Andrew's Brain

V

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.