E. Doctorow - Andrew's Brain

Was he that drunk?

Drunk or not, he was in the play, casting me as the enemy. Some basis for that in my being Martha’s ex. And yes he found just the term, plucked it out of Russian operatic history maybe by way of a deeper recognition. At the root, Andrew is The Pretender, OK? Is that what you want to hear? You’ve interrupted my train of thought. You guys aren’t supposed to do that.

But this is important, don’t you think? Didn’t he make you mad?

Listen, he knew I did cog science. He was not unintelligent. When I left he was singing his heart out to me, following me to the door. So don’t jump to conclusions. I felt sorry for him, to tell you the truth. He kissed me on the top of my head. And then he got down on his knees and begged for my blessing. That’s what Boris does in the opera, he begs for the blessing of the Holy Fool who stands in his mind for all of Russia. So I was no longer the Pretender to the throne. I had been recast as the Holy Fool. Or he might have been acknowledging me as one Pretender to another. After all he couldn’t exclude himself pretending to be the rightful czar. You weren’t there. We were brothers under the skin.

So it was a reprieve, is that what you’re saying? You were absolved of being Andrew the Pretender?

We’re all Pretenders, Doctor, even you. Especially you. Why are you smiling? Pretending is the brain’s work. It’s what it does. The brain can even pretend not to be itself.

Oh? What can it pretend to be, just by way of example?

Well, for the longest time, and until just recently, the soul.

I may have given you the wrong impression about my feelings for Briony. But for that moment in California as we left her parents’ house, and perhaps a few others, my love was as pure and uncomplicated as never before in any attachment I had had to a woman. I haven’t told you about my relationships, some of them seemingly strong. But never uncomplicated.

Before your marriage to Martha?

And after. Trouble with all of them is that I was always myself. With Briony I was the person I’d always dreamt of being. For a person congenitally unable to be happy, I was, with Briony, happy. Happiness consists of living in the dailyness of life and not knowing how happy you are. True happiness comes of not knowing you’re happy, it’s an animal serenity, something between contentment and joy, a steadiness of the belonged self in the world. Of course I’m talking about life in the developed Western world. A modest busyness in the routine of life, a satisfaction with your lot, the deliciousness of sex and food and fine weather. You don’t just love the person you love, you love the given world. A feeling possibly induced by endomorphin, the brain’s opiate. I know, there it is again, the cephalic instruction. But so what! As we crossed the country there were snow mountains for the skiers, white-water runs for the rafters, free rides everywhere you looked. We drove one day along a field where in the distance balloonists had convened. We pulled over to watch this languid flotilla of rainbowed sky ships risen into their own blithe sense of time and space. We discussed the possibility that Americans more than any other people understand what the earth and sky have to offer. At these moments life was what it was and nothing more, it was exactly what it seemed to be with nothing behind it. A presiding belief in the future, all the synapses afire as if to make a metaphysical music and you are blissfully existing in the consciousness of the customary given world as the only reality. And of course the guilt is gone. The fear that was your old self. All that, I say, is what Briony did for me. My delight in everything everywhere on that trip was essentially the joy of being with her, the fact that she was with me — everything about her — her thoughtfulness, how she confronted you with her eyes, her laugh, the simplicity of her self-attentions — she wasn’t much for makeup, never primped, her hair was brushed, sometimes tied behind the neck, sometimes not. Just by the way she casually fixed her hair she suggested the different aspects of her being. When we fell silent during a stretch of straight road that went on for miles, she sat with her arms crossed, or looked for music on the radio. She was in charge of the music and decided I had a lot to learn, which was true, I’d never gotten beyond the Beatles and the Grateful Dead. (Oh, she said, you mean The Dead.) I wasn’t afraid for her, she would never be a victim of The Pretender. I was through with him. I was transmogrified, I was on my way to Holy Fooldom.

But as I say, we were riding across the country and I was the new Andrew, no longer anxious, no longer worried for her. Everything was amazing. Escarpments of red rock, endless fields of wheat, towns of one dusty street, a roadside diner where you moved down along a steam table and took what you liked to the cashier, a sign on the wall announcing: “Efficient and Courteous Self Service.” A trailer park in a sandstorm, the wind whipping up the clotheslines, a motel with a purple dinosaur on its roof, seemingly endless wooden one-room Baptist churches with the day’s chapter and verse out front, antebellum towns with pillared mansions shadowed in live oak. In Atlanta we stopped at a bookstore and bought a bunch of Mark Twains, and on the interstate whoever was not driving read him aloud — we took turns — Briony drove well, not impatiently but not dillydallying either. I saw Mark Twain in her eyes as we passed under the repetitive amber lights of the highway, and I saw him flickering in her imagination—

So, there was your MT. Huckleberry Finn , I suppose?

The Prince and the Pauper . The two boys exchange identities, the prince is the pauper and the pauper the prince. Briony liked the romance of that, Clemens saying there’s nothing to royalty but the assumption. But it’s more than a democratic parable: It’s a tale for brain scientists. Given the inspiration, anyone can step into an identity because the brain is deft, it can file itself away in an instant. It may be stamped with selfhood, but let the neurons start firing and Bob’s-your-uncle.

I’m not sure of the timing of your trip. Had Briony graduated? I thought you said she was a junior when you met. Were you reappointed for a second year?

I remember coming up the Jersey Turnpike, past the oil refinery burn-offs, and with the growling of the convoying semis in our ears, and away off to the left the planes dropping to the runways of Newark Airport and then the fields of burned grass irrigated by rivulets of muck and with what looked like a buzzard floating over the turnpike risen now on concrete pillars that in their tonnage were holding up the furious intentions of traffic, the white lights coming toward us, the red lights beckoning, and when I glanced over at Briony she was staring straight ahead, clearly stunned by this dazzling information, it wasn’t exactly fear in her eyes but more like a virginal response to the unexpected. What I wondered at that moment was how much time one got for transporting a young woman across state lines. What is it you asked?

When this was, and did she drop out of school to go with you.

Briony was half junior, half senior, when I came along. She was graduated in January, when there was no commencement. She had her various jobs while I rode out my year’s contract. With Briony sometimes auditing in her front-row seat I was inspired to give the students only good news: how much neuroscience is advancing almost day by day. I was positive, always anticipating a resolved future of essential discoveries, it was the guarded optimism of the classroom, the assumption of any science course, that we would get to the truth eventually. I harked back to Whitman, who knew better than anybody what we are and sang of “the body electric.” How pleasing to those children to learn, body as brain and brain as body, that it all came together. Of course I wouldn’t tell them he was a poet. Ruin everything.