Andrew's Brain: A Novel (11 page)

This wasn’t the first time Briony could sound like the willful child who fixes her mind on something and won’t listen to reason. Made me think Bill and Betty must every now and then have had their hands full.

She couldn’t take her eyes off the screen. And when the camera cut away from the leaders to the main body, people on the sidewalks holding out cups of water and cheering, a runner here limping, a runner there gasping for breath, the strain on some faces, the concentration so
that you understood they saw and heard nothing but the pavement in front of them, the robotic pounding of their own feet—well, when I looked at Briony I was chastened to see the tears running down her cheeks. She sat there on the couch leaning forward, as if something religious was going on. And so I wasn’t about to argue. When the program was over I hugged her and said not a word about how unrealistic it was there in June to think, the baby coming momentarily, that she could recover quickly enough and turn herself in the few months till November—that’s when they have it—into a long-distance runner through five boroughs and twenty-six-some miles over bridges and up hills and down avenues. I said to her only that the baby and I would be waiting for her at the finish line in Central Park.

W
illa thoughtfully chose to be born just a few days later. How long was it before Briony was doing her jog those summer mornings with the baby carriage flying before her? Sometimes I took them in a cab to Central Park and sat with the carriage while Briony ran around the reservoir. I would do my reading, holding the baby when she fretted, giving her her bottle—I was fearless. And after a while there would Briony be, gleaming with health, laughing, her arms shining, her shirt stained with sweat, and as she drank from her water bottle, head tilted
back, I studied the loveliness of her neck, the peristalsis of her throat. And then right there on the bench in the sun she would unbutton her nursing bra and give the baby her breast, and there were mother and child, a sacrament of nature in the green park among the families drifting by, dogs barking, kids on scooters, the wandering seller of balloons.

You’re describing an idyll.

How is it that first mothers instantly have the knowledge of mothering? Something that’s always been in the brain is called into play. And the organization. Somehow she found time for everything—the baby, her tutoring, seeing after the old lady who lived next door. Into July and August on the hottest of days she would leave the house at dawn for a serious run and do her miles, seven, ten, by the time people were going off to work. She would head downtown to where the offfice buildings were, and find one where she could run the stairs, run up twenty, thirty flights of stairs for strength training.

I assume you approved all of this.

Of course. Wasn’t I working out at the gym? We were a team, including Willa out to see her mother run the marathon. Briony bounded off from our doorway and her feet barely touched the ground. Her legs seemed to grow longer, it was like the levitation you see in classical ballet. [
thinking
]

Yes?

I had also bought us a phone with an answering machine. “Hello, Briony? Bri, are you there? It’s Dirk! I got your number from your folks.”

Her old boyfriend? The football player?

Briony was out. She was tutoring.

Did you tell her?

Of course I told her. She called back and agreed to meet him for lunch. She told me he’d gotten a job at a brokerage downtown.

No more football?

Said he would never make the pros. He was a business major and his father knew people in New York.

How did you feel about this?

I felt in bed at night that she pressed herself to me as she always had. I felt that our baby that we’d made was in her crib next to the bed. I felt Briony’s heartbeat in my chest as my own. Why do you ask these questions—that the love of my life would not be trustworthy, is that what you think? Or that I would think? It was all in her fine honest lovely young face without guile, without secrets, that she had made up her mind, and she had her family now. But they were old friends, and why not? We didn’t even talk about it.

So it was no problem.

The day was the problem. It was the day. It was the morning of the day that they were to have lunch that was
the problem. [
thinking
] You might say that. She got up later than usual because Willa had had a fretful night. So it was almost eight when she went out for her run. It was to be a busy day. When she had done her miles she’d shower, put on something appropriate for lunch in a restaurant, see that the old woman next door was OK, and after her lunch with Dirk she had two hours of afternoon tutoring. So it was a busy day. [
thinking
] She kissed my cheek: Willa likes the applesauce for her morning snack, she said, and set off over the route she had worked out for herself: down along the Hudson to the Esplanade, across Liberty Street, with maybe a stop at the WTC to run some flights of stairs, and then turning north up Broadway.

