I wouldn’t do that if I were you.
Nothing recognizably Briony was ever found. [thinking] How calmly I have said that.
The neighbors knew because they knew her. They filled the house. They held the baby.
There 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.
HELLO, DOC, 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.
I’m writing this though there’s no mail here and chances are you won’t read it till I get back and hand it to you and sit there watching you read. If I ever do. I understand why you asked those questions in the midst of my living through it again—as I spoke of it and recited the voice machine death message wired into my brain, and then Briony’s death message delivered as in a silent film, her face speaking to me earnestly in words I cannot hear, the shutter closing around her face, the aperture contracting to a pinpoint and finally to black … because all you could muster was: Had I informed Briony’s parents. That was you, ever the practical fellow, tidying things up, expecting people to do what was logical and right. Living by the book. What about Bill and Betty, you said, shouldn’t you have called them? Assuming I didn’t. In fact they were on the phone almost the moment it happened, with their distant trumpet-mute voices. She’s not home yet, I said, but don’t worry, I’ll have her call you … trying to sing through the trembling in my voice.
If I could go mad surely that would be better than the sanity of this meditative solitude. Me and my shadow … Dancing in the dark. I do have a big bread knife that I look at from time to time. It looks back.
They died soon after. Bill of a stroke, Betty withering away. Tiny coffins for them, a jar of unidentifiable anonymous ash standing in for Briony. The whole family shamed by the facility of their transfiguration.
Do you want this returned?
No, keep it. It was written to you.
In any event I’m glad you’re back. I didn’t know you were into popular music and liked to sing.
Well, I’m a different man in a fjord.
ANDREW SOLD OFF the furniture, broke his lease, and left New York. The city was Briony’s now. He saw her running through the streets, looking back at him, turning a corner. Besides, there was no work to be found. He’d read in The Chronicle of Higher Education of a cog science clinical professorship at George Mason University, but the interview did not go well and he knew nothing would come of it. So there he was in Washington, thinking maybe he could run a study on the collective brain of an administration using the model of an ant colony. But the only job to be found was as a substitute science teacher at a D.C. high school. He took it. Within a month, one of the science teachers had a heart attack, and so there was Andrew with the pay of a substitute and the hours of a full-timer. He found himself a studio apartment and settled in as a Washingtonian. It suited his sense of his life as a lost cause to have demoted himself from academia to a public high school.
A lost cause? Can we talk more about this?
I can tell you the high school building was a ruin. Paint peeling everywhere, broken furniture, bathrooms out of order, cracks like earthquake fissures in the blackboards, window shades that either wouldn’t come down or wouldn’t go up, and the musty atmosphere of dust and mildew. He established his popularity immediately by sitting down at his desk in front of a class and slowly tilting out of sight, his chair, he had not noticed until it was too late, one with but three legs. Immediately, despite their laughter, several students were beside him, lifting him to his feet, bringing over a working chair, and he knew this had not been a trick on their part. In fact, perhaps because of the woeful condition of the school, the teachers and students seemed to bond in a fellowship of the indomitable. The kids tacked their pastel drawings over holes in the walls, they painted their history murals, worked on their end term musical, cheered their basketball team. Teachers and students were on a first-name basis, and everyone had lunch in the same lunchroom, what had been the separate dining preserve of the teachers having filled over the years with broken equipment—projectors, tape recorders, TV sets, filing cabinets, tables, chairs, an upright piano with half the keys missing. Andrew was given the lesson plan in biology. It was simple enough and he used the occasion of the frog dissection, and a reprise of Galvani, the leg of a dead frog touched with a metal probe twitching as if still alive, to gradually direct the class to some elementary facts of brain science. And the more he wandered off the lesson plan, the more they loved it, girls and boys, the inseparable lovers among them. One of the students jumped up on the stage of the study hall and held his fist to his mouth, microphonelike: “Here it’s dorsal, there it’s ventral, this here’s rostral, you nothin’ but mental …”
But this school was not where you were headed with your coffee and paper the morning a voice asked you to fix the screen door?
