I took Robbie in to the neuro lab for another session with his mother’s brain print. He and Ginny fell into their familiar routine. I watched him for a few minutes as he moved shapes around on his screen by telekinesis. Then I walked down the hall and dropped in on Currier.
“Theo! What a pleasure!” He must have meant something different by the word than everyone else did. Every syllable the man spoke irritated me. I needed a stint or two in his empathy machine. “How’s the boy doing?”
I made the case for guarded optimism. Martin listened, his face reserved.
“He’s probably generating a fair amount of auto-suggestion.”
Of course Robin was auto-suggesting. I was auto-suggesting. The changes might be entirely imagined. But brain science knew that even imagination could change our cells for real.
“Is there anything new about this round of training? Changes in the AI feedback? Was Alyssa’s recording of different neural regions?”
“Different?” Currier’s shoulders rose; his mouth approximated a smile. “Sure. We’ve boosted the scanning resolution. The AI keeps learning about Robin and getting more efficient the more Robin interacts with it. And yes, Aly’s scan is of an evolutionarily older part of the brain than the target templates we worked with in the earlier session.”
“So, in other words . . . nothing at all is the same.” I’d asked what I came to ask. Everything except what I wanted most to know. And I was pretty sure that Currier wouldn’t be able to tell me what Aly herself had refused to say.
But then I thought: Maybe he could. The idea crept across my clammy, conductive skin. Maybe Robbie wasn’t the first to visit Aly’s brain print. But I was afraid the question might make me look crazy. Or I was too afraid of the answer to ask.
ROBBIE EVEN ENJOYED INFLATING THE BOAT. Usually he gave the foot pump two minutes of half-hearted kicks before giving up. That day, he didn’t even ask for help. The watercraft rose from a puddle of floppy PVC without a complaint from my son.
We put in near a sign that gave the fishing limits in Spanish, Chinese, and Hmong. Robin slipped off the dock while getting into the boat. He wailed as his shoes sank into the mud and the lake soaked up to his knees. But the instant he scrambled back into the boat, he looked at his legs, puzzled. Well. That’s weird. Getting so worked up about water.
We paddled out in the flat-bottomed dinghy, taking forever to go a hundred yards. He scoured the shore as he rowed. I should have known what he was looking for. Birds: the creatures that had kept all his mother’s demons at bay. He’d always been interested in them. But interest had turned to love, deep in his spine, as he trained on the print of her brain.
A sleek, gray form shot across our bow. He waved me to stop paddling. The first notes of distress in days tinged my son’s voice. Who is he, Dad? Who is he? I couldn’t see!
A resident so common even I knew its name. “Junco, I think.”
Dark-eyed or slate? He turned to me, sure I could tell him. I couldn’t. His mother spoke, up close to my ear. The robin is my favorite bird.
We rowed some more, the slowest form of transportation known to humankind. In deeper water, he lifted his paddle. Could you take over, Dad? I’m kind of preoccupied.
I worked from the stern, passing my paddle from side to side to keep us from spinning. A butterfly more staggering than any stained-glass window landed on Robin’s downy forearm where he rested it on the boat. Robin held his breath, letting the visitor stumble, fly, and land again on his face. It walked across his closed eyes before flying away.
Robbie lay back against the gunwales and appraised the sky. His eyes sought out all the thousands of points of light from our night in the Smokies, every one of them still up there but erased by the light of day. The two of us glided underneath invisible stars, crossing the placid lake in an inflatable boat.
I’d imagined we were alone. But the more I watched Robin, the more I joined the party. Flying things, swimming things, things skating across the lake’s surface. Things that branched over the shore and fed the water with rains of living tissue. Chatter from every compass point, like some avant-garde piece for a chorus of random radios. And one enormous life in the boat’s bow, a thing that was me but wasn’t. When he spoke, I startled so hard I almost capsized us.
Do you remember that day?
He’d left me far behind. “What day, Robbie?”
