Richard Powers - Bewilderment

We had lucky days, lots of them. Then the climate in Washington changed and funding fell off. The great telescopes we needed—the ones that would give us real data to run through our models—slipped and missed their development deadlines. But there I was, still getting paid to prepare how to discover whether we were alone or surrounded by crazy neighbors.

Aly and I had more projects than we had hours. Then our lives changed, thanks to the one-point-five percent failure rate of our favored birth control. The unlikely roll stunned us both. It seemed a break in our long streak, the worst possible timing for an event we might never have chosen for ourselves. Our careers already stretched us to the limits. Neither of us had the knowledge or wherewithal to raise a child.

A decade later, I see the truth, every morning I wake up. If Aly and I had been in charge, the luckiest thing in my life—the thing that kept me going when all the luck in the world went cold—would never have existed, not even in my wildest models.

THE FIRST NIGHT HOME was hard on Robin. Our mountain getaway had smashed all routines, and thermodynamics long ago proved that putting things back together is lots harder than taking them apart. He tore through the house, wired and erratic. After dinner, I felt him regressing: eight years old, seven, six… I braced myself for zero, and blastoff.

Can I check my farm?

“You can play for one hour.”

Yesss! Gems?

“No gems. I’m still paying off that last little stunt of yours.”

That was an accident, Dad. I didn’t know your card was on the account. I thought I was getting gems for free .

He did look stricken. If his explanation wasn’t the literal truth, regret had made it truer in the months since the disaster. He played for forty minutes, announcing his trophies as he earned them. I graded homework sets from the lecture course and worked on the edits for Stryker.

Following an especially manic harvesting clickfest, he turned to me. Dad? His shoulders hunched in supplication. Here it was at last—the thing that had nagged him since we got home. Can we watch Mom?

He’d been asking more often in recent weeks, in a way that had grown unhealthy. We’d watched some of her videos too many times, and seeing Aly in action didn’t always have the best effect on Robin. But whatever the clips did to him, forbidding them would have done worse. He needed to study his mother, and he needed me to study her with him.

I let Robin search the video site. After two keystrokes, Alyssa’s name rose to the top of previous searches. I have less than fifteen minutes of video of my own mother. Now the moving, talking dead are everywhere, available anytime, from any pocket. It’s a rare week when we dead-to-be don’t surrender a few more minutes of our souls to the overflowing archives. Not even the craziest SF story from my youth predicted it. Imagine a planet where the past never went away but kept happening again and again, forever. That’s the planet my nine-year-old wanted to live on.

“Let’s see. We need a good one.” I took the mouse and scrolled, looking for a clip that would be gentle with us. Aly was up in my ear, whispering, What in God’s name are you thinking? Don’t let him watch that!

Pulling rank didn’t work. Robin swung in the swivel chair and grabbed the mouse. Not those ones, Dad! Madison. Here .

For the magic to work, the ghost had to be nearby. He needed to see his mother lobbying at the state Capitol, an hour’s walk from our two-bedroom bungalow. He remembered those days—afternoons with Alyssa practicing in the dining room, editing and re-editing her testimony, declaiming away her nerves, all those times he’d watched her don her owl pendant, wolf earrings, and one of three warrior dress suits—black, tan, or navy blazer with knee-length stretchy skirt and cream-colored blouse—then hop on her bike with her dress shoes in a shoulder bag to pedal off to the state assembly and do battle.

This one, Dad . He pointed to a clip of Alyssa testifying for a bill to outlaw killing contests.

“That one’s for later, Robbie. Maybe when you’re ten. How about one of these?” Aly lobbying against something called possum tosses. Aly fighting to protect pigs from abuse during the annual “Pioneer Days.” Rough, too, but cakewalks compared to the one he wanted.

Dad! His force surprised us both. I sat still, certain he’d melt down and turn the evening into a screaming match. I’m not a little kid anymore. We watched the farm one. I was fine with the farm one .

He had not been fine with the farm one. The farm one had been a colossal mistake. Aly’s description of chicks raised on tilted wire mesh, packed so closely they pecked each other to death, had given Robin nighttime screaming fits for weeks.

Our little two-man luge was poised to plunge off the mountainside. I took a breath. “Let’s pick another one, buddy. They’re all of Mom, right?”

Dad . Now he sounded old and sad. He pointed to the clip’s date: two months before Alyssa’s death. My son’s equations came clear to me. The ghost had to be as close as possible, not just in space but in time.

I clicked on the link, and there she was. Aly, at full incandescence. The shock never weakened. My cell phone camera has this special effect: the object in the crosshairs stays saturated while everything around it fades to gray. That’s how it was with the woman who let me marry her. She ionized any room, even a roomful of politicians.

All the nerves that plagued her in rehearsal vanished in the final performances. Behind the microphone, she came off consummately self-possessed, with flashes of wry bafflement in the face of our species. She turned her voice into this Platonic public radio announcer. She could blend stats and stories without hectoring. She empathized with all parties, compromising without betraying the truth. Everything she said came across as so damn reasonable. None of the ninety-nine assembly members would have believed she’d suffered from a massive childhood stutter and used to chew her lips until they bled.

As she gave her last recorded performance, her son watched from this side of the ground. Every detail had him so hypnotized that his questions never got past his gaping lips. He watched Aly talk about witnessing a celebrated event up north, near Lake Superior, one of twenty hunting contests held in the state that year. He sat up straight and smoothed his collar; I’d once told him how mature that made him look. For a kid with no self-control, he gave a masterful performance all his own.

Aly described the judging stand on the fourth and final day of the competition: an industrial-spec crane scale waiting for the contestants to deliver their hauls. Pickup trucks filled with carcasses pulled up and unloaded their mounds onto the scales. Awards went to those who had bagged the most poundage over four days. The prizes included guns, scopes, and lures that would make next year’s contest even more one-sided.

She recited the facts: Number of participants. Weight of winning entry. Total animals killed in statewide contests every year. Effects of lost animals on ravaged ecosystems. Her sober eloquence would conclude later that night in a two-hour crying jag in bed, with me powerless to comfort her.

I kicked myself for imagining Robbie could handle this. But he’d wanted to see his mother, and truth be told, he was holding it together pretty well. Nine is the age of great turning. Maybe humanity was a nine-year-old, not yet grown up, not a little kid anymore. Seemingly in control, but always on the verge of rage.

Alyssa wrapped up. Her conclusion was masterful. She always nailed the landing. She said how this bill would restore tradition and dignity to hunting. She said how ninety-eight percent by weight of animals left on Earth were either Homo sapiens or their industrially harvested food. Only two percent were wild. Didn’t the few wild things left need a little break?