Bewilderment

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UP THROUGH THE DIMINISHING HILLS of Kentucky, past the Creation Museum and Ark Encounter, through counties that had little use for science of any kind, we listened to Flowers for Algernon. I’d read it at age eleven. It was one of the first books in my two-thousand-volume library of science fiction. I bought it in a used bookstore—a mass market paperback bearing a creepy image of a face halfway between mouse and man. Paying for it with my own money felt like cracking the code of adulthood. Holding it open in my hands, I wormholed into a different Earth. Small, light, portable parallel universes turned out to be the only thing in this life I’d ever collect.

Algernon didn’t quite start me down the path of science. That was the “sea monkeys,” a kind of brine shrimp shipped to me in an astonishing state of cryptobiosis. By Robbie’s age, I’d already tabulated my first data sets on their hatching rates. But Algernon lit up my proto-scientific imagination and made me want to experiment on something the size of my own life. I hadn’t read the story in decades, and a twelve-hour drive seemed the perfect excuse to revisit with Robin in tow.

The story gripped him. He kept making me pause for questions. He’s changing, Dad. You hear his words getting bigger? A little later, he asked: Is this for real? I mean: Could it ever be for real, someday?

I told him everything could be for real, somewhere, someday. That may have been a mistake.

By the time we reached southern Indiana’s long stretch of factory farms, he was swept up, limiting his commentary to cheers and jeers. We went for miles at a shot, Robin leaning forward, a hand on the dash, forgetting even to look out the window. He was spawning synapses as fast as Charlie Gordon, whose IQ rose to precarious heights. Robbie winced through Charlie’s rejection at the hands of his coworkers. The moral ambiguity of the experimenting scientists Nemur and Strauss hurt him so much I had to remind him to breathe.

When Algernon died, he made me stop the recording. Really? He couldn’t wrap his head around the fact. The mouse is dead? His face flirted with quitting the story altogether. But Algernon had already ended much of the innocence Robin still possessed. The mind’s eye had two bafflements: coming out of the light and going into it.

“You know what that means? You see what’s coming?” But Robin couldn’t see the consequences for Charlie. Nor did he much care. I resumed the story. A minute later, he made me pause again.

But the mouse, Dad. The muh-hu-hu-mouse! His voice mock-mourned, like a smaller, younger kid. But not far down, the play was real.

We stopped for the night at a motel near Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. He wouldn’t sleep until the story ended. He lay on his bed, suffering through Charlie’s final decline with sphinxlike stoicism. At the end, he nodded, and motioned for lights-out. I asked him what he thought, but he simply shrugged. Only in the dark did it come out of him.

Did Mom ever read this story?

The question blindsided me. “I don’t know. I think so. Probably. It’s kind of a classic. Why do you ask?”

Why do you think? he said, sharper than perhaps intended. When he spoke again, he was contrite. He was going into the light, or coming out of it. I couldn’t tell which. You know. The mouse, Dad. The mouse.