Andrew's Brain: A Novel (2 page)

No?

I’m the one who suggested that I fix it. I was tired and hungry. I didn’t see a man anywhere. I thought if I offered some sort of handyman’s help, they’d let me wash
up, give me something to eat. I didn’t want charity. So I smiled and said: Good morning. I’m a bit lost, but I see your screen door needs mending and I think I can fix it if you will offer me a cup of coffee. I’d noticed the door couldn’t close properly, the upper hinge had pulled away from the frame, the mesh was slack. As a screen door it was quite useless, which is why they had hung flypaper from the ceiling light cord. So you see, it was not a preternatural vision that drew me to that place. I had taken that bus ride and seen that farm and those two people and then blanked them out of my mind until the morning in Washington when I was standing on the corner waiting for the red seconds to wind down and heard—

You were then working in Washington?

—yes, as a government consultant, though I can’t tell you doing what—and heard the voice of the old woman saying more or less what I had said when I appeared outside her screen door. Except in her voice the words had a judgmental tone—as if I had given her an insight into my hapless existence, to the effect of: “As long as you’re standing there why don’t you for once make yourself useful and fix the screen door.” There’s a term for this kind of experience in your manual, is there not?

Yes. But I’m not sure we’re talking about the same kind of experience.

We have our manual too, you know. Your field is the
mind, mine is the brain. Will the twain ever meet? What’s important about that bus trip is that I had reached the point where I felt anything I did would bring harm to anyone I loved. Can you know what that’s like, Mr. Analyst sitting in his ergonomic chair? I couldn’t know in advance how to avoid disaster, as if no matter what I did something terrible would follow. So I got on that bus, just to get away, I didn’t care. I wanted to tamp down my life, devote myself to mindless daily minutiae. Not that I had succeeded. What he said made that clear.

What who said?

Martha’s large husband.

W
hen Andrew stepped inside the front door he saw Martha’s large husband putting on his coat and hat and Martha walking up the stairs with the baby in her arms while turning back the little hood, unzipping the snowsuit. Andrew took note of a large well-appointed house, much grander than the house he and Martha had lived in as man and wife. The entrance hall had a dark parquet floor. Out of the corner of his eye he saw to his left a comfortable living room with stuffed furniture, and a fireplace with a fire going, and on the wall over the mantel the portrait of what he took to be some Russian czar in a long robe with an Orthodox cross on a chain and a
crown that looked like an embroidered cap. To the right was a book-lined study with Martha’s black Steinway. The staircase, carpeted in dark red with brass rods at the bottoms of the risers, was elegantly curved with a mahogany banister that Martha was not holding as she mounted the stairs with the baby in her arms. Martha wore slacks. Andrew noticed that she had maintained her figure and he found himself considering, as he hadn’t for many years, the shape and tensile strength of her behind. The coat of Martha’s large husband was of the round-shouldered style with a caped collar and sleeves that flared out. Nobody wore coats like that anymore. The hat, a sporty crushproof number, was too small for Martha’s large husband’s head.

Martha said without turning her head: Go with him, Andrew, in the same quiet commanding tone of voice she used when they were married.

Andrew ran ahead and opened the passenger’s car door. He was grateful when Martha’s large husband maneuvered himself into the seat. Off they went to Martha’s large husband’s preferred pub. He directed Andrew wordlessly, pointing left or right at the intersections, grunting and pointing to the parking space when they’d arrived. It was a bar in a mall. Andrew anticipated a conversation, some sort of understanding—they after all had the shared experience of the same wife—but once
they were seated at the bar with their drinks in front of them in tall crystal-cut glasses, and though Andrew waited for the conversation to begin, Martha’s large husband did not speak. So Andrew said something along these lines:

Everything you believe about me is true. It is true I accidentally killed my baby girl that I had with Martha: In good faith I fed her the medicine I believed had been prescribed by our pediatrician. The druggist sent over the wrong medicine and I was not as alert as I should have been, I’d done a day on my dissertation in cognitive science, I had spent hours at the lab, plus department meetings and so forth, and I dutifully fed the medicine into her tiny mouth with an eyedropper. All night I did this every two hours, until the child stopped crying and was dead. I didn’t know it was dead, I thought it had finally gone to sleep. I was tired and lay down myself, it had been my task to stay up with a sick child because Martha was exhausted—she’d been teaching her master class in piano all day, and I was the man, after all. What woke me was Martha screaming, it was not human, it was the sound of a huge forest animal with its leg caught in a steel trap, and maybe not even an animal of the present time, but something like its paleontological version.