No, by then I had an office in a converted cleaning closet in
the White House basement.
A cleaning closet in the White House basement.
Yes. I hated to leave those kids. They kept me afloat. They buoyed my spirits. The white mice in the maze I built—they loved that. Watching how a mouse brain learns the world. Oh, and “the two thieves dilemma.” Standard first-term cog sci. That really turned them on: Two thieves whom the evidence is not enough to convict are told each in turn and privately by a clever detective that the other has betrayed him and spilled the beans. So each is given a choice. Betray in turn, or keep mum. If they both betray they will both get, say, ten years in prison. If one betrays the other, he will get five years, and the one who doesn’t betray will get twenty. If neither of them betrays the other they will both go free. So what is the best strategy for each thief? He has to figure if the other will betray him or not and what he should do in either case. We played that several times with volunteer thieves taking turns standing outside in the hall. The class booed the betrayers, made fun of them. They applauded when the decision not to betray was chosen by both volunteers.
You seemed to have found a home in that high school.
I did have a strong sympathetic connection to the place, to the teaching of children, to being caught up in their exuberant time of life. That surprised me. From eight to three I whited myself out. There was nothing behind me, no memory.
But you chose to leave.
I hadn’t been teaching a month when, in the middle of a period, a bunch of people blew unannounced into my classroom, my principal leading. Three or four men in suits with cables winding into their ears, photographers with their cameras, what I took to be a couple of women newspaper reporters. Nobody said anything until the door opened again, a man slipped in and stood there by the door, and then behind him, striding in with a big smile, the president of the United States interrupting my lesson on mind reading.
My goodness. What was the occasion?
No occasion, it was just a photo op, some routine puffery. He wrote his name on the cracked blackboard. He told the students how proud he was of the way they made the best of things, stayed in school, and were not brought down by the conditions around them. How they were being made strong, tempered like steel, and how cool that was, the implication being that poverty was good for them. The kids were stunned, they didn’t even laugh when his chalk broke. He told a few of them to come up and have their picture taken with him. Never has a high school classroom been more thunderously silent. I had been elbowed out of the way to stand by the window. With my back to the sun I hoped he wouldn’t recognize me.
Why would he recognize you?
He went on, oblivious of the irony, as he claimed he and the students were neighbors. It was all over in five minutes, the room emptying as suddenly as it had filled. But as he turned to leave, the sun went behind a cloud and I was made visible. He saw me. The momentary surprise on his face, the eyebrows shooting upward as he stopped in midstride while his brain computed. His fusiform gyrus.
His what?
The hank of temporal lobe that recognizes faces.
You’re saying the president knew who you were?
Why wouldn’t he? We were roommates at Yale.
College roommates?
Well, yes, Yale’s a college, Doc. Where I had taken a fall or two for him, as it happens. A week after his visit to my high school class has made the papers, I hear from the principal’s office that a car will be waiting for me at the end of the school day. I can’t say I was surprised. I’m driven to the White House, a marine saluting at the gate, and met at the door by a secretary who escorts me past the portraits of dead presidents into a meeting with one of the deputies to the chief of staff.
No president?
Something even worse. They want to appoint me director of the White House Office of Neurological Research. This will involve tracking neurological developments around the world and eventually putting together a commission of cognitive scientists to formulate brain research policy. The job comes with some modest G salary rating.
My goodness. All so sudden—
I had never heard of such an office and with good reason: It was newly devised and I would be the first appointee. You understand, I didn’t have anything like a major reputation in cog science, so my first thought was that my old roomie was playing one of his practical jokes. [thinking] Because the government had to be deeply into neurological research and that had to have been ongoing for some time.
You think?
Come on, Doc, you have that look about you—
What look? All this is news to me.
—pretending not to know something you know all about. Don’t you believe it’s important for the government to predict how people will react to various stimuli, foreigners especially? Or to magnetically image the hallucinogenic mind? Or how to manipulate the brain’s plasticity? Or a hundred other mental issues that can be useful to a government?
Brainwashing, you mean?