“B
riony, it’s not to be. I have to cancel.” Here a laugh becoming a sob. “I wouldn’t mind so much if I could see you one last time. But then you’d have to be up here and I wouldn’t want that. Wouldn’t want that. Or just to talk to you— Are you there, Bri? Hello? Oh, God. It’s their machine.”

Andrew, what is this?

Giving you Dirk on the answering machine: “Okay, Professor, I’m leaving a message. That’s your voice, isn’t it? Am in the window frame now. Far as I can go. High
altitude. Heat is something.… Standing on the bare steel.… Isn’t it neat that your machine is getting this because it is surely the end of me. So I am finished but everything else will go on including you, especially you, Professor.… We don’t hear as good as bats, see as well as hawks. You remember saying that? We can know only so much. You remember? So I wanted to ask then, how can you be so fucking sure there’s no God? Hear your bullshit answer.”

He was that conversational—that he could think of that?

I’m giving you his words. There were pauses when the sound of unimaginable catastrophe took over. Then his voice would return as from a distance. “My understanding of jumping from high places is that I will be dead … before I hit the ground. I surely hope so. I surely do hope so. Won’t I be like flying? I’ll be flying, I’ll be in free flight. It will be cool because it’s hot as hell here. I think it is time now, steel
—yi!
—melting my shoes. Just step off, why not, why not. I’ll put the phone in my pocket and he will hear my flight, and keep it for posterity, deliver it as a lecture: How Bri’s lover died. Professor, you old fuck, you stole her from me with your smart-ass talk. But hear me: You make a good life for her, live for her, or I will come back and haunt you. I will inhabit your goddamn brain.”

Good lord—

And then I heard the flame behind him like a whoosh of a monstrous breath and think now, as I have listened to the point where I don’t have to listen to hear it, I hear too the voices of the others on the ninety-fifth floor with him as they burned to death, their cries the last organic traces of their enflamed bones, a weird awful chorus finally indistinguishable from the roar of the oil fire and the cringe and screech and squeak of the tortured steel and from the oily smoke of flames that refueled from the smoke and blew out again to flame. And then I hear air in its resistance to a falling body, it is like the sound of a jet engine louder and louder in higher and higher pitch and it lasts but a few seconds before it ceases to be sound, before I hear only the absence of sound followed by a beep of the answering machine terminating the call.

S
o it was that morning.

Yes.

What did you do then?

Nothing.

I don’t understand.

Nothing! By the time I came back in and noticed the light blinking it was all over. Christ, Doc, what country were you in that day? Who in the entire city didn’t know
in a flash what had happened. Where was Briony, where was my wife! I was out in the street holding the baby in my arms and looking for her. Calling her name. Looking for her to turn the corner and appear. In the confusion, the fire engines, people stumbling through the streets, shouting, sirens, it was as if all of that had swallowed her up. Where was she? She would think first of Willa. She’d be back in a second to make sure the baby was all right. Wouldn’t she? Then where was she?

Oh, Andrew …

Or was she trapped there! I went back to the apartment and found a neighbor who would stay with the baby. And then I ran downtown. Of course I couldn’t get near anything. One of the towers had sunken in on itself. People staggered by me to get away, people covered in ash, as if cremated but the form of them not yet collapsed. I thought I saw her. Briony! I stopped her—these eyes looked out at me from a gray mask, bright terrified eyes as the only living part of her, this woman. I actually tried to brush the ash from her face. What are you doing? she said. Get away! It was useless—the lines were up, the stanchions, police, fire, ambulances, lights strobing, the squawking of their radios. I waited at a corner, waiting to see her among the fleeing faces. And then I knew that was hopeless and decided that if I ran home she would be there.… But it was just the light flashing on the machine.

