You’re suggesting they will survive us?
The collective brain of the ant colony is outside the body of any individual ant. It is the gaseous chemical identity of a colony that governs every ant’s behavior. So that looking at them you might think they know what they’re doing. Or why they’re doing it. Or it’s possible that the colonial brain invests each ant with an intelligence he or she might not otherwise have. That interests me. And the chances of survival are improved exponentially.
I seem to recall your quoting Mark Twain about the stupidity of ants.
That was of a particular ant who’d individualistically wandered off on his own. Nevertheless he, the ant, was capable of carrying three or four times his own weight. I didn’t see the equivalent from the grunts lifting sewer covers in my gym.
Why are we having this discussion?
We do pale emulations of the group brain as if in envy. We give ourselves temporarily to a larger social mind and we perform according to its dictates the way individual computers cede their capacities to their network. Perhaps we long for something like the situation these other creatures have — the ants, the bees — where the thinking is outsourced. Cloud thinking, a chemical ubermensch. Which brings us to politics.
I’m not sure you’re serious.
You know Emerson? It’s what Emerson, thinking of his own kind of creature, mistakenly calls the oversoul. He romanticizes it, makes it a constituent of ethical thinking suggesting God. When all he is aspiring to is a kind of universal pheromonal genius.
Seriously, Andrew, are you planning to do this research?
And then, of course, fashion. Even Briony wore jeans. Even I. And then our slang, the way a phrase will catch fire and go through all of us, all at once indispensable, ubiquitous, until it dies out as quickly as it arose. [thinking] What?
Your plans for the future.
Don’t make me laugh, Doc. I’m telling you about the end of my life.
We were getting ready to go out. A Sunday morning, a beautiful May morning, and we were to have brunch at this little French place on Sullivan Street. Briony was well into her eighth month and moving somewhat slowly, and while I waited I turned on our new TV I had bought to certify us as a family. And as it happened there was this documentary about the New York City Marathon. And there were the marathoners, in full color, streaming across the Verrazano Bridge by the thousands. For a moment I had the illusion that Briony was among them. But she appeared beside me, materialized as if from the screen.
All thoughts of leaving for our brunch were put aside, so rapt was she.
It is, after all, a remarkable sight, this legion of runners advancing like a tidal wave over the silver bridge, these thousands all doing the same thing at the same time, a great swath of humanity putting itself to the test of running twenty-six or so miles without falling down dead. I have to admit there is something so clean and spare about it, with its ancient allusions. How it exalts people to do this thing that has no reward except for having done it. There are purses, of course, for the world-class long-distance runners who come from other countries to breast the finish line, a man, a woman, gender indistinguishable in their running shorts and their numbered ribbed shirts and running shoes and sinewy bodies, crossing the finish line hours before the masses. [thinking] She hadn’t known about it, my wife. So it was as if all those runners were about to sweep us up, carry us along, engulf us in the tide of them.
Was this so portentous, people running?
I knew it before she said it, Briony right then and there swearing to run in the coming marathon. With a resolute nod to herself. With a clenching of fists. This was the girl, after all, whom I had seen for the first time spinning around the high bar. I had to smile — here she was, melon-ripe, and planning to begin training like the moment she delivered — but she wasn’t joking and was put out with me for not taking her seriously. I want to do this, Andrew, and I will. I don’t care what you say. And that’s all there is to it.
This wasn’t the first time Briony could sound like the willful child who fixes her mind on something and won’t listen to reason. Made me think Bill and Betty must every now and then have had their hands full.
She couldn’t take her eyes off the screen. And when the camera cut away from the leaders to the main body, people on the sidewalks holding out cups of water and cheering, a runner here limping, a runner there gasping for breath, the strain on some faces, the concentration so that you understood they saw and heard nothing but the pavement in front of them, the robotic pounding of their own feet — well, when I looked at Briony I was chastened to see the tears running down her cheeks. She sat there on the couch leaning forward, as if something religious was going on. And so I wasn’t about to argue. When the program was over I hugged her and said not a word about how unrealistic it was there in June to think, the baby coming momentarily, that she could recover quickly enough and turn herself in the few months till November — that’s when they have it — into a long-distance runner through five boroughs and twenty-six-some miles over bridges and up hills and down avenues. I said to her only that the baby and I would be waiting for her at the finish line in Central Park.
Willa thoughtfully chose to be born just a few days later. How long was it before Briony was doing her jog those summer mornings with the baby carriage flying before her? Sometimes I took them in a cab to Central Park and sat with the carriage while Briony ran around the reservoir. I would do my reading, holding the baby when she fretted, giving her her bottle — I was fearless. And after a while there would Briony be, gleaming with health, laughing, her arms shining, her shirt stained with sweat, and as she drank from her water bottle, head tilted back, I studied the loveliness of her neck, the peristalsis of her throat. And then right there on the bench in the sun she would unbutton her nursing bra and give the baby her breast, and there were mother and child, a sacrament of nature in the green park among the families drifting by, dogs barking, kids on scooters, the wandering seller of balloons.
You’re describing an idyll.
How is it that first mothers instantly have the knowledge of mothering? Something that’s always been in the brain is called into play. And the organization. Somehow she found time for everything — the baby, her tutoring, seeing after the old lady who lived next door. Into July and August on the hottest of days she would leave the house at dawn for a serious run and do her miles, seven, ten, by the time people were going off to work. She would head downtown to where the offfice buildings were, and find one where she could run the stairs, run up twenty, thirty flights of stairs for strength training.
I assume you approved all of this.
Of course. Wasn’t I working out at the gym? We were a team, including Willa out to see her mother run the marathon. Briony bounded off from our doorway and her feet barely touched the ground. Her legs seemed to grow longer, it was like the levitation you see in classical ballet. [thinking]
Yes?
I had also bought us a phone with an answering machine. “Hello, Briony? Bri, are you there? It’s Dirk! I got your number from your folks.”
Her old boyfriend? The football player?
Briony was out. She was tutoring.
Did you tell her?
Of course I told her. She called back and agreed to meet him for lunch. She told me he’d gotten a job at a brokerage downtown.