Andrew's Brain

IX

SO THERE YOU HAVE some of my memory, in case you doubted me.

I didn’t doubt you.

I was surprised to find him a middle-aged man. Unless you’ve seen someone on a daily basis, in which case the changes are imperceptible, it takes a moment before the remembered image dissolves.

Hadn’t you seen photographs, interviews on television, speeches?

Not the same as running into a life up close. Later, when I was sitting around in the Oval Office, I recognized the same twist of the mouth before the punch line of some dumb joke. That was the same. And the cockiness was there. But the eyes, a little bit scared, the eyes. Like he’d realized what he’d become. The hair gunmetal dull, some thinning on the crown.

As for the others, Chaingang and Rumbum, they were small men, I mean physically small, the one red of face, scowling of mouth, the other impeccably tailored and barbered, the instincts of a peacock, but both smaller in scale than their pictures, so that was interesting.

Who did you say?

It was a game of his — subtle, really — a sign of his affection, a kind of honorific, or maybe a brand such as you burn into a steer, because it was also a means of letting you know he owned you, knew what you were in essence. Like with Peachums. So the two key men in his administration, the ones who ran things, were Chaingang and Rumbum.

And what were you?

He stamped me as well, with his breakout smile. I was Android.

I see.

Uncanny, as if some dendrite winding through his brain was snappier than the billions of others. Because I was Android, all right. Tap me with your knuckle, hear the clunk.

So there you were.

He would never ask Android anything about himself, personal stuff, how his life had gone, whether he was married, those questions you ask if you have any curiosity. It was as if we were still at Yale.

Well, they had probably done a background check.

Why would he bother reading it?

Anyway, there you were.

Yes, to people’s puzzlement. Because I had to be a game first of all. Bright and early the first day I was there he summoned me to the Oval Office.

Just sit over here, Android, and don’t say a word. Don’t look up, don’t pay any attention. Here, read this magazine. Make believe you’re at the dentist’s office. And so I sat there off to the side while he conducted the morning’s business, receiving staff, holding meetings, my presence unexplained. As if he didn’t know I was there, as if I was an illusion of the others. Maybe I was Secret Service, though I hardly looked the part. But, if he didn’t seem to notice me, nobody could say anything. What a good time he was having keeping a straight face.

And were you enjoying the joke?

Would you in my position? The joke was my anonymity. I was like a shadow he’d cast. As if I was still his roommate. After a day or two of this, like everything in Washington it turned into news. That the president had a stranger hanging around his office was reported in the Spectator, a four-page subscription weekly: MYSTERY MAN IN THE WHITE HOUSE! That makes two of us, the president said.

Chaingang scripted the White House response for the administration spokesman. Of course no reporter would be allowed near me. It was put out that I was a dear college chum just visiting for a few days. That had an element of truth but didn’t go down with the bloggers. I was to the president as Clyde Tolson was to J. Edgar Hoover. Or the president was seriously ill and required a physician constantly by his side. This was not to be borne: The chief of staff said I had to go. My presence was damaging to the president’s image as the leader of the free world. And there were questions of national security. Not that I ever heard anything interesting — they all talked like the newspapers. But I was remanded to my basement office in the cleaning closet. If the president wanted to kick back, he snuck down there when no one was looking.

What about your White House Office of Neurological Research? Why wasn’t that mentioned?

That the president’s science advisor knew nothing about? Never mind the CIA and the NSA. It would have sent the memos flying. Resignations. I might have actually had to do the work I was supposed to do. No, that was a secret that couldn’t be leaked. You remember the point was to make sure I kept my mouth shut.

Peachums’s idea.

Yes. Like the others, he didn’t like to see me upstairs. I heard him shouting one morning. As I walked into the Oval Office, he stormed out, taking up most of the doorway. But my old buddy would want me to have coffee just to sit around and talk about anything except being president. His war was not going well. He’d invaded the wrong country. You can’t imagine the anxiety that produces.

