E. Doctorow - Andrew's Brain

You think?

Come on, Doc, you have that look about you—

What look? All this is news to me.

— pretending not to know something you know all about. Don’t you believe it’s important for the government to predict how people will react to various stimuli, foreigners especially? Or to magnetically image the hallucinogenic mind? Or how to manipulate the brain’s plasticity? Or a hundred other mental issues that can be useful to a government?

Brainwashing, you mean?

Brainwashing was the 1950s. I don’t know why I talk to you. Anyway, it was a real enough offer and not a joke after all. They just wanted to keep an eye on me. I was to learn it was Peachums’s idea.

Peachums?

That’s what the president called him. The campaign manager. Said to be the president’s brain. I wondered how much of that was left to be parceled out.

Peachums.

Or sometimes Plumsy — whatever was hairless.

I see.

As I was to realize, nobody, least of all the president, cared if I actually did what the job called for. The point was the next election. That some reporter would track me down, and I’d talk about our collegiate misadventures, of which there were quite a few. Like the incident of the bunsen burner. I had never spoken up about my famous roommate but did that mean I wouldn’t? There I was, risen out of his dim past to become a staff concern. I had to sign a confidentiality statement: As an administration appointee I was subject to the law if I leaked information. I looked at the paper wondering whether to sign. It was a total clamp over my mouth.

But you accepted.

How could I ignore a presidential summons? [ thinking ] No, that’s not the truth. It was as if he’d materialized, it was as if our life arcs — his so upward-reaching and mine looping into the depressed hemispheric depths — had described a perfect circle and there we were, superimposed in the same place at the same time. It felt inevitable.

I have to say I’m surprised you haven’t mentioned any of this before now.

Why?

Well, it is unusual to say the least to find your old college roommate the president of the United States. Kind of story you can dine out on for a lifetime.

Are you suggesting I’m making this up?

No, of course not. I just wonder why you would wait this long before mentioning it?

I don’t live vicariously, Doc. I didn’t mention it before now I guess because I was talking about things more important to me.

OK.

Besides which he is nothing to brag about, is he? I didn’t vote for him and wouldn’t have voluntarily sought him out. He wouldn’t have come up at all in these sessions except in the aftermath … the aftermath … [ thinking ] Name dropping is finally self-congratulatory, isn’t it? But the fact that he was my roommate is nothing for which I’ve reason to congratulate myself. Maybe if I’d mentioned it at the beginning, like it wasn’t the last thing in the world I wanted to talk about.

No, no, I believe you — you’re here, aren’t you?

I am politically informed, Doc. Apart from everything I’ve been telling you about myself, I am a citizen sensitive to his country’s history. My roommate had gotten where he was by not quite the usual elected way. I knew how things had gone since — his chosen war, his anti-scientism. I knew all about him and the quality of the people around him. [ thinking ] Analyses had been done. All you had to do was read the newspaper. Those flights should never have happened. The intelligence was there.

You mean, you blame him?

Who am I to blame anyone for anything? But he was feckless, irresponsible, in over his head.… I believed he’d brought a fatal lassitude to the federal mind. On the theory that the president we get is the country we get. That was worth looking into, don’t you think? I had long despaired of ever doing original work in my field. To start with the hypothesis that there is something like a government brain— I had the idea this was an opportunity of some kind.

Quite reasonable.

No, you don’t understand. I kept a photo of Briony and our baby in my wallet. They are in the sun, in the park, Willa seated in Briony’s arms as on a throne, and they are facing me, mother and child, two blondes, laughing, rising out of the picture to fill my eyes—

Yes?

So I signed the confidentiality agreement and became the head of the Office of Neurological Research in the White House basement. I meant to step into history, to act. To make a statement that would finally be the end of me.

What are you saying, Andrew?

And that’s what I’d resolved the morning I stood on the corner with my coffee and paper waiting for the light to change.

HELLO, DOC? I’m speaking to you from their old wall phone, the kind you crank up. Can you hear me?

Yes, Andrew, loud and clear.

No matter how old and broken-down things are, the life seems to work for them. It’s uncanny. The local phone company must be as old as this house. And that flatbed truck, four on the floor, with the bald tires and the paint all weathered away — a kind of art object. So they walk to town. I do it myself. And the town too, shabby dimly lit little stores that have been there forever, but you find what you need. The hardware store — the guy who runs it, he does roofing, I kept picking up shingles in the yard so I engaged him to come patch thing up. There’s a leak, all the old woman does is put a pail under it.

What about the screen door?

Oh, I fixed that. The mesh wasn’t the problem, it was one of the hinges, the top hinge where it pulled away from the frame. But I took the whole thing down and did a job, new hinges, new mesh. Then of course the door frame is soft, spongy, so the real problem is termites. In due time, in due time. I’ve got my work cut out for me. Where the windows stick, where the floor squeaks. You don’t know how good it is to concentrate on these things, the satisfaction of using your hands, figuring things out small-scale.

So you’re planning to be there for a while. I was wondering where you were.

Something about this place. You know how some places stick in your mind for no reason? I mean, this is not a schloss in the mountains. It’s not a finca under the palm trees. They’ve given me a room behind the kitchen with a mattress on the floor, and have otherwise ignored me. Totally incurious as to who I am, where I’ve come from. I can tell they don’t look at me even when my back is turned. So I have every reason to feel safe here. No reason not to — I mean, I can’t possibly bring harm to people with whom I have no relationship.

Do they ever thank you?

Listen, I’m calling to ask you something. She draws. I think I told you that.

What?

The kid, the little girl. She gets off the bus on the two-lane, comes running down the dirt road, flings her book bag on a kitchen chair, and sits down at the table with her colored pencils, her crayons, and her drawing pad, and she draws. It’s all she wants to do. The old lady brings her a glass of milk and she’s too busy drawing to drink it. Are you listening? Can you hear me?

Like we’re in the same room.

When she senses that I’m looking at her through the screen door she scribbles over her drawings that she’s worked on so carefully — puts the pencil in her fist and destroys what she’s done.

So maybe you shouldn’t watch her. Kids get shy about things that are meaningful to them. Do you say anything to her?

I’ve never said a thing. There’s very little conversation in this farmhouse. Theirs is a relationship of mimes, the old woman and the kid. They seem to understand each other and what has to be done in any given moment — when to leave for school, when to go to bed — without talking about it. I’ve gotten to be just like them. I know when to come in for morning coffee, I know when to work on a project, I know when we have dinner, I know to nod good night. It’s like a silent movie in this house.