Richard Powers - Bewilderment

“Like Aly for Alyssa. And Ally, because she was my ally.”

Miss Lissy .

“She never liked that one.”

Mom. You called her Mom!

“Sometimes. Yes.”

That is so flipping weird . I reached out to rough his hair. He jerked away but gave me a pass. How did I get my name again ?

He knew how he got his name. He’d heard the story more often than was healthy. But he hadn’t asked for months, and I didn’t mind repeating it.

“On our first date, your mother and I went birding.”

Before Madison. Before everything .

“Before everything. Your mother was brilliant! She kept spotting them left and right. Warblers and thrushes and flycatchers—every one of those birds was an old friend. She didn’t even have to see them. She knew them by ear. Meanwhile, there I was, poking around, stumbling over these confusing little brown jobs that I couldn’t tell apart…”

Wishing you’d asked her to the movies?

“Ah. So you have heard this one before.”

Maybe .

“At last I saw an amazing patch of bright orange-red. I was saved. I started shouting, Ooh, ooh, ooh! ”

And Mom said, “What do you see? What do you see?”

“She was very excited for me.”

Then you swore .

“I may have sworn, yes. I was so humiliated. ‘Gee. Sorry. It’s only a robin.’ I figured I’d never see this woman again.”

He waited for the punch line that, for some reason, he needed to hear out loud once more.

“But your mother was looking through her binoculars like my find was the single most exotic life-form she’d ever seen. Without taking her eyes off it, she said, ‘The robin is my favorite bird.’”

That’s when you fell in love with her .

“That’s when I knew I wanted to spend as much time around her as I could. I told her so, later, when I knew her better. We started saying it all the time. Whenever we were doing anything together—reading the paper or brushing our teeth or doing the taxes or taking out the trash. Whatever blah or boring thing we were taking for granted. We’d trade a look, read each other’s minds, and one of us would blurt out, ‘The robin is my favorite bird!’”

He stood and stacked his dish onto mine, brought them to the sink, and turned on the faucet.

“Hey! It’s your birthday. My turn to wash dishes.”

He sat back down across from me with his Look me in the eye look.

Can I ask you something? No lies. Honesty is important to me, Dad. Was the robin actually her favorite bird?

I didn’t know how to be a parent. Most of what I did, I remembered from what she used to do. I made enough mistakes on any one day to scar him for life. My only hope was that all the errors somehow canceled each other out.

“Actually? Your mother’s favorite bird was the one in front of her.”

The answer agitated him. Our curious boy, as strange as anyone. Weighed down by the world’s history, before he even learned to talk. Six going on sixty , Aly said, a few months before she died.

“But the robin was the national bird, for her and me. It kept things special. We just had to say the word, and life got better. We never thought of naming you anything else.”

He bared his teeth. Did you have any idea what being a Robin is like?

“What do you mean?”

I mean, at school? At the park? Everywhere? I have to deal with it, every day .

“Robbie? Listen to me. Are kids bullying you again?”

He closed one eye and pulled away. Does the entire third grade being a total jerk-face count?

I held out my hands, asking forgiveness. Alyssa used to say, The world is going to take this child apart .

“It’s a dignified name. For men and women. You could do good things with it.”

On some other planet, maybe. A thousand years ago. Thanks again, guys .

He gazed into his microscope’s eyepiece, avoiding me. The note-taking grew diligent. Someone looking in from outside might have thought his research was real. In a confidential report, his second-grade teacher had called him slow but not always accurate . She was right about the slow, wrong about the accurate. Given time, he’d converge on more accuracy than his teacher could imagine.

I went out on the deck to breathe in the trees. A tract of forest ran in all directions. Five minutes later—it must have felt an eternity to him—Robin came out and slipped underneath my arm.

Sorry, Dad. It’s a good name. And I’m okay with being… you know. Confusing .

“Everyone’s confusing. And everyone’s confused.”

He put a sheet of paper into my hand. Check it out. What do you think?

From the upper left, a colored-pencil bird, in profile, looked toward the center of the page. He’d drawn it well, down to the streaked throat and white splotches around the eye.

“Well, look at that. Your mother’s favorite bird.”

How about this one?

A second bird in profile looked back from the top right. This one, too, was unmistakable: a raven with its wings tucked in, like a tuxedoed man pacing with his hands behind his back. My family name derived from Bran —raven in Irish. “Nice. From the Mind of Robin Byrne?”

He took the sheet back and appraised it, already planning slight corrections. Can we print up some stationery from this when we get back? I really, really need some stationery .

“This could happen, Birthday Boy.”

I TOOK HIM TO THE PLANET DVAU, about the size and warmth of ours. It had mountains and plains and surface water, a thick atmosphere with clouds, wind, and rain. Rivers wore the rocks into great channels that ran the sediment down to rolling seas.

My son jittered, taking it in. It looks like here, Dad? It looks like Earth?

“A little.”

What’s different?

The answer wasn’t obvious, on the reddish rocky coast where we stood. We turned and looked. Across the entire landscape, nothing grew.

It’s dead?

“Not dead. Try your microscope.”

He knelt and scooped some film from a tidal pool onto a slide. Creatures everywhere: spirals and rods, footballs and filaments, ribbed, pored, or lined with flagella. He could have taken forever, just sketching all the kinds.

You mean, it’s just young? It’s only getting started?

“It’s three times older than the Earth.”

He looked around the blighted landscape. Then what’s wrong? For my boy, large creatures wandering everywhere were a God-given right.

I told him Dvau was almost perfect—the right place in the right kind of galaxy, with the right metallicity and low risk of annihilation from radiation or other fatal disturbances. It revolved at the right distance around the right kind of star. Like Earth, it had floating plates and volcanoes and a strong magnetic field, which made for stable carbon cycles and steady temperatures. Like Earth, it was showered with water from comets.

Holy crow. How many things did Earth need?

“More than a planet deserves.”

He snapped his fingers, but they were too rubbery and small to make a sound. Got it. Meteors!

But Dvau, like Earth, had large planets in a farther orbit shielding it from extreme bombardment.

Then what’s wrong? He seemed about to cry.

“No large moon. Nothing nearby to stabilize its spin.”

We lifted into near orbit and the world wobbled. We watched as the days changed chaotically and April blinked into December, then August, then May.

We watched for millions of years. Microbes bumped up against their limits, like a float thumping a dock. Every time life tried to break loose, the planet twirled, beating it back down to extremophiles.