Bewilderment
Page 5
She got the word out, and then the sentence. I worked my one little trick of digital wizardry. She thanked me for saving her from failing her course on animal law. By her third sentence, the stutter settled down. If you ever need any advice about what constitutes legal cruelty, I’m your gal.
Everything about her felt familiar, as if I’d been briefed on the local customs in advance. Her mouth puckered in permanent near-interruption, halfway between a- and be-mused. Her auburn frazzle was parted down the middle. The top of her head just reached my shoulder. She held her small frame like an athlete before the starting gun: challenges everywhere. She felt like a prediction, a thing on its way here. Compact but planetary. My favorite poet Neruda seemed to fall in love with her, too, the minute I did.
She had on Mil-Spec hiking boots and a green vest that made her look like something from the Shire. I lunged at my one entrée. “I’m just back from a week in the San Juans.” She lit up. Even as I worked up the courage to ask if she’d like to see our field site, her lips formed her trademark look, half wince, half smirk. Laugh lines swamped her hazel eyes and she said, I can go days without showering. The stutter was nowhere.
It took some months to accept my luck. I’d met someone else who liked to hike more than most people like to sleep. It boggled me that a woman who looked like her would also be aroused by Latin nomenclature. Weirdest luck of all, she laughed at my jokes, even when I didn’t know I was making one.
The fit between us was rough but useful. I gave her stamina and fed her curiosity. She taught me optimism and appetite, albeit plant-based. There it was: roll the dice and find your life catalyzed by another, one who, ten minutes later or three seats farther down at another computer screen, would have remained an undetected signal from deep space.
ALYSSA FINISHED HER JD as I wrapped up my doctorate. And still our streak kept rolling. We both landed decent jobs in the same unlikely city. Madtown, Cheeseland: from U Dub to U Double U. A place on neither of our radars soon made natives of us. We loved the city, and our only contention was east side or west. We found a place near Lake Monona, a healthy walk from campus. It was a good house, a little dowdy, a little old—pine-framed midwestern standard issue, renovated many times, with leaks around the flashing of the skylights. It was just right for two. It got snugger later, with three. Later still, with two again, it would feel cavernous.
Aly was a dynamo, cranking out fully researched action plans for one of the country’s leading animal rights NGOs every other week while dashing off countless diplomatic emails and press releases in her spare minutes. In four years, she rose through the ranks from glorified fundraiser to Midwest coordinator. State legislators from Bismarck to Columbus both dreaded and adored her. She inched ahead on colorful profanity and sardonic cheer. The vilest factory farm brought out her steely will. Between occasional full-on collapses of confidence, her days remained as resolute as they were long. At night, there was red wine and poems for Chester.
Wisconsin gave me my first real home. I found a collaborator. Stryker handled the astrochemistry that was beyond me. I contributed the life science. Together, we studied how the absorption lines in the spectra of distant atmospheres might reveal biology. We refined our biosignature models by applying them to terrestrial satellite data, scaled down to what Earth would look like if spied on by a four-meter telescope from distant space. We learned to read its fluctuating images. In the shimmer of data points we detected the planet’s makeup, calculated its cycling elements, watched the bright continents and swirling currents of ocean. The harsh Sahara and fertile Amazon, mirror-like ice sheets and changing temperate forests: all appeared in the fluctuations of a few pixels. It thrilled me to peer through that narrow keyhole on the breathing Earth and see it the way alien astrobiologists would from a trillion miles away.
We had lucky days, lots of them. Then the climate in Washington changed and funding fell off. The great telescopes we needed—the ones that would give us real data to run through our models—slipped and missed their development deadlines. But there I was, still getting paid to prepare how to discover whether we were alone or surrounded by crazy neighbors.
Aly and I had more projects than we had hours. Then our lives changed, thanks to the one-point-five percent failure rate of our favored birth control. The unlikely roll stunned us both. It seemed a break in our long streak, the worst possible timing for an event we might never have chosen for ourselves. Our careers already stretched us to the limits. Neither of us had the knowledge or wherewithal to raise a child.
A decade later, I see the truth, every morning I wake up. If Aly and I had been in charge, the luckiest thing in my life—the thing that kept me going when all the luck in the world went cold—would never have existed, not even in my wildest models.
THE FIRST NIGHT HOME was hard on Robin. Our mountain getaway had smashed all routines, and thermodynamics long ago proved that putting things back together is lots harder than taking them apart. He tore through the house, wired and erratic. After dinner, I felt him regressing: eight years old, seven, six . . . I braced myself for zero, and blastoff.
Can I check my farm?
“You can play for one hour.”
Yesss! Gems?
“No gems. I’m still paying off that last little stunt of yours.”
That was an accident, Dad. I didn’t know your card was on the account. I thought I was getting gems for free.
He did look stricken. If his explanation wasn’t the literal truth, regret had made it truer in the months since the disaster. He played for forty minutes, announcing his trophies as he earned them. I graded homework sets from the lecture course and worked on the edits for Stryker.
Following an especially manic harvesting clickfest, he turned to me. Dad? His shoulders hunched in supplication. Here it was at last—the thing that had nagged him since we got home. Can we watch Mom?
