E. Doctorow - Andrew's Brain

How animated she was telling me this family history — living it, almost, by punctuating her account with handstands, cartwheels, back flips to a standing position, running broad jumps. There on the beach that night to the rhythmic lapping of the surf.

He toured them in all the European capitals and that was how Mom and Dad met. They were in the Leo Singer Lilliputstadt.

So, Doc, did you ever hear of this man, Singer?

No.

That’s two of us. But it turns out he was the go-to guy when MGM needed Munchkins for their film. He was this international dealer in Munchkins.

I hear a note of disdain in your voice.

Clearly an operator who infantilized these people, made a spectacle of them, and made himself a fortune in the process.

Didn’t you say we all have an affection for what is miniature? And here they were in California, her parents, comfortably retired in their own home, a lovely family.

I know, I know. What was in store for them from their villages if the guy hadn’t taken them away? Their parents probably only too relieved. I suppose money changed hands. Bill and Betty must have been young, in their teens or early twenties. And he gave them a profession, a means of self-respect, whereas back home they would have been forever misfits, tolerated, made fun of, or treated with insulting sympathy. But it all smacks of Europe, you know? This sensibility. At least the Munchkins in the film had a fictive identity, they weren’t midgets performing, they were these fantasy creatures made up not to look like themselves. Not Bill and Betty or the other Lilliputians. Don’t you think this has Europe written all over it?

I’m not sure what you mean.

I mean serfdom, indentured oppression, and all their damn uniforms and monarchal wars and colonizations and autos-da-fé. Baiting bears, that’s what I mean, the European culture of bearbaiting. Freak taunting. Jew killing. That’s what I mean.

[ thinking ] She was so happy. So I didn’t say anything. Did I tell you I had bought her an engagement ring before we made the trip west?

No.

I did. I was doing all sorts of un-Andrew things. Holding hands in public, being happy. And now, on the beach, clowning around, trying to do my cartwheels, my handstands, and falling and getting up with a mask of sand on my face. How she laughed. And as it happens with new lovers, we were tinder. The passion fired up from anything — laughter, the keenness of the moment. Close your eyes, she said, and I felt her brushing the sand away. And then all at once she pushed me down, and as I lay back she was upon me, mouth on mouth, vehemently yanking my trousers down and then flipping us over so that I lay on top of her. When had she pulled up her shift to bare herself? And then the three little words: Put it in, she said. Put it in!

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?