Richard Powers - Bewilderment

The video blinks first and cuts away.

THEY WALK ALONG THE LAKESHORE. Jay lifts one hand to the small of her back, as if he’s a doctor breaking news that’s delicate but not disastrous. She says, “You must have been hurting so much.”

I want to scream at her, every time. But he’s paying attention to the world, not her question.

“When did the hurt start? When your mother passed, or before?”

He frowns at that word passed . But he figures it out on the fly. My mother didn’t pass. She died .

Dee Ramey stutter-steps and stops. Maybe his words stun her into listening. Maybe they excite her, their weirdness promising a couple thousand more thumbs-up. Maybe I’m being cruel.

“But you’ve learned to match the patterns of her brain activity. So now that part of her is inside you, right?”

He smiles and shakes his head, but not in disagreement. He knows now that no grown-up gets it. He holds out his hands to the grass and sky and oaks and lindens lining the lake. Paws up in the crisp air, he waves them to include our distant invisible neighborhood, the university, the houses of friends, the Capitol, and states beyond our state. Everybody’s inside everyone .

The video cuts to clips from early in his training. It’s a different boy, hunched in a scooped plastic chair, evading a questioner in diffident monotones. He bites his lip and snarls at small setbacks. The world is out to punish him. Then footage of him painting, blissed out on line and color. I’ve watched the video more times than I can count. I’m responsible for a thousand of the clip’s hits all by myself. But seeing the two boys side by side still stuns me.

Then he and Dee Ramey are by the lake again. “You seemed so hurt and angry.”

A lot of people are hurt and angry .

“But you’re not, anymore?”

He giggles, a wild contrast to the boy in Currier’s clips. No. Not anymore .

On a bench under the trees, Dee Ramey holds one of his notebooks in her lap, turning pages. He’s explaining the drawings. That’s an annelid. Incredible, you gotta admit. That is a brittle star. These things? They’re water bears. Also known as tardigrades. They can survive in outer space. Serious. They could float to Mars .

Cut to a medium shot, and he takes her down a footpath to show her something. The camera pulls in for a close-up: a patch of plants whose round-toothed leaves bead all over with tiny globes from that morning’s rain. He points to the pods of fruit still hanging from its branches. Go like this around one. Careful! Don’t brush it!

It’s like he’s telling a joke and can barely conceal the punch line. Dee squeals in amazement when the touch of her cupped hands makes the pod pop. She opens to look: weird green coils lie exploded on her palm. “Wow! What is that ?”

Crazy, right? Jewelweed. You can eat the seeds!

He picks through the detonated, steampunk curls and extracts a pale green pill. Dee Ramey mugs for the camera—“I hope you’re right” — and pops it in her mouth. She looks surprised. “Mm. Nutty!”

I don’t remember ever teaching my son about that plant. I do remember the day I learned about it from the woman who became his mother. The years since then lie like shrapnel in my open hand.

In the video, my son never mentions the plant’s other name: touch-me-not. All he says is, Lots of good eats out here, if you know where to look .

EVERYBODY’S BROKEN , he tells her. They sit on the beach on an upside-down kayak and watch the single low sun throw colors. Two boats in full sail skim alongside one another, back to the docks before the light is gone.

That’s why we’re breaking the whole planet .

“We’re breaking it?”

And pretending we aren’t, like you just did . The shame in her face shows up only in freeze-frame. Everybody knows what’s happening. But we all look away .

She waits for him to elaborate. To say what’s wrong with people and what might cure them.

He says, I wish I had my sunglasses .

She laughs. “Why?”

He points toward the lake. There’s fish in there! We could see them, with sunglasses. Have you ever seen a northern pike?

“I don’t know.”

His face clouds over with incomprehension. You would know. You’d know, if you saw a pike .

A couple with two small kids walk the beach near them. Jay greets them with enthusiasm. He’s forgotten the camera crew. His arms spin around the compass points in pleasure. The parents smile as he points out three kinds of ducks and imitates their calls. He tells them about daphnia and other water crustaceans. He shows them how to find sand fleas. The little boy and girl hang on his words.

Dusk falls in time-lapse. The show’s theme music starts up, far away. Jay and his new best friend sit on their upturned boat. The lights of the city blink on in a ring around them. He says, My dad’s an astrobiologist. He’s looking for life up there. It’s either nowhere, or it’s all over the place. Which do you want it to be?

She looks up, where he’s pointing, into the dark sky. Her expression wobbles, as if she’s training to match the pattern of a feeling her mouth and eyes refuse to recognize. Maybe she’s thinking about how she’s going to violate her promise to me by keeping those last few words of his in the finished video. They’re just too good to be lost to something so small as ethics.

Dee Ramey speaks over the shot of her upward stare. “Most of us think we’re the only ones out here. But not Jay.”

The shot reverses, and it’s Robbie again, gazing at her with the same indiscriminate love he felt for everyone, in that narrow run of days. His face seems lit from the inside. She looks back down at him, a crumpled smile at dusk. Her later self goes on talking while the one on the screen stays mute.

“To spend time with Jay is to see kin everywhere, to take part in a giant experiment that doesn’t end with you, and to feel loved from beyond the grave. I, for one, would love to hear that feedback.”

But Robin has the last word. Serious , he says, smiling up at her in pure encouragement . Which do you think would be cooler?

CURRIER CALLED a week after Ova Nova posted the video. His voice skidded around the emotional color wheel. “Your boy’s viral.”

“What are you talking about? What happened?” I thought some brain infection had shown up on one of Robbie’s scans.

“We’ve gotten inquiries from half a dozen companies on three different continents. That’s not counting all the individuals who want to sign up for the training.”

I considered and rejected all kinds of replies. At last I landed on, “I truly hate you.”

There was a silence, more thoughtful than awkward. Then Currier must have decided I was just being rhetorical. He set to work as if I’d said nothing, filling me in on all that had happened in the last few days.

Ova Nova had dropped the video as part of a bundle called “The World Is Ending Again. What Now?” They launched the suite with a sweeping social media campaign. Other outfits picked up the news, if only to meet their own daily quota of announcements. Robbie’s video caught the rapidly strobing attention of an influencer. This woman had her own lucrative video channel where she went around the world helping people get rid of things they never really wanted. Countless people around the globe were addicted to her tough love, and two and a half million of those people counted themselves as her friends. The influencer posted a link with an image of Robbie holding his hands together around a jewelweed pod. Her caption read: