E. Doctorow - Andrew's Brain

So is this cognitive science?

Not quite yet. It’s still only suffering.

Tell me, Doc, am I a computer?

What?

Am I the first computer invested with consciousness? With terrible dreams, with feelings, with grief, with longing?

No, Andrew, you’re a human being.

Well, you would say that.

I see you’ve let your beard grow, your hair. You could indeed be the Holy Fool. But it needs something.

What’s this?

A Yankees baseball cap. Your wardrobe needed refreshing.

How old is Willa now?

Twelve.

And where are they all living?

We’ve been through this—

Where?

They’re in New Rochelle.

In their old house?

Yes.

Martha and Martha’s large husband.

Yes.

And they need my agreement? Why? A judge will rule in their favor — Martha has raised her since she was a baby. And I’m an enemy combatant.

You’re not an enemy combatant.

Whatever I am I haven’t much legal standing, have I?

It’s for the child’s sake. Here are the papers.

So my daughter will have Boris Godunov, that drunk, that Pretender, for a legal father.

He’s in AA. Doesn’t drink anymore.

When did they get back together, the loving couple?

A few years ago, I think. Three or four.

And where did she take my child when she disappeared?

As I’ve told you, Martha settled in a small town in western Pennsylvania. A farm inherited from an aunt and uncle.

Do they have the finances to keep my daughter as she deserves?

They are not without resources. She teaches piano again and he has a master class in voice. They are both at Juilliard.

It says here Willa is not to be told about me. It says I may never approach her, reveal myself to her as her father—

She has no reason to believe that Martha is not her mother. I’m not sure how the status of the husband will be represented in her eyes.

— or that her real mother died trying to save people.

Is that what you think now?

Yes.

I don’t imagine they would tell the child that.

Well, then, the hell with them!

Oh, for God’s sake, why can’t you be reasonable for a change? Think of someone besides yourself.

Oh, Doc. I do. I think all the time of my two girls. I want to read to them like MT did to his little girls, making up stories to help them get to sleep. He says, “They think my tales are better than paregoric, and quicker.”

Andrew, please—

He wrote down this one story for other fathers to use? Every name, and where possible every word, will have a cat in it — Catasauqua, Cataline, cattalactic. And the girls keep interrupting. What is a catadrome, Papa? I’ll look, he says, pretending to consult the dictionary. Ah, it is a racecourse. I thought it was a tenpin alley, but cats do not play tenpins when they are feeling well, but they do run races. Thank you, Papa, the little girl says. Yes, he says, and the story continues.

Andrew—

MT’s invented silliness at his children’s bedtime. How he is their protector, and the world’s a safe snug place at their bedtime. How when they are grown they will remember this tale and laugh with love for their father. How this is his redemption.

E. L. DOCTOROW’S works of fiction include Homer & Langley, The March, Billy Bathgate, Ragtime, The Book of Daniel, City of God, Welcome to Hard Times, Loon Lake, World’s Fair, The Waterworks , and All the Time in the World . Among his honors are the National Book Award, three National Book Critics Circle awards, two PEN/Faulkner awards, and the presidentially conferred National Humanities Medal. In 2009 he was short-listed for the Man Booker International Prize, honoring a writer’s lifetime achievement in fiction, and in 2012 he won the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, given to an author whose “scale of achievement over a sustained career places him in the highest rank of American literature.” In 2013 the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded him the Gold Medal for Fiction.