Bewilderment

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WE GOT TO MADISON A LITTLE AFTER NOON on the day I’d promised to get Robin back to school. I got the automated text saying he was absent without excuse and asking if I knew that (Please reply Y or N). I should have brought him straight to class. But there were only a few hours left of school, and I was feeling how I always felt whenever I had to hand him over to people who didn’t get him. I wanted him to myself a little longer.

I brought him to campus with me. I dreaded going in after so long away. We got my mail, and I checked in with my grad assistant, Jinjing, who’d taught my undergrad classes in my absence. Jinjing fussed over Robin like he was her own little brother back in Shenzhen. She took him to see the display case of meteorites and the photos from Cassini. I took the opportunity to get chewed out by Carl Stryker, my colleague and coauthor on a paper about detecting biosignature gases from lensing-revealed exoplanets that I was holding up.

“MIT is going to scoop us,” Stryker said. Of course it was. MIT or Princeton or the EANA was always scooping us. It wasn’t enough for anyone simply to do science. Everything was a race for priority, for professional advancement, for a share of the shrinking grants pool and a raffle ticket to Stockholm. The truth was, Stryker and I were never going to win the Swedish Sweepstakes. But continued funding was nice. And I was jeopardizing that by failing to refine my model data for the article.

“Is it the boy, again?” Stryker asked.

I wanted to say: He has a name, jerk-face. But yes, I said, it was the boy, silently begging my collaborator to cut me a little slack. Stryker didn’t have much slack to give. Fifteen years ago, the exoplanet bonanza had turned the grants agencies as generous toward astrobiology as the Renaissance courts had been to any adventurer with a caravel. But Earth was shakier now, and the funding winds had changed.

“We need the edits by Monday, Theo. I’m serious.”

I told him I could manage by Monday. I left Stryker’s office wondering what my career in this infant field might have been like, had I never married. A little luckier, maybe. But nothing in existence could ever be luckier than Alyssa and Robin.