Bewilderment

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IN THE SHORTENING DAYS, I worked to keep Robin at his lessons. He liked me to sit and do them with him. But the moment I turned to my own work, he lapsed into a trance.

He and I made it through the equinox, and harder still, the holidays. I lied to Aly’s family, telling them that we were celebrating somewhere else. By mutual agreement, the two of us spent the week alone. We snowshoed through the blanketed cornfields just outside of town. Robbie made ornaments for the tree from sketches cut out of his field notes. On New Year’s, all he wanted was to play endless games of Concentration with the Songbirds of the Eastern U.S. playing cards that he’d gotten me for a Christmas present. He was asleep by eight.

Throughout January, he slipped in small steps from color back to black-and-white. In early February, I gave him a one-week break from classes, apropos of nothing. He needed it. He began playing his farm game again on the computer, after months away. He was touchy when I told him to give it a break. Before the week was over, he wanted to get back to his school assignments. He didn’t have the focus to sit more than half an hour at a shot, but he was desperate to learn something. I knew I would have to bring him to a doctor if this went on much longer.

Give me a treasure hunt, Dad. Anything.

“How much of that butcher paper roll do you have left from Washington?”

He made a face. Don’t remind me about Washington. I got you in trouble.

“Robin! Stop.”

I got Dr. Currier’s whole experiment shut down. And now you see what’s happening!

“That’s not true. I talked to Dr. Currier two days ago. There’s a chance the lab will be up and running soon.”

How soon?

“I don’t know. Maybe by summer.” In that moment, it didn’t feel like a lie. And it made him sit up like an alerted prairie dog. I’d tell it again.

The thought of a reprieve seemed to give him strength. Just imagining doing the training again was almost as good as doing it. Somewhere in the universe, there are creatures for whom that’s always so. He picked at his shoelaces, stilled by contrition. He told his shoes, There’s a bunch of that roll left.

In fact, he had about ten feet. We trimmed a foot off one end. “Nine feet. Perfect. Roll it out in the living room.”

For real? He took some persuading. He rolled out a paper path through the middle of the room.

“All right. Nine feet, for four and a half billion years. That’s half a billion years per foot. Let’s make a timeline.”

He rallied a little and held up a finger. He went to his room and returned with a basket of pens and brushes. Then we both got down on the floor and went to work. I penciled in the major waypoints: the end of the Hadean, one foot into our scroll. Immediately after that, the start of life. Robbie penned in those first microbes, hundreds of colored specks you almost needed a magnifying glass to see. He filled the next four feet with a rainbow of cells.

Five feet in, I marked the moment when competition gave way to networking and complex cells swarmed the Earth. Robbie’s cells swelled a bit and gained a little texture. For two more feet, his forms unfolded into worms and jellyfish, seaweed and sponges. When I finally stopped him that night, he was himself again.

That’s a good day, he declared, as I tucked him in.

“Agreed.”

And we haven’t even gotten to the big stuff yet.

He was out in the living room when I woke the next morning, adding, refining, touching up, and waiting for me to mark the start of the main event. I penciled it in—the Cambrian explosion, just over a foot from the end of the scroll.

Dad, there’s no room left. And everything’s just starting. We need wider paper.

His arms flung outward, then dropped to his side. Enthusiasm and distress had become the same thing. I left him to it and took up my own delinquent modeling. All morning long he stayed at it. A parade of giant creatures fanned out across the width of the paper. He ate lunch on the floor, perched over his growing masterpiece. He stood and stepped back, mouth wide with pride and ire. A moment of study from above, and he dropped back down into the thick of things.

All that afternoon, we worked alongside each other. I checked in once or twice, but his immense journey was flowing along at full tilt, and the last thing Robbie wanted was help from anyone. At five, cross-eyed from too much coding, I quit to make dinner. The day had been so fine that I wanted to reward him, and that meant mushroom burgers and fries.

I put in my earbuds to listen to the news while prepping the meal. The stem rust that had killed a quarter of the wheat harvest in China and Ukraine had been found in Nebraska. Fresh water from a dissolving Arctic was flooding into the Atlantic, swirling the protective currents like a hand passed through a smoke plume. And a hideous infection was hitting cattle feedlots in Texas.

I forgot myself, forgot that my son was crawling on the floor in the other room. I shouted something vile, and louder than I realized. Because of the earbuds, I didn’t hear Robin until he was tugging on my shirt. He startled me, and I jumped. He got flustered and defensive. Well, don’t just ignore me! What’s the matter?

“It’s nothing.” I took out my buds and stopped the app. “Just the news.”

