Andrew's Brain

II

YOU 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.

Another 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.

Another 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 …

Very 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.

The 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.

Here I was in a state of such possessive love that I couldn’t bear to share Briony with anyone else, not even a stupid mutt. I wanted her exclusive attention. I didn’t say anything but I felt resentful, as if I had been invited to accompany her with no more thought on her part than she had impulsively bestowed on the dog.

Why were you going to California?

And it didn’t help that the lout bid us goodbye, or bid her goodbye, there on the sidewalk in front of his dorm.

Did the lout have a name?

I don’t know. Duke something. What else could it have been? She kissed him lightly on the mouth and touched his cheek and got in the car and closed the door and looked back and waved as I drove off. A voice in my mind said, “Step on it!” What the hero says to the cabbie in every 1930s movie. That voice in my head defining the moment: I was not of this generation. I was not of their time. I did not have this girl by any legitimate right.

Surely she had some choice in the matter.

I’m telling you how I felt. Briony knew I was divorced but no more than that. I had wanted to be completely open with her but I couldn’t bring myself to tell her everything. Clearly, I had become her project.

Her project? So you still didn’t understand how taken she was.

I sensed her interest. I felt indulged. I couldn’t believe more than that. Not that I was without guile. The gloomier I was the more attentive she was. This had gone on through the semester. I could affect my nihilistic despair, making a lie even of that, I could wear the appropriate face while inside of myself I was smiling like an idiot. It was all I could do to keep my hands off her. But she was picking up my language, she was reading the course work, so that every boldly thoughtful sentence that came from her I could credit to my teaching. Briony had the intellectual assertiveness of the young, who make the learned ideas their own. She even mentioned the brain’s limbic system and looked at me with a question in her eyes. I had instantly to get her off of that.

Why?

Damage to the limbic system inhibits feeling, among other things. There’s indifference, coolness. You’re half alive. People who’ve been traumatized show limbic system dysfunction.

Do you believe you suffered such an experience? Had you been traumatized?

Only by life. Listen, when I was with Briony there was nothing wrong with my limbic system. My hippocampus and my amygdala were up and running. Whistling, applauding. Doing back flips. Fortunately, my course syllabus included readings from William James, Dewey, Rorty, and then the French existentialists, Sartre, Camus. She dove into all that.

For a course in elementary brain science?

Well, it was over most of their heads. And what they understood they didn’t like. I wasn’t aware of any particular religiosity among these kids, it was more that God was an assumption, like something preinstalled in their computers. But if there was a philosophy that was appropriate to the study of the brain, of the material of consciousness, I maintained it was either pragmatism or existentialism. Or maybe both. No God in either, you see. No soul. No metaphysical bullshit. Briony got it. But for her, a little more drama and human exaltation was in the idea of a painful freedom. So she opted for the existentialists. And applied her knowledge like a pragmatist to me. The evidence was clear that I was of the existentialist school. That I was outside the realm of psychology — I had an historic identity. That seemed to make fast the connection between us. She was happy with Andrew the Existentialist. She could kiss me on the cheek. She could find me in my office and come in with two coffees. I wanted to get down on my knees and kiss the hem of her frock. This clean lovely creature of the West had found in what she decided was my existentialism the resurrection of the nineteenth-century Romantic — Andrew poised at cliff’s edge with the back of his hand pressed to his brow.

It was just a matter of time before we became lovers. The first time, it was in her dorm room. She took her clothes off and lay down and turned her face to the wall while I undressed. Migod, to hold this tremulous being in my arms. After that she always rode her bike to my place.… And I remember when she woke me up one dawn, dragging me out of bed like an excited child, and pulling me stumbling up the stairs to the roof of my suite motel to watch the rising sun light the mountaintops. I doubt that my seduction technique had ever before been practiced in this country of cowboys. I had taken her out of her time, out of her place, and I was jealous even of the stray dog that she’d picked up to come with us on our trip.

So as I understand it, you were going to California with the girl of your dreams and what with one thing or another you managed to feel miserable about it.

We were off to see her parents. How would you feel?

