E. Doctorow - Andrew's Brain

Your brains are looking good, he told them. Like a promising field for oil drilling.

They were not loath to show their irritation. In their eyes the president was a kind of dauphin who they felt lacked gravitas, to say nothing of a reasonable attention span. Their belief in their intellectual superiority was at odds with the fact that he was of the historically elected and they were not. He could affect a presidential strut walking to his helicopter, but he was not the real kingly thing as they felt they would be were they in his shoes. [ thinking ] In other countries it was men like these who mounted coups.

You saw all that?

When you’re in a room with the president of the United States you become very observant. My presence enraged the two men. So much so that I thought I would go along with the president and run a thought experiment. They believed I was putting them under the microscope, so why not? When in the history of the United States had a private citizen ever had a chance like this? But it had to be quick. It could work only until the president lost interest. That didn’t give me much time.

Chaingang and Rumbum had made their careers in government. Their minds were wired into well-established neuronal circuits that found expression in the vocabularies of war, detention, physical torture, political power, social gossip, sex, and money. So I cleared my throat and gave them each a pad and a pencil, and explained the cog sci prisoners’ dilemma game to them. Of course I didn’t send them out of the room as I had the high schoolers, I just told them each, privately, outside of the hearing of the other, to imagine that the president knew of their conspiracy to overthrow the government because his co-conspirator had betrayed him. He could say nothing or he could betray his colleague in turn. Their decisions would have greater or lesser punitive consequences in the hands of the attorney general. They were to write down the decision to betray or not to betray their co-conspirator.

They put up with this?

Like children given a task. They sat at opposite ends of one of the Oval Office sofas, their backs turned as they bent over their pads — with frowns, a closing of eyes here, a rubbing of forehead there — in the performance of heavy thought. I had warned them not to look at each other, but that was unnecessary. This was game theory, after all. Betray your co-conspirator and you’re in trouble, for you’ve admitted your guilt, but if you don’t betray him and he betrays you, he goes free and you’re headed for the slammer big-time. Only if neither of you betrays the other is the case against you dropped.

And what happened?

These men had served in various capacities over several administrations. Now they were at the very top. How had they gotten there? Who more than they knew how politics worked? So of course each of them, figuring the best possible outcome for himself, had no choice but to betray.

How the president laughed when I handed him the pads on which they’d written their decisions. A no-brainer, he said.

You made yourself known there, didn’t you.

I had no illusions, though. He needed a sidekick, a familiar, but for how long? He gave me one of those little lapel flags they liked to wear, so you knew they were patriots.

Yes?

Pinned it on me as you would a medal. I was now one of the good guys. Though as it turned out, my job as the director of the phantom White House Office of Neurological Research lasted not quite three weeks.

But a lifetime, as it were.

Yes. One afternoon, before I left for the day, the president showed me the Lincoln Bedroom on the second floor. Lincoln never slept there, of course, it wasn’t even a bedroom when he lived there. What was it, a study? But anyway the heavy Victorian furniture and swooping draperies looked as if Lincoln might have slept there. I said hello to the tenants—

The tenants?

Well, you know, this is where the president put up big-time donors for an overnight thrill. A calm enough couple they were, not at all overwhelmed to be in the president’s company, the man some decades grayer than the woman. They were in the act of unpacking. When you look at money it doesn’t seem anything but human. We all huddled over the desk where a copy of the Gettysburg Address was under glass.

So you were getting around in the White House.

I noticed of the young wife that she was tall with a good figure, but the face was as if ceramicized, somehow, the eyes glancing at me without seeming to realize I was there. A golden fall of hair as shiny and stiff as if shellacked. If Briony had been with me she would have felt cowed, my poor innocent, but just for a moment. This was an entire aspect of American life she knew nothing about. On the other hand, looking at Briony’s simple face-washed beauty, and the pure being that shone from her blue eyes, this woman would have felt her heart sinking for having spent her life affecting a sophistication she did not feel.

You knew all this from looking at her?

Thoughts of Briony gave me all sorts of perceptive advantages. It was as if something of her mind was still alive in me.

Is that cognitive science?

Not really. It’s more like suffering.

HE DID KEEP a neat desk, the president, a few papers aligned under a little snow globe that served as a paperweight. You shook the globe and the snow drifted over a child sledding down a hillside. I had begun to feel sorry for my old roommate. He lived with his ineptitude. From my basement window I could see a more or less constant procession of limos driving up: generals and admirals, diplomats, cabinet members, visiting foreign dignitaries, all of whom he had to see because he was said to be the leader of the free world. He seemed more relaxed in those arts awards evenings where performers sang and medals were given out to film directors, playwrights, and actors. I was invited to one of those and sat in the rear where no one noticed me.

I had begun to savor my role there in the White House, having accepted a lieutenancy in the little war between the president and his closest advisors. It was as if right there in the Oval Office the prevailing contentiousness of the world outside had to be honored. It was as if the wars they were conducting were to be symbolized in their own relationships. I thought how contention makes us human. How every form of it is practiced religiously, from gentlemanly debate to rape and pillage, from dirty political attacks to assassinations. Our nighttime street fights outside of bars, our slapping arguments in plush bedrooms, our murderous mutterings in the divorce courts. We had parents who beat their children, schoolyard bullies, career-climbing killers in ties and suits, drivers cutting one another off, people pushing one another through the subway doors, nations making war, dropping bombs, swarming onto beaches, the daily military coups, the endless disappearances, the dispossessed dying in their tent camps, the ethnic cleansing crusades, drug wars, terrorist murders, and all violence in every form countenanced somewhere by some religion or other … and for its entertainment politicidal, genocidal, suicidal humanity attending its beloved kick-boxing matches, and cockfights, or losing its paychecks on the blackjack felt and then going back to work undercutting the competition, scamming, ponzi-ing, poisoning … and the impassioned lovers of their times contending in their own little universe of sex, one turgidly wanting it, the other wincingly refusing it.

Have you left anything out?

So I had been brought here, I thought, to give my old roommate some measure of satisfaction in his peculiar struggle with Chaingang and Rumbum. But there was a country to be run and they were the president’s two closest advisors, and after all he needed them just as they needed him. So after a few more of Android’s reports of neurological developments around the world, I detected a shift in the dynamic: I’d been there for a couple of weeks. At a certain moment one day they all had the same look on their faces, an effort not to laugh, and I understood that a new alliance in the great diplomatic tradition had been effected. I was alone versus the triumvirate and the joke was on me — the three of them in collusion to put me in a foolscap with bells — and all this while the world waited for the next civil war, the next tanking of the market, the next suicide bombing, the next tsunami, the next earthquake, the next leakage of radioactive material from the next defective nuclear plant — this game of seeing how long Android would go on with the show before he realized that he was their cruel sport, that they were taking a break, the three of them, right there in the White House — and I, the fool, was bringing a bit of comedy to their dark, contentious, power-charged, world-ruling day.