Something bad? It’s something bad. You swore pretty hard.

I made a mistake. “It’s nothing, Robbie. Don’t worry.”

He sulked over dinner and slammed through the meal. But way too quickly, he seemed to forgive me. By the time I broke out the cocoa almonds, he was smiling again. I was stupid not to guess.

After we finished, he went back to his spot on the living room floor while I returned to my computer. I was tweaking one of my algorithms for volcanic eruptions on water worlds when a thumping came from across the house. I cursed again. It sounded like a small mammal had gotten into the walls of Robin’s bedroom and was making a nest between the studs. I’d never be able to get it out and save my house without sending my son into another spiral.

There was another thump, several more, too metronomic to be anything but human. It sounded like a plumber making serious mistakes. I went for a look.

The sound came from Robin’s bedroom. I opened the door and saw him curled up in the corner holding his Planetary Exploration Transponder and banging his head against the wall. It was a slow-motion, soft, exploratory head-slamming, like an experiment in final penance.

I rushed him, shouting. Before I could pull him away from the wall, he barreled to his feet, through my arms, and out of the room. I stopped only long enough to check the tablet. On the screen, a group of demented cows stumbled into each other. They’d lost control of their bodies. One of them slipped to the ground, lowing in confusion. The close-up cut to an aerial shot of a staggering animal mass hundreds of creatures wide.

The story was all over the net: brain contagion, tearing through Texas’s four and a half million head of cattle, spreading from feedlot to feedlot with industrial-scale efficiency. Robin had logged in to my account and found it, using my password that I never changed: his mother’s favorite bird, flying backward.

Screaming started up from outside, looping over the agonizing video. Stop! Enough! Stop! I ran from the room and outside. He was alone in the dark backyard. No threat anywhere, no one at all but my wailing child. He dropped like a deadweight the moment I reached him. His screams grew worse when I tried to embrace him. That’s enough. Stop. Stop!

I dropped to my knees and took his face. My own shouted whispers were half comfort, half muzzle. “Robbie. Hush. Don’t. It’ll be okay.”

That word okay drew a shriek that shattered me, so out of control, up close to my ear. I recoiled, and he broke free. He was across the yard and around the corner of the house before I could get to my feet. I chased him back inside. He was coiled again in the corner of his room, battering the wall with his brain. I broke through the doorway and threw myself between the wall and his skull. But he finished the moment I reached him. He slumped in my arms. A sound came out of him as awful as his screams. A long, low gurgle of defeat.

I cradled him and stroked his hair. He didn’t fight. Aly had stopped whispering in my ears, the moment I most needed her. My brain searched for something to say that wouldn’t make him lash out again. Every possibility felt inane. We lived in a place where feedlots were subsidized, but feedback was prohibited. I should never have brought him to visit this planet.

“Robbie. There are other places.”

He lifted his head to glare at me. His eyes were small and hard. Where?

His body went limp. The rage had cleaned him out. I let him lie a while longer. Then I got him up and into the kitchen, where I iced his forehead. In the bathroom, he washed and brushed his teeth in a stupor. The lump came on, plump and dark, a thousand-year egg set above the brow of his right eye.

He didn’t want to read or be read to. He violently rejected a trip through space. He lay in bed, staring at the ceiling. Why did you hide it from me, Dad?

Because I was afraid of exactly what had happened. That was the honest answer, and still I hid. “I shouldn’t have.”

What’s going to happen?

“They’ll be put down. They probably already have been.”

Killed.

“Yes.”

Won’t it spread? With animals packed in like that? And getting moved around all over the place?

I told him I didn’t know. I do now.

Lying in his narrow bed, he looked impossibly pale. His hand reached out from under the sheets to cover his eyes. Did you see them? How they were moving? In the stillness, his whole body jerked, like that galvanic jolt just before sleep. He grabbed my hand for balance. His upper arm felt wilted and useless.

Last month, he said, then lost his way. Last week? I could have handled this.

“Robbie. Buddy. Everyone goes up and down. You’ll—”

Dad? He sounded petrified. I don’t want to go back to being me.

“Robbie. I know it feels like the end of the world. But it isn’t.”

He pulled the sheet up over his face. Go away. You don’t know what’s happening. I don’t want to talk to you.

I held still. Anything I said might drive him screaming back out into the dark yard. Minutes passed. He seemed to soften. Perhaps he started to fall asleep. He slid the sheet from off his face and lifted his head from the pillow.

Why are you still here?

“Aren’t you forgetting something? May all sentient beings—”

He held up a flaccid hand. I want to change the words. May all life. Get free. From us.