Briony directed Andrew to a little seaside town about an hour south of Los Angeles. He turned off the Coast Highway to a street lined with small-scale homes in pastel colors. The predominating building material was stucco. In front of each home, a garden patch stuffed with ridiculously exorbitant tropical plants in flower. Perhaps he was tired from the two days on the road. Even Briony’s excitement as she pointed him to one of the narrow driveways that separated each house from its neighbor he found annoying. And who was this running up to the front door, flinging it open and disappearing inside — certainly not the spectacular spandexed handstander on the high bar, nor the lovely creature demurely submitting to a brain scan in the elementary cognitive science lab, nor the lover of an older man. Coming home for someone her age was a regression to childhood. Andrew stood by the car with his hands on his hips and looked over the neighborhood. It was shadowless. Heat shimmering from the white pavement. He couldn’t admit to himself how nervous he felt, how out of place, squiring this child like some vile seducer.

I can understand this was a difficult moment for you.

Yes. I didn’t want to follow her. The house was just a short walk from a retaining wall at the end of the street. I found myself looking down a vine-covered hillside to a beach covered with people — a brueghel of people, sunning themselves, playing volleyball, children picking up shells along the water’s edge. More of them were out in the blue water drifting patiently on their surfboards. Beyond was the Pacific, flecked with sailboats. Above it all, in a smoggy sky, was a bloodstained sun clearly intending to set over the sea. The whole scene seemed unnatural. Where I come from the sun sets over the land.

Briony was calling to him from the house, waving, smiling. He turned and noticed the parents’ car that he had parked behind, a red Morris Minor. You didn’t see many of those anymore. At the door, Briony took his hand. They’re out back, she said. And in the short walk through the house to the garden Andrew had the impression of — what to call it — a prosthetic house? The stairway to the second floor was made of shallow half steps, the upholstered chairs and sofa in the living room had attached footstools. The center island in the kitchen was stepped. Whatever needed to be used came with graduated access, handrails. And the place smelled very clean, antiseptic almost. All of this Andrew perceived peripherally as he passed through the house and to the garden where there, smiling and rising to greet him, and not crippled or maimed at all, were Briony’s parents. I’m Bill, he said. I’m Betty, she said.

The fact that I was a college teacher was in my favor. These were retired show-business people with great respect for the education they never had. And so loving of their daughter that they trusted her judgment. Never even a raised eyebrow for this man twice their daughter’s age. Gave me a hearty welcome. So I had worried for no reason. There were bottles and an ice bucket on a tea caddy. You name it we got it, Bill said. We had drinks, Briony sitting close to me on the settee, glancing at me for my reaction. But Bill and Betty were classy, they had the social ease of longtime performers. They were young-looking given that they were retirees. It’s hard to tell with Diminutives.

Diminutives?

You don’t want to patronize them. “Midgets” is beyond the pale. Derives from the insect the midge. And “Little People” is not much better.

You’re saying Briony’s parents were midgets?

Only out of their hearing.

My goodness. And “Diminutives” was their term of choice?

That’s my term. They didn’t speak of themselves descriptively. You just look at them and you go into the politically correct mode. To my credit I didn’t even blink the moment I saw them. Just an example of the brain’s synaptic speed. It had probably told me what I’d find as I’d walked through the house.

Why hadn’t Briony warned you?

I don’t know. Could she have been testing me? My reaction a measure of my character? But it couldn’t have been that. Briony was incapable of any kind of subterfuge. And she was too self-aware to act unconsciously. And why should she warn me? We were seriously together — why would something like that matter? They were her folks, who were in her sight lines from the day she was born. She loved them. And given their sociability with others of their like she was raised in an aura of normality, not being the only child in that situation. You don’t go around apologizing for your mom and dad.

But what young girl of even normally proportioned parents will not say something in advance by way of softening their effect? A parent is a person who embarrasses you.

