E. Doctorow - Andrew's Brain

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 court, 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.