Amazing.

What’s amazing? You think I’m making this up?

No, it’s just that—

I was a story for a day or two before it all suddenly and mysteriously disappeared. Where were you at the time? You of all people. And if not, it’s in the file, it would have to be.

What file?

Come on, Doc, at least have some respect. Do you know what Mind Reading is in cog science talk? It’s not about some magician up on a stage working his audience.

No?

No. Mind Reading is what, at the right temporoparietal junction of the brain, allows us in our social lives to know deductively, instinctively, what other people are thinking. The mood they’re in — happiness, boredom, whatever. Mind reading is our way of characterizing human sensitivity, like knowing, for instance, when someone is pretending not to know something.

I’m sorry you feel that way.

The Post and the Times had got as far as my past life — two marriages, one death, one divorce, a child farmed out, another died in infancy. I came to appreciate investigative reporting. It’s like obituary writing — they get everything but the feeling. They had my college grade average—3.25, something like an exoneration in my mind. And an old photograph from the college newspaper, the roomies with big smiles on their faces and arms around each other’s shoulders right there on the front page of the Post. I realized for the first time that, apart from my curly hair, we were look-alikes. There was almost a familial resemblance, at least then. I had since worn not as well as he. Surely you know something of this. Or else why am I here?

Good morning, class. Good morning, red of face and scowl of mouth. Good morning, starched of shirt and waved of hair. This morning we will speak of consciousness. Where does it come from? What does it do with itself? Does it connive? Does it seek advantages? How does it learn its ways — as billions of neurons self-conceiving in neural circuits, revise, adjust, reorganize, multiply responding behaviorally to outer-world creature experience — in a process of natural selection or neural Darwinism, according to Edelman? Does that include you, pretty-boy warmaker? Are you the culmination of this evolutionary brainwork? Crick, on the other hand, opts for the role of the claustrum or maybe the thalamus. Abjure claustrumphobia. Remember the thalamus! In any event you have no soul. But neither do Edelman or Crick. And neither does scowler here, though he will kill to prove that he has one. But that is the pretense of the brain. We have to be wary of our brains. They make our decisions before we make them. They lead us to still waters. They renounceth free will. And it gets weirder: If you slice a brain down the middle, the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere will operate self-sufficiently and not know what the other is doing. But don’t think about these things, because it won’t be you anyway doing the thinking. Just follow your star. Live in the presumptions of the socially constructed life. Abhor science. Sort of believe in God. Put your failings behind you. Present your self-justifications to the bathroom mirror.

You really disliked those men, didn’t you.

Chaingang and Rumbum were self-appointed world strategists. They had ranks of ideologues and think-tank warriors behind them. The president was only that. These were complicated relationships among the three men, and at moments he had to feel outnumbered and outclassed. For every instance that he went along with their bidding, however persuasive and in accord with his own instincts, there had to be some resentment there, don’t you think? I understood that he was using me as a prod to annoy them, having me test them, knowing it was an affront to make them hear me lecture on neurological developments around the world. That’s what he kept saying: Android (with a sly smile), let’s hear about the neurological developments around the world.

Well, Mr. President, in Switzerland they are building a megacomputer to emulate the human brain. Slowly but surely they’re building circuitry to mimic its synaptical, neuronal capacities. As complex as our brains are, the number of elements that make them work are finite. That means it’s just a matter of time before we have a working out-of-body brain.

Is that true?

That’s what Chaingang asked with an ironic smile. This is not an old science fiction movie you’re giving us? The president had his hands full with Chaingang and Rumbum, men he’d appointed who had more or less taken over where the important decisions were to be made. So his next joke was to announce that I was a brain researcher doing a study of executive brains like theirs. They were busy men, they had things to do, a war to run, and here he was having fun at their expense.

Your brains are looking good, he told them. Like a promising field for oil drilling.