He’d been asking more often in recent weeks, in a way that had grown unhealthy. We’d watched some of her videos too many times, and seeing Aly in action didn’t always have the best effect on Robin. But whatever the clips did to him, forbidding them would have done worse. He needed to study his mother, and he needed me to study her with him.
I let Robin search the video site. After two keystrokes, Alyssa’s name rose to the top of previous searches. I have less than fifteen minutes of video of my own mother. Now the moving, talking dead are everywhere, available anytime, from any pocket. It’s a rare week when we dead-to-be don’t surrender a few more minutes of our souls to the overflowing archives. Not even the craziest SF story from my youth predicted it. Imagine a planet where the past never went away but kept happening again and again, forever. That’s the planet my nine-year-old wanted to live on.
“Let’s see. We need a good one.” I took the mouse and scrolled, looking for a clip that would be gentle with us. Aly was up in my ear, whispering, What in God’s name are you thinking? Don’t let him watch that!
Pulling rank didn’t work. Robin swung in the swivel chair and grabbed the mouse. Not those ones, Dad! Madison. Here.
For the magic to work, the ghost had to be nearby. He needed to see his mother lobbying at the state Capitol, an hour’s walk from our two-bedroom bungalow. He remembered those days—afternoons with Alyssa practicing in the dining room, editing and re-editing her testimony, declaiming away her nerves, all those times he’d watched her don her owl pendant, wolf earrings, and one of three warrior dress suits—black, tan, or navy blazer with knee-length stretchy skirt and cream-colored blouse—then hop on her bike with her dress shoes in a shoulder bag to pedal off to the state assembly and do battle.
This one, Dad. He pointed to a clip of Alyssa testifying for a bill to outlaw killing contests.
“That one’s for later, Robbie. Maybe when you’re ten. How about one of these?” Aly lobbying against something called possum tosses. Aly fighting to protect pigs from abuse during the annual “Pioneer Days.” Rough, too, but cakewalks compared to the one he wanted.
He had not been fine with the farm one. The farm one had been a colossal mistake. Aly’s description of chicks raised on tilted wire mesh, packed so closely they pecked each other to death, had given Robin nighttime screaming fits for weeks.
Our little two-man luge was poised to plunge off the mountainside. I took a breath. “Let’s pick another one, buddy. They’re all of Mom, right?”
Dad. Now he sounded old and sad. He pointed to the clip’s date: two months before Alyssa’s death. My son’s equations came clear to me. The ghost had to be as close as possible, not just in space but in time.
I clicked on the link, and there she was. Aly, at full incandescence. The shock never weakened. My cell phone camera has this special effect: the object in the crosshairs stays saturated while everything around it fades to gray. That’s how it was with the woman who let me marry her. She ionized any room, even a roomful of politicians.
All the nerves that plagued her in rehearsal vanished in the final performances. Behind the microphone, she came off consummately self-possessed, with flashes of wry bafflement in the face of our species. She turned her voice into this Platonic public radio announcer. She could blend stats and stories without hectoring. She empathized with all parties, compromising without betraying the truth. Everything she said came across as so damn reasonable. None of the ninety-nine assembly members would have believed she’d suffered from a massive childhood stutter and used to chew her lips until they bled.
As she gave her last recorded performance, her son watched from this side of the ground. Every detail had him so hypnotized that his questions never got past his gaping lips. He watched Aly talk about witnessing a celebrated event up north, near Lake Superior, one of twenty hunting contests held in the state that year. He sat up straight and smoothed his collar; I’d once told him how mature that made him look. For a kid with no self-control, he gave a masterful performance all his own.
Aly described the judging stand on the fourth and final day of the competition: an industrial-spec crane scale waiting for the contestants to deliver their hauls. Pickup trucks filled with carcasses pulled up and unloaded their mounds onto the scales. Awards went to those who had bagged the most poundage over four days. The prizes included guns, scopes, and lures that would make next year’s contest even more one-sided.
She recited the facts: Number of participants. Weight of winning entry. Total animals killed in statewide contests every year. Effects of lost animals on ravaged ecosystems. Her sober eloquence would conclude later that night in a two-hour crying jag in bed, with me powerless to comfort her.
I kicked myself for imagining Robbie could handle this. But he’d wanted to see his mother, and truth be told, he was holding it together pretty well. Nine is the age of great turning. Maybe humanity was a nine-year-old, not yet grown up, not a little kid anymore. Seemingly in control, but always on the verge of rage.
Alyssa wrapped up. Her conclusion was masterful. She always nailed the landing. She said how this bill would restore tradition and dignity to hunting. She said how ninety-eight percent by weight of animals left on Earth were either Homo sapiens or their industrially harvested food. Only two percent were wild. Didn’t the few wild things left need a little break?
Her closing words chilled me all over again. I remembered her working them out, in weeks of laboring over this testimony. The creatures of this state do not belong to us. We hold them in our trust. The first people who lived here knew: all animals are our relatives. Our ancestors and our descendants are watching our stewardship. Let’s make them proud.
The clip ended. I canceled the one that queued up next. To my relief, Robin didn’t argue. He held three fingers against his mouth. The gesture made him look like a four-foot-tall Atticus Finch.
