Bewilderment

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YOU MEAN, LIKE A VIDEO GAME? My son loved games, but they also scared him. The fast-twitch shooters or the action scrollers where you had to jump at just the right moment made him nuts. He’d attack them with zeal, then retreat, routed, in a fury. They stood for the whole pecking order of competition that ruled the kingdom of his peers. When a certain racing game made him throw my tablet across the room and I banned him from playing it again, he seemed relieved. But he adored his farm. He could click on his fields to get wheat and click on the mill to grind flour and click on the oven to bake bread, all day long.

“Yes,” I said. “A little like a game. You’ll try to move a dot around on a screen or make a musical note sound softer or louder or higher or lower. It’ll get easier with practice.”

All with my brain? That’s insane, Dad.

“Yep. Pretty crazy.”

Wait. It’s like something. It reminds me of something else. He paddled the air with one hand and sawed at his chin with the other—warning me to let him think. He snapped a finger. Like one of your worlds. “Imagine a planet where the people plug their brains into one another.”

“This isn’t quite like that.”

Do you think that scanner could teach me to paint better?

It seemed like something Currier might try one day. “You paint perfectly. They could use your brain to train other people to paint better.”

He beamed and ran to get his portfolio to show me his latest masterpiece, a birdwing pearlymussel. He had birds and fish and fungi now, and he was working on snails and bivalves.

We’re going to need a big table at the market, Dad.

I held the painting with both hands, thinking: No therapy could be better than this. But then my boy looked down and smoothed the paper with his guilty hands, and I saw the marks of enraged crumpling. He traced his fingers on the painting with contrition. I wish I could see one of these. For real, I mean.