Richard Powers - Bewilderment

I’m gonna make something for the trip, okay?

He wouldn’t tell me what. But as Robin’s legal teacher, I was always looking out for anything better than the grim social studies materials I found online. ( How Do I Save Money? What Is Profit? I Need a Job! ) A civics field trip to Our Nation’s Capital, with homemade show-and-tell, seemed just the thing.

He made me wait in the car while he went into the art supply store with his life savings. He came out a few minutes later clasping a bag to his chest. When we got home, he squirreled away his covert treasures in his room and got to work. A sign appeared on his door. His balloon-letter writing had grown more playful, more like Aly’s with each new feedback session:

I had no clue what he was up to, other than that it involved a roll of eighteen-inch-wide white butcher paper too bulky to hide. My questions succeeded only in eliciting stern warnings not to pry. So the two of us prepared for our joint field trip. While my son worked on his secret project, I polished the testimony I would present to the congressional Independent Review Panel.

The panel was tasked with making a simple recommendation: answer the world’s oldest and deepest unanswered question or walk away. Dozens of my colleagues were testifying on behalf of NASA’s proposed Earthlike Planet Seeker mission, over several days. Our job was simple: save the telescope from the ax of the Appropriations subcommittee, and make a world that would be able, in a few more years, to look into nearby space and see life.

The party in power was not inclined to hunt for other Earths. The heads of the review panel threatened to add our Planet Seeker to a growing graveyard of NASA cancellations. But scientists across three continents were giving up the pretense of detached objectivity and making the case for exploration, every way we knew how. That’s how the son of a con man, a kid who went by the nickname Mad Dog and got his start in life cleaning out septic tanks, found himself on a plane to D.C., testifying for the most powerful pair of spectacles ever made. And my son was coming with, bringing his own campaign.

HE HUSTLED DOWN THE AISLE IN FRONT OF ME, beaming and greeting all the passengers. He chided me as I put his bag in the overhead bin . Careful, Dad! Don’t crush it! Robbie wanted the window. He watched the baggage loaders and ground crew as if they were building the pyramids. He gripped my hand during takeoff but was fine once we were airborne. During the flight, he charmed the attendants and told the businessman on my right about “a few good nonprofits” he might want to consider supporting.

We had to change in Chicago. Robin sketched people in the gate area and gave them their portraits as gifts. Three kids across the concourse whispered to each other and pointed, as if they’d never seen a living video meme before.

He was better with takeoff the second time. As we broke down through the clouds in our final approach, he shouted over the engines, Holy crap! Washington Monument! Just like in the book!

The rows near us laughed. I pointed over his shoulder. “There’s the White House.”

He answered in hushed tones. Wow. So beautiful!

“Three branches of government,” I quizzed.

He held out his finger, fencing with me. Executive, legislative, and… the one with the judges .

We saw the Capitol from the cab on our way to the hotel. He was awed. What will you tell them?

I showed him my prepared comments. “They’ll ask questions, too.”

What kind of questions?

“Oh, they might ask anything. Why the Seeker cost keeps going up. What we hope to discover. Why we can’t discover life some cheaper way. What difference it would make if it never got built.”

Robin gazed out the window of the cab, marveling at the monuments. The cab slowed as we entered Georgetown and neared the hotel. Robbie sat in a cloud of preoccupation, trying to solve my political crisis. I straightened his hair, like Aly used to do when the three of us were heading out into public. I felt us traveling on a small craft, piloting through the capital city of the reigning global superpower on the coast of the third largest continent of a smallish, rocky world near the inner rim of the habitable zone of a G-type dwarf star that lay a quarter of the way out to the edge of a dense, large, barred, spiral galaxy that drifted through a thinly spread local cluster in the dead center of the entire universe.

We pulled into the hotel’s circular drive and the cabbie said, “Here we are. Comfort Inn.”

I FED MY CARD INTO THE CAB’S READER and credits poured out from a server farm nestled in the melting tundra of northern Sweden into the cabbie’s virtual hands. Robbie got out, retrieved his bag from the trunk, gazed at the very modest chain hotel, and gave a deep, appreciative whistle. Holy crow. We are living like kings . He wouldn’t let the doorman take his bag. It’s got stuff in it!

He whistled again in the very plain room on the ninth floor overlooking the Potomac. His civics lesson stretched out in radial boulevards below. He put his hand to the window and gazed at all the possibilities. Let’s go!

We never made it past the Bone Hall on the second floor of the Museum of Natural History. The parade of skeletons hooked Robin by the brain stem and wouldn’t let him go. He stood with his sketchbook in front of the case of perciform fishes, lavishing attention on the turn and taper of every rib. I couldn’t stop staring at him from across the hall. In his loosened windbreaker and baggy jeans, he looked like an elder of one of those tiny, superannuated, wayfaring races that have been making records for billions of years, curating an account of a planet that had once thrived brilliantly but vanished without a trace.

We found a restaurant that served herbivores and walked back to the hotel. Up in our room, he grew earnest again. He sat on the edge of his bed with his hands folded in front of his face. Dad? I wanted to wait until tomorrow to show you, but I should probably just show you now?

Crossing to his luggage, he extracted the roll of butcher paper, a little crumpled from the journey. He set it on the floor at the foot of the beds, placed a pillow on one curled end, and unrolled. The banner was longer than the two of us stretched end to end. And it was covered in paints, markers, and inks of all colors. Down the length of it ran the words:

He had filled the scroll with bright, bold design. It seemed another thing he’d learned directly from Aly, who worked on a canvas too large for me to see. Creatures ringed the letters, as though drawn by a hand more mature than his. Stands of staghorn coral were bleaching white. Birds and mammals fled a burning forest. Ten-inch-long honeybees lay on their backs along the bottom of the banner, legs up and little X’s in their eyes.

That’s supposed to be pollinator decline. You think people will get that?

I couldn’t say. I couldn’t even talk. But then, he wasn’t really waiting for my answer.

You can’t depress people, though. That just scares them. You gotta show them the good life .

He lifted one end of the banner and told me to grab the other. We flipped the whole scroll over. If the first side was hell, this was the peaceable kingdom. This time the words filled the banner’s middle, one row above the other:

Creatures crowded in on either side: feathered and fur-covered, spiny, star-shaped, lobed and finned, bulky or sleek and streamlined, bilateral, branching, radial, rhizomatic creatures, known and unknown, creatures in the wildest array of colors and forms, all deployed between the deep green forest and the ocean blue. The sessions with Aly’s brain print had made his painting more luminous, freed up his hand and eye.