Well, this was Briony. This was the girl who led me up the mountain. She was in all ways enigmatic. I was deeply in the world of her affections — why wouldn’t I know already, without being told, that her parents were tiny? What can I say that will satisfy you? En route to CA, she gave her dog away to some kid who worked at the motel where we stayed one night. At the time, I didn’t know why she would do that — after impulsively bringing it along, naming it Pete, and then giving him away to someone, and with a dollar or two to buy some kibble. She knelt and hugged the dog and looked on sadly as the kid walked him away on a leash. Perhaps that was the acknowledgment you’re looking for. When I saw Briony take her mother in her arms and hold her as you would a child, when I watched her kneeling to hug her father, I could see why she might have had second thoughts about Pete the dog. He was big. Had a tail on him that could crack your fibula.

I just remembered — she did tell me one thing, Briony. She asked me not to talk politics with her father. My last-minute instructions. We were just approaching the family manse. She kissed my cheek. Oh, and, Andrew, please, please, no politics, OK?

What was that about?

We were in Orange County, CA, the land of love it or leave it.

How did Briony know what your politics were? I can’t imagine new lovers talking politics.

Lovers live in each other’s minds. Briony found in mine a degree of civic intensity that she recognized from her father’s conversation. Except I was of a different era.

I see.

You don’t know everything about me, Doc, you’re only hearing what I choose to tell you. I’ve always responded to the history of my times. I’ve always attended to the context of my life.

The context.

Yes, as it ripples in concentric circles all the way out to the stars. Bill was a bright little man and I did honor Briony’s request, though it wouldn’t have occurred to me in any case as a guest in this house to tease out our political differences. But between Bill and me, I would say I was the truer patriot. If you keep the larger picture in mind you can’t be convinced of the permanence of this country. Not when you know who’s running it.

As you do?

Oh, yes! As I know myself.

Bill and Betty were not disproportioned dwarves, with large heads or torsos, and short legs, they were perfectly proportioned, everything in harmony with everything else. They lived on what I assumed was a fixed income and took pains to live meticulously and with dignity. Bill was show-business handsome, his small fine features and pale blue eyes obviously the source of Briony’s good looks. He was somewhat florid, with a head of white hair neatly pompadoured. Betty had the flat doll-like face more often seen in Diminutives. They dressed as Southern Californians, in light colors, crisp slacks, shirts and blouses, penny loafers for him, open flats for her. Betty was a bit stout of figure, but with her dyed brown hair done up in a short bob, and a lovely smile and a face whose default expression was sympathetic understanding. With their outgoing personalities they did emanate the show-business life they had lived. They had toured with various troupes of performing midgets, singing, dancing, or serving in World’s Fair tableaus in the native costumes appropriate to various foreign pavilions. They told me all about it. They had played Las Vegas. An entire wall in Bill’s study was covered with photographs — inscribed headshots of entertainers I’d never heard of. They’d done some television, toured with Ringling Bros., there were pictures of Betty standing on a cantering horse, of Bill dressed as a drum major and leading a band of clowns. But never sideshows, Bill said, it never came to that and if it did we still wouldn’t.

Tell me, Doc, why do things in miniature bring out our affection? Like those little metal cars we all played with as kids that were models of real cars. How important to us that they were accurate to scale. And what about cats, I never liked cats but I could play happily with a kitten, testing its reflexes with a piece of string. And here were Bill and Betty. Toy people, kitten people, accurate to scale. The idea of them was alluring, each moment in their presence was as original as the moment before. It was as if you had traveled to another land, some exotic place on earth that you could write home about, if you had a home and someone there to write to. Not everyone can hope for the experience of being made welcome by these people and treated as an equal, as it were, as if that weren’t in itself funny.

So your affection was that of a superior, a taller, grander version of humanity.

Not necessarily. After a few days they were the norm. With the four of us at the dinner table, Briony seemed huge in my eyes, she wore a dress for dinner and had her hair combed back and reaching almost to her shoulders. She was this lovely but ungainly Alice in Wonderland. Me, I was under the illusion that if I stood up too suddenly I’d bang my head on the ceiling. And their voices, Bill’s and Betty’s, lacking timbre, something like trumpets played with mutes, were sometimes difficult to hear, as if they were communicating from a great distance.

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.

The 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.

Well, I’m reassured. For a while there, love was making you a dull fellow.