Brainwashing was the 1950s. I don’t know why I talk to you. Anyway, it was a real enough offer and not a joke after all. They just wanted to keep an eye on me. I was to learn it was Peachums’s idea.
Peachums?
That’s what the president called him. The campaign manager. Said to be the president’s brain. I wondered how much of that was left to be parceled out.
Peachums.
Or sometimes Plumsy—whatever was hairless.
I see.
As I was to realize, nobody, least of all the president, cared if I actually did what the job called for. The point was the next election. That some reporter would track me down, and I’d talk about our collegiate misadventures, of which there were quite a few. Like the incident of the bunsen burner. I had never spoken up about my famous roommate but did that mean I wouldn’t? There I was, risen out of his dim past to become a staff concern. I had to sign a confidentiality statement: As an administration appointee I was subject to the law if I leaked information. I looked at the paper wondering whether to sign. It was a total clamp over my mouth.
But you accepted.
How could I ignore a presidential summons? [thinking] No, that’s not the truth. It was as if he’d materialized, it was as if our life arcs—his so upward-reaching and mine looping into the depressed hemispheric depths—had described a perfect circle and there we were, superimposed in the same place at the same time. It felt inevitable.
I have to say I’m surprised you haven’t mentioned any of this before now.
Why?
Well, it is unusual to say the least to find your old college roommate the president of the United States. Kind of story you can dine out on for a lifetime.
Are you suggesting I’m making this up?
No, of course not. I just wonder why you would wait this long before mentioning it?
I don’t live vicariously, Doc. I didn’t mention it before now I guess because I was talking about things more important to me.
OK.
Besides which he is nothing to brag about, is he? I didn’t vote for him and wouldn’t have voluntarily sought him out. He wouldn’t have come up at all in these sessions except in the aftermath … the aftermath … [thinking] Name dropping is finally self-congratulatory, isn’t it? But the fact that he was my roommate is nothing for which I’ve reason to congratulate myself. Maybe if I’d mentioned it at the beginning, like it wasn’t the last thing in the world I wanted to talk about.
No, no, I believe you—you’re here, aren’t you?
I am politically informed, Doc. Apart from everything I’ve been telling you about myself, I am a citizen sensitive to his country’s history. My roommate had gotten where he was by not quite the usual elected way. I knew how things had gone since—his chosen war, his anti-scientism. I knew all about him and the quality of the people around him. [thinking] Analyses had been done. All you had to do was read the newspaper. Those flights should never have happened. The intelligence was there.
You mean, you blame him?
Who am
I to blame anyone for anything? But he was feckless, irresponsible, in over his head.… I believed he’d brought a fatal lassitude to the federal mind. On the theory that the president we get is the country we get. That was worth looking into, don’t you think? I had long despaired of ever doing original work in my field. To start with the hypothesis that there is something like a government brain— I had the idea this was an opportunity of some kind.
Quite reasonable.
No, you don’t understand. I kept a photo of Briony and our baby in my wallet. They are in the sun, in the park, Willa seated in Briony’s arms as on a throne, and they are facing me, mother and child, two blondes, laughing, rising out of the picture to fill my eyes—
Yes?
So I signed the confidentiality agreement and became the head of the Office of Neurological Research in the White House basement. I meant to step into history, to act. To make a statement that would finally be the end of me.
What are you saying, Andrew?
And that’s what I’d resolved the morning I stood on the corner with my coffee and paper waiting for the light to change.
HELLO, DOC? I’m speaking to you from their old wall phone, the kind you crank up. Can you hear me?
Yes, Andrew, loud and clear.
No matter how old and broken-down things are, the life seems to work for them. It’s uncanny. The local phone company must be as old as this house. And that flatbed truck, four on the floor, with the bald tires and the paint all weathered away—a kind of art object. So they walk to town. I do it myself. And the town too, shabby dimly lit little stores that have been there forever, but you find what you need. The hardware store—the guy who runs it, he does roofing, I kept picking up shingles in the yard so I engaged him to come patch thing up. There’s a leak, all the old woman does is put a pail under it.