Bewilderment

-

IN CAMP, NO ONE could touch us. We pitched the tent close to the riverbank and spread our sleeping rolls on the ground. We set up kitchen in a blackened fire ring, and Robbie cooked lentils with tomato, cauliflower, and onions. The meal left him ready to forgive me everything.

We hung our packs in the same old sycamores, by the water. The sky through our gap in the tulip poplars and hickories was so clear that we tempted fate again and took off the tent fly. Soon it was dark. We lay side by side, on our backs, under the transparent mesh, looking up into the blue-black wash, where stars remade the rules in all quarters of the night.

He nudged me with his shoulder. So there are billions of stars in the Milky Way?

This boy made the world good for me. “Hundreds of billions.”

And how many galaxies in the universe?

My shoulder nudged his back. “Funny you should ask. A British team just published a paper saying there might be two trillion. Ten times more than we thought!”

He nodded in the dark, confirmed. His hand waved a question across the sky. Stars everywhere. More than we can count? So why isn’t the night sky full of light?

His slow, sad words stiffened the hairs up and down my body. My son had rediscovered Olbers’ paradox. Aly, who had been away for so long, leaned her mouth up to my other ear. He’s quite something. You know that, don’t you?

I laid it out for him, as clearly as I could. If the universe were steady and eternal, if it had been around forever, the light from countless suns in every direction would turn night as bright as day. But ours was a mere fourteen billion years old, and all the stars were rushing away from us at an increasing rate. This place was too young and was expanding too fast for stars to erase the night.

Lying so close, I felt his thoughts racing outward into the darkness. His eyes skipped around the sky from star to star. He was drawing pictures, making his own constellations. When he spoke, he sounded small but wise. You shouldn’t be sad. I mean, because of the telescope.

He spooked me. “Why not?”

Which do you think is bigger? Outer space…? He touched his fingers to my skull. Or inner?

Words from Stapledon’s Star Maker, the bible of my youth, lit up in a backwater of my brain. I hadn’t thought about the book in decades. The whole cosmos was infinitely less than the whole of being… the whole infinity of being underlay every moment of the cosmos.

“Inner,” I said. “Definitely inner.”

Okay. So, maybe the millions of planets that never launch the telescope are just as lucky as the millions of planets that do.

“Maybe,” I said, and turned my head away from him.

That one, there. He pointed. What’s happening on that one?

I told him. “On that one, people can split in half and grow back as two separate people, with all their memories intact. But only once in life.”

His arm swung to the far side of the sky. And that one? How about over there?

“On that one, chromatophores all over a person’s skin always give away exactly what they’re feeling.”

Cool. I’d like to live there.

We flew around the universe for a long time. We traveled so far that the waxing moon, two days from full, rose over the mountains’ rim and blotted out the stars. He pointed to one of the last bright lights remaining. Jupiter.

On that one? All your memories never get weaker, and they never go away.

“Ouch. A broken bone? A fight you have with somebody?”

The way Mom’s skin smelled. Seeing that heron.

I looked where his finger pointed. The light was dimming in the full wash of the moon. “Do you want to go there?”

His shoulders lifted off his sleeping pad. I don’t know.

Something called in the woods. It wasn’t a bird and it wasn’t any mammal I’d ever heard. The cry pierced the dark and hung above the roar of the river. It might have been pain or joy, grief or celebration. Robbie jerked and grabbed my arm. He hushed me, although I made no sound. The shout came again, farther away. Another call provoked another response, overlapping in the wildest chords.

Then it stopped, and the night filled up with other music. Robin turned and grabbed me harder, his face lit by moonlight. Every creature alive would feel all things they were built to feel.

Listen to that, my son told me. And then the words that would never weaken and never go away: Can you believe where we are?