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.
X
HE DID KEEP a neat desk, the president, a few papers aligned under a little snow globe that served as a paperweight. You shook the globe and the snow drifted over a child sledding down a hillside. I had begun to feel sorry for my old roommate. He lived with his ineptitude. From my basement window I could see a more or less constant procession of limos driving up: generals and admirals, diplomats, cabinet members, visiting foreign dignitaries, all of whom he had to see because he was said to be the leader of the free world. He seemed more relaxed in those arts awards evenings where performers sang and medals were given out to film directors, playwrights, and actors. I was invited to one of those and sat in the rear where no one noticed me.
I had begun to savor my role there in the White House, having accepted a lieutenancy in the little war between the president and his closest advisors. It was as if right there in the Oval Office the prevailing contentiousness of the world outside had to be honored. It was as if the wars they were conducting were to be symbolized in their own relationships. I thought how contention makes us human. How every form of it is practiced religiously, from gentlemanly debate to rape and pillage, from dirty political attacks to assassinations. Our nighttime street fights outside of bars, our slapping arguments in plush bedrooms, our murderous mutterings in the divorce courts. We had parents who beat their children, schoolyard bullies, career-climbing killers in ties and suits, drivers cutting one another off, people pushing one another through the subway doors, nations making war, dropping bombs, swarming onto beaches, the daily military coups, the endless disappearances, the dispossessed dying in their tent camps, the ethnic cleansing crusades, drug wars, terrorist murders, and all violence in every form countenanced somewhere by some religion or other … and for its entertainment politicidal, genocidal, suicidal humanity attending its beloved kick-boxing matches, and cockfights, or losing its paychecks on the blackjack felt and then going back to work undercutting the competition, scamming, ponzi-ing, poisoning … and the impassioned lovers of their times contending in their own little universe of sex, one turgidly wanting it, the other wincingly refusing it.
Have you left anything out?
So I had been brought here, I thought, to give my old roommate some measure of satisfaction in his peculiar struggle with Chaingang and Rumbum. But there was a country to be run and they were the president’s two closest advisors, and after all he needed them just as they needed him. So after a few more of Android’s reports of neurological developments around the world, I detected a shift in the dynamic: I’d been there for a couple of weeks. At a certain moment one day they all had the same look on their faces, an effort not to laugh, and I understood that a new alliance in the great diplomatic tradition had been effected. I was alone versus the triumvirate and the joke was on me — the three of them in collusion to put me in a foolscap with bells — and all this while the world waited for the next civil war, the next tanking of the market, the next suicide bombing, the next tsunami, the next earthquake, the next leakage of radioactive material from the next defective nuclear plant — this game of seeing how long Android would go on with the show before he realized that he was their cruel sport, that they were taking a break, the three of them, right there in the White House — and I, the fool, was bringing a bit of comedy to their dark, contentious, power-charged, world-ruling day.
So there came that moment of realization and it was time to let them know who they were dealing with. I gave them Android’s last lecture on neurological developments around the world. I told them the great problem confronting neuroscience is how the brain becomes the mind. How that three-pound knitting ball makes you feel like a human being. I said we were working on it, and if they valued their lives, or life as they knew it, they would do well to divert whatever government funding there was for neuroscience and add it to the defense budget. More rockets, landmines, jet fighters — all those things you love, I said. Because if we figure out how the brain gives us consciousness, we will have learned how to replicate consciousness. You understand that, don’t you, Doc?
I do.
So what, you mean computers who talk back? Chaingang said. I’ve seen that in the movies. Computers, of course, I said, and animals genetically developed to have more than the primary consciousness of animals. To have feelings, states of mind, memory, longing. He means like in Disney, Rumbum said, and they laughed. I laughed as well. Yes, I said, and with all of that the end of the mythic human world we’ve had since the Bronze Age. The end of our dominion. The end of the Bible and all the stories we’ve told ourselves until now.
Andrew, you really think that?
How insulated these men were. They were imperial in their selfhood, these corporate culturists running a government. They lived, heedless, infallible. They understood contention and expected nothing else. I told them it depressed me to be in the same room with them. The president looked at me — did I mean him as well? You all live unquestioningly inside the social reality — war, God, money — that other people invented long ago, I said, and you take these things for raw existence. It was quite a speech I gave them.
Apparently.
They were careless of life, I said, they were prime examples of human insufficiency, I said, and I told them I spoke as an authority on the subject. Then I took a deep breath and did a handstand.
A what?
It just came over me, I was up on my hands almost before I realized it. Perhaps it was the image of Briony on the high bar — my first glimpse of her — that animated me, my brain having decided that this was the thing to do, a mimetic act to bring her into resolution there in the White House. At least that is my interpretation now. At the time it was possibly no more than an act of inspired madness. Or maybe it was just my brain saying if it’s a fool they want it’s a fool they will get. Or maybe I just wanted to be out of there.