I endured what I could. I couldn’t sleep. I lay in bed listening for the key turning in the lock. The women of the neighborhood helped for a couple of weeks. After that I was on my own. Willa would look at me with her mother’s blue eyes. Quietly judgmental, I felt, though knowing that could not be true. Fretful at times, looking past me, looking for Briony. I rocked the carriage back and forth. And then in November they held their marathon as a national vow to prevail. It grew colder. Snow fell. And there I was swaddling Willa, pushing the little feet into the leggings, the arms into the sweater, and then the hat and the snowsuit and the blanket and the whole bundle of her into the car seat. It is an arduous process, preparing an infant for the outdoors in winter. And when I had buckled her in and started the engine I realized what I had in mind: I would bring her to Martha.
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.
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.