You sound like a confirmed New Yorker.
My puppy with its short legs tried to get into the game on that run. It was funny to see him waddling after some big dog who turned and ran past him the other way before he could turn his sausage of a body around.
What did you name your dog?
I hadn’t gotten around to that. I was finding out that I didn’t respect him all that much. I mean, you couldn’t insult him, which was a sign of his mental deficiency. He would never take offense no matter what I said to him or how I yanked on the leash. So in this time I’m speaking of, I was walking him home one afternoon through the park — we had a university apartment on the west side of the Square. More trees on that side, which made it darker, quieter, there were fewer people. This is not a Tom Sawyer episode I’m about to relate.
I rather thought that.
I saw something under a bench that looked like a Spaldeen, a valuable pink rubber ball. I wasn’t sure. I got down on my knees to investigate, poking my hand under the bench, and that’s when I must have let go of the leash. Next thing I knew my dog let out a cry, a tenor squeal — a weird unnatural sound from a dog — and when I looked around I saw his leash waving about in the air. I didn’t question why but grabbed for it — an automatic reflex — and felt transmitted to my arm, as if it was my own pounding pulse, the wing beat of the hawk that had him. That’s what it was, a red-tailed hawk. You would think I could have yanked the dog loose, maybe bringing the hawk down too unless it released the creature, but its talons were dug into the dachshund’s neck and for a moment I was given to understand implacable nature. [thinking] Yes, I was in touch with an insistent rhythmic force, mindless and without personality. For a moment I held the hawk suspended, as it beat its wings while unable to rise. I won’t swear to it but I think I was actually lifted to my toes before I let go and watched the bird shoot up to the top of a tree, the leash hanging down like a vine, my dachshund immobile in shock as the bird pressed its neck onto the branch and pecked at its eyes.
Why did you let go, was the hawk too strong for you? How old were you at this time?
Seven, eight, I don’t know. But I try to remember at what point I felt it was no use. Was I too frightened to hold on? Did I understand it was all over for the dog the moment those talons curled into him? I’m not sure. Perhaps, deferential to God’s world, I had merely conceded. I stepped back to get a better view of what was happening up in the tree. The hawk didn’t look down, our struggle had been of no consequence to him, he was tearing into the little dog as if I didn’t exist. I can remember the thrill of feeling the pulse of those wings in my skinny little chest. Nevertheless, I ran home crying. It was all my fault. There you have it. Early Andrew. I’m presuming you like childhoods.
Well, they can be instructive.
The day before we took off for California, Briony found a stray mutt and insisted on taking it with us. Speaking of dogs.
When was this?
Lots of dogs on the campus whose student owners let them run loose and finally forgot them. She said this one looked so appealingly at her that she couldn’t resist. A big black-and-white dog, with floppy ears. It stood with its paws on the back of my seat and its wet nose nuzzled my neck as I tried to drive.
Why were you going to California?
She named it Pete. He’s a Pete, don’t you think? she said. She had turned around, her knees on the front seat, as she leaned over my shoulder to pet the damn thing. Yes, she said, that’s your name all right.
Here I was in a state of such possessive love that I couldn’t bear to share Briony with anyone else, not even a stupid mutt. I wanted her exclusive attention. I didn’t say anything but I felt resentful, as if I had been invited to accompany her with no more thought on her part than she had impulsively bestowed on the dog.
Why were you going to California?
And it didn’t help that the lout bid us goodbye, or bid her goodbye, there on the sidewalk in front of his dorm.
Did the lout have a name?
I don’t know. Duke something. What else could it have been? She kissed him lightly on the mouth and touched his cheek and got in the car and closed the door and looked back and waved as I drove off. A voice in my mind said, “Step on it!” What the hero says to the cabbie in every 1930s movie. That voice in my head defining the moment: I was not of this generation. I was not of their time. I did not have this girl by any legitimate right.
Surely she had some choice in the matter.
I’m telling you how I felt. Briony knew I was divorced but no more than that. I had wanted to be completely open with her but I couldn’t bring myself to tell her everything. Clearly, I had become her project.
Her project? So you still didn’t understand how taken she was.
I sensed her interest. I felt indulged. I couldn’t believe more than that. Not that I was without guile. The gloomier I was the more attentive she was. This had gone on through the semester. I could affect my nihilistic despair, making a lie even of that, I could wear the appropriate face while inside of myself I was smiling like an idiot. It was all I could do to keep my hands off her. But she was picking up my language, she was reading the course work, so that every boldly thoughtful sentence that came from her I could credit to my teaching. Briony had the intellectual assertiveness of the young, who make the learned ideas their own. She even mentioned the brain’s limbic system and looked at me with a question in her eyes. I had instantly to get her off of that.
Why?
Damage to the limbic system inhibits feeling, among other things. There’s indifference, coolness. You’re half alive. People who’ve been traumatized show limbic system dysfunction.
Do you believe you suffered such an experience? Had you been traumatized?
Only by life. Listen, when I was with Briony there was nothing wrong with my limbic system. My hippocampus and my amygdala were up and running. Whistling, applauding. Doing back flips. Fortunately, my course syllabus included readings from William James, Dewey, Rorty, and then the French existentialists, Sartre, Camus. She dove into all that.
For a course in elementary brain science?
Well, it was over most of their heads. And what they understood they didn’t like. I wasn’t aware of any particular religiosity among these kids, it was more that God was an assumption, like something preinstalled in their computers. But if there was a philosophy that was appropriate to the study of the brain, of the material of consciousness, I maintained it was either pragmatism or existentialism. Or maybe both. No God in either, you see. No soul. No metaphysical bullshit. Briony got it. But for her, a little more drama and human exaltation was in the idea of a painful freedom. So she opted for the existentialists. And applied her knowledge like a pragmatist to me. The evidence was clear that I was of the existentialist school. That I was outside the realm of psychology — I had an historic identity. That seemed to make fast the connection between us. She was happy with Andrew the Existentialist. She could kiss me on the cheek. She could find me in my office and come in with two coffees. I wanted to get down on my knees and kiss the hem of her frock. This clean lovely creature of the West had found in what she decided was my existentialism the resurrection of the nineteenth-century Romantic — Andrew poised at cliff’s edge with the back of his hand pressed to his brow.