The day you two recorded your feelings?
I remembered it with weird precision. How Aly and I craved each other afterward. How we locked ourselves in our room. How she wouldn’t tell me the source of her ecstasy. How she’d called through the closed door to reassure our son that everything and everyone were so okay.
There was something funny about the two of you. You were both acting strange.
He couldn’t have remembered that. He’d been so young, and nothing about that afternoon would have been remarkable enough to impress itself on him.
Like you both had a big secret.
Then my wife was whispering. You remember the secret, don’t you, Theo?
I paddled against our spin and slowed my breathing. “Robbie. What made you think of that?”
He didn’t answer. Alyssa kept teasing. Of course he remembers. His parents were acting weird.
“Did Dr. Currier mention something about that day? Was he asking you things?”
Robin rolled over onto his belly, rocking the boat. He squinted at the far shore, trying to see into the past. Did Mom have a tattoo or something?
He could not have known about that. I didn’t dare ask him how he did. She’d gotten the thing before we met. She needed a psychic boost to power her through a disastrous first year of law school. To push back against the demoralizing crush of L1, she hit upon the idea of sowing the world’s tamest wild oat. Four scalloped petals around a tiny center of stamens and anthers, inked into her skin.
“It was supposed to be a little flower. Her namesake plant.”
Sweet alyssum.
“That’s right.”
But something happened to it?
“She didn’t like the way it turned out. Someone told her it looked like a deformed smiley face. So she asked the tattooist to turn it into a bee.”
And the bee ended up looking funny, too.
He was rattling me. “That’s right. But she stuck with the bee. She didn’t want to end up with a funny-looking horse tattooed all over her.”
His face was turned toward the water. He didn’t smile.
“Robbie? Why are you asking?”
His shoulder blades stuck out through his polo shirt like amputated wings. Dad. What do you think she was thinking, that day? It’s so weird. It’s . . . like walking into a forest a million years old.
I wanted to beg. Send me word—just one small thing that survived what happened to her. I’d lost the gist of her, the feel. And Robbie couldn’t tell me. Or he wouldn’t.
He rested his chin on the side of the boat and gazed into the lake. The bobbing surface of the water was the ocean of another world, one in a story I’d read when not much older than he was. He was looking for the thousands of fish that the dark green water hid from the eyes of air-breathers.
What’s the ocean like, Dad?
What was the ocean like? I couldn’t tell him. The sea was too big, and my bucket was so small. Also, it had a hole. I put my hand on the back of his calf. It seemed like my best available answer.
Did you know that the world’s corals will be dead in six more years?
His voice was soft and his mouth was sad. The world’s most spectacular partnership was coming to an end, and he’d never see it. He looked up at me, with Aly’s ghost planted right into his brain. So what are we supposed to do about that?
THE FIRST TIME TEDIA DIED, a comet tore off a third of the planet and turned it into a moon. Nothing on Tedia survived.
After tens of millions of years, the atmosphere came back, water flowed again, and life sparked a second time. Cells learned that symbiotic trick of
how to combine. Large creatures spread once more into every niche of the planet. Then a distant gamma ray burst dissolved Tedia’s ozone shield and ultraviolet radiation killed most everything.
Patches of life survived in the deepest oceans, so this time it was faster coming back. Ingenious forests set out again across the continents. A hundred million years after that, just as a species of cetacean was beginning to make tools and art, a neighborhood star system supernovaed, and Tedia had to start again.
The problem was that the planet lay too near the galactic center, packed in too closely to the calamities of other stars. Extinction would never be far away. But there were periods of grace, between the devastations. Forty resets in, the calm lasted long enough for civilization to take hold. Intelligent bear-people built villages and mastered agriculture. They harnessed steam, channeled electricity, learned and built simple machines. But when their archaeologists revealed how often the world ended, and their astronomers figured out why, society broke down and destroyed itself, millennia before the next supernova would have.
