Bewilderment

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THREE HUNDRED PEOPLE filled the auditorium, with folks still drifting in as the morning’s presenters finished. Fifteen minutes before showtime, the three of us went backstage. A techie wired up Currier and Robin and walked them through their marks.

“You’ll see a red clock down on the front of the stage. At four minutes and forty-five seconds…” The tech drew his index finger across his throat and gurgled. Marty nodded. Robbie laughed. I wanted to puke on the floorboards.

I didn’t realize the talk was under way until Currier was standing center stage in the audience applause. I held my arm around Robin, as if he might dash onstage if I let go. The tech stood on his other side, brandishing a handheld monitor and whispering into a headset boom.

Currier sounded fresh, given how often he’d pitched his research in public. He still talked about the work as if the results mystified him. He took fifty seconds to describe neurofeedback, another forty to explain the fMRI and AI software, and half a minute to summarize the effects. Minute three went to the clips of Robin. The audience was audibly impressed. So was my son, seeing them again, standing next to me in the wings of a dark, packed theater. Geez. That’s what happened to me?

Minute four brought the reveal. Currier dropped it as if it were just another data point: the same mother whose death sent the boy into a downward spiral has returned to nurse his spirit into health. Robin twitched, under my arm. I looked down at the compact planet next to me, whose shoulder I was clasping too hard. But he was grinning, as if the boy saved from that downward spiral fascinated him.

In his last half minute alone onstage, Currier succumbed to interpretation. “We’ve barely glimpsed the potential of these techniques. Only the future will reveal their full possibilities. Meanwhile, imagine a world where one person’s anger is soothed by another’s calm, where your private fears are assuaged by a stranger’s courage, and where pain can be trained away, as easily as taking piano lessons. We could learn to live here, on Earth, without fear. Now please say hello to a friend of mine. Mr. Robin Byrne.”

The diminutive figure next to me shrugged off my arm and was gone. I held on to the back of my neck as he crossed the stage. He looked so small. I once saw a child his size play Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 8 at Merkin Hall in New York. The girl’s hands barely stretched a fifth. I don’t know how she did it, or why her parents let her. I felt the same confusion now. My son had become a tiny prodigy on his own instrument. The audience clapped wildly as Robin trotted to the floodlit center stage. There, he stabbed a hand across his front and bowed deeply from the waist. The clapping and laughter grew.

I’ve watched the film so often my memory is convinced I was out in the darkened hall. Currier must have thought that Robin would smile and wave, then the two of them would say goodbye. But they still had a long and fluid minute left.

The whole auditorium wants him to ask: What’s it like? How does it feel? Is it still her? But Currier veers off into another place. He asks, “What’s the biggest difference between when you started the training and now?”

Robin rubs his mouth and nose. He takes too long to answer. You can see Currier’s confidence waver and hear the audience grow restive. You mean in real life?

The words slip through his teeth with a little lisp. The audience titters. Currier has no idea where Robin is going. But before he can get things back on the rails, my son declares, Nothing!

The audience laughs again, though not comfortably. The question irritates Robin. Something in those two syllables says: You know what’s happening. Everyone knows, despite the code of silence. This endless gift of a place is going away. But his right wrist rotates oddly, down by his thigh, a gesture that none of the hundreds of thousands of viewers but me knows how to interpret.

Just that I’m not scared anymore. I’m all mixed into a really huge thing. That’s the coolest part.

Currier gestures toward the audience, who break into applause. He puts a hand on Robin’s head. My son’s mother’s lover. With ten seconds left, the talk ends.