Richard Powers - Bewilderment

He leaned forward, suspicious. Wait a minute! Like slime molds?

I’d shown him, in the labs at the university: those independent single cells that merged into a community with its own aggregate behavior and rudimentary intelligence.

You stole that from Earth! He slugged my upper arm several times in slow motion. Then he lay back on the pillow. I risked smoothing his bangs out of his eyes, the way he liked me to do when he was little.

“Robbie? You’re still upset. I can tell.”

He jerked up. How do you know?

I pointed at his fists, holding his thumbs crimson captives again. He stared, amazed that his own parts had betrayed him. He shook his hands and liberated his thumbs. Then his head dropped back onto the pillow.

Dad? What happened to her? This time, he meant it. That night, in the car .

I looked down at my own hands, which were busy tagging me. “Robin? Did Jayden say something about Mom?”

Luckily, no heavy objects were within reach. But the force of his voice alone knocked me backward. Just tell me. Tell me! He slashed back and forth. I’m nine years old. Just… TELL ME!

I grabbed his wrist, and the pain startled him. “You will stop right now.” I spoke with all the calm authority I could fake. “And get control of yourself. Then you will tell me what Jayden said.”

He yanked his wrist free and nursed it. Why did you do that?

I waited out my pounding pulse. He rubbed his wrist, hating me. Then he burst into tears. When I could, I held him. He tried to work his red and worthless mouth. I signaled that he had all the time on Earth.

He bared his palm and caught his breath. I was telling him about Mom’s video. He said his parents said there was more to her crash than people knew. Jayden said they think that Mom was—

I pressed his lips, as if I could push the thought back in. “It was an accident, Robbie. Nobody thinks anything else.”

That’s what I told him! But he kept on saying it. Like he knew the truth. That’s why I went nuts .

“You know? I might have slugged him myself.”

Half a syllable came up out of his throat, lost between sob and laugh. Great . He patted blindly at my upper arm. Then we’d both be toast .

“You’re not toast, Robbie. Get a tissue and wipe.”

His half-formed features smeared under his pressing hands. The squall had blown over, leaving him clear, small, but still winded.

So what did they mean, Jayden’s parents?

What kind of people knew their son was torturing mine with something they themselves had said, and didn’t alert me when I called them? Scared and scrambling, like everyone.

I’m nine, Dad. I can handle it .

I was forty-five, and couldn’t. “Robbie? There were witnesses. Everyone agrees. Something ran in front of her car.”

What do you mean? Like a person?

“An animal.” He frowned, baffled, like some cartoon boy. “You remember it was dark and icy?”

He nodded at a tiny model he was making of that evening, a foot in front of his eyes. January twelfth. Nine p.m .

“It ran in front of her car. She must have jerked the wheel. The car skidded, and that’s how she crossed the center line.”

He kept his eyes on his tiny simulation. Then he asked a question I should have been ready for. Such an obvious thing. What kind of animal?

I panicked. “Nobody knows for sure.”

Maybe a marten, or something really rare? Maybe it was a wolverine .

“I don’t know, buddy. Nobody does.”

Calculations ran through his head. The oncoming car. The nearby pedestrians. The two of us, waiting for her to come home. I lasted ten seconds. The shame of owning up couldn’t be worse than the nausea I felt.

“Robbie? They think it might have been an opossum. It was an opossum.”

But you said…

I needed him to say: The opossum is North America’s only marsupial, Dad. Things Aly taught him: how hard winters were on opossums, how frostbite punished their hairless ears and tails. But he scowled in silence at the thought of the most despised large animal on Earth.

He swung his head toward me, stunned. You lied to me, Dad. You said nobody knew what it was .

“Robbie. It was only for a minute.” But no: it was forever, really.

He tilted his head and shook, as if clearing his ears. His voice was flat and low. Everybody lies . I couldn’t tell if he was forgiving me or condemning all humanity.

It was way past bedtime. But there we were, the two of us on his bed, the last of the crew of a generational spacecraft that had come to the end of its possibilities long before reaching its new home.

So she chose not to hit it, even though…?

“She didn’t choose anything. There wasn’t time. It was a reflex.”

He thought for a while. At last he seemed appeased, although some part of him was still mapping the changing coastline between reflex and choice.

So Jayden’s parents are full of crap? Mom wasn’t trying to hurt herself?

I felt no need to reprimand the language. “Sometimes, the less people know about something, the more they want to talk about it.”

He got his notebook and scribbled in it, holding it away from me. He snapped it shut and squirreled it away in the nightstand drawer. Something brightened in him. Maybe he was happy that he might be friends with his friend again, tomorrow.

I stood and kissed him on the forehead. He let me, preoccupied with his hands, remembering how they’d deceived him.

How about this one, Dad? What does this mean?

He held one cupped hand upward on the stalk of his arm and twisted it back and forth. A tiny planet, spinning on its axis.

“Tell me.”

It means the world is turning and I’m good with everything .

We traded the signal, and he nodded. I told him I was glad he was who he was. I twisted my own hand in the air again by way of saying good night. Then I turned out the light and left him to fall asleep in the comfort of my larger lie. I’ve always been especially good at lying by omission. And I lied wildly to him that night, by failing to tell him about the car’s other passenger, his unborn little sister.

HE WOKE UP SUNDAY in high excitement. Before dawn, he was climbing all over me, shaking me awake. Great idea, Dad. Listen to this .

I was still half-asleep, and I cranked at him. “Robbie, for God’s sake! It’s six in the morning!”

He stormed off and barricaded himself in his lair. It took forty minutes and the promise of blueberry pancakes to coax him out.

I waited until he was sluggish with carbs. “So let’s hear this great idea.”

He weighed the quid pro quos of forgiving me. His chin jutted out. I’m only telling you because I need your help .

“Understood.”

I’m going to paint every endangered species in America. Then I’ll sell them at the farmers’ market next spring. We can raise money and give it to one of Mom’s groups .

I knew he’d never be able to paint more than a fraction of them. But I also knew a great idea when I heard one. We cleaned up breakfast and headed to the Pinney branch of the public library.

My son loved the library. He loved putting books on hold online and having them waiting, bundled up with his name, when he came for them. He loved the benevolence that the stacks held out, their map of the known world. He loved the all-you-can-eat buffet of borrowing. He loved the lending histories stamped into the front of each book, the record of strangers who checked them out before him. The library was the best dungeon crawl imaginable: free loot for the finding, combined with the joy of leveling up.