Richard Powers - Bewilderment

What happens when they’re gone? When it’s just us? How is this going to end ?

I had no answer. We’d fall asleep spooned against each other, making what comfort we could. And every few nights, she’d wake up screaming again.

But until the end, there would be battle. She was built for it. One afternoon, I watched her in front of the bathroom mirror, suiting up for war: blush, mascara, hair gel, lip gloss. She’d helped draft a call for nonhuman rights that she planned to promote throughout the Upper Midwest. That meant playing on the animal emotions of lawmakers of both sexes, in ten different states.

Take no prisoners. Right, man?

The barnstorm campaign was to start that evening, on home turf, in the southern wing of the Wisconsin Capitol. She hummed a song as she dolled up. The cuckoo’s a fine bird, she sings as she does fly. And when she cries cuckoo, then summer is nigh . The bill she backed was decades ahead of its time. It had no chance in hell of passing, and she knew it. But Aly played the long game—a game as long as there was time left to play.

She came from the bathroom, glorious. She eyed me coyly. Hey! You’re the fella who once brought back my childhood stutter! For this, she rewarded me with a teasing feel.

She needed the car, for a reception afterward. That justified the hassle of parking downtown. I walked with her out to the driveway. With one hand on the driver’s-side door, she leaned forward and pointed campily in the air. All right, then. Avengers, assemble! She kissed me, nibbling my lip. Then she headed off to the Capitol. I would not see her again on this planet, except to identify the body.

THE FOOT TRAFFIC PICKED UP. People started to notice Robin. Several women approached near enough to make sure he was okay. Men walked by. One coiffed, gray-haired lady in a black skirt suit who looked like Aly’s mother came up to him like she was ready to dial 911. I stood to intervene, but Robin talked her down. She dove into her purse and produced a handful of bills, which she tried to press on him. He glanced at me, begging, but he knew the rules. The protest permit strictly prohibited fundraising.

He managed to hand out some flyers, mostly to bemused people who didn’t hang around to read them. The flyers rarely made it past the trash cans at the corners of the landscaped park. I figured his exploration of participatory democracy might last an hour, followed by a very short oral report at school the next day. But some combination of holy cause and many sessions of neural feedback turned my boy into a Zen bulldog. He dug in, developing a repertoire of playful patter with which he accosted people across the expanses of concrete and cut stone.

I sat on a backless bench with my laptop, tweaking a simulation of the atmospheres that might evolve on a Super Earth just discovered thirty light-years away. I got hungry before he did. I crossed to him, holding up the thermos of cold juice and the bag lunch he’d made for us the night before. He wolfed down half of a hummus-avocado sandwich, then ordered me back to my observation post, shaking his sign to make up for his few minutes away.

After lunch, time slowed down like some relativity thought experiment. I balanced my phone-tethered notebook computer on my lap and pretended to work while keeping one eye on my activist-in-training.

My in-box piled up with unaddressed urgencies. The department’s Chinese graduate students had had their student visas revoked. Even Jinjing, my assistant and die-hard Packers fan, who knew more about this country than I did: more collateral victims in the President’s two-front war against foreign powers and the scientific elites who supported them. Apparently God had made life on one planet only, and only one country of that planet’s dominant species needed to manage it. The department called an emergency faculty meeting for late that afternoon.

When I looked up to check on Robin, he had buttonholed a white-haired black man in a crisp gray suit. My son was shaking his hand-painted sign, scattering facts and figures. The man listened, suspicious. He began grilling Robin.

I closed my computer and walked over. “Everything all right here?”

The man turned to size me up. “Is this your son?”

“I’m sorry. Do you have a problem with something he’s doing?”

“I have a problem with you.” His voice was stentorian and suffered no fools. “Did you put him up to this? Why isn’t he in school? Is this your idea of manipulating strangers? What exactly are you trying to do?”

This is my protest , Robin said. I told you already. He has nothing to do with it .

“You left him out here unsupervised.”

“I did nothing of the sort. I was sitting right over there.”

The man turned to Robin. “Why didn’t you tell me that?”

We did everything legally. I’m just trying to get people to believe the truth .

The man turned back to me. He pointed at the sign. “Help me, i’m dying. You don’t think there’s something wrong with letting a young child stand in a public place, all by himself, holding—”

“Excuse me.” I held my shaking hands behind my back. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d interrupted anyone. “Who are you to tell me how to raise my child?”

“I’m the chief of staff of the assembly minority leader, and the father of four successful children. What are you teaching this boy, letting him stand out here by himself, holding this ? You should be connecting him with existing groups. He could be helping to organize other kids. Write letters. Work on specific and useful projects.” He looked me in the eye and shook his head. “I should report you for cruelty.”

Then he turned and climbed the steps and vanished into government. I wanted to shout after him: What do you mean, “successful children”?

I looked at Robin. He was crumpling a corner of his poster. His first crushing legislative defeat, and his bill hadn’t even been drafted.

I told you not to come over , he shouted. I was handling it .

“Robin. You’ve been here for a long time. Let’s go home.”

He didn’t look up. He didn’t even shake his head. I’m staying. And I’m coming back tomorrow .

“Robin. I need to get to a meeting. We have to leave now.”

Hatred for his own kind rose in his eyes, as plain as the words on his placard. His brain was struggling to raise and lower its own pitches, to move the dots around, to grow and shrink them in the theater of his own head. His shoulders collapsed, and he turned away. He seemed ready to run or yell or smash his sign against the ground. When he spoke again, his voice was small and lost.

How did Mom do it? Every day. For years .

I COULDN’T FIND THE PLANET ISOLA. I looked across large swaths, for many years. My son came along to keep me company and witness my confusion.

“It should be right around here. All the data say so.”

He no longer put much stock in data. My son was losing his faith in other planets.

The strange thing was, we could see it from far away. Transit photometry and radial velocity and gravitational microlensing all agreed on its exact location. We knew its mass and radius. We’d calculated its rotations and revolutions down to very small margins of error. But when my son and I came within a few thousand kilometers, it disappeared. The space where it should have been turned empty in every direction.

He took pity on my trouble with the obvious. They’re hiding, Dad. The creatures on Isola are going into our minds and cloaking themselves .

“What? How?”