E. Doctorow - Andrew's Brain

This wasn’t the first time Briony could sound like the willful child who fixes her mind on something and won’t listen to reason. Made me think Bill and Betty must every now and then have had their hands full.

She couldn’t take her eyes off the screen. And when the camera cut away from the leaders to the main body, people on the sidewalks holding out cups of water and cheering, a runner here limping, a runner there gasping for breath, the strain on some faces, the concentration so that you understood they saw and heard nothing but the pavement in front of them, the robotic pounding of their own feet — well, when I looked at Briony I was chastened to see the tears running down her cheeks. She sat there on the couch leaning forward, as if something religious was going on. And so I wasn’t about to argue. When the program was over I hugged her and said not a word about how unrealistic it was there in June to think, the baby coming momentarily, that she could recover quickly enough and turn herself in the few months till November — that’s when they have it — into a long-distance runner through five boroughs and twenty-six-some miles over bridges and up hills and down avenues. I said to her only that the baby and I would be waiting for her at the finish line in Central Park.

Willa thoughtfully chose to be born just a few days later. How long was it before Briony was doing her jog those summer mornings with the baby carriage flying before her? Sometimes I took them in a cab to Central Park and sat with the carriage while Briony ran around the reservoir. I would do my reading, holding the baby when she fretted, giving her her bottle — I was fearless. And after a while there would Briony be, gleaming with health, laughing, her arms shining, her shirt stained with sweat, and as she drank from her water bottle, head tilted back, I studied the loveliness of her neck, the peristalsis of her throat. And then right there on the bench in the sun she would unbutton her nursing bra and give the baby her breast, and there were mother and child, a sacrament of nature in the green park among the families drifting by, dogs barking, kids on scooters, the wandering seller of balloons.

You’re describing an idyll.

How is it that first mothers instantly have the knowledge of mothering? Something that’s always been in the brain is called into play. And the organization. Somehow she found time for everything — the baby, her tutoring, seeing after the old lady who lived next door. Into July and August on the hottest of days she would leave the house at dawn for a serious run and do her miles, seven, ten, by the time people were going off to work. She would head downtown to where the offfice buildings were, and find one where she could run the stairs, run up twenty, thirty flights of stairs for strength training.

I assume you approved all of this.

Of course. Wasn’t I working out at the gym? We were a team, including Willa out to see her mother run the marathon. Briony bounded off from our doorway and her feet barely touched the ground. Her legs seemed to grow longer, it was like the levitation you see in classical ballet. [ thinking ]

Yes?

I had also bought us a phone with an answering machine. “Hello, Briony? Bri, are you there? It’s Dirk! I got your number from your folks.”

Her old boyfriend? The football player?

Briony was out. She was tutoring.

Did you tell her?

Of course I told her. She called back and agreed to meet him for lunch. She told me he’d gotten a job at a brokerage downtown.

No more football?

Said he would never make the pros. He was a business major and his father knew people in New York.

How did you feel about this?

I felt in bed at night that she pressed herself to me as she always had. I felt that our baby that we’d made was in her crib next to the bed. I felt Briony’s heartbeat in my chest as my own. Why do you ask these questions — that the love of my life would not be trustworthy, is that what you think? Or that I would think? It was all in her fine honest lovely young face without guile, without secrets, that she had made up her mind, and she had her family now. But they were old friends, and why not? We didn’t even talk about it.

So it was no problem.

The day was the problem. It was the day. It was the morning of the day that they were to have lunch that was the problem. [ thinking ] You might say that. She got up later than usual because Willa had had a fretful night. So it was almost eight when she went out for her run. It was to be a busy day. When she had done her miles she’d shower, put on something appropriate for lunch in a restaurant, see that the old woman next door was OK, and after her lunch with Dirk she had two hours of afternoon tutoring. So it was a busy day. [ thinking ] She kissed my cheek: Willa likes the applesauce for her morning snack, she said, and set off over the route she had worked out for herself: down along the Hudson to the Esplanade, across Liberty Street, with maybe a stop at the WTC to run some flights of stairs, and then turning north up Broadway.

“Briony, it’s not to be. I have to cancel.” Here a laugh becoming a sob. “I wouldn’t mind so much if I could see you one last time. But then you’d have to be up here and I wouldn’t want that. Wouldn’t want that. Or just to talk to you— Are you there, Bri? Hello? Oh, God. It’s their machine.”

Andrew, what is this?

Giving you Dirk on the answering machine: “Okay, Professor, I’m leaving a message. That’s your voice, isn’t it? Am in the window frame now. Far as I can go. High altitude. Heat is something.… Standing on the bare steel.… Isn’t it neat that your machine is getting this because it is surely the end of me. So I am finished but everything else will go on including you, especially you, Professor.… We don’t hear as good as bats, see as well as hawks. You remember saying that? We can know only so much. You remember? So I wanted to ask then, how can you be so fucking sure there’s no God? Hear your bullshit answer.”

He was that conversational — that he could think of that?

I’m giving you his words. There were pauses when the sound of unimaginable catastrophe took over. Then his voice would return as from a distance. “My understanding of jumping from high places is that I will be dead … before I hit the ground. I surely hope so. I surely do hope so. Won’t I be like flying? I’ll be flying, I’ll be in free flight. It will be cool because it’s hot as hell here. I think it is time now, steel —yi! — melting my shoes. Just step off, why not, why not. I’ll put the phone in my pocket and he will hear my flight, and keep it for posterity, deliver it as a lecture: How Bri’s lover died. Professor, you old fuck, you stole her from me with your smart-ass talk. But hear me: You make a good life for her, live for her, or I will come back and haunt you. I will inhabit your goddamn brain.”

Good lord—

And then I heard the flame behind him like a whoosh of a monstrous breath and think now, as I have listened to the point where I don’t have to listen to hear it, I hear too the voices of the others on the ninety-fifth floor with him as they burned to death, their cries the last organic traces of their enflamed bones, a weird awful chorus finally indistinguishable from the roar of the oil fire and the cringe and screech and squeak of the tortured steel and from the oily smoke of flames that refueled from the smoke and blew out again to flame. And then I hear air in its resistance to a falling body, it is like the sound of a jet engine louder and louder in higher and higher pitch and it lasts but a few seconds before it ceases to be sound, before I hear only the absence of sound followed by a beep of the answering machine terminating the call.