Bewilderment

by Richard Powers

  HE ASKED FOR INGA ALDER as he once begged for videos of his mother. We watched the girl march and carry banners. We followed her posts. We sat through documentaries where she made honest commonplaces sound like urgent revelations. We saw her take over the little Tuscan hill town where the G7 met. We watched her tell the assembled UN how history would remember them, if there was a history.

  Robin fell hard, as only a nine-year-old can fall for an older woman. But his was that rare love—pure gratitude untroubled by need or desire. In one go, Inga Alder opened my son’s feedback-primed mind to a truth I myself never quite grasped: the world is an experiment in inventing validity, and conviction is its only proof.

  Late April brought the first outdoor farmers’ market of the year. We went down to the big square across from the Capitol. It felt like his mother was with us, just across the street. The stalls were few and the pickings slim. But there were lemony goat cheese and the last of last fall’s apples and potatoes. There were carrots, kale, spinach, green garlic, and people glad that the land had come alive again. The Amish brought cakes and cookies of all colors and creeds. There were food trucks with cuisine from every continent. There were hand-built ceramics and scrap-metal jewelry and mandolin-saxophone duets, lathed bowls made from windfall oaks, marbleized shot glasses, and handsaws enameled with local landscapes. There were hanging ivy, flame flower, and spider plants. In the outer rim of that solar system were the fundraisers, community radio people, and public service folks. Alongside these was one fully fee-paid booth where customers could take their pick of one hundred and thirty-six wild pen-and-ink watercolors of creatures about to be relegated to memory.

  Over the course of five hours, Robin became someone else. Maybe it was the trillion dollars of advertising that rained down each year, teaching children how to confuse themselves with stuff. Every nine-year-old Earthling has long since learned how to pitch a sale. But I never imagined how cunning Robin could be at it, or how good. So good that for an entire Saturday, he passed for a native of this planet.

  He reinvented every borderline-shyster trick in the traveling salesman’s book. What do you think would be a good price? I spent hours making that one! The golden-crowned sifaka matches your eyes. Nobody wants the thicklip pupfish; I don’t know why. He accosted gray-haired ladies from twenty yards away. Help keep a beautiful creature alive, ma’am? Best few dollars you’ll ever spend.

  People bought because he made them laugh. Several got a kick out of the salesman routine or wanted to reward a budding entrepreneur. Some took pity on him; others just wanted to assuage their guilt. Maybe someone among the hundred purchasers even liked the art well enough to hang it on her walls. But most people who stopped and bought were simply patronizing a child who’d spent months making things of little value on lots of misplaced hope.

  In six hours, he made nine hundred and eighty-eight dollars. The guy who took our booth fee bought the black-chested spiny-tailed iguana—not Robin’s most successful effort—for twelve bucks to make the grand total an even thousand. Robin was beside himself. Months of single-minded work had led to triumph. Any sum with that many zeroes in it was indistinguishable from a fortune. Who knew what such an amount might do?

  Dad, Dad, Dad: Can we mail it tonight?

  He’d worked for way too long for me to argue with this rush to the finish line. We took the money to the bank. I wrote a check to send off to the conservation organization he’d chosen after hours of agonizing. That night, after plant-based burgers and a couple of Inga videos, we lay reading on opposite ends of the sofa, our feet launching little border wars into the space between us. He closed his book and studied the beaded ceiling.

  I feel great, Dad. Like I could die now and be pretty happy with how things went.

  “Don’t.”

  Uh, oh-kee, he said, in his clown voice.

  Two weeks later, he got a letter from his not-for-profit saviors of choice. I put it on the front table for him to find when he came home from school. He opened it in high excitement, tearing the envelope. The letter thanked him for his contribution. It bragged about the fact that almost seventy cents on every dollar went directly or indirectly toward slowing the rate of habitat destruction in ten different countries. It suggested that if he wanted to donate another two thousand five hundred dollars, now was a good time, because matching funds and favorable exchange rates put them within reach of their quarterly fundraising goal.

