Richard Powers - Bewilderment

Over the course of five hours, Robin became someone else. Maybe it was the trillion dollars of advertising that rained down each year, teaching children how to confuse themselves with stuff. Every nine-year-old Earthling has long since learned how to pitch a sale. But I never imagined how cunning Robin could be at it, or how good. So good that for an entire Saturday, he passed for a native of this planet.

He reinvented every borderline-shyster trick in the traveling salesman’s book. What do you think would be a good price? I spent hours making that one! The golden-crowned sifaka matches your eyes. Nobody wants the thicklip pupfish; I don’t know why . He accosted gray-haired ladies from twenty yards away. Help keep a beautiful creature alive, ma’am? Best few dollars you’ll ever spend .

People bought because he made them laugh. Several got a kick out of the salesman routine or wanted to reward a budding entrepreneur. Some took pity on him; others just wanted to assuage their guilt. Maybe someone among the hundred purchasers even liked the art well enough to hang it on her walls. But most people who stopped and bought were simply patronizing a child who’d spent months making things of little value on lots of misplaced hope.

In six hours, he made nine hundred and eighty-eight dollars. The guy who took our booth fee bought the black-chested spiny-tailed iguana—not Robin’s most successful effort—for twelve bucks to make the grand total an even thousand. Robin was beside himself. Months of single-minded work had led to triumph. Any sum with that many zeroes in it was indistinguishable from a fortune. Who knew what such an amount might do?

Dad, Dad, Dad: Can we mail it tonight?

He’d worked for way too long for me to argue with this rush to the finish line. We took the money to the bank. I wrote a check to send off to the conservation organization he’d chosen after hours of agonizing. That night, after plant-based burgers and a couple of Inga videos, we lay reading on opposite ends of the sofa, our feet launching little border wars into the space between us. He closed his book and studied the beaded ceiling.

I feel great, Dad. Like I could die now and be pretty happy with how things went .

“Don’t.”

Uh, oh-kee , he said, in his clown voice.

Two weeks later, he got a letter from his not-for-profit saviors of choice. I put it on the front table for him to find when he came home from school. He opened it in high excitement, tearing the envelope. The letter thanked him for his contribution. It bragged about the fact that almost seventy cents on every dollar went directly or indirectly toward slowing the rate of habitat destruction in ten different countries. It suggested that if he wanted to donate another two thousand five hundred dollars, now was a good time, because matching funds and favorable exchange rates put them within reach of their quarterly fundraising goal.

Matching funds?

“That’s when big donors give a dollar for every dollar someone else gives.”

They have the money… but they won’t give it unless…?

“It’s incentive. Like your two-for-one deals, at the farmers’ market.”

That’s different . Evil thoughts curdled his forehead. They have the money, but they keep it back? And only seven hundred of my dollars goes to the animals? Species are dying, Dad. Thousands!

He shouted at me, hands flailing. I suggested dinner, but he refused. He went to his room, slammed his door, and wouldn’t come out, even to play his favorite board game. I listened for crashing, but the silence was scarier. I sneaked outside and peeked in his window. He was lying in bed, scribbling into a notebook. Plans everywhere.

Fourteen months earlier, he’d punched his bedroom door and fractured two bones in his hand because I’d accidentally thrown away a trading card of his. Now, faced with this crushing thank-you letter, he was concentrating himself, writing out some secret set of action points. For that remarkable metamorphosis, I had Martin Currier’s neural feedback training to thank. Somehow, though, standing outside in the chilly spring wind while the maples showered me with red flowers, I wasn’t sure Thankful was the emotion on Marty’s ambiguous color wheel that best matched what I was feeling.

Right before bedtime, Robin came out of his room. He waved a handful of handwritten notes at me. Can we apply for a protest permit?

Little yellow warning triangles filled my head. “What are we protesting?”

He shot me a look so filled with disdain that I felt like his disappointing child. By way of answer, he held out a sheet of eleven-by-seventeen drawing paper, his sketch for a larger placard. In the middle of the rectangular landscape were the words:

In a ring around these words ran a cartoon bestiary of soon-to-vanish plants and animals. My pride in his skill was offset by my dismay at the slogan.

“Is the protest going to be… just you?”

You’re saying it’s no good?

“No, I’m not saying that. It’s just that protests usually work better when you join with other people.”

Do you know any protests I can join? My head dipped. He touched my wrist. I need to start somewhere, Dad. Maybe it’ll inspire other people .

“Where do you want to protest?”

His lips pinched and he shook his head. The man who’d watched all those Inga Alder videos with him—the man who’d married his mother—demeaned himself with such a question.

Duh. At the Capitol .

THE PEOPLE HAVE A RIGHT TO ASSEMBLE PEACEFULLY .

So my son informed me. Still, we read over the sections of the municipal code. We learned how the Constitution was one thing and the local powers of enforcement were another. That alone was enough civics lesson to show why legal public demonstration was never going to threaten the status quo.

Wow. They don’t make it easy, do they? What if something really bad happens and a bunch of people want to protest, like, that same night?

“Good question, Robbie.” One that was getting better with each passing month. I wanted to tell him that democracy had a way of working out, however ugly things got. But my son had this thing about honesty.

He spent three days on his poster. When he finished, it was a thing of beauty, halfway between an illuminated manuscript and a page from The Adventures of Tintin . His palette was simple, the lines clean, and the vibrant animals large enough to see from far away. Not bad, for a child who struggled with grasping the minds of others. He also prepared an illustrated handout of twenty-three species threatened or endangered in the state of Wisconsin, including the Canada lynx, gray wolf, piping plover, and Karner blue butterfly. What else, Dad? What else?

“Do you want to add a little message for the legislators?”

What do you mean?

“To say what actions you want them to take?”

His puzzled look turned to distress. If his own father was so blindly stupid, what hope was there for the world? I just want to stop the killing .

I knew it was asking for trouble, but I let his slogan ride. help me. i’m dying. Who knew what might move a stranger? After months of neural feedback, his empathy was surpassing mine. He and I would learn together how to enter the world that his mother had lived in like a native.

Dad? When will everyone be there?

“Who?”

The governor and the senators and the assembly people. Maybe those Supreme Court guys? I want as many of them as possible to see me .

“Weekday mornings, probably. But you can’t miss any more school.”