you feel comfortable there.

  Until now. Last night, after they had gone upstairs for the night, I went into the kitchen. They leave a light on. And I looked at the drawing she’d done that day on her pad of drawing paper. The kid. [thinking]

  Andrew? You still there?

  She draws well, far better than you’d think someone of that age could draw. She’s really good. It’s all circus stuff. Acrobats, trapeze artists, tumblers, human pyramids. Girls in tutus standing on horses going around the ring. Little tiny figures all, perfectly formed.

  Andrew?

  They’re coming. I’m hanging up now.

  ALL RIGHT, if my life as an undergraduate is what interests you: I never expected to have him as a roommate. His family name, after all. And I, the financial aid student. But the college forbade preferential treatment—every freshman was no more than that. He laughed at my clumsiness. We would be in frequent trouble, a pair of misfits. [thinking] I guess it was just a matter of time and here we were again.

  What was the incident of the bunsen burner you mentioned?

  Our digs were a center of social life. People gathered around. It was mostly him, of course, but I too became known on campus—a second banana, as it were. I must have realized at some point that I had no identity without him. Because he was who he was, I was who I was. I did manage to keep up with my studies, which drove him mad. I’d be at my desk cramming for an exam and he couldn’t bear that, he’d drag me off to a bar. I’ll say this in his favor, hanging out with him I got braver with girls and by my junior year I was in a fairly serious relationship. But around him, the pressure was to be a clown, to find a way to make him laugh. Not just me but other guys too, that desire to fulfill his expectations. And every once in a while, after a few beers, what came to the fore was his mean streak, because he did have one. [thinking] His fooling around could segue into hurting people. Or humiliating them. His grades were dismal, he never cracked a book. It wasn’t as if he couldn’t have done better by applying himself. He was a contrarian. He was making a stand.

  And so what was that incident of the bunsen burner?

  In the inorganic chem lab. I was standing right where it happened with a shard of beaker sticking in my cheek and blood running down my chin. Something had exploded, I didn’t know what, but the room was filled with smoke, people were coughing, shouting, the sprinkler system had turned on, in one instant the lab was a total disaster. It was funny, actually. The professor, running in and waving away the smoke, assumed I was the culprit. I didn’t argue.

  Well, this doesn’t sound like something they would feel endangered by in an election thirty years later.

  Well, it wasn’t the only thing. I tutored him on occasion.

  So?

  Onsite, as it were. Where we were taking the exam.

  I see.

  Yes. But why would I reveal something now that would make me look just as bad? Given an academic career to uphold. Such as it is.

  I understand.

  The incident of the bunsen burner got me a semester of probation. And an invitation to go home with him on the spring break.

  A cold glance from the formidable mother, a limp distracted handshake from the father. That’s what I remember. Their son seemed to accept their rude offhand greetings as typical. I stood there with my backpack while staff ran by in some urgency. The household was busy preparing for dinner guests. I can tell you my roommate and I smoked dope in the upstairs of a huge floor-length duplex and not a book in sight.

  Andrew looked out the window—one of those unopenable bronze-framed windows, and all he could see was a building across the wide empty street that was just like the one in which he stood looking out at what he thought might be a shadowed reflection of himself. These were condominiums designed to look like office buildings, architectural statements celebrating the prevailing culture. He’d never seen a city like this, spread out on a flat plane. It baked in heat that shimmered up in the afternoon, and with its endless parking lots all filled under a hot sky and, in the downtown center, these characterless skyscrapers covered in dark glass. Andrew believed it could not be called a city if it did not have narrow streets filled with people and shops, horns blowing, the sidewalks overflowing and a nightlife into the early hours. Here everything went still after sundown, the traffic lights mindlessly directing nonexistent traffic. The two college boys were invited to the dinner that first evening and seated down at the far end of an enormous table that stood under three glistening chandeliers. Even I could tell the place settings were of the finest china, with heavy silver, and thin-stemmed wineglasses that contained the light as small golden suns. And this was just their pied-à-terre. We sat below the salt along with the secretaries and family business flunkies, none of whom were interested in talking, a spiritless lot suffering their lesser stature in silence while the formal reception and many toasts went on at the far end. It was a colorful dinner, in fact, all these sheiks and princes in their keffiyehs and designer floor-length tunics, men without women, mustached, bearded, stately, impressive, and in fact dressed appropriately in cotton for this desert. But when it came to a close and everyone stood and moved en masse out of the dining room, this is what I want to tell you: Andrew accidentally stepped on the train—if that was what it was—of one of the princes. It ripped, a flap of it fell open, and there in front of me was this hairy leg. It wore a running shoe. The things we remember. A moment later my roomie pulled me into a side door, running me up some back stairs two at a time till we got to his rooms and fell on our
beds laughing.

