Andrew's Brain: A Novel (7 page)

When one morning Briony and her mother went off in a taxi to shop at a mall, Bill sat me down in their little
backyard garden for our morning coffee, lit himself a cigar, crossed his little legs, waited for me to speak of something so that he could tell me what he knew about it. There was an assertiveness to him, some inner demand that he prove himself to whatever person of normal stature he happened to be with. He was a kind of pouncing conversationalist. When I mentioned that Briony and I had been reading Mark Twain aloud, he shook his head and said, What do you think of the ending of
Huckleberry Finn
, Professor? It’s a goddamn disaster, isn’t it? Ruined the whole story for me. When Tom makes his late entrance, it’s Twain throwin’ in the towel, coming in with his trickster shtick to wrap things up and while he’s at it to make the whole grand thing of Huck and Jim going down the river neither here nor there. I know a little bit about the cruelties of life and I’ll tell you, this is a damn shame of an ending, Twain bein’ in such a hurry to finish his tale any which way and so crap up what might have been a huge story for all time.

Did you know, Bill, that he stopped work on that book for seven years before coming up with the ending?

Sure I knew, that’s what I’m sayin’. Couldn’t work it out, and said, Damn it all, I’ll just get this thing off my desk. Some more coffee?

Actually, Andrew, I happen to agree with that criticism.

I asked about
The Wizard of Oz
—had he ever worked
maybe not in the movie, that was an earlier generation, but in some stage version? He took a big hit on his cigar and set it down in the ashtray. Professor, never mind the movie, you got to read the book. You haven’t, have you?

Got me there, Bill.

According to some, the whole thing is communist.

What is?

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
. See, what the moral is, is don’t rely on me, don’t trust me, my rule is a scam, you’ve got the stuff to run things yoursels. You and your comrades. All you got to do to take over is get up your courage, use your brain, everone’s your equal, ’cept for some at the top, of course, and the world’s your oyster. That’s communist allegory, according to some.

I don’t know, Bill. An allegory—doesn’t that mean everything in it stands for something else? Then who are the Munchkins, and why the Wicked Witch of the West, and why is the road of yellow brick? They would have to stand for something besides themselves.

The yellow brick road, well, that’s the way to the gold. The Wicked Witch, well, she’s the West, you see, meaning us, and with all those flying monkeys being her military forces, if you don’t do something she will be even worse than the phony Wizard. And I know who the Munchkins stand for. Believe me, I’m the authority on that.

I
’ll tell you about the party they gave us the night before we left.

There was a party?

Bill and Betty—to announce our engagement. It was a mostly Diminutive crowd. You know the way New York neighborhoods become Greek, Italian, Latino, the way Koreans run the convenience stores, the Muslims drive the taxis? So in the same way this town had its share of little people who made their living in show business. One elderly fellow sat in a chair and was deferred to by the others—he had actually been a Munchkin. Maybe the last of them alive. The liquor flowed, and the decibels were birdlike. Naturally the rug was rolled up and Bill and Betty did one of their vaudeville routines, the old soft shoe, a George M. Cohan number, “… for it was Mary, Mary, plain as any name can be …” And with such grace and ease, laughing as they accomplished this or that move, Bill at one point essaying some kind of double time step and Betty glancing to heaven. One of their friends had hoisted himself up onto the piano bench to accompany them and sing the lyrics in his mute tenor, and it was so fine, Briony and I the audience they played to, Briony sitting on the floor, beside me, her legs tucked under her, and her face luminous with joy. “But with propriety, society will say ‘Marie’ …” Others stepped up to
do their signature routines, a mock lecture here, a poetry declamation there, all of it great fun, and I remember at one point the Diminutive pastor of the local church meeting me at the self-service bar and asking what I would do, if I were president, about the terrible turbulence in the world. I said I’d go to war to stop it, and it was against his better judgment but he laughed.

Sounds as if you were having a good time.

Well, I saw how Briony loved her parents’ routine, laughing and clapping for something she must have seen a hundred times. Watching her lifted me into a comparable state of happiness. As if it had arced brain to brain. This was a pure, unreflective, unselfconscious emotion. It had taken me by surprise and was almost too much to bear—happiness. I felt it as something expressed from my heart and squeezing out of my eyes. And I think as we all laughed and applauded at the end of the soft-shoe number I may have sobbed with joy. And I was made fearless in that feeling, it was not tainted by anxiety, I at that moment had no concern that I might trip and fall over one of them and squash him to death.