Martha’s large husband said, looking into the blue mirror behind the bar: When an animal’s leg is caught in
a trap, do you know what it does to free itself? It chews the leg off. But of course it is forever disabled and unable to reasonably provide for itself and live a normal life.

You mean Martha, Andrew said.

Yes. And so I have been permanently crippled as well, having in love married an irremediably damaged woman who can no longer practice her profession. Thanks to Sir Andrew the Pretender.

Is that who I am, Sir Andrew the Pretender?

Yes, whose well-meaning, gentle, kindly disposed, charming ineptitude is the modus operandi of the deadliest of killers. Let’s have another.

When Andrew picked up his glass to down his drink quickly so that he could honor his moral debt to Martha’s large husband by having another, which he didn’t really want, the glass slipped from his hand. In his attempt to grab it, Andrew hooked the bowl of peanuts off the bar with the edge of his jacket sleeve, and flustered by the sudden obligation to right two things simultaneously he lost them both, the glass and its contents, including its ice cubes and wedge of lime, following the cascade of peanuts onto Martha’s large husband’s lap.

W
ere you offended by what he said—Martha’s large husband? Did that anger you?

No, he’s an opera singer. Opera is the art of unconstrained emotions. Something happens and they sing about it for hours. What he said, though expressed in a bass-baritone voice of great and intimidating czarist resonance, was true. I could not be offended or made angry, not only because I already knew that about myself, but because there is a caesura in my brain—so that honor, among other virtues, is nothing I connect to. I have none. Deep down, at the bottom of my soul, if such exists, I am finally unmoved by what I’ve done. A faint tinge of regret for dead babies, for dead wives, for the fires I’ve inadvertently started, and all such disasters can make me run in my dreams to someplace where I can’t do any harm, but in this waking life I am numb to my guilt.

But after that terrible event of the baby’s death you did get onto a bus to western Pennsylvania. Didn’t you? Or are you saying now you dreamt the whole thing?

No, what actually happened is the way I’ve described it.

Well, then, in your waking life as in your dreams, weren’t you running away? That doesn’t sound like someone numb to his guilt.

You can have such moments but they’re not characteristic, they’re incidental to the predominant state of mind. Remnants of whatever humanity I may have once had.

I see.

Because the truth is, I just shrug and soldier on. As kind as I am, as well-meaning and helpful as I try to be, I have no feelings finally, for good or ill. In the depths of my being, no matter what happens, I am left cold, impenetrable to remorse, to grief, to happiness, though I can pretend well enough even to the point of fooling myself. I am trying to say I am finally, terribly, unfeeling. My soul resides in a still, deep, beautiful, emotionless, calm cold pond of silence. But I am not fooled. A killer is what I am. And to top things off I am incapable of punishing myself, taking my own life in despair of the wreck I’ve made of people’s lives, helpless infants or women I love. And that’s what Martha’s large husband the opera singer failed to understand when he condemned me, perhaps in the hope that I would see the light and off myself. [
thinking
] Of course I would never do that.

So now Martha had a baby after all, a replacement for her lost child.

I hadn’t thought of it that way. I didn’t mean to give her the baby outright. I just needed some help. For a year or two. I was still in shock from Briony’s death. But Martha took possession of the kid as if she was the rightful parent.

Did that bother you?

I was in no position to argue. Do I have to spell it
out? Are you that dense? I’d killed one baby. Did you want me to kill another? Anyway, I’ll reconnect someday. She has Briony’s pale blue eyes. The same fair coloring.

Was Martha’s large husband correct that you bore a responsibility for your wife’s death?

