Richard Powers - Bewilderment

I FOUND HIM IN THE BACKYARD on a too-warm, late autumn day, drawing into a notebook as if his colored pencil were a scalpel. He jerked when my shadow fell across the grass in front of him, and he rushed the notebook shut. His stealth surprised me. He switched to his math problems worksheets—two-digit multiplication—and slipped the incriminating notebook under his folded legs as if it might disappear back into the grass and soil.

The last thing I wanted was to ransack his private thoughts again. But given the situation, it felt wise to have a look. I waited three days, until Robbie took an afternoon bike ride down to the railroad tracks to look for migrating monarchs on the last milkweeds. Then I combed through his bookcase and his bedroom’s prime hiding spots until I found the book. In between his field notes was a two-page splash of lines and colors. The painting looked like a child’s Kandinsky. It had that rush of modernist excitement shared by a generation of artists about to go up in flames. Underneath, he’d written, in a small, shaky hand: Remember what she feels like! You can remember!!!

ON MONDAY MORNING I had to go into his bedroom to rouse him for breakfast. I’d made his favorite tofu scramble, but when I tried to tickle him awake, he shouted at me. His own volume startled him. Dad! I’m sorry. I’m really tired. I didn’t sleep so good .

“Was it too warm in here?”

He closed his eyes, watching some remnant animation on the inside of his lids. There weren’t any more birds. That’s what happened. In my dream .

He rallied and got up. We had breakfast and enjoyed a reasonable day, although his homework, as always now, took longer than before. We played bocce in the park and he won. Coming home, we saw an eagle take a mourning dove, and though Robbie flinched at the sight of the tearing beak, he still drew it from memory when we got back to the house.

I’d fallen so behind in my teaching that I was in danger of having my tenure revoked. But after dinner I took him by the shoulders and said, “How do you want to spend the evening? Name your galaxy.”

He knew his answer. With one admonitory finger, he commanded me to sit on the couch. He poured me a glass of pomegranate juice—the closest thing to wine available—and went to the bookshelf to retrieve a beaten-up anthology. He put it in my hands.

Read me Chester’s favorite poem . I laughed. He kicked my shins. Serious .

“I’m not sure which one was his favorite. Should I read you your mom’s?”

He didn’t even bother to shrug—just a flick of his small hands. I read him Yeats’s “A Prayer for My Daughter.” Maybe it wasn’t Aly’s favorite. Maybe it was just the one I remember her reading to me. It’s a long poem. It was long for me back then, in my thirties. For Robin, it must have felt geological. But he sat still for it. He still had some concentration left. I was tempted to skip to the end, but I didn’t want him to discover, twenty years later, that I’d cheated him.

I was fine until stanza nine. That one had some long pauses in it, as I read.

Robin sat still for the whole long trip. He didn’t even twitch until I finished. Even then, he stayed curled against my flank. In that clear soprano voice, he said, I didn’t get it, Dad. Chester probably got more of it than I did .

I had promised him months ago that we’d talk about getting another dog. Nothing had kept me from following through but selfish cowardice. I nudged him with my flank. “We still need to get you a birthday present, Robbie. Should we look for a new Chester?”

I thought the words would galvanize him. He didn’t even lift his head. Maybe, Dad . It might help .

THE FIRST MELTDOWN CAME as we were driving back from the shoe store at the mall. We were six blocks from home, on the edge of our quiet neighborhood, when I hit a squirrel. The thing about squirrels is that they think the car is a predator. Natural selection has shaped them to evade pursuers by cutting back and running right into you, as you carry straight on down the street.

The thing threw itself under my wheels with a fur-muffled thump. Robin swung around to stare at the sentient being in the road behind us. I saw it, too, in the rearview mirror, a lump on the asphalt. My son screamed. In the closed car, the sound turned wild, long and bloodcurdling, and it converged on the word Dad .

He undid his seat belt and opened the passenger door. I screamed, too, and grabbed his left arm to keep him from stepping out of the moving car. I rolled to a stop on the side of the residential street. He was still howling, tearing against my grip and trying to jump out. I held him until he stopped struggling. But the end of the struggle was not the end of his howls. He calmed down enough to light into me again.

You killed it! You freaking killed it!

I told him it was an accident, that everything had happened too fast for me to make any choice at all. I apologized. Nothing made any difference.

You didn’t even slow down! You didn’t even… Mom died instead of killing an opossum, and you didn’t even take your foot off the gas!

I tried to stroke his hair, but he shoved me away. He turned to look out the back window. “Robbie,” I said. But he wouldn’t look away from the lump in the street. I asked him to say something, to tell me what he was feeling. But he held his face into his hands. There was nothing to do but start the car and head home.

There, he headed straight to his room. At dinner, I knocked. He opened the door a crack and asked if he could skip the meal. I said he could eat in his room if he wanted. I loaded up a bowl with fried apples, which he loved. But when I went in at seven-thirty, the bowl was untouched. He was lying in bed in his plaid pajamas, with the lights out and his hands behind his head.

“Would you like a planet?”

No, thanks. I have one .

I sat in my study and pretended to work. A reasonable hour for sleep took forever to arrive. I woke from a nightmare with a tiny hand clamped around my wrist. Robin was standing by my bed. In the dark, I couldn’t read him. Dad. I’m going backwards. I can feel it .

I lay there, dumb with sleep. He had to spell it out.

Like the mouse, Dad. Like Algernon .

IN THE SHORTENING DAYS, I worked to keep Robin at his lessons. He liked me to sit and do them with him. But the moment I turned to my own work, he lapsed into a trance.

He and I made it through the equinox, and harder still, the holidays. I lied to Aly’s family, telling them that we were celebrating somewhere else. By mutual agreement, the two of us spent the week alone. We snowshoed through the blanketed cornfields just outside of town. Robbie made ornaments for the tree from sketches cut out of his field notes. On New Year’s, all he wanted was to play endless games of Concentration with the Songbirds of the Eastern U.S. playing cards that he’d gotten me for a Christmas present. He was asleep by eight.

Throughout January, he slipped in small steps from color back to black-and-white. In early February, I gave him a one-week break from classes, apropos of nothing. He needed it. He began playing his farm game again on the computer, after months away. He was touchy when I told him to give it a break. Before the week was over, he wanted to get back to his school assignments. He didn’t have the focus to sit more than half an hour at a shot, but he was desperate to learn something. I knew I would have to bring him to a doctor if this went on much longer.