This, too, happened again and again.
But let’s go see, my son said. Let’s just have a look.
By the time we arrived, the planet had died and resurrected itself a thousand and one times. Its sun was almost spent and would soon expand to engulf the entire world. But life went on assembling endless new platforms. It didn’t know any better. It couldn’t do otherwise.
We discovered creatures high up in Tedia’s jagged young mountains. They were tubular and branchy and they held so still for so long that we mistook them for plants. But they greeted us, putting the word Welcome directly into our heads.
They probed my son. I could feel their thoughts go into him. You want to know if you should warn us.
My frightened son nodded.
You want us to be ready. But you don’t want to cause us pain.
My son nodded again. He was crying.
Don’t worry, the doomed tubular creatures told us. There are two kinds of “endless.” Ours is the better one.
SUMMER FLOODS THROUGHOUT THE GULF contaminated the drinking water of thirty million people, spreading hepatitis and salmonellosis across the South. Heat stress in the Plains and the West was killing old people. San Bernardino caught fire, and later, Carson City. Something called Theory X had armed militias patrolling the streets of cities throughout the Plains states, searching for unspecified foreign invaders. Meanwhile, a novel stem rust triggered wheat crop failure throughout China’s Huangtu Plateau. In late July, a True America demonstration in Dallas turned into a race riot.
The President declared another national emergency. He mobilized the National Guard of six states, sending the troops to the border to combat illegal immigration:
THE GREATEST THREAT TO THE SECURITY OF EVERY AMERICAN!!
Wild weather throughout the Southeast triggered an outbreak of Amblyomma americanum, the Lone Star tick. Robbie loved the story. He asked me to read him anything I saw about it. It might not be a bad thing, Dad. It might even save us.
He said strange things these days. I didn’t always challenge him. This time I did. “Robbie! What a horrible thing to say!”
Seriously. The infection makes people allergic to meat. No more meat eaters could be an amazing thing. Our food would go ten times farther!
The words made me queasy. I wanted Aly to intervene with the boy. But that was the problem: she was intervening already.
He trained a fourth time on the template of his mother’s ecstasy. And then a fifth. Each session left him a little more happily baffled. He spoke less and less, even as he looked and listened more. He drew into his notebook with the speed of a growing plant.
He came into my study after dinner, where I sat writing code. Was I better yesterday than I am today?
“What do you mean?”
Like, yesterday I felt like nothing could touch me. Today? Arrrggh!
He roared the roar of impatient rage his mother always did, when confronted with inane bureaucracy. But even as he sank his claws in me and shook with a frustration he couldn’t name, his aura felt large and loose. He’d grown easy in his new skin.
The days brightened. He sat with his digital microscope for hours at a time. He could stare at simple things and sketch for the better part of an afternoon. The backyard birdhouses, the contents of an owl pellet, even the mold on an orange entranced him. He still fell into old fears and angers. But they leached out of him faster, and low tide left behind all kinds of treasures in the exposed and tranquil pools.
The boy who stood on the steps of the Capitol waving his handmade placard was gone. I ought to have been relieved. But I’d go to bed at night feeling something toward my once-anxious child that seemed an awful lot like mourning.
I did a terrible thing. I sneaked a look in his notebooks. Over the millennia, millions of parents have done worse, though usually for better reasons. I couldn’t pretend he needed policing. I had no reason to eavesdrop on his thoughts. I simply wanted to listen in on his ongoing séance with Aly.
It happened on the first of August, when he asked if he could camp in the yard. I love it out there at night. So much going on. Everything talking to everything else!
You could hear the sounds from the house well enough: the choirs of tree frogs, the massed cicada choruses, and the solos of night birds that hunted them. But he wanted to be inside the sounds. It surprised me, my timid son asking to spend the night outdoors by himself. I was glad to encourage him. The world might be dissolving, but our backyard still felt safe.