So that cold clear emotionless pond of silence—

I was rising from it to living and breathing, to great gasping breaths of life. Finding redemption in the loving attentions of this girl.

Afterward, we excused ourselves and she led me to
the dead end of the street. We climbed over the retaining wall where a path through the ground cover led down to the beach. We found ourselves alone on the beach, not in moonlight, there was no moon to be seen, but in the misty dim light of the cities to the north, the light pollution of Los Angeles spreading out over the sea. I had resisted going for a swim in daylight, not wanting to display my concave chest and skinny arms to the world. Briony had of course seen me in the nude, but one’s structure in a bedroom at night when the predominant light is one’s intellectual presence is not the vulnerable thing that a pale white professor of cognitive science, bony and slightly potbellied, conveys to the world on a public beach. But nothing could stop me now, we kicked off our shoes, dropped our clothes in the sand, and ran into the surf, which was warm and lapping. We swam together in the Pacific sea, and kissed of course, and I felt the smoothness of her, the tautness of her nipples in the briny sea, running my hand between her legs, holding her by the waist, kissing her as we clasped each other as we were rolled over and over together, cupped in the curl of the waves.

When we came out I dried her with my shirt and we dressed and sat there on little thrones I built out of the sand. This was the time of peaceful reflection when I chose to satisfy my curiosity. I had seen on the wall of
Bill’s study two framed naturalization certificates. Bill and Betty hadn’t been born here.

Pop was born in Czechoslovakia, Briony said. That’s the Czech Republic now. Mom is Irish, from Limerick.

Well, how did they meet?

Ah, she laughed, then you’ve never heard of Leo Singer!

At this, Briony jumped up and pulled me to my feet. She walked backward, holding my hands. And she told me about this man who went around Europe finding people like her mom and dad, hiring them and training them to work in his show, Leo Singer’s Lilliputians.

Here Briony turned, ran ahead, and found it necessary to do a cartwheel. When she was back on her feet I said, What kind of a show?

Well, Mom says the theme changed every season, and the costumes, but it was essentially vaudeville, with songs and sketches and routines like you saw tonight. Circus acts like jugglers, and wire walkers, people who could play the fiddle behind their back, everything you could think of. The attraction was their size, and how many things they could do anyway that people would come to see and marvel at.

How animated she was telling me this family history—living it, almost, by punctuating her account with handstands, cartwheels, back flips to a standing position,
running broad jumps. There on the beach that night to the rhythmic lapping of the surf.

He toured them in all the European capitals and that was how Mom and Dad met. They were in the Leo Singer Lilliputstadt.

So, Doc, did you ever hear of this man, Singer?

No.

That’s two of us. But it turns out he was the go-to guy when MGM needed Munchkins for their film. He was this international dealer in Munchkins.

I hear a note of disdain in your voice.

Clearly an operator who infantilized these people, made a spectacle of them, and made himself a fortune in the process.

Didn’t you say we all have an affection for what is miniature? And here they were in California, her parents, comfortably retired in their own home, a lovely family.

I know, I know. What was in store for them from their villages if the guy hadn’t taken them away? Their parents probably only too relieved. I suppose money changed hands. Bill and Betty must have been young, in their teens or early twenties. And he gave them a profession, a means of self-respect, whereas back home they would have been forever misfits, tolerated, made fun of, or treated with insulting sympathy. But it all smacks of Europe, you know? This sensibility. At least the Munchkins in the film
had a fictive identity, they weren’t midgets performing, they were these fantasy creatures made up not to look like themselves. Not Bill and Betty or the other Lilliputians. Don’t you think this has Europe written all over it?

I’m not sure what you mean.

I mean serfdom, indentured oppression, and all their damn uniforms and monarchal wars and colonizations and autos-da-fé. Baiting bears, that’s what I mean, the European culture of bearbaiting. Freak taunting. Jew killing. That’s what I mean.

[
thinking
] She was so happy. So I didn’t say anything. Did I tell you I had bought her an engagement ring before we made the trip west?

No.

