Bewilderment

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I WAS PACING IN THE LAB’S FOYER when he came from the first session. He’d trained for ninety minutes. Colored dots, musical pitches, and other feedback helped him to find and match the patterns of his mother’s brain. I smiled, faking a calm I didn’t have. Robin must have known I was crazy for anything he could tell me.

Ginny brought him from the test room. Her arm draped over his shoulder while his hand reached up to clutch the sleeve of her lab coat. Ginny looked as casual as I was trying to be. She leaned down and asked, “You cool, Brain Boy? Want to sit in my office for a minute?”

He loved to sit at Ginny’s desk and read her collection of hipster comics. Ordinarily he’d have jumped at the offer. He shook his head. I’m cool. Then, as his mother had reminded him a million times in life, he added, Thank you.

For an hour and a half, he’d been feeling his way around Aly’s limbic system. Each time he’d raised and lowered pitches or steered icons toward targets on the screen he was steering himself into the bliss that had been Alyssa’s once, years ago—a lark we’d taken part in on an otherwise ordinary day. In Robin’s head, if nowhere else, he was talking to his mother again. I needed to know what she was saying.

He saw me from across the laboratory suite. His face lit with excitement and hesitation. I saw how badly he wanted to tell me where he’d just been. But he didn’t have words for that planet.

He let go of Ginny’s sleeve and slid out from under her arm. Her professional face betrayed a stab of abandonment. Robin approached me, something new in his walk. His stride was looser, more experimental. Ten feet away he shook his head. Reaching me, he grabbed my upper arm and pressed his ear against my chest.

“Good one?” The syllables came out of me, anemic.

It was her, Dad.

I flushed in the back of my legs. It occurred to me, too late, what an overactive imagination like Robin’s might do with so rich an inkblot.

“It felt… different?”

He shook his head, not at the question but at my dissembling. We made another appointment for the next week. I chatted with Ginny and a pair of postdocs. It felt like my classic nightmare where I’m lecturing in public and only belatedly discover my skin is green. Robin patted me on the back and nudged me toward the hallway, out of the emotional incubator, into the world.

We walked to the parking lot. I peppered him with questions, everything but what I was too adult to ask. He answered with monosyllables, more stymied than impatient. Only when I put my pass in the parking garage machine and the gate lifted did he open up.

Dad? You remember that first night in the cabin, in the mountains? Looking through the telescope?

“I do. Very well.”

That’s what it was like.

He held his hands in front of his face and spread them. Some memory amazed him, either blackness or stars.

I turned on Campus Drive toward home, keeping my eyes on the road. Then, in a voice I barely recognized, the alien on the front seat next to me said, Your wife loves you. You know that, right?