Andrew's Brain

VI

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.