Did that bill pass, Dad?
“Not yet, buddy. But something like it will, one of these years. And look at the number of views. People are still hearing her.”
I mussed his hair. His locks were all over the place. He wouldn’t let anyone cut them but me. That wasn’t doing much for his social standing.
“Why don’t you get ready for bed, and we’ll burn the midnight oil.” Our code for reading together for twenty minutes past his eight-thirty bedtime.
Can I have a juice, first?
“Juice might not be the best thing, right before bed.” I didn’t need a two a.m. disaster. I’d removed the plastic fitted sheet. It was too humiliating for him.
How do you know? Maybe it is. Maybe juice is exactly the perfect thing before bed. We should run a double-blind experiment.
I’d made the mistake of telling him about those. “Naw. We’re gonna fake the data. Scoot!”
HE WAS THOUGHTFUL WHEN I CAME INTO HIS ROOM. He lay under the covers in his brown plaid canoe pajamas that he’d forbidden me from giving to Goodwill. The cuffs stopped two inches above his wrist and the waist pinched his boy’s belly into a muffin-top. The pajamas had been a little too big when his mother had bought them. The way he was going, he’d still be wearing them on his honeymoon.
I had my book—The Chemical Evolution of the Atmosphere and Oceans—and he had his—Maniac Magee. I took my place beside him in the bed. But he was too thoughtful to read. He put his hand on my arm, as Aly always did.
What did she mean about our ancestors watching us?
“And our descendants. It was just an expression. Like saying that history is going to judge us.”
Is it?
“Is what?”
Is history going to judge us?
I had to think about that. “That’s what history is, I guess.”
And are they?
“Are our ancestors watching us? It’s a figure of speech, Robbie.”
When she said that, I pictured them all together, on one of your exoplanets. TRAPPIST-whatever. And they had a huge telescope. And they were watching us and seeing whether we’re doing okay.
“That’s a pretty cool metaphor, all by itself.”
But they’re not.
“I . . . no. I don’t think so.”
He nodded, opened Maniac, and pretended to read. I did the same, with Atmospheres and Oceans. But I knew his next question was only waiting for a decent interval. As it happened, the interval was two minutes.
So . . . what about God, Dad?
My mouth pumped, like something in the Gatlinburg aquarium. “You know, when people say God . . . I don’t, I’m not sure they always . . . I mean, God isn’t something you can prove or disprove. But from what I can see, we don’t need any bigger miracle than evolution.”
I turned to face him. He shrugged. I mean, duh. We’re on a rock, in space, right? There are billions of planets as good as ours, filled with creatures we can’t even imagine. And God is supposed to look like us?
I gawked again. “Then why’d you ask?”
To make sure you weren’t kidding yourself.
This, God help me, made me laugh out loud. There we were. Nothing. Everything. My son and me. I tickled him until he screamed for forgiveness, which took about three seconds.
We sobered up and read. The pages turned; we traveled easily, everywhere. Then, without taking his eyes off his book, Robin asked, So what do you think happened to Mom?
For one awful moment, I thought he meant the night of the accident. All kinds of lies presented themselves before I realized he was asking something much easier.
“I don’t know, Robbie. She went back into the system. She became other creatures. All the good things in her came into us. Now we keep her alive, with whatever we can remember.”
His head tipped, a little reticent. My son, growing away from me. I think she’s like a salamander or something.
I rolled to face him. “Wait . . . what? Where’d you get that?” I knew: the thirty species the Smokies had.
&
nbsp; Well, remember you said how Einstein proved nothing could be created or destroyed?
“That’s right. But he was talking about matter and energy. How they keep changing from one form to another.”
That’s what I’m saying! The words tore out of him so wildly I had to shush him. Mom was energy, right?
My face got away from me. “Yes. If Mom was anything, she was energy.”
And now she’s changed into another form.
When I could, I asked him. “Why a salamander?”
Easy. Because she’s fast, and she loves the water. And because how, like you always say, she’s totally her own species.
Amphibious. Small but mighty. And she breathed through her skin.
There’s a salamander that lives for fifty years. Did you know that? He sounded desperate. I tried to hug him, but he pushed away. It’s probably just a figure of speech. She’s probably not anything.
The words froze me. Some awful switch had been thrown in him, and I couldn’t tell why.
Two percent, Dad? He snarled like a cornered badger. Only two percent of all animals are wild? Everything else is factory cows and factory chickens and us?
“Please don’t shout at me, Robbie.”
Is that for real? Is it?
I took our abandoned books and put them on the nightstand. “If your mother said it in a speech for the state legislature, it’s for real.”
His face bunched up like he’d been punched. His eyes curdled and his mouth opened in a silent scream. It took a moment for the soundless jag to turn into tears. I held out my arms, but he shook his head. Something in him hated me for letting that number be true. He backed into the corner of his bed, up against the wall. His head swung sideways in disbelief.
Just as suddenly, he deflated. He lay back down, his back to me, one ear to the mattress. He lay there listening to the hum of defeat. He felt around for my body in the space behind him. When he found it, he mumbled into the sheets, New planet, Dad. Please.