Andrew's Brain: A Novel (5 page)

Y
OU ASKED ME
to keep a diary or daybook. Writing is like talking to yourself, which I have been doing with you all along anyway, Doc. So what’s the difference. I’m writing from Down East: This morning it’s like the winter fog has frozen. To walk the fields is to feel yourself breasting the air, leaving behind you the sound of tinkling ice and a tubular indication of your form. But I need places like this. I am safe here. I mean, for all we know I put you in danger every time I walk into your office.

And now, later, the wind has come up and blows snow against my window and I must turn on the light. I have nothing to read here but the cabin owner’s complete works of Mark Twain, MT embossed on the cracked binding. How MT dealt with life was to make a point of explaining children to adults, and adults to children. Isn’t that so? Or to write of his neighbors with amused compassion. He went to ridiculous church for the sake of his wife. Invested in an unworkable Linotype machine. Hobnobbed with the Brahmins of Boston. Slyly skewered the self-satisfied gentlemen enjoying his after-dinner
speeches. Noted the anointed barbarity of kings. But always, always, it was to wrap himself in society. To keep himself snugly within what Searle, a guy whose work I teach, calls “the construction of social reality.”

And just now, loud as a clap of thunder, a poor dumb gull riding the winds has bashed his head against the windowpane. I exchange looks with his glazed eye as he slides a smeared red funnel down the snow on my window.

A
nother day: I see through the fog the humped green heron, out there on the piling. All huddled into himself, a gloom bird, one of us.

Now, later, the sky turned cold and clear, the wind cuffing the seawater, and I imagine a warm swamp somewhere filled with the jumping frogs of Calaveras County. I mean, you read him and he does put one over. But for me the intemperate ghost of MT rises from his folksy childhood and rages at the imperial monster he has helped create.

I see his frail grasp of life at those moments of his prose, his after-dinner guard let down and his upwardly mobile decency become vulnerable to his self-creation. And the woman he loved, gone, and a child he loved, gone, and he looks in the mirror and hates the pretense
of his white hair and mustache and suit, all gathered in the rocking-chair wisdom that resides in his bleary eyes. He despairs of the likelihood that the world is his illusion, that he is but a vagrant mind in a futile drift through eternity.

See the ant, he says, how stupid and incompetent he is, dragging some fly’s wing hither and yon, hauling it over pebbles because they are in his way, climbing leaves of grass because he doesn’t know not to, and where does he think he’s going, says MT, nowhere, that’s where.

A
nother morning. I am down on the beach as the osprey hovers pulsingly over the sea, and the sanderlings tiptoe along the ocean’s foamy edge while the shadowing blue-fish waits for the tide to flip them into its razored maw.

This is you, God. And who did you say it was, Jonah, riding the struts of the leviathan? With the tons of fish washing beneath him into the digestive caldron, as he plants one foot on one beamy rib, the other on the other, and it would be dark except for the luminescence of the electric fishes looking to find their way out, against the tide, against the moon-rock slurp of the ocean tide, against the diurnal twist of the rumbling planet that cups the ocean, that nods the mountains back and forth in metronomic rhythm …

… this earth we find ourselves gravity-stuck to, me and MT and my flaxen-haired fairy-tale beauty, my darling who read to me, by the light of a flashlight, as I drove us at night across the continent, read to me of the imperial outrages annotated by MT in the last years of his life, when the truth of his humor turned green and bilious, when he saw by the light of the moon with the night heron humpslunk between its shoulders that the impossible world was not effectively met any longer by satire or mockery.

So, Doc, I write to tell you that I agree: Life—in being irresolute, forever unfinished though the deaths are astronomical—is not a movie. I do not see in my mind a white-robed D-cup empress facing down a phalanx of centurions looking like me in their spiked helmets and shields and spears and leather-striped calves, those extra-filled movies that drip their Technicolor effusions over the ghosts of the ancient empire so like our own.

Ah, but when they didn’t make a sound, how uncanny they were with the title cards doing the talking, the written-out words blocking our view to make things clearer. A mysterious intervening translation agency connecting us in our own language to a shadow world where humans like us were speaking to one another in their spiked helmets and shields, in their black ties and cigarette holders and ass-clinging white satin evening gowns,
but from such otherwordly distances that you could not hear them, though they seemed to hear themselves.

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 …

V
ery 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.

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.

T
he 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.