E. Doctorow: Andrew's Brain

These were my preparatory thought experiments — to begin from a basic philosophical hopelessness before looking for rescue from the first responders, Emerson, William James, Damasio, and the rest. But I must have given myself away as nothing more than a depressive.

Who was the lout?

He was no contest, really. Long, lean, indolent, with black hair combed back wet, like Tarzan. The school’s star quarterback. He didn’t stand a chance once I entered the picture.

And “bosky babe”?

Yes, that was a momentary lapse, a lingering thought of my high school girlfriend who was the bosky babe down there. Not Briony. Briony, for comfort’s sake as she did her spandex-suited gymnastics, kept her mons trimmed.

There were a lot of western blondes at the college but mostly of the blaringly self-indicative kind, with an empty-headedness or cunning about them, or perhaps their faces too clearly anticipated cosmetic collapse. Briony was fine-featured, her looks were modestly aristocratic, you would think she belonged at a country house in the Cotswolds or perhaps in a Polish shtetl. For some reason I kept seeing her around the campus. Riding her bike, standing in the cafeteria line, talking with friends. Didn’t that mean something? Each time she arrived for class she smiled hello. I asked her if she would volunteer to be a subject for the lab work and she said yes. And so, one morning, as I placed the electrode net on her pretty head — didn’t shave it, of course, this was not medical science, just a way to show the electric busyness of our brains — I had reason to tuck her long hair behind her ears. I inhaled the clean freshness of her. I felt I was in a sunlit meadow. I did a basic brain graph using an old EEG machine I had brought west with me. Something like a lie detector, very primitive, but useful for Brain Science 101. Flashing pictures at her, seeing where the graph spiked, where she was frightened, where she remembered something, where she was hungry, where a sexual innuendo lit her up. The exercise was illustrative, this was elementary stuff, nothing about localizations. The other students stood around and watched and made jokes. The lout was there with a stupidly superior smile on his face. I decided I would flunk him, not that it would matter. But I saw things the students couldn’t have. I saw things more intimately Briony’s than if I had seen her undressed. This wasn’t mere voyeurism, it was cephalic-invasive, I admit, but, after all, less legitimate scientific inference than professorial fantasy.

What did you see?

One of the flash cards was a picture of a toy circus. A one-ring circus with a circus master in top hat and jodhpurs in the center and ladies in tutus standing on backs of ponies galloping in a circle around the ring and overhead a man in tights hanging upside down from a trapeze and a woman in matching tights suspended from his hands. That practically took the pen off the scroll. It actually made me uneasy that the joys of a child were still evocative.

And then the despair of my chosen field. You’ve got to be brave when you do science. I reacted badly to the publication of an experiment demonstrating that the brain can come to a decision seconds before we’re conscious of it.

That is unsettling. And you disagree?

It would be easy to disagree. Say “Wait a minute. Is this duplicable? Will it stand?” But my own brain took over and declared its solidarity with the experiment’s results. There will be more sophisticated experiments and it will be established that free will is an illusion.

But surely—

One morning I found myself abandoning my lecture and blurting out something I had not planned to say — something like a preamble to a course in cognitive science that I had not yet devised.… [ thinking ]

What did you say?

What?

Something you blurted out to the class.

I asked this question: How can I think about my brain when it’s my brain doing the thinking? So is this brain pretending to be me thinking about it? I can’t trust anyone these days, least of all myself. I am a mysteriously generated consciousness, and no comfort to me that it’s one of billions. That’s what I said to them and then picked up my books and walked out of the room.

Hmmm.

What do you mean “Hmmm”? You remember why the great Heinrich von Kleist committed suicide? He’d read Kant, who said we could never know reality. He should have come out west, Heinrich. Would have saved his life. No despair of intellect possible in these parts. Something about the mountains and the sky. Something about the football team.

So you were an anomaly with your intellectual crisis.

Only one student showed up for the next class and that was Briony. We went to the student union and had coffee. She was concerned, looked me over with a compassionate frown. As I see her now I realize that she never fussed with herself the way young women do, running their hands through their hair, tieing it back if it’s loose, letting it loose if it’s tied, all those small gestures of self-reflection. Briony did nothing of that sort, she sat still, calmly present in the moment with no undercurrent of self-regard. This was early enough in the semester for students to drop out of one class and switch to another and she knew that could mean trouble for me. Of course the dean would get on my back but I couldn’t have cared less with this glorious creature before me. I basked in her sympathy. I wore a mournful expression. She extended her hand across the table as if to console me. She did not want to show me that she found me strange. She was the sort of person who’d feel obliged to engage a leper in conversation.

What was her background?

Her background? The Wasatch mountains.

No, I mean—

You want to know where she was from, this extraordinary child, who her parents were, the family that produced her?

Yes.

Why does that matter? They don’t tell you in movies where people grew up unless the movies are about people growing up. They never tell you where your heroes come from, to whom they were related, you just find them as they are, in the present moment. You’re called to worry about them as they live on the screen and all you know about them is the time they’re there. No history, no past, just them.

Is this a movie?

This is America. Having discovered each other we went hiking in the mountains, Briony and I. You could walk right up the street and find yourself at the foot of a mountain trail. The Wasatch let you know they were always there — even when your back was turned, even as you drove away from them, you sensed them. They changed constantly according to the light they negotiated but also the temperature, their coloration like their change of mood, but they were constant presences, a family of gods, low mountains jagged in the peaks, this one taller, that one shorter, but all connected, an alliance of venerable powers, trail-scarred, implacable with snow that could kill, or carelessly alive with spring foliage in all the pale shades of green or blue evergreen, but still with the yellow-brown remnants of the previous year. And then their tilt, their rising backward to their apex in the sky as if in aversion to something we supplicants had done to displease them, for when you lived in that town awhile you knew those mountains ruled, they walled you in, you were their people. Briony in her white shorts with her belted water bottle and baseball cap with the blond hair ponytailed through the hole in back, and her hiking boots and ankle socks and firm rounded mulping calves — Briony climbed ahead of me, and she was vigorous, and in my need to keep up — at moments I worried that she was trying to get away from me — I could not luxuriate in contemplation of her legs and the glory of her tight white shorts as she hoisted herself over rocks, sometimes touching the ground for support, or gripping an outcrop, and so climbing higher and higher, the path more like a series of cryptic Tibetan steps into a Buddhist acceptance of the way things really were when you didn’t talk about them.