Richard Powers - Bewilderment

THE NEXT-DOOR NEIGHBOR CALLED to say that Robin was out behind the house. “He’s very still. He’s not moving. I think there’s something wrong with him.”

I wanted to say: Of course, there’s something wrong with him. He’s looking at things . But I thanked her for the information. She was just doing her part in the perpetual neighborhood watch, making sure no one ever travels too far.

I went out into the crepuscular yard to find the offender. He’d gone out in the later afternoon with a box of chalks to sketch the birch, which was still trading in late-summer greens. He took a little canvas stool. I found him sitting in the chill grass and sat down next to him. My jeans were damp in seconds. I forgot that dew forms at night. We only discover it in the morning.

“Let’s see.” He handed over his pastel hostage. The tree was gray by now, as was his drawing. “I’m going to have to trust you on this one, buddy. I can’t see a thing.”

His small laugh got lost in the roar of leaves. Weird, Dad, isn’t it? Why does color disappear in the dark ?

I told him the fault was in our eyes, not in the nature of light. He nodded, like he’d reached that conclusion already. His head aimed straight in front of him at the exhaling tree. Off to each side of his face, his hands patted the air for secret compartments.

This is even weirder. The darker it gets, the better I can see out of the sides of my eyes .

I tested; he was right. I vaguely remembered the reason—more rods on the edges of the retina. “That might make a good treasure hunt.” He didn’t seem interested in anything but the experience itself.

“Robbie? Dr. Currier wants to know if he can show your training videos to other people.”

I’d been evading the question for two days. I hated the idea of other people appraising the changes in Robin. I hated Currier for destroying my memories of Aly. Now he had my son.

I lay back on the wet grass. I owed Currier nothing but hostility. And still, I felt an obligation so large I couldn’t name it. No good parent would turn his child into a commodity. But ten thousand children with Robin’s new eyes might teach us how to live on Earth.

He faced the tree, still experimenting, watching me from the corner of his eye. What other people?

“Journalists. Health workers. People who might set up neurofeedback centers around the country.”

You mean a business? Or does he want to help people?

My question, exactly.

Because, you know, Dad. He helped me. A lot. And he brought Mom back .

Some large invertebrate in the dirt sank its mandibles into the back of my calf. Robin dug his fingernails into the soil and pulled up ten thousand species of bacteria wrapped in thirty miles of fungal filament in his small hand. He shook out the fistful of dirt and came down on the grass to lie beside me. He propped his head on the pillow of my arm. For a long time, we just looked up at the stars—all the ones we could see and half the ones we couldn’t.

Dad. I feel like I’m waking up. Like I’m inside everything. Look where we are! That tree. This grass!

Aly used to claim—to me, to state legislators, to her colleagues and blog followers, to anyone who would listen—that if some small but critical mass of people recovered a sense of kinship, economics would become ecology. We’d want different things. We’d find our meaning out there .

I pointed up to my favorite late summer constellation. Before I could name it, Robin said, Lyra. Some harp thingie?

It was hard to nod, with my head against the ground. Robin pointed to the far corner of the sky, and moonrise.

You said that light gets from there to here almost instantly, right? That means everybody who looks at the moon is seeing the same thing at the same time. We could use it like a giant light telephone, if we ever get separated .

He was traveling beyond me again. “It sounds like you’re okay with Dr. Currier showing people video of you?”

His shrug nudged my bicep. It’s not really my video. It probably belongs to everybody .

Aly was there, lying with her head against my other arm. I didn’t shrug her off. Smart boy , she said.

Remember how much Mom loved this tree? For two years he’d been asking me what Aly was like. Now he was reminding me. She called it the Boardinghouse. She said no one has ever even counted all the kinds of things that live in it .

I looked to his mother for confirmation, but she was gone. When the first of the year’s last fireflies lit up the air a few feet from us, Robin gasped. We held still and watched them flash and blink out. They floated in slow streaks across the summer dark, like the lights of interstellar landing craft from all the planets we’d ever visited, gathered in a mass invasion of our backyard.

I CALLED MARTIN CURRIER. “Use the clip. But his face had better be totally obscured.”

“I can promise that.”

“And if this comes back to us in any way, I’m holding you personally responsible.”

“I understand. Theo. Thank you.”

I hung up on him. At least I waited until the line was dead before cursing.

This late in the world’s story, everything was marketing. Universities had to build their brands. Every act of charity was forced to beat the drum. Friendships were measured out now in shares and likes and links. Poets and priests, philosophers and fathers of small children: we were all on an endless, flat-out hustle. Of course science had to advertise. Call it my belated graduation from naïveté.

Currier was a dignified salesman, at least. He pitched his results to interested parties without distorting the data. He was clear about the technique’s clinical limits while still suggesting the far shores of its possibility. In a world addicted to upgrades, journalists loved his careful hints of a coming golden age.

By October, spots about the Currier Lab began appearing in the popular media. Robin and I watched him on the Tech Roundup show. I saw the articles in New Science, Weekly Breakthrough , and Psychology Now . In each venue, he came across as a slightly different person, cutting the carpet to fit the corner store.

Then came the half-page feature in the Times . It portrayed Currier as sanguine but circumspect. A picture of him seated next to the machine that had so often scanned Robin’s feelings in real time bore the caption: “The brain is a tangled network of networks. We’ll never fully map it.” The man in the picture rested his chin on his hand.

Throughout the piece, Currier positioned Decoded Neurofeedback as the heir to mainstream psychotherapy, “only much faster and more effective.” Solid numbers supported his claims about robustness. He downplayed the emotional telepathy angle. “The best comparison might be to the effects of a powerful work of art.” But his guided tour of the technique included just enough to make DecNef feel like the next big thing:

Well-being is like a virus. One self-assured person at home in this world can infect dozens of others. Wouldn’t you like to see an epidemic of infectious well-being?

Pressed by the journalist, Currier claimed, “The critical threshold for such a thing is probably lower than you think.”

Alongside the standard deviations and p-values and claims of therapeutic gains, Currier generally mentioned that tantalizing data point out on the end of the curve: a nine-year-old boy who came into the trials a bundle of rage and graduated as a junior Buddha. Sometimes, in Currier’s presentations, the boy had lost his mother. Sometimes he wrestled with prior emotional disorders. Sometimes he was just a boy suffering from unspecified “challenges.” Then came the video: half a minute of a pixilated Robin talking with experimenters on the day of his first session, forty-five seconds of him training on a screen while inside the tube, and another minute, one year later, of him talking to his beloved Ginny. Seeing the spliced-together clips for the first time, I gasped. My son’s posture and carriage, the melody of his voice: like the before-and-after of some experimental immunotherapy. He wasn’t the same person. He was barely the same species.