Richard Powers - Bewilderment

When the third Tuesday in March came along, it surprised the entire fatigued country when the polls did open at last. But it shocked only half of us when another wave of irregularities were declared insignificant and the President was named the winner.

THE SIGNAL CAME FROM XENIA, a small planet in a modest star system near the tip of one spiral arm of the Pinwheel Galaxy. There, at the start of a night that lasted for several Earth years, something like a child held up something not quite a flashlight to something quite unlike the Earth’s night sky.

Near the child stood the closest living thing to what might be called its parent. On Xenia, the entire species of intelligent beings contributed a little germ plasm to birth each new child. But each Xenian was given one child to raise. On Xenia, everyone was everyone else’s parent and everyone else’s child, everyone’s older sister and younger brother all at once. When one person died, so did everyone and no one. On Xenia, fear and desire and hunger and fatigue and sadness and all other transitory feelings were lost in a shared grace, the way that separate stars are lost in the daytime sun.

“There,” the something-like-a-father said to its something-like-a-child, in something almost like speech. “A little higher. Right up there.”

The little one lay back, floating on its living kinship raft above the intelligent soil. It felt its not-quite arm nudged by a process of assistance no one from Earth would have a name for.

“There?” the younger one asked. “Right there? Why didn’t they ever answer?”

The older one replied not in sound or light but in changes in the surrounding air. “We bathed them in signals for thousands of their generations. We tried everything we could think of. We never managed to get their attention.”

The sequence of chemicals that the young one emitted was not quite a laugh. It was a whole verdict, really, an entire astrobiological theory. “They must have been very busy.”

THE DAYS LENGTHENED. Sunlight made a comeback. My son did not. He was certain that he’d failed me, that he’d failed all the creatures he was forced to outlive. He sat curled up in Aly’s egg chair or hunched at the dining room table staring at his schoolwork. An hour would pass while he held himself crumpled and still. Once I glimpsed him holding his palms out in front of his face, mystified by all the life that still passed through them.

It was in my power to help him. The time for fear and principle was past. All I had to do was accept a few future risks, and I could ease his present pain. He needed medication.

One night, after a bath, he lingered in the bathroom for so long that I had to check on him. He was standing with a towel wrapped around his boy’s slight body, staring at the mirror. It’s gone, Dad. I can’t even remember what I can’t remember .

This is what I miss most about him. Even when his light went out, he was still looking.

My spring break was days away. I’d been preparing in secret. I sprang the idea on him. “How about a gigantic treasure hunt?” His shoulders fell. He was done with discovery. “No, Robbie. A real one.”

He eyed me, suspicious. What do you mean?

“Put your pajamas on and meet me in my office.”

He obeyed, too curious to refuse. When he appeared at the side of my desk, I handed him a sheet of paper filled with names, two dozen in all. Spring beauties. Sharp-lobed hepatica. Trailing arbutus. Bishop’s cap. Fire pink. Six kinds of trilliums.

“Know what these are?” If he didn’t when he started to nod, he’d figured it out by the time the nod was done. “How many can you find and draw?”

His limbs began to jitter. He snarled in distress. Dad! I held his arm to calm him.

“I mean for real. From life.”

Puzzlement kept him from melting down. His hand paddled the air, begging me to be reasonable. How? Where? As if flowers would never happen again, for someone so fallen.

“How about the Smokies?”

He shook his head, refusing to believe. Serious? Serious?

“Totally, Robbie.”

When?

“How about next week?”

He searched my face to see if I was lying. For the first time in weeks, hope trickled out of him. Can we stay in the same cabin again? Can we sleep outdoors? Can we go to that river with the rapids where you and Mom went? Then the full awfulness of life washed over him again. He raised the list of wildflower names up to eye level and groaned. How am I supposed to learn all of these in one week?

I vowed that when we came back from the woods, I’d make an appointment with his physician and start him on a new treatment.

THE RIDE DOWN MADE HIM RESTLESS. His smallest thoughts now required endless reassurance. He couldn’t stop asking about the past. Through most of Illinois and all through Indiana and Kentucky, he talked about Aly. He wanted to know where she grew up and what she studied in school. He asked how we met and how long it took us to get married and about all the places we visited before he came along. He wanted to know everything we’d done together on our honeymoon in the Smokies, and what Alyssa had liked best about those mountains.

When he wasn’t grilling me, he was studying an Appalachian wildflowers book I’d gotten him, indexed by color and organized by the time of blooming. What’s a “spring ephemeral”?

I corrected his pronunciation and told him.

Why do they go so fast?

“Because they’re down in the shade on the forest floor. They have to germinate and bud and bloom and fruit and set their seed before the trees leaf out and it’s game over.”

What was Mom’s favorite spring wildflower?

I must have known once. “I can’t remember.”

What was her favorite tree? You can’t remember her favorite tree?

I willed him to stop asking, before I forgot the little I’d ever known.

“I can tell you her favorite bird.”

He started shouting at me. It was a long trip.

I MANAGED TO RENT the same cabin we stayed in so long ago, the one with its wraparound deck open to the woods and stars. We crunched down the steep gravel drive, chasing the shadows of trees. Robin bolted from the car and took the front steps two at a time. I followed, with the bags. Inside, all the light switches still bore their labels— Hallway, Porch, Kitchen, Overhead —and the cabinets were still covered in the same color-coded instructions.

Robbie tore into the living room and flung himself onto that couch emblazoned with its procession of bears, elk, and canoes. Three minutes later he fell asleep. His breathing was so peaceful I left him there to sleep through the night. He woke only when dawn poured in.

That morning we hit the trails. I found a climb not far inside the boundary of the park that faced the southern sun while backing onto a damp ledge. Every twenty yards we came across another wet outcrop packed with more species than a manic terrarium. You could have cut out a chunk, loaded it into the cargo bay of an interstellar spacecraft, and used it to terraform a distant Super Earth.

Robin clutched his list. He was finding new flowers left and right. But he’d lost his ability to name things. Are these rue anemones, Dad?

He’d found a clump identical to the picture in his field guide. “I don’t know. What do you think?”

Well, the petals don’t quite match up. And the little thingies in the middle are a lot longer .

I looked at the picture and then at him. He’d lost his confidence. Four months ago, he would have been correcting the book. “Trust yourself, Robbie.”