Richard Powers - Bewilderment

They’ve been around for a billion years. They’ve learned some things .

He was tired now, impatient with my failure to see. What were the odds of any contact ending well? All human history answered that one.

That’s why the universe is silent, Dad. Everyone’s hiding. All the smart ones, anyway .

“BUT WE’VE SEEN REAL PROGRESS,” Martin Currier insisted. “You can’t deny that. More than anyone expected.”

We sat in a lunch booth in an abandoned dim sum shop almost shuttered by the Asian student visa crisis. The entire campus—all of American academia—was reeling. Those foreign students whose visas hadn’t been curtailed were hiding out indoors. The crowded, cosmopolitan summer session had thinned out to a few safe white people.

Currier’s chin nudged his point home. “No one promised you a cure.”

I wanted to slap the bottom of his coffee cup as he lifted it to his face. “He won’t get out of bed. I have to go to war just to get him up and dressed. He doesn’t want to go outside. He’s ready to go to sleep again as soon as we have lunch. Thank God it’s summer vacation, or his school would be riding me again.”

“And it’s been like this…?”

“For days.”

Currier lifted a dumpling to his lips with chopsticks and chewed. Some lump of gluten and pride, insoluble in tea, stuck in his Adam’s apple. “Maybe it’s time to think about a very low-dose regimen of an antidepressant.”

The word filled me with animal panic. He saw.

“Eight million children in the country take psychoactive drugs. They’re not ideal, but they can work.”

“If eight million children are taking psychoactive drugs, something isn’t working.”

The senior research professor shrugged. Concession or objection—I couldn’t tell. I searched a for a way out. “Could Robbie be… I don’t know. Starting to tolerate or habituate to the sessions? Could the effects be wearing off faster?”

“I can’t imagine. In most subjects, we see durable improvement lasting for weeks after each training.”

“Then why is he sliding down again?”

Currier raised his gaze to the television screen on the wall opposite our table. In the record heat, clusters of lethal bacteria were spreading up and down the Florida coast. The President was telling reporters, Maybe it’s entirely natural. Maybe it isn’t. People are saying…

“Maybe his reactions are entirely understandable.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, although my neck hair knew.

His frown was remarkably like his smile. “Clinicians and theorists are rarely going to agree on what constitutes mental health. Is it the ability to function productively in hard conditions? Or is it more a matter of appropriate response? Constant, cheerful optimism may not be the healthiest reaction to…” He nodded at the TV.

I had an awful thought: Maybe the last few months of neural feedback were hurting Robbie. In the face of the world’s basic brokenness, more empathy meant deeper suffering. The question wasn’t why Robin was sliding down again. The question was why the rest of us were staying so insanely sanguine.

Currier flipped a hand in the air. “He’s scoring much higher on self-control and resilience. He’s so much better at coping with uncertainty than he was when he first came to see us. All right: So he’s still angry. He’s still depressed. Honestly, Theo? I’d be concerned if he weren’t upset, these days.”

We finished eating. Martin argued over the morality of my paying for our tab, but the fight wasn’t vigorous. We walked back across campus. I’d made a mistake, going out without sunblock. It was only June, but I couldn’t breathe. Currier struggled, too. He held a surgical mask to his face. “Sorry. I know how ridiculous this looks. But my allergies are off the charts.” At least we weren’t in Southern California, where weeks of Code Red air from wildfires had sealed millions inside.

The protection of DecNef seemed to be ending. For a while it had kept Robin happy and me safe from having to drug my son. Now even Currier was suggesting it. One small conflagration at school and the choice would no longer be mine.

“He keeps asking me how Aly fought a losing battle for years without getting beaten by it.” Currier’s expression was unreadable behind his mask. I pressed on blindly. “I wonder the same thing. She used to get angry. She got depressed. A lot.” I didn’t much care to tell her old birding friend about her night terrors. “But she blew right through.”

His smile was audible, even behind his mask. “His mother had some prize brain-body chemistry.”

We paused on University Avenue near the Discovery Center, where our paths divided. I braced myself for another suggestion that it was time for the trial-and-error of child brain cocktails. But Currier removed his mask and nursed an expression that I couldn’t decode.

“We could learn her secret. Robin could tell us himself.”

“What in the world are you talking about?”

“I still have Aly’s run.”

Angers flooded me from many directions, none of them useful. “You what ? You saved our recordings?”

“One of them.”

I knew without asking. He’d pitched my Admiration and Grief and her Vigilance. He’d kept her Ecstasy.

“You’re saying you could train Robin on Aly’s old brain scan?”

Currier sized up the wonder of it down on the pavement near his feet. “Your son could learn how to put himself into an emotional state his mother once generated. It might be motivating. It could answer his question.”

The colors of Plutchik’s wheel spun around me. Stabs of orange interest gave way to shards of green fear. The past was turning as porous and ambiguous as the future. We were making it up, the story of life in this place, as surely as I made up the bedtime stories of alien life my son hadn’t yet outgrown.

I looked down both long diagonals of the sidewalk intersection: not an Asian student in sight. I’d missed something obvious, in over thirty years of reading and two thousand science fiction books: there was no place stranger than here.

THE QUESTION GOT HIM OUT OF BED. He looked at me, his face a nursery of stars. They have Mom’s brain? She’s in the experiment?

I answered with every adult reservation, but it didn’t matter. He all but jumped me.

Holy crow. Dad! Why didn’t you tell me?

He took my face in his palms and made me swear solemnly that I wasn’t lying. It was like the two of us had stumbled on a video clip that no one knew existed, the record of a day that had been sealed off forever. Peace came over him, as if all would be well now, whatever the outcome. He turned his head to look out through his bedroom window at the summer rains. His eyes had a calm resolve, resigned to anything existence might throw at him. He’d never be laid low again.

I WAS PACING IN THE LAB’S FOYER when he came from the first session. He’d trained for ninety minutes. Colored dots, musical pitches, and other feedback helped him to find and match the patterns of his mother’s brain. I smiled, faking a calm I didn’t have. Robin must have known I was crazy for anything he could tell me.

Ginny brought him from the test room. Her arm draped over his shoulder while his hand reached up to clutch the sleeve of her lab coat. Ginny looked as casual as I was trying to be. She leaned down and asked, “You cool, Brain Boy? Want to sit in my office for a minute?”

He loved to sit at Ginny’s desk and read her collection of hipster comics. Ordinarily he’d have jumped at the offer. He shook his head. I’m cool . Then, as his mother had reminded him a million times in life, he added, Thank you .