E. Doctorow - Andrew's Brain

So it was that morning.

Yes.

What did you do then?

Nothing.

I don’t understand.

Nothing! By the time I came back in and noticed the light blinking it was all over. Christ, Doc, what country were you in that day? Who in the entire city didn’t know in a flash what had happened. Where was Briony, where was my wife! I was out in the street holding the baby in my arms and looking for her. Calling her name. Looking for her to turn the corner and appear. In the confusion, the fire engines, people stumbling through the streets, shouting, sirens, it was as if all of that had swallowed her up. Where was she? She would think first of Willa. She’d be back in a second to make sure the baby was all right. Wouldn’t she? Then where was she?

Oh, Andrew …

Or was she trapped there! I went back to the apartment and found a neighbor who would stay with the baby. And then I ran downtown. Of course I couldn’t get near anything. One of the towers had sunken in on itself. People staggered by me to get away, people covered in ash, as if cremated but the form of them not yet collapsed. I thought I saw her. Briony! I stopped her — these eyes looked out at me from a gray mask, bright terrified eyes as the only living part of her, this woman. I actually tried to brush the ash from her face. What are you doing? she said. Get away! It was useless — the lines were up, the stanchions, police, fire, ambulances, lights strobing, the squawking of their radios. I waited at a corner, waiting to see her among the fleeing faces. And then I knew that was hopeless and decided that if I ran home she would be there.… But it was just the light flashing on the machine.

Had she instinctively run toward the disaster, leaping into the firestorm, by nature a first responder? I didn’t know. Only later, haunting the police stations, was I deranged enough to think it was Dirk she wanted to rescue, to climb ninety-five flights of stairs to pull to safety, catastrophically, insanely, passionately. In my bad moments I thought it was that. But she might not even have known where he worked. They were to have lunch in the neighborhood down there. Anyway, what difference did it make? He broadcast his death, but her silence was what connected them in my mind. It was as if their simultaneous deaths, each unknown to the other, could be construed as a peculiar coalescing of their fates — their transformation into star-crossed lovers. But that is only if I put me in the picture.

I wouldn’t do that if I were you.

Nothing recognizably Briony was ever found. [ thinking ] How calmly I have said that.

The neighbors knew because they knew her. They filled the house. They held the baby.

There were in the street these posters everywhere plastered, on every wall, on every fence, on mailboxes, on phone booths and in subway stations, with the photographs of intensely alive, of can’t possibly be dead, faces. Name, age, last seen. Phone numbers in black marker. Have you seen this person? Call this number. Please call. I went around putting up the picture of Briony. Name, age, last seen. I wanted people to see her face. I knew it was useless, but I thought it necessary. I had taken it in the park, she was smiling at me. I had a folder with her faces, a hundred copies, printed at a Kinko’s, and I went around posting them. She was in that community of the last seen, their names and addresses, that they were loved. Please call. She was in that community of what was left of them.

And beside the firehouses, or against the schoolyard fences, or on signboards under streetlamps, were the makeshift shrines of their pictures, or their children’s drawings, nestled in sprays of evergreen and framed by candles and with bunches of flowers, and petals in bowls of water. It took another day or two before I found flowers at our door.

I endured what I could. I couldn’t sleep. I lay in bed listening for the key turning in the lock. The women of the neighborhood helped for a couple of weeks. After that I was on my own. Willa would look at me with her mother’s blue eyes. Quietly judgmental, I felt, though knowing that could not be true. Fretful at times, looking past me, looking for Briony. I rocked the carriage back and forth. And then in November they held their marathon as a national vow to prevail. It grew colder. Snow fell. And there I was swaddling Willa, pushing the little feet into the leggings, the arms into the sweater, and then the hat and the snowsuit and the blanket and the whole bundle of her into the car seat. It is an arduous process, preparing an infant for the outdoors in winter. And when I had buckled her in and started the engine I realized what I had in mind: I would bring her to Martha.

HELLO, DOC, why I’m here on the mountainside overlooking this fjord is to get as far away from you as possible. I am in a cabin with not even the work of MT to pass the time. Not even Knut Hamsun. I have a table, a chair, a cot, a sink, a camp stove, and a toilet. As compact as a prison cell except I can stand in the doorway and see the Norwegian mountains framing the valley of icewater — darker in hue than the Wasatch, green-black they are, more into themselves than the sun-specked Western cousins, humpier, and more sedate. When it rains that’s when I have my shower. Regularly a cruise ship, toy-size, floats by down there, soundless from this height but as if to affirm the self-satisfaction of the people who claim these fjords for their national heritage. I can shout and hear my voice coming back a moment or two later, faintly, and maybe only in my imagination. I do that to believe I’m not alone. I sing a lot as well, I remember the words of the old Hit Parade numbers. Without my knowing it, my brain had stored dozens and dozens of lyrics in neuronal connection with the tunes. If I say the words the tune comes to me. Can’t have one without the other. I also have a tin mirror over the sink and I look into it so that someone is there beside me. I have done this because Wittgenstein did it. He who understood so well the deceptions of the thinking brain. But it is dangerous to stare into yourself. You pass through endless mirrors of self-estrangement. This too is the brain’s cunning, that you are not to know yourself.

I’m writing this though there’s no mail here and chances are you won’t read it till I get back and hand it to you and sit there watching you read. If I ever do. I understand why you asked those questions in the midst of my living through it again — as I spoke of it and recited the voice machine death message wired into my brain, and then Briony’s death message delivered as in a silent film, her face speaking to me earnestly in words I cannot hear, the shutter closing around her face, the aperture contracting to a pinpoint and finally to black … because all you could muster was: Had I informed Briony’s parents. That was you, ever the practical fellow, tidying things up, expecting people to do what was logical and right. Living by the book. What about Bill and Betty, you said, shouldn’t you have called them? Assuming I didn’t. In fact they were on the phone almost the moment it happened, with their distant trumpet-mute voices. She’s not home yet, I said, but don’t worry, I’ll have her call you … trying to sing through the trembling in my voice.

If I could go mad surely that would be better than the sanity of this meditative solitude. Me and my shadow … Dancing in the dark . I do have a big bread knife that I look at from time to time. It looks back.

They died soon after. Bill of a stroke, Betty withering away. Tiny coffins for them, a jar of unidentifiable anonymous ash standing in for Briony. The whole family shamed by the facility of their transfiguration.

Do you want this returned?

No, keep it. It was written to you.