Richard Powers - Bewilderment

He must have felt my deflation, because the little victory made him darken. He looked at me, ready to beg me to change my mind. Dad? What if it doesn’t help at all?

NO SITTER IN MY CONTACTS LIST could watch him all weekday on such short notice. Fortunately, I didn’t teach that day and could work from home. At quarter to nine, while canceling and rescheduling appointments, I got the automated text. Your child is absent without excuse. Are you aware of this (please reply Y or N)? I pressed Y , then phoned the office and told a curt, skeptical staffer that Robin had a doctor’s appointment I’d forgotten to call in.

I applied myself to email triage, then finished the delinquent edits for the article for Stryker: dimethyl sulfide and sulfur dioxide in our models of atmospheric disequilibrium. Sulfur-based life, in place of carbon: I thought about what lunch might look like in such a place, while cooking up Robin’s favorite lentils with masses of melt-away onions and the barest hint of tomato. In the afternoon, Robin knocked on my office door with several small questions about his paintings for which any answer at all would do. He was lonely. By morning, I figured, he’d be ready to head back to school.

We knocked off again for dinner. Robin wanted Aly’s signature eggplant casserole. He insisted on laying out the layers. Our finished result was not a success, but he ate with the appetite of someone who’d put in a full day. After dinner, I asked for an exhibition. A few paintings remained from the many that he’d destroyed in anger. He mounted the day’s work on a bare wall in the dining room using bits of reusable tape. I was forbidden to come in until he said to. There was an ivory-billed woodpecker and a red wolf and a Franklin’s bumblebee and a giant anole and a clump of desert yellowhead. Some were more skillful than others. But they all vibrated, and the colors shouted, Save us .

That’s a bird and a mammal and an insect and a reptile and a plant . To go with yesterday’s amphibian .

I still don’t see how a nine-year-old held still long enough to paint them. He was channeling some other maker. “Robin. They’re incredible.”

The woodpecker and the anole might already be extinct. How much should I ask for them? I want to send in as much as I can .

“You could ask people how much they might want to pay.” Used-car trick, put to a good cause. He took the pictures down and stashed them in his portfolio. “Careful! Don’t crumple them.”

So many more to do, Dad .

The next morning, after breakfast, he announced he was staying home to work some more.

“No way. Get going, now. We had a deal.”

When? What deal? You said you believed in me!

In one quick escalation, he went from nine to sixteen. Blocked from doing right, he stared me down with a fury bordering on hatred. His lips pursed and he spit near my feet. Then he wheeled, ran back down the hall to his bedroom, and slammed his door. Twenty seconds later, a skin-freezing scream turned into the thunder of toppling furniture. I pushed in his door against a mass of junk piled up behind it. He’d pulled down a five-foot-high bookshelf, and books, toys, model spacecraft, and arts-and-crafts trophies spilled across his bedroom floor. When I stepped into the room, he screamed again and swung Aly’s old ukulele into the multi-paned window, breaking both the glass and the instrument.

He lunged at me, howling. We fought. He tried to claw my face. I took his arm and twisted way too hard. Robin screamed and dropped sobbing on the floor. I wanted to die. The back of his hand was half a crushed butterfly. Aly and I had had a pact, the only one she ever made me swear to. Theo? Whatever happens, we must never hit that child . I looked around the room, ready to throw myself at her mercy. But she was nowhere.

ON GEMINUS, WE WERE TRAPPED on opposite sides of a terrible meridian. The planet’s sun was small, cool, and red. Geminus lay so close in that the star had captured its rotation. One side remained forever in scalding light. The other side stayed night, icy and perpetual.

Life germinated in the strip of twilight between permanent noon and midnight. In that band between burning and frozen, winds whipped the air and currents drove the water. Creatures evolved to exploit the loops of energy, moving bits of morning to warm the blackness and bits of night to cool the endless blaze.

Life pushed deeper into both halves of the wind-whipped landscape. Tendrils of habitability seeped down canyons and up watersheds, creeping from the temperate boundary toward the extremes. Life on Geminus split into two kingdoms, one of ice, one of fire, each adapting to half of the bipolar planet. For the boldest pilgrims, there was no turning back. Even the temperate boundary strip became fatal.

Intelligence arose twice. Each kind solved its own impossible climate. But the minds of day failed to find the night intelligible, while night’s minds couldn’t comprehend the day. They shared only one bit of common knowledge: life could never exist “over the edge.”

We traveled to Geminus together, my son and I. But we each arrived alone. I found myself in a wind-fed channel on the side of constant day. I searched throughout the habitable strip but couldn’t find him. The local inhabitants were no help. I’d imagined that people of endless day would be cheerful and upbeat. But their sky was filled with one single unchanging light, blocking out all signs of a universe. They lived as if there could be nothing but Here and Now and this. The thought stunted them. Their sciences and arts had stalled in infancy. They never even invented the telescope.

On Geminus, seasons were places. Walking a few miles toward the boundary belt took me from August to January. He had to be somewhere on the side of constant night. What people would he find there, shaped by lethal cold? Cunning and ingenious, diggers of heat mines and farmers of subterranean fungi. Brutal, barbaric, and depressed killers, competing for every priceless calorie.

He had been looking for me as well. Nearing the temperate boundary belt, I saw him a long way off, rushing from the other side. I broke into a run, but he held up his hands to stop me. I realized, there on the edge of darkness: he had seen the raw night sky. He’d looked at stars as no one on Earth ever would again. He’d seen change and time, cycles and variety. Math and stories, as countless, subtle, and various as the black-backed constellations.

He called to me, from over the standing edge of dark. Dad. Dad! You have no idea . But I was trapped in light and couldn’t cross over.

LOTS OF PEOPLE LOVED MY WIFE. And Aly loved lots of people, as if that were the most natural thing in the world. She’d had partners before me and stayed on good terms with most of them, even with one woman who’d broken her heart. Flirting was a part of her job. I watched her work hallways full of legislators and ballrooms full of donors as if they were all her dear friends.

She was on the road a lot, directing her NGO across ten midwestern states. For the first two years of our marriage, it used to kill me. She’d call me from some budget interstate hotel to say, We went to a great little Italian place downtown , and when I croaked a casual, “We?” she’d say, Oh, didn’t I say? Michael Maxwell’s in town. My ex from grad school? And that would be another eight hours of night thoughts I didn’t need.

Her ten-state area hosted an equal-opportunity harem of devoted women and men. Some of these friendships I knew about; others came as surprises, at her memorial service. The one time I asked whether she was ever tempted to stray, her jaw popped open in astonishment. Oh my God. I am so not built that way! I’d split into little pieces if I ever tried that .