Richard Powers - Bewilderment

Oddly enough, there’s no name in the DSM for the compulsion to diagnose people.

When his school suspended Robin for two days and put their own doctors on the case, I felt like the last reactionary throwback. What was there to explain? Synthetic clothing gave him hideous eczema. His classmates harassed him for not understanding their vicious gossip. His mother was crushed to death when he was seven. His beloved dog died of confusion a few months later. What more reason for disturbed behavior did any doctor need?

Watching medicine fail my child, I developed a crackpot theory: Life is something we need to stop correcting. My boy was a pocket universe I could never hope to fathom. Every one of us is an experiment, and we don’t even know what the experiment is testing.

My wife would have known how to talk to the doctors. Nobody’s perfect , she liked to say. But, man, we all fall short so beautifully .

HE WAS A BOY, so naturally he wanted to see Hillbilly Vegas. Three towns jammed together with two hundred places to order pancakes: What’s not to love?

We drove from the cabin, down seventeen winding miles along a stunning river. It took us almost an hour. Robin watched the water, scanning the rapids from the back seat. Wildlife bingo. His new favorite game.

Tall bird! He called out.

“What kind?”

He flipped through his field guide. I was afraid he might get carsick. Heron? He turned back to the river. Half a dozen more curves and he shouted again.

Fox! Fox! I saw him, Dad!

“Gray or red?”

Gray. Oh, man!

“The gray fox climbs persimmon trees to eat the fruit.”

No way . He looked it up in his Mammals of the Smokies . The book confirmed me. He groaned and slugged my arm. How do you know all this stuff, anyway?

Skimming his books before he woke up helped me keep one step ahead of him. “Hey. I am a biologist, aren’t I?”

Ass… trobiologist .

His grin tested whether he’d just crossed a terrible line. I gaped, equal parts stunned and amused. His problem was anger, but it almost never turned mean. Honestly, a little meanness might have protected him.

“Whoa, mister. You just missed getting a time-out for the rest of your eighth year on Earth.”

His grin firmed, and he returned to scouting the river. But a mile down that winding mountain road, he put his hand on my shoulder. I was just joking, Dad .

I watched the road and told him, “Me, too.”

We stood in line for the Ripley’s Odditorium. The place unnerved him. Kids his age ran all over, forming bands of improvised mayhem. Their screaming made Robbie wince. Thirty minutes of the horror show and he begged me to leave. He did better with the aquarium, even if the stingray he wanted to sketch wouldn’t hold still for its portrait.

After a lunch of french fries and onion rings, we took the lift to the sky platform. He almost vomited all over the glass floor. White-knuckled, jaw clenched, he declared it fantastic. Back in the car, he seemed relieved to have gotten Gatlinburg out of the way.

He was thoughtful on the drive back to the cabin. That would not have been Mom’s favorite place on the face of the planet .

“No. Probably not even in her top three.”

He laughed. I could get him to laugh, if I chose my moments.

That night was too cloudy for stargazing, but we slept outside again, on our rustic cushions with their parades of elk and bear. Two minutes after Robin snapped off his flashlight I whispered, “Your birthday tomorrow.” But he was asleep already. I recited his mother’s prayer softly for the both of us, so I could reassure him if he woke up horrified at forgetting.

HE WOKE ME IN THE NIGHT. How many stars did you say there are?

I couldn’t be angry. Even yanked from sleep, I was glad he was still stargazing.

“Multiply every grain of sand on Earth by the number of trees. One hundred octillion.”

I made him say twenty-nine zeros. Fifteen zeros in, his laughter turned to groans.

“If you were an ancient astronomer, using Roman numerals, you couldn’t have written the number down. Not even in your whole lifetime.”

How many have planets?

That number was changing fast. “Most probably have at least one. Many have several. The Milky Way alone might have nine billion Earth-like planets in their stars’ habitable zones. Add the dozens of other galaxies in the Local Group…”

Then, Dad…?

He was a boy attuned to loss. Of course the Great Silence hurt him. The outrageous size of emptiness made him ask the same question Enrico Fermi did over that famous lunch in Los Alamos, three quarters of a century ago. If the universe were larger and older than anyone could imagine, we had an obvious problem.

Dad? With all those places to live? How come nobody’s anywhere?

IN THE MORNING I PRETENDED I’d forgotten what day it was. My new nine-year-old saw through me. While I made super-deluxe oatmeal with half a dozen mix-ins, Robin bobbed in place, pushing off the counter and pogo-sticking with excitement. We set a land speed record eating.

Let’s open the presents .

“The what? You’re making a pretty big assumption, aren’t you?”

Not assumption. Hypothesis .

He knew what he was getting. He’d been bargaining with me for months: a digital microscope that attached to my tablet and let him display magnified images on the screen. He spent all morning trying out pond scum, cells from inside his cheek, and the underside of a maple leaf. He would have been happy looking at samples and sketching notes into his notebook for the remainder of our vacation.

Afraid of pushing him over the top, I wheeled out the cake I’d bought on the sly at the little 1950s grocery store at the bottom of the mountain. His face shone before he caught himself.

Cake, Dad?

He made a beeline for the box, which I’d failed to hide. He studied the ingredients, shaking his head.

Not vegan, Dad .

“Robbie. It’s your birthday. That only happens, what…? Barely once a year?”

He refused to smile. Butter. Dairy products. Egg. Mom would not have gone for it .

“Oh, I watched your mother eat cake, on more than one occasion!”

I regretted the words as soon as they left my mouth. He looked like a timid squirrel, not sure whether to take the outstretched goodness that he craved or to flee back into the woods.

When?

“She made exceptions now and then.”

Robin stared at the cake, a carroty, sinless thing whose virtue would have disgusted any other child. His brief little birthday Eden had just been overrun with snakes.

“It’s okay, champ. We can feed it to the birds.”

Well. We could try a little, first?

We did. Every time the taste of cake made him happy, he caught himself and grew thoughtful again.

How tall was she?

He knew her height. But today he needed a number.

“Five-foot-two. You’ll pass her, before long. She was a runner, remember?”

He nodded, more to himself than to me. Small but mighty .

She called herself that, when gearing up to go do battle at the Capitol. I liked to call her “compact, but planetary.” Stolen from a Neruda sonnet I once recited to her on an autumn night that ended in a winter. I had to resort to some other man’s words to ask her to marry me.

What did you call her?

It always rattled me when he read my mind. “Oh, all kinds of things. You remember.”

But like what?