  The next morning I was told to leave by one of the secretaries. The heir apparent excused the chauffeur and ruefully drove me to the airport. The airport had the family name and there were huge photographs of his mother and father above the escalators. I’ll see you back there, he said, uncharacteristically gloomy. And Andrew understood that for a moment he’d been brought into the family dynamic as an incidental player in his roommate’s ongoing struggle.

  SO THERE YOU HAVE some of my memory, in case you doubted me.

  I didn’t doubt you.

  I was surprised to find him a middle-aged man. Unless you’ve seen someone on a daily basis, in which case the changes are imperceptible, it takes a moment before the remembered image dissolves.

  Hadn’t you seen photographs, interviews on television, speeches?

  Not the same as running into a life up close. Later, when I was sitting around in the Oval Office, I recognized the same twist of the mouth before the punch line of some dumb joke. That was the same. And the cockiness was there. But the eyes, a little bit scared, the eyes. Like he’d realized what he’d become. The hair gunmetal dull, some thinning on the crown.

  As for the others, Chaingang and Rumbum, they were small men, I mean physically small, the one red of face, scowling of mouth, the other impeccably tailored and barbered, the instincts of a peacock, but both smaller in scale than their pictures, so that was interesting.

  Who did you say?

  It was a game of his—subtle, really—a sign of his affection, a kind of honorific, or maybe a brand such as you burn into a steer, because it was also a means of letting you know he owned you, knew what you were in essence. Like with Peachums. So the two key men in his administration, the ones who ran things, were Chaingang and Rumbum.

  And what were you?

  He stamped me as well, with his breakout smile. I was Android.

  I see.

  Uncanny, as if some dendrite winding through his brain was snappier than the billions of others. Because I was Android, all right. Tap me with your knuckle, hear the clunk.

  So there you were.

  He would never ask Android anything about himself, personal stuff, how his life had gone, whether he was married, those questions you ask if you have any curiosity. It was as if we were still at Yale.

  Well, they had probably done a background check.

  Why would he bother reading it?

  Anyway, there you were.

  Yes, to people’s puzzlement. Because I had to be a game first of all. Bright and early the first day I was there he summoned me to the Oval Office.

  Just sit over here, Android, and don’t say a word. Don’t look up, don’t pay any attention. Here, read this magazine. Make believe you’re at the dentist’s office. And so I sat there off to the side while he conducted the morning’s business, receiving staff, holding meetings, my presence unexplained. As if he didn’t know I was there, as if I was an illusion of the others. Maybe I was Secret Service, though I hardly looked the part. But, if he didn’t seem to notice me, nobody could say anything. What a good time he was having keeping a straight face.

  And were you enjoying the joke?

  Would you in my position? The joke was my anonymity. I was like a shadow he’d cast. As if I was still his roommate. After a day or two of this, like everything in Washington it turned into news. That the president had a stranger hanging around his office was reported in the Spectator, a four-page subscription weekly: MYSTERY MAN IN THE WHITE HOUSE! That makes two of us, the president said.

  Chaingang scripted the White House response for the administration spokesman. Of course no reporter would be allowed near me. It was put out that I was a dear college chum just visiting for a few days. That had an element of truth but didn’t go down with the bloggers. I was to the president as Clyde Tolson was to J. Edgar Hoover. Or the president was seriously ill and required a physician constantly by his side. This was not to be borne: The chief of staff said I had to go. My presence was damaging to the president’s image as the leader of the free world. And there were questions of national security. Not that I ever heard anything interesting—they all talked like the newspapers. But I was remanded to my basement office in the cleaning closet. If the president wanted to kick back, he snuck down there when no one was looking.

  What about your White House Office of Neurological Research? Why wasn’t that mentioned?