They were not loath to show their irritation. In their eyes the president was a kind of dauphin who they felt lacked gravitas, to say nothing of a reasonable attention span. Their belief in their intellectual superiority was at odds with the fact that he was of the historically elected and they were not. He could affect a presidential strut walking to his helicopter, but he was not the real kingly thing as they felt they would be were they in his shoes. [thinking] In other countries it was men like these who mounted coups.

You saw all that?

When you’re in a room with the president of the United States you become very observant. My presence enraged the two men. So much so that I thought I would go along with the president and run a thought experiment. They believed I was putting them under the microscope, so why not? When in the history of the United States had a private citizen ever had a chance like this? But it had to be quick. It could work only until the president lost interest. That didn’t give me much time.

Chaingang and Rumbum had made their careers in government. Their minds were wired into well-established neuronal circuits that found expression in the vocabularies of war, detention, physical torture, political power, social gossip, sex, and money. So I cleared my throat and gave them each a pad and a pencil, and explained the cog sci prisoners’ dilemma game to them. Of course I didn’t send them out of the room as I had the high schoolers, I just told them each, privately, outside of the hearing of the other, to imagine that the president knew of their conspiracy to overthrow the government because his co-conspirator had betrayed him. He could say nothing or he could betray his colleague in turn. Their decisions would have greater or lesser punitive consequences in the hands of the attorney general. They were to write down the decision to betray or not to betray their co-conspirator.

They put up with this?

Like children given a task. They sat at opposite ends of one of the Oval Office sofas, their backs turned as they bent over their pads — with frowns, a closing of eyes here, a rubbing of forehead there — in the performance of heavy thought. I had warned them not to look at each other, but that was unnecessary. This was game theory, after all. Betray your co-conspirator and you’re in trouble, for you’ve admitted your guilt, but if you don’t betray him and he betrays you, he goes free and you’re headed for the slammer big-time. Only if neither of you betrays the other is the case against you dropped.

And what happened?

These men had served in various capacities over several administrations. Now they were at the very top. How had they gotten there? Who more than they knew how politics worked? So of course each of them, figuring the best possible outcome for himself, had no choice but to betray.

How the president laughed when I handed him the pads on which they’d written their decisions. A no-brainer, he said.

You made yourself known there, didn’t you.

I had no illusions, though. He needed a sidekick, a familiar, but for how long? He gave me one of those little lapel flags they liked to wear, so you knew they were patriots.

Yes?

Pinned it on me as you would a medal. I was now one of the good guys. Though as it turned out, my job as the director of the phantom White House Office of Neurological Research lasted not quite three weeks.

But a lifetime, as it were.

Yes. One afternoon, before I left for the day, the president showed me the Lincoln Bedroom on the second floor. Lincoln never slept there, of course, it wasn’t even a bedroom when he lived there. What was it, a study? But anyway the heavy Victorian furniture and swooping draperies looked as if Lincoln might have slept there. I said hello to the tenants—

The tenants?

Well, you know, this is where the president put up big-time donors for an overnight thrill. A calm enough couple they were, not at all overwhelmed to be in the president’s company, the man some decades grayer than the woman. They were in the act of unpacking. When you look at money it doesn’t seem anything but human. We all huddled over the desk where a copy of the Gettysburg Address was under glass.

So you were getting around in the White House.

I noticed of the young wife that she was tall with a good figure, but the face was as if ceramicized, somehow, the eyes glancing at me without seeming to realize I was there. A golden fall of hair as shiny and stiff as if shellacked. If Briony had been with me she would have felt cowed, my poor innocent, but just for a moment. This was an entire aspect of American life she knew nothing about. On the other hand, looking at Briony’s simple face-washed beauty, and the pure being that shone from her blue eyes, this woman would have felt her heart sinking for having spent her life affecting a sophistication she did not feel.

You knew all this from looking at her?

Thoughts of Briony gave me all sorts of perceptive advantages. It was as if something of her mind was still alive in me.

Is that cognitive science?

Not really. It’s more like suffering.