Richard Powers - Bewilderment

“This isn’t quite like that.”

Do you think that scanner could teach me to paint better?

It seemed like something Currier might try one day. “You paint perfectly. They could use your brain to train other people to paint better.”

He beamed and ran to get his portfolio to show me his latest masterpiece, a birdwing pearlymussel. He had birds and fish and fungi now, and he was working on snails and bivalves.

We’re going to need a big table at the market, Dad .

I held the painting with both hands, thinking: No therapy could be better than this. But then my boy looked down and smoothed the paper with his guilty hands, and I saw the marks of enraged crumpling. He traced his fingers on the painting with contrition. I wish I could see one of these. For real, I mean .

I GAVE CURRIER’S HANDOUTS to Dr. Lipman, along with three articles touting the therapeutic potential of the research. She seemed satisfied. Excited by the prospect of finger-painting with his brain, Robbie had two mercifully quiet weeks. For two weeks, I returned to my neglected duties and undid the damage to my in-box.

For Thanksgiving, we drove to Aly’s parents on Chicago’s West Side. The postwar, crowded suburban Tudor was the usual pressure cooker of glucose-fueled cousins, around-the-clock wall-sized sports no one was watching, and political shouting matches. Half of Aly’s extended family backed one of the opposition candidates now gearing up for the primaries. The other half backed our defiant President in his return to the world of half a century ago. By noon on Thursday, the White House’s new decree requiring everyone in the country to carry proof of citizenship or visas had Robin’s blood relations sniping at each other across the trenches of a static front.

His grandmother spoke the Thanksgiving dinner prayer. The whole table said amen and began passing the food in four different directions. Robbie said, Nobody’s listening to that prayer, you know. We’re on a rock, in space, and there are hundreds of billions of other rocks just like ours .

Adele was horrified. She gaped at me. “Is that any way to raise a child? What would his mother say?”

I didn’t tell her what her daughter would have said. Robin did that for me. My mother’s dead. And God didn’t help her .

The bickering table fell silent. Everyone looked to me to correct my son. Adele was on him before I could say a thing. “You need to apologize to me, young man.” She turned to me. I turned to Robin.

I’m sorry, Grandma , he said. And the whole table went back to bickering. Only his favorite aunt and I, seated at each side of him, heard him mutter under his breath like Galileo, but you’re wrong .

Throughout the meal, Robin pecked away at his beans, cranberries, and militantly gravy-free potatoes. His grandpa Cliff kept riding him, from across the table. “Have a little turkey, man. It’s Thanksgiving!”

When Robin finally blew, it was geothermal. He started screaming, I don’t eat animals. I don’t eat animals! Don’t make me eat animals!

I had to take him outside. We walked around the block three times. He kept saying, Let’s go home, Dad. Let’s just go home. It’s easier to be thankful there .

We got back to Madison and finished the holiday alone together. He started the treatment the following Monday afternoon. He slid into the same fMRI tube his mother once disappeared into. The techs asked him to hold still, close his eyes, and say nothing. But when they played him the Moonlight Sonata, my son laughed and shouted, I know that song!

“WATCH THE DOT IN THE MIDDLE OF THE SCREEN.” Robin lay tiny in the scanner, staring at the image on the monitor above him. Pads held his head swaddled in place. Martin Currier sat at the panel in the control room. I sat next to him. He coached Robin through the earbuds. “Now let the dot move to the right.”

My son fidgeted. He wanted to click a mouse or reach up and swipe the screen. How?

“Remember, Robbie. No talking. Just relax and hold still. When you’re in the right mood, the dot will know it and start to move. Just stay with it and let it travel. Try to keep it at a middle height. Don’t let it go too far up or down.”

Robin held still. We watched his results on a monitor in the booth. The dot jigged and jagged like a water strider on the surface of a pond.

Currier walked me through it again. “He’s basically practicing mindfulness. Like doing meditation, but with instant, powerful cues steering him toward the desired emotional state. The more he learns how to get into that state, the easier that state is to get into. Get into it often enough, and we can take away the training wheels. He’ll own it.”

I watched my boy play a game of Blind Man’s Bluff with his own thoughts: Colder, colder, warmer…

Currier pointed as the dot jerked toward the upper left quadrant. “See? He’s frustrated. Now he’s getting angry. Maybe mixed with a little sadness.”

I pointed at the right-hand center, the place Robin was trying to reach. “What does this represent?”

Currier gave me that playful look that so annoyed me. “Step one of Enlightenment.” Half a minute passed. Then another. The dot settled down and drifted back toward the screen’s center. “He’s getting the hang of this,” Marty whispered. “He’s going to be fine.” Which made me anxious in whole new and creative ways.

I never knew what passed through my son’s singular head at any given moment. Few days went by when he didn’t surprise me. I know less about the planet he lived on than I know about Gliese 667 Cc. But I do know that when Robin settled into a groove, few things could deflect him. The dot swung in sullen, wary circles. It crept rightward under his nudging, even as it nudged him back. Massy and reluctant, the dot moved like a floater in your eye when you try to look at it. It crept, rocked back, and crept again, like a car getting pushed from a snowbank.

The prospect of victory excited Robin. Right at the finish line, he laughed, and the dot veered into the lower left quadrant. Inside the tube, Robin whispered, Shit , and the dot shot wildly around the screen. Contrition was instant. Sorry to curse, Dad . I’ll do the dishes for a week .

Martin and I started laughing. So did the techs. It took a minute for everyone to sober up and continue the session. But Robin had found the trick of it, and after a few more false starts and faster recoveries, my son and his dot achieved their joint goal.

A tech named Ginny adjusted Robin’s position in the scanner. “Wow,” Ginny told him. “You’re a natural at this.”

Currier tweaked the software and started a new run. “This time make the dot as big as the background shadow. Then hold it there.”

This new dot sat at the center of the screen. Behind it sat a paler disk, the target that Currier asked him to aim for. The dot shrank and grew in spasmodic concert with a different region inside Robin’s head. “We’re training intensity now,” Currier said. The dot bobbed like an oscilloscope wave or the bouncing volume-level lights on an old stereo. Robbie fell into a trance. The fluctuating dot calmed down. Gradually it grew from dime-sized to a half-dollar. He brought it into the target zone, then overshot. That upset him, and the dot fell away to nothing. He started again, lifting it on the wavering power of his mood alone.

Each time the dot aligned with the template size, it turned dusky rose. When the dot filled its background shadow long enough to glow, the scanner resounded with a short, victorious bell, and the dot reset.