  That the president’s science advisor knew nothing about? Never mind the CIA and the NSA. It would have sent the memos flying. Resignations. I might have actually had to do the work I was supposed to do. No, that was a secret that couldn’t be leaked. You remember the point was to make sure I kept my mouth shut.

  Peachums’s idea.

  Yes. Like the others, he didn’t like to see me upstairs. I heard him shouting one morning. As I walked into the Oval Office, he stormed out, taking up most of the doorway. But my old buddy would want me to have coffee just to sit around and talk about anything except being president. His war was not going well. He’d invaded the wrong country. You can’t imagine the anxiety that produces.

  Amazing.

  What’s amazing? You think I’m making this up?

  No, it’s just that—

  I was a story for a day or two before it all suddenly and mysteriously disappeared. Where were you at the time? You of all people. And if not, it’s in the file, it would have to be.

  What file?

  Come on, Doc, at least have some respect. Do you know what Mind Reading is in cog science talk? It’s not about some magician up on a stage working his audience.

  No?

  No. Mind Reading is what, at the right temporoparietal junction of the brain, allows us in our social lives to know deductively, instinctively, what other people are thinking. The mood they’re in—happiness, boredom, whatever. Mind reading is our way of characterizing human sensitivity, like knowing, for instance, when someone is pretending not to know something.

  I’m sorry you feel that way.

  The Post and the Times had got as far as my past life—two marriages, one death, one divorce, a child farmed out, another died in infancy. I came to appreciate investigative reporting. It’s like obituary writing—they get everything but the feeling. They had my college grade average—3.25, something like an exoneration in my mind. And an old photograph from the college newspaper, the roomies with big smiles on their faces and arms around each other’s shoulders right there on the front page of the Post. I realized for the first time that, apart from my curly hair, we were look-alikes. There was almost a familial resemblance, at least then. I had since worn not as well as he. Surely you know something of this. Or else why am I here?

  Good morning, class. Good morning, red of face and scowl of mouth. Good morning, starched of shirt and waved of hair. This morning we will speak of consciousness. Where does it come from? What does it do with itself? Does it connive? Does it seek advantages? How does it learn its ways—as billions of neurons self-conceiving in neural circuits, revise, adjust, reorganize, multiply responding behaviorally to outer-world creature experience—in a process of natural selection or neural Darwinism, according to Edelman? Does that include you, pretty-boy warmaker? Are you the culmination of this evolutionary brainwork? Crick, on the other hand, opts for the role of the claustrum or maybe the thalamus. Abjure claustrumphobia. Remember the thalamus! In any event you have no soul. But neither do Edelman or Crick. And neither does scowler here, though he will kill to prove that he has one. But that is the pretense of the brain. We have to be wary of our brains. They make our decisions before we make them. They lead us to still waters. They renounceth free will. And it gets weirder: If you slice a brain down the middle, the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere will operate self-sufficiently and not know what the other is doing. But don’t think about these things, because it won’t be you anyway doing the thinking. Just follow your star. Live in the presumptions of the socially constructed life. Abhor science. Sort of believe in God. Put your fai
lings behind you. Present your self-justifications to the bathroom mirror.

  You really disliked those men, didn’t you.

  Chaingang and Rumbum were self-appointed world strategists. They had ranks of ideologues and think-tank warriors behind them. The president was only that. These were complicated relationships among the three men, and at moments he had to feel outnumbered and outclassed. For every instance that he went along with their bidding, however persuasive and in accord with his own instincts, there had to be some resentment there, don’t you think? I understood that he was using me as a prod to annoy them, having me test them, knowing it was an affront to make them hear me lecture on neurological developments around the world. That’s what he kept saying: Android (with a sly smile), let’s hear about the neurological developments around the world.

  Well, Mr. President, in Switzerland they are building a megacomputer to emulate the human brain. Slowly but surely they’re building circuitry to mimic its synaptical, neuronal capacities. As complex as our brains are, the number of elements that make them work are finite. That means it’s just a matter of time before we have a working out-of-body brain.

  Is that true?

  That’s what Chaingang asked with an ironic smile. This is not an old science fiction movie you’re giving us? The president had his hands full with Chaingang and Rumbum, men he’d appointed who had more or less taken over where the important decisions were to be made. So his next joke was to announce that I was a brain researcher doing a study of executive brains like theirs. They were busy men, they had things to do, a war to run, and here he was having fun at their expense.