E. Doctorow: Andrew's Brain

How goddamn awful, so much of life having been a wasteful expenditure of time, of living not bravely or at home on the planet of delights, of thunderous icebergs calving, tsunamis rinsing away the seacoasts, of drought withering the cornfields, not at home in any of that, or atop mountains or on the sea but in cities only, a person seated in the subway car amid a carful of subway persons, or running under an umbrella to the available cab, or going to the theater or listening to Mahler or reading the news and not doing anything about it … that news that always seemed to happen to other people in other places. Except when it happened to me. When it finally happened to me …

Very interesting, Andrew. Surprising.

Yeah, well, I’m another man when I’m alone in a cabin.

I had almost given up on you.

I don’t know what I’m doing here.

I can tell you that, as a boy one winter afternoon, Andrew appeared at the door of his little girlfriend to return the doll he’d stolen from her. His mother had insisted that he do this, knock on the door and not give any excuse, or suggest he’d found it in the street or anything that wasn’t the truth, but just to say he’d taken the doll when she wasn’t looking and he was sorry and would never do anything like that again. Andrew did as he was told. The little girl took the doll out of his hands and slammed the door in his face. On the way home he slipped on a patch of ice and broke his eyeglasses.

This was where?

Montcalm, New Jersey. A town not as well-to-do as Glen Vale, its neighbor. Old two- and three-story houses, some with glassed-in porches and most with patchy un-tended front yards and needing paint jobs behind the worn-out trees lining the streets. You can tell you’d passed over into Glen Vale when everything was brighter, the front yards groomed, the trees full and rich-looking, the homes bigger with more space between them. America will always tell you how much money people have.

Why did you steal the doll?

For a physical examination. It was a girl doll and I needed to confirm what I suspected.

You wore glasses as a child?

I’ve always been nearsighted. Why are you asking these questions? I’m trying to tell you something. My life was discordant. I was usually in one sort of trouble or another. Do you know what belly flopping is? You hold the sled in front of you, start running, and when you’re up to speed you fling yourself down on the sled and you’re off.

On your Flexible Flyer.

Good, Doc, so you’re in this world after all. There weren’t any real hills in Montcalm, my street went along as a gently descending tilt, and so we used our driveways for momentum, that was our practice, taking advantage of their slight elevation, belly flopping halfway down the driveway and twisting the sled handle to make a right turn once we cleared it. If you turned too sharply the sled went over on its side and dumped you. So I didn’t make too sharp a turn this time I’m speaking of, but did it by degrees till I was still in my turn halfway across to the other sidewalk. The other thing to mention, it was dusk, the time you should have been home. Your cheeks were red, your nose was dripping water, snow clung to your eyebrows, snow was under your sleeves and inside your boots. A horn blew. I looked up into the toothy grille of a Buick sedan. The guy had braked, and the car spun in a neat circle around me backward, three hundred and sixty degrees. It was like an act of some sort, first he was behind me then he was in front of me, all the time spinning around backward. Then I heard a big bong, as the car slammed into a light pole down the street. All this time the man had been pounding on his horn, it was a brassy tritone horn, as if to announce a festive event, but now with the car crashed it was an anticlimactic continuous blare, very unpleasant. I saw that he had hit the light pole hard enough for it to be slightly askew. I got off my sled and went closer. He had hit the pole on the driver’s side, and what was blowing the horn was his head, resting on the steering wheel while his hands hung down beside him. OK?

OK.

We moved to New York, Greenwich Village. My father said it was because we’d be closer to his job at NYU. But I knew it was because our family was persona non grata in Montcalm after that crash. I said as much and my father said, Son, lots of kids were sleigh riding and it could have been any one of them in the path of that car. It just happened to be you. He didn’t believe this any more than I did. He knew that if any kid was likely to cause a fatal crash it would be me.

You father was an academic?

He did science. Molecular biology. He said science was like a searchlight beam growing wider and wider and illuminating more and more of the universe. But as the beam widened so did the circumference of darkness.

I thought Albert Einstein said that.

I was lonely in the city and had no friends and so my parents got me a dog, a dachshund. They said it was my responsibility to care for it, walk it, train it to obey. That was interesting, trying to see what kind of a brain it had. Not much was the answer. It had a nose that seemed to serve as a brain. The nose/brain’s primary function of course was to process smell. Because I had that dog I noticed all the other dogs in the park and they all went around smelling one another and the urological codes they left at the base of water fountains, tree trunks, chess tables, and so on. What they did with these signals was nothing that I could see. Maybe it was just a kind of conversation. Or like emails. They’d compute the olfactory signal, pee out their response, and walk on. This was Washington Square Park, and lots of people came there with their dogs. There was a dog run, like everything else in the city a measured space for whatever you wanted to do.

You sound like a confirmed New Yorker.

My puppy with its short legs tried to get into the game on that run. It was funny to see him waddling after some big dog who turned and ran past him the other way before he could turn his sausage of a body around.

What did you name your dog?

I hadn’t gotten around to that. I was finding out that I didn’t respect him all that much. I mean, you couldn’t insult him, which was a sign of his mental deficiency. He would never take offense no matter what I said to him or how I yanked on the leash. So in this time I’m speaking of, I was walking him home one afternoon through the park — we had a university apartment on the west side of the Square. More trees on that side, which made it darker, quieter, there were fewer people. This is not a Tom Sawyer episode I’m about to relate.

I rather thought that.

I saw something under a bench that looked like a Spaldeen, a valuable pink rubber ball. I wasn’t sure. I got down on my knees to investigate, poking my hand under the bench, and that’s when I must have let go of the leash. Next thing I knew my dog let out a cry, a tenor squeal — a weird unnatural sound from a dog — and when I looked around I saw his leash waving about in the air. I didn’t question why but grabbed for it — an automatic reflex — and felt transmitted to my arm, as if it was my own pounding pulse, the wing beat of the hawk that had him. That’s what it was, a red-tailed hawk. You would think I could have yanked the dog loose, maybe bringing the hawk down too unless it released the creature, but its talons were dug into the dachshund’s neck and for a moment I was given to understand implacable nature. [ thinking ] Yes, I was in touch with an insistent rhythmic force, mindless and without personality. For a moment I held the hawk suspended, as it beat its wings while unable to rise. I won’t swear to it but I think I was actually lifted to my toes before I let go and watched the bird shoot up to the top of a tree, the leash hanging down like a vine, my dachshund immobile in shock as the bird pressed its neck onto the branch and pecked at its eyes.