But as I say, we were riding across the country and I was the new Andrew, no longer anxious, no longer worried for her. Everything was amazing. Escarpments of red rock, endless fields of wheat, towns of one dusty street, a roadside diner where you moved down along a steam table and took what you liked to the cashier, a sign on the wall announcing: “Efficient and Courteous Self Service.” A trailer park in a sandstorm, the wind whipping up the clotheslines, a motel with a purple dinosaur on its roof, seemingly endless wooden one-room Baptist churches with the day’s chapter and verse out front, antebellum towns with pillared mansions shadowed in live oak. In Atlanta we stopped at a bookstore and bought a bunch of Mark Twains, and on the interstate whoever was not driving read him aloud — we took turns — Briony drove well, not impatiently but not dillydallying either. I saw Mark Twain in her eyes as we passed under the repetitive amber lights of the highway, and I saw him flickering in her imagination—
So, there was your MT. Huckleberry Finn, I suppose?
The Prince and the Pauper. The two boys exchange identities, the prince is the pauper and the pauper the prince. Briony liked the romance of that, Clemens saying there’s nothing to royalty but the assumption. But it’s more than a democratic parable: It’s a tale for brain scientists. Given the inspiration, anyone can step into an identity because the brain is deft, it can file itself away in an instant. It may be stamped with selfhood, but let the neurons start firing and Bob’s-your-uncle.
I’m not sure of the timing of your trip. Had Briony graduated? I thought you said she was a junior when you met. Were you reappointed for a second year?
I remember coming up the Jersey Turnpike, past the oil refinery burn-offs, and with the growling of the convoying semis in our ears, and away off to the left the planes dropping to the runways of Newark Airport and then the fields of burned grass irrigated by rivulets of muck and with what looked like a buzzard floating over the turnpike risen now on concrete pillars that in their tonnage were holding up the furious intentions of traffic, the white lights coming toward us, the red lights beckoning, and when I glanced over at Briony she was staring straight ahead, clearly stunned by this dazzling information, it wasn’t exactly fear in her eyes but more like a virginal response to the unexpected. What I wondered at that moment was how much time one got for transporting a young woman across state lines. What is it you asked?
When this was, and did she drop out of school to go with you.
Briony was half junior, half senior, when I came along. She was graduated in January, when there was no commencement. She had her various jobs while I rode out my year’s contract. With Briony sometimes auditing in her front-row seat I was inspired to give the students only good news: how much neuroscience is advancing almost day by day. I was positive, always anticipating a resolved future of essential discoveries, it was the guarded optimism of the classroom, the assumption of any science course, that we would get to the truth eventually. I harked back to Whitman, who knew better than anybody what we are and sang of “the body electric.” How pleasing to those children to learn, body as brain and brain as body, that it all came together. Of course I wouldn’t tell them he was a poet. Ruin everything.
So there we were. I had taken her out of her organized life, removed her from her horizontal bar, and moved us to New York. In fact, she loved the city. We found a place after a while in the West Village. An apartment in a converted warehouse, with a loading-dock entrance and iron front windows, a creaky elevator, old unpolished wooden floors. Three rooms, lots of light, trees on the block, wonderful stores in the neighborhood, and of course the storekeepers all got to know Briony, the Italian bakery on the corner with the fresh breads in the window, the Korean food market, the coffee shop, newsstand. Because she was lovely, outgoing, cheerful, friendly, asking questions, warming up all these crotchety New Yorkers, who responded, to their own amazement, in kind. Andrew, she said, everything you need is right here, you don’t have to drive to a mall to shop, when was this invented! And we would walk everywhere, she wanted to explore, we walked to Chinatown, we walked over to Washington Square, where I had lived as a child, she got to know the city quite well.
How did you live?
I had a contract from a textbook publisher to do a kind of cog sci workbook. And then for the same company I became an outsource editor for their science lists. Reading books and proposals. And Briony tutored in math. She put something on the Internet and in no time at all she had more clients than she wanted — high school kids, middle school kids — testament to the state of education in America. So we made out OK. This was before the baby, you understand. When the baby came, a cake was delivered by the old Italian baker, the Koreans sent over a basket of fruit, all the old ladies of the neighborhood had tracked her pregnancy, she was everyone’s expectant young mother, and when on a spring day Briony brought Willa out for the first time, carrying her in a chest sling, somehow people appeared, it was as if they had been waiting, it was a kind of royal procession, Mother and Child, Briony couldn’t walk ten feet without someone stopping to ooh and aah.
What about you?
Well, I was there, of course, hanging in the background. I had never connected with the neighbors as Briony had. I just kept a smile frozen on my face, saying nothing and being more or less ignored. But I’ll tell you how lovely it was to watch Briony nurse our little girl, her cheeks flushed with happiness, her eyes on the baby and then on me with an expression of such fruition, as to enunciate in that moment the magnificence of life. And it was all in her eyes, my dear wife of twenty-two, who had the strength of being to totally transform me, turn me into something resembling a normal, functioning citizen of the world. [thinking] Ach, God.
Kleenex on the little table there.
So now you know why I’m here.
I do.
It’s a kind of jail, the brain’s mind. We’ve got these mysterious three-pound brains and they jail us.
Is that where you are?
I’ve known it for some time. I’m in solitary, one hour in the yard for the exercise of memory. You’re a government psychiatrist, aren’t you?
Well, I’m board-certified, if that’s what you mean.
And I thought we were travelers on the road together. The two of us, walking down the road. On the other hand I don’t think you travel well. I suppose you’ve never been to Zagreb.
Zagreb?
I was in a park there where every little bush and sprig of flowers was identified with a card on a metal stand. You had to bend down to read the Latin name. I was there with the woman who did the all-in-the-air somersault.
I see.
She was a prostitute, of course. And why I said to the pimp that her act was too brief to hold an audience for an entire evening, I don’t know. Perhaps I was drunk. Perhaps the somersault only seemed to be entirely in the air. She was a soft-spoken little woman habituated to submission. She smiled through her tears as she asked me to take her away from Zagreb, there in the park on a chilly autumn afternoon with the little bushes labeled carefully as if this was a truly civilized part of the world that had never seen war and whose native population didn’t hate the Serbs or the Bosnians, and who hadn’t made themselves into a puppet state of the Nazis in World War II. I saw this sedate, meticulously botanized park with the autumn leaves blowing across our path as a claim in the name of civilization to deny the brutal history of this place.