Not entirely.

What does that mean?

It was indirect—not directly causal.

So what happened? You mean in childbirth?

No, I do not mean that.

How did she die?

I don’t want to talk about it. [
thinking
] I can tell you that after killing his baby with Martha, Andrew took a low-paying adjunct professorship at a small state college out west that he’d never heard of.

Why?

Why do you think? Because it was far away. Because after she divorced him Martha liked to be seen standing outside his apartment building when he came home from work. She would take a drag on her cigarette, drop it on the ground, step on it, and walk away.

So in her eyes only you were to blame—you and only you.

Who else?

What about the pharmacist? Did you think of suing?

Oh, God, you have no idea, do you, of the obliteration of social reality in the aftermath of something like this. The brain all lit up with the realization that what you did is unchangeable. To sue someone? Was there redemption in that? What would you gain—money? Jesus, I don’t know why I talk to you. Would suing someone bring the infant back? And whom should we have sued? The pediatrician who phoned in the prescription? the druggist who filled it? the delivery boy who brought it? Where had the thing gone wrong? Whom should we have sued? I could have read the label. I could have sued myself. I had administered the medicine. That’s all Martha could see, that I had done the thing, finally, I and no one else.

And you agreed with her.

I did. It was me, all over.

A
nd now here was Andrew, self-exiled to this state college in the foothills of a mountain range called the Wasatch. At first I liked the mountains. I got there early in September, a still-warm summer’s end with traces of the old winter’s snow on the mountaintops. That gave me a sense of the nonhuman world we live in. You get that when you’re out of the city. Americans like to catch rides in that world.

What is this you’re saying?

Skiing down a mountain—that’s one of the free rides. Sea combers, white-water rivers. A wind to hang in. Free rides of the planet. They’re all there for you to get on or get off or get killed.

I see. So it turned out to be a good change of scenery for you.

Not really. I don’t suppose you’ve ever lived under a mountain. Wasatches ruled that town. After a day or two the truth dawned on me. You got up in the morning, they were there. You pulled into a gas station, and they were there. They were there in their stolid immensity, and that was that. You were colonized. They negotiated the light, they had to pass on it before it got to you.

I don’t understand.

They took in the light, they’d bounce it down or suck it up as was their wont. It was a kind of mountain bureaucracy, and nobody could do anything about it, least of all the sun. The college had a deal for visiting faculty with a local suite motel. Formica countertop kitchenette. Laminated furniture. And turquoise-and-rust curtains to suggest the Native American heritage. That was also what the mountains did—invite a corporate culture. I was the college’s halfhearted attempt to expand its offerings. I was the one-man Department of Brain Science. I had no one to talk to. My colleagues, if that’s what they
were in their polite and distant way, were bores. I was lonely and miserable.

O
ne day, as Andrew walked past the college gymnasium, a building much like an airplane hangar, he saw through the open doors a population of gymnasts and track and fielders: broad jumpers, high jumpers, hurdlers, shot putters, pole vaulters, pommel horsers, steel ringers, balance beamers, trampoliners. The intensity, the concentration of each of them on what they were doing, everyone moving in a differentiated self-absorbed effort while ignoring everyone else, put him in mind of a culture of squiggling DNA molecules, so that if he waited long enough all these jumping and vaulting and circling squiggles would assemble themselves into the double helix of a genetic code. He was particularly attracted to one of the gymnasts working out on the high bar, a blond girl swinging to and fro in what could have been a one-piece swimsuit. She seemed more human than the rest of them, as if she were actually reveling in the exercise. But this swinging maneuver was preparatory—once she had the velocity, up she rose to a handstand, holding herself upside down and straight as an arrow, only to lazily begin to fall backward into another sequence of three-hundred-and-sixty-degree suspensefully-pausing-at-the-top rotations.
And then to fall into another spin, but forward this time, like a clock hand gone crazy. Andrew, not wanting to be seen staring, quickly walked on when she completed her routine with a final spin around and a leap through the air with a perfect landing in a half crouch, arms outstretched.