Richard Powers - Bewilderment

A hundred yards upstream, Alyssa tumbled feetfirst down this channel in a wet suit that fit her like skin. I anchored downstream to catch her, but she still yelped as the flow tossed her down the chutes. Her body bobbed toward me, small but mighty, swelling as it swept downstream, and just as my muscles reached to catch her, she passed right through me.

Robbie let go of his hold and scudded down the rapids. I stuck out an arm and he snagged it. He grappled to me and brought his eyes up to mine. Hey. What’s up?

I held his gaze. “You’re up. I’m down. Only a little, though.”

Dad! He jabbed with his free hand, waving it at the evidence all around us. How can you be down? Look where we are! Who gets this ?

Nobody. Nobody in the world.

He sat down in the cascade, still hanging on to me, working it out. It took him no longer than half a minute. Wait. Were you here with Mom? Your honeymoon?

His superpower, really. I shook my head in wonderment. “How do you do that, Sherlock?”

He frowned and raised himself out of the water. Tottering in place, he surveyed the whole watershed with new eyes. That explains everything .

BACK AT CAMP, I FELT A CRAVING for current events. Urgent things were happening across the world that I knew nothing about. Notes from colleagues were piling up in my off-line in-box. Astrobiologists on five continents huddled in a scrum over the latest publications. Ice shelfs were breaking off Antarctica. Heads of state were testing the outermost limits of public gullibility. Little wars were flaring everywhere.

I pushed back against the informational DTs, while Robin and I shaved pine twigs for a fire. We’d strung our packs up on a wire between two sycamores where not even the fattening bears could reach them. With the fire blazing, our only responsibility in the whole world was to cook our beans and toast our marshmallows.

Robin stared into the flames. In a robotic monotone that would have alarmed his pediatrician, he droned, The good life . A minute later: I feel like I belong here .

We did nothing but watch the sparks, and we did that well. One last purple rib of sun lined the ridges to the west. The forested mountainsides, having inhaled all day long, now began to breathe back out again. Shadows flickered around the fire. Robin swung his head at every noise. His wide eyes blurred the line between thrill and fear.

Too dark to draw , he whispered.

“Yes,” I said, although he probably could have managed, even in the dark.

Gatlinburg used to look like this?

The question startled me. “Bigger trees. Much older. Most of these are younger than a hundred.”

A forest can do a lot in a hundred years .

“Yes.”

He squinted, sending all kinds of places—Gatlinburg, Pigeon Forge, Chicago, Madison—back to wilderness. I’d done the same thing, on my own worst nights after Alyssa died. But in the mind of this child, the one who’d kept me going, the wish seemed unhealthy. Every decent parent in the world would have argued him out of it.

Robin saved me the effort. His voice was still low, still robotic. But I saw his eyes spark as he studied the fire. Mom used to read poetry at night, to Chester?

Who knows how he leapt from one thought to another? I’d stopped trying to trace him a long time ago.

“She did.” It had been Alyssa’s favorite ritual, long before I showed up on the scene. Two glasses of red wine, and she’d submit the homeliest beagle–border collie rescue that ever walked the Earth to her favorite stanzas.

Poetry. To Chester!

“I’d listen, too.”

I know , he said. But clearly, I didn’t count.

The embers spat, then settled again into reddish gray ingots. For a moment I worried that he’d ask me to name her favorite poems. Instead, he said, We should get another Chester .

Chester’s death had almost killed him. All the grief over Alyssa that he’d suppressed in order to protect me tore out of him when the crippled old beast gave up. The rages took over, and I let the doctors medicate him for a while. All he could think about was getting another dog. For a long time, I’d fought him off. Somehow, the idea traumatized me.

“I don’t know, Robbie.” I poked the cinders with a stick. “I don’t think there is another Chester.”

There are good dogs, Dad. Everywhere .

“It’s a lot of responsibility. Feeding, walking, cleaning up after it. Reading it poetry every night. Most dogs don’t even like poetry, you know.”

I’m very responsible, Dad. More responsible than I ever am .

“Let’s sleep on it, okay?”

He doused the fire in several gallons of water, to show how responsible he could be. We crawled into the two-man tent and lay faceup, side by side, no fly, just the lightest netting between us and the universe. The tops of trees waved in the Hunter’s Moon. A thought formed on his face as he studied their moving tips.

What if we hung a huge Ouija board upside down, above them? Then they could send us messages, and we could read them!

A bird started up in the woods behind our heads, another cryptic message no human would ever decode. Whip-poor-will . Whip-poor-will . I started to name it, but there was no need. The bird would not quit. Whip-poor-will . Whip-poor-will . Whip-poor-will . Whip-poor-will .

Robin grabbed my arm. It’s going nuts!

The bird looped its name into the cooling dark. We started to count together, under our breaths, but gave up when we reached one hundred and the bird showed no sign of flagging. That bird was still perseverating when Robin’s eyes started to close. I nudged him.

“Hey, mister! We forgot. ‘May all sentient beings…’”

“…be free from needless suffering.” Where does that come from, anyway? I mean, before Mom .

I told him. It came from Buddhism, the Four Immeasurables. “There are four good things worth practicing. Being kind toward everything alive. Staying level and steady. Feeling happy for any creature anywhere that is happy. And remembering that any suffering is also yours.”

Was Mom a Buddhist?

I laughed, and he slugged my arm through two sleeping bags. “Your mother was her own religion. When she said something, it was worth saying. When she spoke, everybody listened. Even me.”

Half a vowel trickled out of him, and he hugged himself. Some large forager snapped twigs on the slope above our tent. Smaller creatures rooted through the leaf layer. Bats mapped the canopy in frequencies beyond our ears. But nothing troubled my son. When Robin was happy, he had all the Four Immeasurables covered.

“She once told me that no matter how much bad stuff she had to deal with during the day, if she said those words before bed, she’d be ready for anything the next morning.”

ONE MORE QUESTION , he said. What exactly do you do, again?

“Oh, Robbie. It’s late.”

I’m serious. When somebody at school asks me, what am I supposed to say?

It had been the cause of his suspension, a month before. The son of some banker had asked Robin what I did. Robin had answered, He looks for life in outer space . That made the son of a brand executive ask, How is Redbreast’s Dad like a piece of toilet paper? He circles Uranus, looking for Klingons . Robin went nuts, apparently threatening to kill both boys. These days, that was grounds for expulsion and immediate psychiatric treatment. We got off easy.

“It’s complicated.”

He waved toward the woods above us. We’re not going anywhere .