I did. I was doing all sorts of un-Andrew things. Holding hands in public, being happy. And now, on the beach, clowning around, trying to do my cartwheels, my handstands, and falling and getting up with a mask of sand on my face. How she laughed. And as it happens with new lovers, we were tinder. The passion fired up from anything—laughter, the keenness of the moment. Close your eyes, she said, and I felt her brushing the sand away. And then all at once she pushed me down, and as I lay back she was upon me, mouth on mouth, vehemently yanking my trousers down and then flipping us over so that I lay on top of her. When had she pulled up her shift
to bare herself? And then the three little words: Put it in, she said. Put it in!

You needn’t go into details, Andrew.

It may begin as devotional, your lovemaking, but the brain goes dark, as a city blacks out, and some antediluvian pre-brain kicks in that all it knows to do is move the hips. It is surely some built-in command from the Paleozoic Era and may be the basis of all drumming.

Drumming?

What I mean to say is you’re not at your most observant at these times. As if what remaining human mind you have, whatever dim consciousness, has located itself somewhere in the depths of your testicular being. That’s why I didn’t hear its engine and why I did not immediately understand why the beach seemed to be flying away in the sandstorm around us. But then I looked into her eyes: They were blinded white in terror—of me, or of the unnatural blazing light above us? I have wondered about this ever since—surely it was the searchlight, the whoop whoop air-scything of the helicopter rotors. But given what was later to happen, I’ve never been able to convince myself that it wasn’t in terror of me, of the emblazoned Paleozoan she had lain down with. But in any event I knew instantly that the situation was antithetical. I held my hand over her face, hiding her from them, keeping her hidden with my body, while with my other hand
I essayed to pull my trousers up. Perhaps you know about the beaches at night, in Southern California, how they were patrolled.

I think I may have heard something of the sort.

Yes. And the loudspeaker coming over the roar of the rotors—you cannot believe how low they had settled in the sky just above us—the operators of this black buglike monster, punishing us with flying sand, hovering over us as we scampered to our feet and ran, I holding my shirt over her head, and they keeping us in their beam, accusing us of unspecified but monstrous misdemeanor, of blaspheming civilized life, of contaminating a precious sanctuary of innocent children and players of volleyball.

And then the light went out and the damn thing swooped up and away, kicking sand in our faces as we stood there with our arms shielding our eyes. A few moments later it was as if nothing had happened, the night was quiet, and then Briony laughed and she looked at me and laughed some more, shaking the sand out of her hair and tossing her head, dealing with humiliation as women particularly learn to do, with resigned laughter and a kind of shrug and comic raising of the palms.

We had run all the way to the end of the beach where there was a jetty of piled stone, and in a hollow at the land end of the jetty bodiless eyes in multiple array glowed out from the darkness. Briony said it was a clutch
of feral cats who’d lived here as far back as she could remember. They skulked and hissed. We had come too close and the hiss enveloped us like the spun web of a spider. Maybe that was when I began thinking once more about something besides myself.

Like what?

Like this country of eternal sun and midget populations and sky police.

T
he next morning, when we were about to leave, I was standing out by the car and saying goodbye and Betty was holding my hands, gently bobbing them up and down as indication of her fondness. We’re so happy she has found you, Andrew. We want everything for our girl. We love her beyond words. She is the triumph of our life.

I admit I was hoping these were Briony’s adoptive parents. Why do you suppose that was? I was still recovering from the night on the beach, and standing now under the oppressive sun I had a sick feeling trying to accommodate the bizarre facts of my true love’s life. These were her founding circumstances, they marked her, they were hers, she had been made from them, and what I had made of her before now—my glorious student in the long sunlit frock and running shoes—had been incomplete if not illusory. Yes, she was, in the great
American tradition, working her way through college—a financial aid package here, a bank loan there—obviously Bill and Betty were not of much help and so Briony was truly out of the nest, her own person. But I didn’t want her to have grown up in this household, in this town, among these people, and walking out of the front door every day of her girlhood to see this unchanging street of the little stucco homes and seashelled flower pots in the little front yards, and with the pale paved streets with no shadows. Everything so clearly the life to bake away a functioning brain. I imagined her as a child going down to that beach and playing in the sand, and picking shells at the water’s edge, day after day, year after year. It was the shameful feeling of just a moment, before I drove it from my mind—that all this of California was a fraud. Briony came out the door with her backpack and smiled, gorgeous as ever, and I felt that somehow I had been taken in.