  Matching funds?

  “That’s when big donors give a dollar for every dollar someone else gives.”

  They have the money . . . but they won’t give it unless . . .?

  “It’s incentive. Like your two-for-one deals, at the farmers’ market.”

  That’s different. Evil thoughts curdled his forehead. They have the money, but they keep it back? And only seven hundred of my dollars goes to the animals? Species are dying, Dad. Thousands!

  He shouted at me, hands flailing. I suggested dinner, but he refused. He went to his room, slammed his door, and wouldn’t come out, even to play his favorite board game. I listened for crashing, but the silence was scarier. I sneaked outside and peeked in his window. He was lying in bed, scribbling into a notebook. Plans everywhere.

  Fourteen months earlier, he’d punched his bedroom door and fractured two bones in his hand because I’d accidentally thrown away a trading card of his. Now, faced with this crushing thank-you letter, he was concentrating himself, writing out some secret set of action points. For that remarkable metamorphosis, I had Martin Currier’s neural feedback training to thank. Somehow, though, standing outside in the chilly spring wind while the maples showered me with red flowers, I wasn’t sure Thankful was the emotion on Marty’s ambiguous color wheel that best matched what I was feeling.

  Right before bedtime, Robin came out of his room. He waved a handful of handwritten notes at me. Can we apply for a protest permit?

  Little yellow warning triangles filled my head. “What are we protesting?”

  He shot me a look so filled with disdain that I felt like his disappointing child. By way of answer, he held out a sheet of eleven-by-seventeen drawing paper, his sketch for a larger placard. In the middle of the rectangular landscape were the words:

  HELP ME I’M DYING

  In a ring around these words ran a cartoon bestiary of soon-to-vanish plants and animals. My pride in his skill was offset by my dismay at the slogan.

  “Is the protest going to be . . . just you?”

  You’re saying it’s no good?

  “No, I’m not saying that. It’s just that protests usually work better when you join with other people.”

  Do you know any protests I can join? My head dipped. He touched my wrist. I need to start somewhere, Dad. Maybe it’ll inspire other people.

  “Where do you want to protest?”

  His lips pinched and he shook his head. The man who’d watched all those Inga Alder videos with him—the man who’d married his mother—demeaned himself with such a question.

  Duh. At the Capitol.

  THE PEOPLE HAVE A RIGHT TO ASSEMBLE PEACEFULLY.

  So my son informed me. Still, we read over the sections of the municipal code. We learned how the Constitution was one thing and the local powers of enforcement were another. That alone was enough civics lesson to show why legal public demonstration was never going to threaten the status quo.

  Wow. They don’t make it easy, do they? What if something really bad happens and a bunch of people want to protest, like, that same night?

  “Good question, Robbie.” One that was getting better with each passing month. I wanted to tell him that democracy had a way of working out, however ugly things got. But my son had this thing about honesty.

  He spent three days on his poster. When he finished, it was a thing of beauty, halfway between an illuminated manuscript and a page from The Adventures of Tintin. His palette was simple, the lines clean, and the vibrant animals large enough to see from far away. Not bad, for a child who struggled w
ith grasping the minds of others. He also prepared an illustrated handout of twenty-three species threatened or endangered in the state of Wisconsin, including the Canada lynx, gray wolf, piping plover, and Karner blue butterfly. What else, Dad? What else?

  “Do you want to add a little message for the legislators?”

  What do you mean?

  “To say what actions you want them to take?”

  His puzzled look turned to distress. If his own father was so blindly stupid, what hope was there for the world? I just want to stop the killing.

  I knew it was asking for trouble, but I let his slogan ride. help me. i’m dying. Who knew what might move a stranger? After months of neural feedback, his empathy was surpassing mine. He and I would learn together how to enter the world that his mother had lived in like a native.

  Dad? When will everyone be there?

  “Who?”

  The governor and the senators and the assembly people. Maybe those Supreme Court guys? I want as many of them as possible to see me.