Try to understand. I know it’s hard for you, but pretend you are me. This whole thing had been a shock. Wouldn’t you feel somehow negated? Was it me she loved, or something about me that was all too familiar to her? Had she intuited it the first day of class when I was writing my name on the blackboard and the chalk broke in my hand and I knocked my books off the lectern? She had picked up everything and smiled with understanding. Grown in this endless sun, amid these awful flowers, her parents, face it, freaks of nature, she’d been nurtured to the weird, the unnatural. It was what she knew, her normal social reality. So who would she find for herself, whom would she be morbidly attracted to, but someone as adorable as a freakishly depressive cognitive scientist klutz, whom she was soon enough comforting after the nihilistic despair of his lectures?

I hear self-loathing.

You do?

Another version of your unworthiness as the lover of this girl. First there was Andrew the anachronism on the football campus, and now the opposite, the all too appropriate proto freak fitting right in.

I said this was the feeling for a moment. We have momentary feelings that don’t turn into action, don’t we?

We do.

You don’t think I’d be stupid enough to give up the love of my life because of some momentary suspicion that was actually a ritual self-denigration do you?

I guess not.

She had gotten away, hadn’t she, and now as we drove off, her parents waving from their front door, she wept. It was as if she’d said goodbye to them for the last time. I suppose I was responsible.

Why?

With me there she couldn’t pretend anymore that she hadn’t grown away from them. She could love them, be grateful to them, but not deny that they were from a world no longer her own.

What had you done?

I had met them.

Briony was a superb athlete but without the sinew, the female musculature. She was a slim slip of a thing. Her limbs were firm and shapely but not tightly knotted, as even a dancer’s are. So that all this physical life seemed to me not natural, given her build, but more in the nature of a determination, a self-invoked discipline. So where it came from, why she had found it necessary to top a pyramid of cheerleaders, flip herself around on the high bar, run, jump, train for a purpose other than an intensely physical joy of being, I doubt if she even knew. When she had the baby she did her jogging while pushing the carriage. [thinking]

Yes?

Only one time did her determined athleticism fail her. Back in the shadow of the mountains. To show her I was not totally foreign to sports I bought us a couple of tennis racquets and we went over to the college courts to hit. I had played a bit at Yale — not for Yale, at Yale. I never took any lessons but I somehow knew what was involved and in my loose-limbed ambling way I could run around and get to the ball, I had a pretty good forehand and a less reliable backhand, I could hit a topspin lob and I had a nice drop shot if I needed it. The game was new to Briony, but when I offered instruction, how to grip the racquet, how to position your body to hit a forehand, a backhand, and so on, she wasn’t interested. She thought she could get the hang of things by herself. When she couldn’t — overhitting, knocking the ball over the fence, or netting it, or missing the ball completely, running frantically this way and that — though I tried always to hit where she could hit it back — she finally lost her temper, slammed the racquet down, and walked off the court, sulking. It was the first time in our life together that I saw her lose her composure.

There were others?

Carrying the baby. I forget what month. She was staining, and that frightened her. She was biting on her knuckles as I called the doctor. It turned out to be nothing. But that one time on the tennis court — I’ve since wondered if, to show off, I hit some shots I knew she couldn’t get to.

[thinking]

I’ve never told you about my time in the army. When I was in the army, at the end of basic training there were nighttime maneuvers. I fell asleep in my foxhole while I was supposed to be guarding the perimeter. A cadre officer woke me up. I was given a hundred push-ups with an M1 on my back, but my platoon sergeant, who was responsible for me, was RA, Regular Army, and he lost his stripes. He was two months from retirement. [thinking] I was once at an academic cocktail party expressing myself effusively in this crowded room, flinging my arms out to make some point or other. The back of my hand slammed into the jaw of a woman professor standing off to the right of me. She screamed and sank to the floor. All conversation stopped. I ran to the host’s kitchen, and was feeling around in the refrigerator freezer for some ice, lifting aside and holding a couple of liters of vodka. The woman’s husband had come after me, shouting, and when I turned I was so startled that I dropped the vodka bottles and broke his foot. In the space of a minute I had taken out an entire family. [thinking] I was an undergraduate biology major at Yale. One day in the lab we were doing an experiment with sea anemones—

Andrew, stop.

What? Stop what?