E. Doctorow: Andrew's Brain

Why did you let go, was the hawk too strong for you? How old were you at this time?

Seven, eight, I don’t know. But I try to remember at what point I felt it was no use. Was I too frightened to hold on? Did I understand it was all over for the dog the moment those talons curled into him? I’m not sure. Perhaps, deferential to God’s world, I had merely conceded. I stepped back to get a better view of what was happening up in the tree. The hawk didn’t look down, our struggle had been of no consequence to him, he was tearing into the little dog as if I didn’t exist. I can remember the thrill of feeling the pulse of those wings in my skinny little chest. Nevertheless, I ran home crying. It was all my fault. There you have it. Early Andrew. I’m presuming you like childhoods.

Well, they can be instructive.

The day before we took off for California, Briony found a stray mutt and insisted on taking it with us. Speaking of dogs.

When was this?

Lots of dogs on the campus whose student owners let them run loose and finally forgot them. She said this one looked so appealingly at her that she couldn’t resist. A big black-and-white dog, with floppy ears. It stood with its paws on the back of my seat and its wet nose nuzzled my neck as I tried to drive.

Why were you going to California?

She named it Pete. He’s a Pete, don’t you think? she said. She had turned around, her knees on the front seat, as she leaned over my shoulder to pet the damn thing. Yes, she said, that’s your name all right.

Here I was in a state of such possessive love that I couldn’t bear to share Briony with anyone else, not even a stupid mutt. I wanted her exclusive attention. I didn’t say anything but I felt resentful, as if I had been invited to accompany her with no more thought on her part than she had impulsively bestowed on the dog.

Why were you going to California?

And it didn’t help that the lout bid us goodbye, or bid her goodbye, there on the sidewalk in front of his dorm.

Did the lout have a name?

I don’t know. Duke something. What else could it have been? She kissed him lightly on the mouth and touched his cheek and got in the car and closed the door and looked back and waved as I drove off. A voice in my mind said, “Step on it!” What the hero says to the cabbie in every 1930s movie. That voice in my head defining the moment: I was not of this generation. I was not of their time. I did not have this girl by any legitimate right.

Surely she had some choice in the matter.

I’m telling you how I felt. Briony knew I was divorced but no more than that. I had wanted to be completely open with her but I couldn’t bring myself to tell her everything. Clearly, I had become her project.

Her project? So you still didn’t understand how taken she was.

I sensed her interest. I felt indulged. I couldn’t believe more than that. Not that I was without guile. The gloomier I was the more attentive she was. This had gone on through the semester. I could affect my nihilistic despair, making a lie even of that, I could wear the appropriate face while inside of myself I was smiling like an idiot. It was all I could do to keep my hands off her. But she was picking up my language, she was reading the course work, so that every boldly thoughtful sentence that came from her I could credit to my teaching. Briony had the intellectual assertiveness of the young, who make the learned ideas their own. She even mentioned the brain’s limbic system and looked at me with a question in her eyes. I had instantly to get her off of that.

Why?

Damage to the limbic system inhibits feeling, among other things. There’s indifference, coolness. You’re half alive. People who’ve been traumatized show limbic system dysfunction.

Do you believe you suffered such an experience? Had you been traumatized?

Only by life. Listen, when I was with Briony there was nothing wrong with my limbic system. My hippocampus and my amygdala were up and running. Whistling, applauding. Doing back flips. Fortunately, my course syllabus included readings from William James, Dewey, Rorty, and then the French existentialists, Sartre, Camus. She dove into all that.

For a course in elementary brain science?

Well, it was over most of their heads. And what they understood they didn’t like. I wasn’t aware of any particular religiosity among these kids, it was more that God was an assumption, like something preinstalled in their computers. But if there was a philosophy that was appropriate to the study of the brain, of the material of consciousness, I maintained it was either pragmatism or existentialism. Or maybe both. No God in either, you see. No soul. No metaphysical bullshit. Briony got it. But for her, a little more drama and human exaltation was in the idea of a painful freedom. So she opted for the existentialists. And applied her knowledge like a pragmatist to me. The evidence was clear that I was of the existentialist school. That I was outside the realm of psychology — I had an historic identity. That seemed to make fast the connection between us. She was happy with Andrew the Existentialist. She could kiss me on the cheek. She could find me in my office and come in with two coffees. I wanted to get down on my knees and kiss the hem of her frock. This clean lovely creature of the West had found in what she decided was my existentialism the resurrection of the nineteenth-century Romantic — Andrew poised at cliff’s edge with the back of his hand pressed to his brow.

It was just a matter of time before we became lovers. The first time, it was in her dorm room. She took her clothes off and lay down and turned her face to the wall while I undressed. Migod, to hold this tremulous being in my arms. After that she always rode her bike to my place.… And I remember when she woke me up one dawn, dragging me out of bed like an excited child, and pulling me stumbling up the stairs to the roof of my suite motel to watch the rising sun light the mountaintops. I doubt that my seduction technique had ever before been practiced in this country of cowboys. I had taken her out of her time, out of her place, and I was jealous even of the stray dog that she’d picked up to come with us on our trip.

So as I understand it, you were going to California with the girl of your dreams and what with one thing or another you managed to feel miserable about it.

We were off to see her parents. How would you feel?

Briony directed Andrew to a little seaside town about an hour south of Los Angeles. He turned off the Coast Highway to a street lined with small-scale homes in pastel colors. The predominating building material was stucco. In front of each home, a garden patch stuffed with ridiculously exorbitant tropical plants in flower. Perhaps he was tired from the two days on the road. Even Briony’s excitement as she pointed him to one of the narrow driveways that separated each house from its neighbor he found annoying. And who was this running up to the front door, flinging it open and disappearing inside — certainly not the spectacular spandexed handstander on the high bar, nor the lovely creature demurely submitting to a brain scan in the elementary cognitive science lab, nor the lover of an older man. Coming home for someone her age was a regression to childhood. Andrew stood by the car with his hands on his hips and looked over the neighborhood. It was shadowless. Heat shimmering from the white pavement. He couldn’t admit to himself how nervous he felt, how out of place, squiring this child like some vile seducer.

I can understand this was a difficult moment for you.

Yes. I didn’t want to follow her. The house was just a short walk from a retaining wall at the end of the street. I found myself looking down a vine-covered hillside to a beach covered with people — a brueghel of people, sunning themselves, playing volleyball, children picking up shells along the water’s edge. More of them were out in the blue water drifting patiently on their surfboards. Beyond was the Pacific, flecked with sailboats. Above it all, in a smoggy sky, was a bloodstained sun clearly intending to set over the sea. The whole scene seemed unnatural. Where I come from the sun sets over the land.