  “Weekday mornings, probably. But you can’t miss any more school.”

  Inga doesn’t even go to school anymore. She says why bother to study how to live in a future that—

  “I’m familiar with Inga’s ideas about education.”

  We made a deal with Dr. Lipman and his teacher, Kayla Bishop. Robin would keep up on his homework, and he’d do an oral report on his experiences at the Capitol when he got back to school the next day.

  He dressed up. He wanted to wear the blazer he’d worn to his mother’s funeral, but after two years, putting it on was like squeezing a butterfly back into the chrysalis. I made him wear layers; any kind of weather could blow in over the lake that time of year. He wore an oxford shirt, a clip-on tie, slacks with a crease, a sweater vest, a windbreaker, and boy’s dress shoes that shone from long polishing.

  How do I look?

  He looked like a tiny god. “Commanding.”

  I want them to take me seriously.

  I drove him downtown to the narrow isthmus between the lakes, where the Capitol sat like the center of a compass rose. Robin rode in the back seat, holding his poster on its foam-board handle across his lap. The act required his full attention. At the Capitol, a guard showed him where he could stand, off to the side of the south wing stairs leading to the senate. Relegation to the periphery of the steps upset him.

  Can’t I stand up by the doors so people see me on their way inside?

  The guard’s No left him grim but resolute. We headed to the area of confinement. Robin looked around, surprised at the sedate midmorning. Government employees drifted up the steps in dribs and drabs. A group of schoolchildren listened to their docent before touring the corridors of power. A block away on Main and Carroll, desperate pedestrians prowled the shops for caffeine and calories, picking their way through the many homeless people of all races. People who looked like elected officials but were probably lobbyists walked past, intent on the voices pressed to their ears.

  The stillness confused Robin. Nobody else is protesting anything? Everyone in the state is perfectly happy with everything just the way it is?

  He’d based his idea of this place on video clips of his mother. He wanted drama and showdown and righteous calls for justice from concerned citizens. Instead, he got America.

  I took my place alongside him. He erupted. His free hand slashed the air. Dad! What do you think you’re doing?

  “Doubling the size of your protest group.”

  No. Freaking. Way. Go stand over there.

  I walked thirty feet down the pavement. He waved me farther off.

  Over there. Far enough that no one thinks you’re with me.

  He was right. The two of us standing together would look like an adult put-up job. But a nine-year-old standing alone with a sign reading help me i’m dying might be something you’d want to stop and talk over.

  I relocated, as far off as I was comfortable going. We didn’t need a well-meaning passerby calling Dane County Human Services. Satisfied, Robin picked up his painted sign and held it in the air. Then the two of us settled into the trenches of Earthly politics.

  I’VE WAITED AT THE BASE OF THOSE STAIRS more times than I can remember. I’d meet Alyssa there, after she’d testified on bills that few people in the state would ever hear of. Often she was pleased with her day’s work, sometimes elated, but never entirely satisfied. Coming down the steps, she’d wrap herself around me, dead with fatigue. She’d hold tight to my ribs and say, It’s a start.

  Eventually her turf expanded to include nine more Capitols. She traveled more and lobbied less, training others to do the testifying. But as I watched her son work the steps where Alyssa had so often battled against Things as They Are, I got turned around in time. The books in my sprawling science fiction library agreed: Time travel was not just possible. It was obligatory.

  At our wedding, in a part of the vows I didn’t know was coming, my wife-to-be gave me an oval loaf of ciabatta. This is not a symbol. It’s not a metaphor. It’s just a loaf of bread. I made it. I baked it. It’s food. We can eat it together tonight. From each according to her abilities, eh? Just stay with me, spring through winter. Stay with me when there’s nothing left. I’ll stay with you. There’ll always be food enough.

  I lost it, idiot that I am. I don’t even like bread. But I wasn’t alone. After an equally unrehearsed pause, Aly sighed and said, Okay. Maybe it is a metaphor. And all the crying people laughed, even my mother. After, we had a great party.