Had she instinctively run toward the disaster, leaping into the firestorm, by nature a first responder? I didn’t know. Only later, haunting the police stations, was I deranged enough to think it was Dirk she wanted to rescue, to climb ninety-five flights of stairs to pull to safety, catastrophically, insanely, passionately. In my bad moments I thought it was that. But she might not even have known where he worked. They were to have lunch in the neighborhood down there. Anyway, what difference did it make? He broadcast his death, but her silence was what connected them in my mind. It was as if their simultaneous deaths, each unknown to the other, could be construed as a peculiar coalescing of their fates—their transformation into star-crossed lovers. But that is only if I put me in the picture.

I wouldn’t do that if I were you.

Nothing recognizably Briony was ever found. [
thinking
] How calmly I have said that.

T
he neighbors knew because they knew her. They filled the house. They held the baby.

T
here were in the street these posters everywhere plastered, on every wall, on every fence, on mailboxes, on phone booths and in subway stations, with the photographs
of intensely alive, of can’t possibly be dead, faces. Name, age, last seen. Phone numbers in black marker. Have you seen this person? Call this number. Please call. I went around putting up the picture of Briony. Name, age, last seen. I wanted people to see her face. I knew it was useless, but I thought it necessary. I had taken it in the park, she was smiling at me. I had a folder with her faces, a hundred copies, printed at a Kinko’s, and I went around posting them. She was in that community of the last seen, their names and addresses, that they were loved. Please call. She was in that community of what was left of them.

And beside the firehouses, or against the schoolyard fences, or on signboards under streetlamps, were the makeshift shrines of their pictures, or their children’s drawings, nestled in sprays of evergreen and framed by candles and with bunches of flowers, and petals in bowls of water. It took another day or two before I found flowers at our door.

I
endured what I could. I couldn’t sleep. I lay in bed listening for the key turning in the lock. The women of the neighborhood helped for a couple of weeks. After that I was on my own. Willa would look at me with her mother’s blue eyes. Quietly judgmental, I felt, though knowing
that could not be true. Fretful at times, looking past me, looking for Briony. I rocked the carriage back and forth. And then in November they held their marathon as a national vow to prevail. It grew colder. Snow fell. And there I was swaddling Willa, pushing the little feet into the leggings, the arms into the sweater, and then the hat and the snowsuit and the blanket and the whole bundle of her into the car seat. It is an arduous process, preparing an infant for the outdoors in winter. And when I had buckled her in and started the engine I realized what I had in mind: I would bring her to Martha.

H
ELLO
, D
OC
, why I’m here on the mountainside overlooking this fjord is to get as far away from you as possible. I am in a cabin with not even the work of MT to pass the time. Not even Knut Hamsun. I have a table, a chair, a cot, a sink, a camp stove, and a toilet. As compact as a prison cell except I can stand in the doorway and see the Norwegian mountains framing the valley of icewater—darker in hue than the Wasatch, green-black they are, more into themselves than the sun-specked Western cousins, humpier, and more sedate. When it rains that’s when I have my shower. Regularly a cruise ship, toy-size, floats by down there, soundless from this height but as if to affirm the self-satisfaction of the people who claim these fjords for their national heritage. I can shout and hear my voice coming back a moment or two later, faintly, and maybe only in my imagination. I do that to believe I’m not alone. I sing a lot as well, I remember the words of the old Hit Parade numbers. Without my knowing it, my brain had stored dozens and dozens of lyrics in neuronal connection with the tunes. If I say the words the tune comes to me. Can’t
have one without the other. I also have a tin mirror over the sink and I look into it so that someone is there beside me. I have done this because Wittgenstein did it. He who understood so well the deceptions of the thinking brain. But it is dangerous to stare into yourself. You pass through endless mirrors of self-estrangement. This too is the brain’s cunning, that you are not to know yourself.