Andrew's Brain: A Novel by E.L. Doctorow

long underground tunnels in their effort to understand who we were and what we were up to with our stacked caves of steel and stone and on the streets and runways our rusted-out prosthetic devices to move us from one place to another.
    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.
    W e 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, genderindistinguishable 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