I helped him pitch the tent. “Sure you don’t want company?” I wasn’t really offering. My mind was already planning my illicit evening reading.
I waited until his tent light went out. His notebooks were on top of his student desk, propped up between geode bookends. He trusted me. He knew I’d never spy on him. I found his current one, its cover emblazoned with the words PRIVATE OBSERVATIONS OF ROBIN BYRNE. I pored through the pages, feeling no guilt at all until I saw what they contained. Not a single word about his mother, or about me, either, for that matter. Not a line of his own private hopes or fears. The entire book was devoted to drawings, notes, descriptions, questions, speculations, and appreciation—the proof of other life.
Where do finches go when it rains?
How far does a deer walk in one year?
Can a cricket remember how to get out of a maze?
If a frog ate that cricket, would he learn the maze faster?
I warmed a butterfly back to life with my breath.
One mostly blank page declared:
I love grass. It grows from the bottom, not the top. If something eats the tips, it doesn’t kill the plant. Only makes it grow faster. Pure genius!!!
Underneath that manifesto he’d drawn a grass stem with all the parts labeled: blade, sheath, node, collar, tiller, spike, awn, glume . . . He’d copied the names from somewhere, and yet the seeing was all his. He’d circled a spot on the open blade and put a question mark next to it: What is the fold in the middle called?
My face flushed with two shames. I was spying on my son’s notebooks. And I was getting my first good look at a blade of grass. The oddest feeling came over me: the pages had been dictated from the grave. I put the notebook back in place. When he came back into the house the next morning and went to his room, I was afraid he might smell the prints of my fingers on his pages.
WHAT ABOUT AN ADVENTURE? he asked, and he took me on a walk around the neighborhood. I’d never seen him walk slower or swivel his head more. Ecstasy wasn’t right. Alyssa’s zeal softened in Robin, to something more fluid and improvised. Half the world’s species were dying. But the world, his face said, would stay green or even greener. He was all right now with every coming disaster, so long as he could just get outdoors.
He shocked me by greeting a young couple who came down the sidewalk toward us. How far are you going today?
The question made them laugh. Not far, they said.
We�
�re not going far, either. Maybe just around the block. Although, who knows?
The young woman regarded me, the muscles around her eyes praising me for a job well done. I denied all responsibility.
Down the sidewalk, he grabbed my elbow. Hear that? Two downy woodpeckers, having a chat.
I worked to hear it. “How do you know?”
Easy. “Downy goes down.” Hear how the song sinks a little, at the end?
“Well, yes. But I mean, how do you know that the downy’s song goes down?”
And there’s a house wren. Per-chick-oree!
I wanted to shake him by the shoulders. “Robbie. Who taught you this?”
Mom knew all the birdsongs.
He must have known that he was spooking me. Maybe he was chiding me for my ignorance. I’d birded with Aly all through courtship. But after we married, I left that task to other people.
“That’s true. She did. But she studied them for years.”
I don’t know them all. I only know the ones I know.
“Are you studying them somewhere? Online?”
Not really studying. I just listen and like them.
Where had I been, during all that listening? On other planets.
We walked, Robbie listening and me fretting. I was running a calculation I didn’t know how to complete. How different was he from who he’d been months ago? He’d always sketched, always been curious, always loved living things. But the boy at my right elbow was a different species from the boy who’d played with his birthday microscope in our rented cabin in the woods less than a year earlier. Fascination had made him invincible.
Two more steps and he froze in place. He waved me forward, pointing down at the sidewalk, pantomiming. On the concrete, the shadows of a nearby ironwood tree played against a field of sandy sunlight. They looked like layers of Japanese ink paintings on coarse paper, floating over one another in ghostly animation. His face broke out in contagious joy. But Robbie’s happiness and mine were as different as a tern on a thermal and a rubber-band prop plane. I got restless long before he did. He might have stayed there all afternoon watching the spectral silhouettes if I hadn’t prodded him away.
Bewilderment Page 13