  She warned me, at the start, that she had nightmares. I deal with some grim stuff, Theo. A lot of days. It gets into my dreams. You sure you want to sign on for sleeping next to someone with the screaming meemies?

  I told her if she ever needed company in the middle of the night to wake me up.

  Oh, I’ll wake you up, all right. That’s the problem.

  The first time, I thought she was screaming at someone coming into the room. I shot up, my heart seceding from my chest. My lunge woke her. Still in limbo, she broke out crying.

  “Honey,” I said. “It’s okay. I’m here.”

  It’s not okay!

  Her rebuff was so violent I almost got up and went to sleep in the other room. Three in the morning, the woman I loved was weeping in the dark, and I wanted to tell her how badly she’d just hurt me. That’s the ruling story on this planet. We live suspended between love and ego. Maybe it’s different in other galaxies. But I doubt it.

  “What was it, Aly? Tell me, and it’ll go away.” We like to say, Tell me everything. Everything. But always with the tacit proviso that there’s nothing truly horrible to tell.

  I can’t tell you. And it won’t go away.

  Her sobbing subsided as she came awake. I tried again. “What can I do?”

  She showed me: Shut up and hold her. It seemed too small a thing, something anyone at all might do. She fell asleep in my arms.

  She woke early. By breakfast, it was as if nothing had happened in the night. Doing her mail, she basked in a pool of sun like some strong, green thing. I thought she might tell me now, describe the horror that had awakened her screaming. But she didn’t volunteer.

  “You were on the ropes last night. Bad dream?”

  She shuddered. Oh, sweetie. Don’t ask.

  Her look begged me to let the whole thing drop. She didn’t trust me; I wasn’t a true believer. I hid that thought, but she read me like a primer.

  My worst nightmare. She looked around the room for a way to placate me without getting into details.

  “In my worst nightmare, you’re lost in a foreign city when the sirens start going off. And I can’t find you.”

  She took my hand, but her smile faltered. I was wasting my energy worrying about such a small thing when we were living in the middle of a vaster catastrophe.

  They think we’re neurotic, Theo. That we’re a bunch of nutjobs.

  I was not included in that disparaged we. She meant her kind, the ones who could feel their wa
y across the species line.

  Why is it so hard for people to see what’s happening?

  Her night screams grew so familiar they stopped waking me fully. Over time, she let me in on them. In her dreams, other kinds of life could talk, and she understood them. And they told her what was really happening on this planet, the systems of invisible suffering on unimaginable scales. Human appetite’s final solution.

  In sunlight, she worked flat-out. I’d drive her to the Capitol on days when she lobbied, and I’d pick her up at night, at the bottom of the southern stairs. The day’s results mostly satisfied her. But in the evenings, after two glasses of red wine and a poetry session with her rescued mutt, she could turn panicky again.

  What happens when they’re gone? When it’s just us? How is this going to end?

  I had no answer. We’d fall asleep spooned against each other, making what comfort we could. And every few nights, she’d wake up screaming again.

  But until the end, there would be battle. She was built for it. One afternoon, I watched her in front of the bathroom mirror, suiting up for war: blush, mascara, hair gel, lip gloss. She’d helped draft a call for nonhuman rights that she planned to promote throughout the Upper Midwest. That meant playing on the animal emotions of lawmakers of both sexes, in ten different states.

  Take no prisoners. Right, man?

  The barnstorm campaign was to start that evening, on home turf, in the southern wing of the Wisconsin Capitol. She hummed a song as she dolled up. The cuckoo’s a fine bird, she sings as she does fly. And when she cries cuckoo, then summer is nigh. The bill she backed was decades ahead of its time. It had no chance in hell of passing, and she knew it. But Aly played the long game—a game as long as there was time left to play.

  She came from the bathroom, glorious. She eyed me coyly. Hey! You’re the fella who once brought back my childhood stutter! For this, she rewarded me with a teasing feel.