Richard Powers - Bewilderment

I looked down at my notes and came unstuck in time. My wife-to-be, twenty minutes after having me for the first time, was lying with her nose against my floating rib. I love your smell , she said.

I told her, “You don’t love me. You love my microbiome.”

When she laughed, I thought: I’ll just stay here in these parts for a bit. Until I die, or so. I told her how a person had ten times more bacterial cells than human cells and how we needed a hundred times more bacterial than human DNA to keep the organism going.

Her eyes crinkled in love. So we’re the scaffolding, is that it? And they’re the building? Her scaffolding laughed again and climbed on top of mine.

“Without that bizarre collaboration, there’d be no complex cells, no multicellular creatures, nothing to get you out of bed in the morning. The friendly takeover took forever to happen. But here’s the weird thing: It took two billion years to happen. But it happened more than once .”

That was as far as my lecture got. A buzz went off in my pocket—a text from one of the few numbers allowed past my afternoon block list. It was from Robin’s school. My son, my own flesh and blood, had smashed a friend in the face and cracked the boy’s cheekbone. The former friend was in the ER getting stitched up, and Robin was being held in the principal’s office pending my arrival.

I let the class out, ten minutes early. My students would have to figure out the rest of the origin of life on their own.

THEY WOULDN’T LET ME SEE MY SON until I sat for my own punishment. Dr. Lipman’s office walls were covered with accreditation. Her desk was not large, but she used it to tremendous effect. The previous two times she called me in, she’d tried empathy and posture-mirroring. This time she was considerably more Excel spreadsheet. She was younger than I was and dressed too well. Ed psych jargon enthralled her. In her own over-professionalized way, she cared about my son. She was a reformer, and she saved herself for the troubled ones. To her, I was a pigheaded scientist damaging a special child by not following established protocols.

She laid out the facts. Robin had been having lunch with Jayden Astley, his only real friend. They were seated across from each other at the long lunchroom table. The feral din of lunch hour gave way to Robin’s shouts. All the witnesses agreed: he wouldn’t quit screaming, Tell me. Tell me, you freaking jerk-face . Just as the lunchroom monitor got to their table to break things up, Robin snapped, scooped up his metal thermos and flung it hard in Jayden’s face. Miraculously it only fractured the boy’s cheek.

“But what happened? What made him go off?”

Jill Lipman stared at me as if I’d asked how life began. “Neither boy will say.” It was clear where she placed the blame. “We need to talk about why this happened right after you took him out of school for a week.”

“I took him out of school to give him a chance to calm down. I doubt my son smashed his only friend’s face because of a week in the Smokies.”

“He missed a week of class. That’s five days in every academic subject. He needs continuity, focus, and social integration. He’s not getting that, and that’s stressful for him.”

He’d missed class when Dr. Lipman suspended him, too. But I listened and kept still.

“Robin needs orientation and accountability. But since his unscheduled vacation, he has been late to school twice.”

“I’m a single parent. When things beyond my control—”

“I’m not passing judgment on your parenting.” Which, of course, she was. “Children deserve a safe, secure, and stable learning environment. Instead, we’re all coping with a violent assault against another child.”

A fractured cheekbone. A painkiller and an ice pack, and Jayden was fine. I fractured my own cheekbone, on the monkey bars, when I was seven, back when schools had monkey bars.

Anger makes me clam up. It’s a deep-seated trait, one that has often saved me. Dr. Lipman’s strange little lips moved, and stranger words came out. “You have a child with special needs. When all this happened the last time—”

“ This didn’t happen, the last time.”

“When we had trouble before, you chose to ignore the recommendations of more than one doctor. You have another choice now. You can help your child by giving him the treatment that he needs, or we can get the state involved.”

The principal of my son’s school was threatening to investigate me if I didn’t put my third-grader on psychoactive drugs.

“We’ll need to see some progress by December.”

When I spoke again, I sounded remarkably composed. “May I please talk to my son?”

Dr. Lipman led me out of her office through the administrative suite. The staff’s eyes were on me throughout the perp walk: the man who kept his boy in misery rather than obey the doctors.

Robin was being held in the “Calm Room,” a detention cubicle next to the vice principal’s office. I saw him through the panel of shatterproof glass. He was hunched over on the too-large wooden chair, doing that thing with his hands he did whenever he was beaten down. He’d stick his thumbs between his index and second fingers and squeeze his fists until everything turned red.

The door opened and Robin looked up. He saw me and his pain doubled. The first words out of his mouth were something no boy at that school had ever said. Dad, it’s all my fault .

I sat beside him and cuffed his slender shoulder. “What happened, Robbie?”

My anger was going nuts. I tried to let my good parts breathe, like you said to. But my hands got confused .

HE WOULDN’T TELL ME what Jayden Astley said to set him off. I called the boy’s parents, half expecting them to sue me over the phone. Instead, they were weirdly sympathetic. Their boy had given them more information than mine had given me, but they weren’t volunteering anything. Everyone involved was protecting me. I couldn’t tell from what.

I surprised Robin by not forcing the issue, and he surprised me by not wetting the bed that night. The next day was Saturday. I still hadn’t finished the edits for Stryker. Robin and I took a long walk down near Olbrich Gardens. For lunch, I scrambled tofu, using the exact ratio of black salt and nutritional yeast that he loved. We played his favorite board game about racing cars across Europe. I pretended to work while he played with his microscope and looked through his files of collectible cards. We read together in peace for half an hour, before he asked for another planet.

I had two thousand paperbacks scattered through our house and thirty years of reading to steal from. When was the golden age of science fiction? For me, it started at nine.

I gave him a planet where the dominant sentient species could merge into a compound creature with all the powers of its separate parts.

His slew of questions stopped the story. Are you for real? How could that even be?

“It’s another planet. That’s how.”

But, I mean, are they still separate when they’re together, or all one single brain?

“One single brain that can have their separate thoughts.”

You mean, like telepathy?

“More than telepathy. A superorganism.”

Can the big one, like, get inside the heads of the little ones? Does he need them all, to make it work? What if some of the little ones don’t want to join? Or are they really just parts to begin with?

He worried the edge between friendly merger and hostile takeover. I tried to tilt his fascinated horror toward horrified fascination. “They do it voluntarily, when times are hard and they need something extra to survive. And later, when things get better, they split up again.”