Richard Powers - Bewilderment

Her closing words chilled me all over again. I remembered her working them out, in weeks of laboring over this testimony. The creatures of this state do not belong to us. We hold them in our trust. The first people who lived here knew: all animals are our relatives. Our ancestors and our descendants are watching our stewardship. Let’s make them proud .

The clip ended. I canceled the one that queued up next. To my relief, Robin didn’t argue. He held three fingers against his mouth. The gesture made him look like a four-foot-tall Atticus Finch.

Did that bill pass, Dad?

“Not yet, buddy. But something like it will, one of these years. And look at the number of views. People are still hearing her.”

I mussed his hair. His locks were all over the place. He wouldn’t let anyone cut them but me. That wasn’t doing much for his social standing.

“Why don’t you get ready for bed, and we’ll burn the midnight oil.” Our code for reading together for twenty minutes past his eight-thirty bedtime.

Can I have a juice, first?

“Juice might not be the best thing, right before bed.” I didn’t need a two a.m. disaster. I’d removed the plastic fitted sheet. It was too humiliating for him.

How do you know? Maybe it is. Maybe juice is exactly the perfect thing before bed. We should run a double-blind experiment .

I’d made the mistake of telling him about those. “Naw. We’re gonna fake the data. Scoot!”

HE WAS THOUGHTFUL WHEN I CAME INTO HIS ROOM. He lay under the covers in his brown plaid canoe pajamas that he’d forbidden me from giving to Goodwill. The cuffs stopped two inches above his wrist and the waist pinched his boy’s belly into a muffin-top. The pajamas had been a little too big when his mother had bought them. The way he was going, he’d still be wearing them on his honeymoon.

I had my book— The Chemical Evolution of the Atmosphere and Oceans— and he had his— Maniac Magee . I took my place beside him in the bed. But he was too thoughtful to read. He put his hand on my arm, as Aly always did.

What did she mean about our ancestors watching us?

“And our descendants. It was just an expression. Like saying that history is going to judge us.”

Is it?

“Is what?”

Is history going to judge us?

I had to think about that. “That’s what history is , I guess.”

And are they?

“Are our ancestors watching us? It’s a figure of speech, Robbie.”

When she said that, I pictured them all together, on one of your exoplanets . TRAPPIST- whatever. And they had a huge telescope. And they were watching us and seeing whether we’re doing okay .

“That’s a pretty cool metaphor, all by itself.”

But they’re not .

“I… no. I don’t think so.”

He nodded, opened Maniac , and pretended to read. I did the same, with Atmospheres and Oceans . But I knew his next question was only waiting for a decent interval. As it happened, the interval was two minutes.

So… what about God, Dad?

My mouth pumped, like something in the Gatlinburg aquarium. “You know, when people say God… I don’t, I’m not sure they always… I mean, God isn’t something you can prove or disprove. But from what I can see, we don’t need any bigger miracle than evolution.”

I turned to face him. He shrugged. I mean, duh. We’re on a rock, in space, right? There are billions of planets as good as ours, filled with creatures we can’t even imagine. And God is supposed to look like us ?

I gawked again. “Then why’d you ask?”

To make sure you weren’t kidding yourself .

This, God help me, made me laugh out loud. There we were. Nothing. Everything. My son and me. I tickled him until he screamed for forgiveness, which took about three seconds.

We sobered up and read. The pages turned; we traveled easily, everywhere. Then, without taking his eyes off his book, Robin asked, So what do you think happened to Mom?

For one awful moment, I thought he meant the night of the accident. All kinds of lies presented themselves before I realized he was asking something much easier.

“I don’t know, Robbie. She went back into the system. She became other creatures. All the good things in her came into us. Now we keep her alive, with whatever we can remember.”

His head tipped, a little reticent. My son, growing away from me. I think she’s like a salamander or something .

I rolled to face him. “Wait… what ? Where’d you get that ?” I knew: the thirty species the Smokies had.

Well, remember you said how Einstein proved nothing could be created or destroyed?

“That’s right. But he was talking about matter and energy. How they keep changing from one form to another.”

That’s what I’m saying! The words tore out of him so wildly I had to shush him. Mom was energy, right?

My face got away from me. “Yes. If Mom was anything, she was energy.”

And now she’s changed into another form .

When I could, I asked him. “Why a salamander?”

Easy. Because she’s fast, and she loves the water. And because how, like you always say, she’s totally her own species .

Amphibious. Small but mighty. And she breathed through her skin.

There’s a salamander that lives for fifty years. Did you know that? He sounded desperate. I tried to hug him, but he pushed away. It’s probably just a figure of speech . She’s probably not anything .

The words froze me. Some awful switch had been thrown in him, and I couldn’t tell why.

Two percent, Dad? He snarled like a cornered badger. Only two percent of all animals are wild? Everything else is factory cows and factory chickens and us?

“Please don’t shout at me, Robbie.”

Is that for real? Is it?

I took our abandoned books and put them on the nightstand. “If your mother said it in a speech for the state legislature, it’s for real.”

His face bunched up like he’d been punched. His eyes curdled and his mouth opened in a silent scream. It took a moment for the soundless jag to turn into tears. I held out my arms, but he shook his head. Something in him hated me for letting that number be true. He backed into the corner of his bed, up against the wall. His head swung sideways in disbelief.

Just as suddenly, he deflated. He lay back down, his back to me, one ear to the mattress. He lay there listening to the hum of defeat. He felt around for my body in the space behind him. When he found it, he mumbled into the sheets, New planet, Dad. Please .

THE PLANET PELAGOS had many times more surface than Earth. It was covered in water—a single ocean that made the Pacific look like the Great Lakes. One sparse chain of tiny volcanic islands ran through that immensity, bits of punctuation sprinkled through an empty book hundreds of pages long.

The endless ocean was shallow in places, kilometers deep in others. Life spread through its latitudes from steamy to frozen. Hosts of creatures turned the ocean bottoms into underwater forests. Giant blimps migrated from pole to pole, never stopping, each half of their brains taking turns to sleep. Intelligent kelp hundreds of meters long spelled messages in colors that rippled up the length of their stalks. Annelids practiced agriculture and crustaceans built high-rise cities. Clades of fish evolved communal rituals indistinguishable from religion. But nothing could use fire or smelt ores or build any but the simplest tools. So Pelagos diversified and invented new forms, each stranger than the last.