Three blocks from our house, we reached the tiny neighborhood park. He pointed to a slender fountain of a tree trunk in the corner of the playground near the swings.
That’s my favorite. I call it my redhead tree.
“Your what? Why?”
Because it has red hair. Serious! You’ve never seen it?
He steered me toward the low-hanging branches. When we reached the tree, he twisted a leaf. There, on the underside, in the junction of the side veins and the midrib, were tiny patches of red hair.
Scarlet oak. Cool, right?
“I had no idea!”
He patted me on the back. That’s okay, Dad. You’re not the only one.
Shouts came from down the street. Three boys a little older than Robbie were trying to dislodge a stop sign. Concern clouded Robin’s face. People are so strange.
He let the leaf go, and the branch sprang back into place. I looked up at the column of tree, where every leaf was now red-haired. “Robbie. When did you learn all this stuff?”
He reared back and gawked at me, the only creature out here that baffled him. What do you mean, “when?” All along!
“But have you been teaching yourself?”
His whole body demurred. Everybody out here wants me to know them. In another moment, he’d entirely forgotten I’d ever asked him anything. He showed me an ant mound and a burrow dug under the wall of a small pavilion. I don’t know whose that is, yet. He got down on his haunches and watched the opening for long enough to make me restless. Whoever’s in there is fantastic.
He walked under the tunnel of maples and doomed ash trees as if he were in a submersible at the bottom of the Marianas Trench. I tagged along in the wake of his rotating gaze. But still, I wasn’t looking. I couldn’t clear my head of a question that had nagged at me for weeks. It came out of me even as I was thinking of some new way to suppress it. “Robbie? When you do the training? Is it like Mom’s there?”
He stopped and grabbed at a section of chain-link fence. Mom’s all over.
“Yes. But—”
Remember what Dr. Currier told us? Whenever I train myself to match the pattern, then what I’m feeling . . .
Was what she was feeling. The lemon-colored wedge, that grand prize on Plutchik’s wheel of fortune. He had Ecstasy, while I was stuck on Apprehension, Envy, or worse.
He started up again, and I followed. His hand swept along the length of suburban street. Dad? It’s like that planet we went to. The one where all the separate creatures share a single memory.
HE POINTED DOWN THE BLOCK toward the sign-vandalizing boys. Let’s see what they’re doing.
This wasn’t Robbie. Real Robbie was back in the house, playing his solo farming game, watching videos of his two favorite women, and cowering from the rest of humanity. But this boy took me by the arm and pulled.
We’ll just say hi, okay?
Words that Aly cajoled me with a thousand and one times in this life. I questioned the wisdom of heading into that cloud of testosterone. Then it hit me: A large part of this experiment consisted of training my son to unlearn the worst of the traits he’d gotten from me. In this lawless little boondock of Sol 3 that had me so cowed, my son had somehow grabbed the crown of confidence.
The three preteens glanced up from their destruction to sneer as we got close. Two of them wore ads for running shoes. The third wore camo pants and a shirt reading THESE COLORS DON’T RUN, THEY RELOAD. They stopped kicking at the sign, but in a way to suggest that they’d finish the task the moment we were gone. I’d seen a pre-election poll the week before. Twenty-one percent of Americans thought society needed to be burned to the ground. A stop sign probably seemed an easy place to start.
Before I could fake authority and tell them to go home, Robbie called out. Hey! What are you guys doing?
The one in the reload shirt snorted. “Burying our goldfish.”
Robin’s eyes widened. Really? All three boys snickered. I watched my son recoil a little, before snickering back. We had to bury our dog once. Do you know about the owl?
The boys just stared, trying to decide if he was mentally challenged. At last the smallest of the three, the one in the baseball cap reading I’M NOT REALLY THIS UGLY, said, “What are you talking about?”
The great horned owl. In the white pine by the Catholic church. The thing is huge! He spread his hands to half his height. Come on! I’ll show you.
The two small guys checked with the big one, who wavered on the corner of Disgust and Interest. Robin turned and motioned for them to follow. Amazingly, they did.
Robin led us around the block to a mat of accumulated brown needles under the branches of a big white pine. He pointed, and we four looked up. Shh. There he is.
“Where?” one of my companion thugs bellowed.
Robin shushed again, exasperated. He whispered through clenched teeth, Arggh! Right. Up. There!
I searched for half a minute before realizing I was looking into the eyes of the magnificent bird. It must have been two feet tall, but the crazed camouflage of its feathers disappeared into the pine’s fissured bark. Only the whitewash on the trunk beneath and the golden rings of its pitiless stare betrayed it. The whole neighborhood would have been out under the tree, if they’d known.
RELOAD boy whipped out his phone to take pictures. The tiny kid in the NOT THIS UGLY cap pulled out his phone, too, and began texting. The third kid shouted, “Shit!” and the great creature stooped, bobbed twice, and straightened into the air. Its huge, tapered wings opened as wide as I was tall. They pressed on the heavy air and the bird disappeared over the roof of the house across the street.
Robin looked ready to lay into them for scaring the creature off. But he merely sighed at giving away such a valuable secret. He caught my eye and tipped his head, down the street toward our escape route. He didn’t talk again until we were out of earshot.
The great horned owl’s conservation rating is “Least Concern.” How stupid is that? Like: unless they’re all dead, we shouldn’t be concerned.
Even his anger seemed bountiful. I draped my arm across his shoulders. “How did you happen to find him?”
Easy. I just looked.
THE DAYS GREW SHORTER and summer ran its course. One night in mid-August, he asked for a planet before bed. I gave him the planet Chromat. It had nine moons and two suns, one small and red, the other large and blue. That made for three kinds of day of different lengths, four kinds of sunset and sunrise, scores of different eclipses, and countless flavors of dusk and night. Dust in the atmosphere turned the two kinds of sunlight into swirling watercolors. The languages of that world had as many as two hundred words for sadness and three hundred for joy, depending on the latitude and hemisphere.
He was thoughtful, at the story’s end. He lay back on his pillow, hands clasped behind his head, looking up at the idea of Chromat on his bedroom ceiling.
Dad? I think I’m done with school.
His words collapsed me. “Robbie. We can’t start this again.”
What about homeschooling? He seemed to be reasoning with someone on the roof.
“I have a full-time job.”
As a teacher, right?
He was calm as a skiff on a windless pond. I was capsizing. I wanted to shout, Give me one good reason why you can’t sit in a classroom like every other child your age. But I already knew several.
Eddie Tresh is homeschooled, and his parents work. It’s easy, Dad. We just fill in a form and tell Wisconsin that you’re going to do it. We can get some course packets and stuff online, if we want. You wouldn’t have to spend any time on me at all.
“Robbie, that’s not the problem.”
He turned to look at me and waited for my objections. When none came, he rolled over on one elbow and retrieved a battered paperback from his little student desk next to the bed. He handed me the volume: Aly’s old field guide to the birds of the eastern U.S.
“Where did you get this?” My tone made even me flinch. I seemed to
want to criminalize my son. He got it off the bookshelf in my bedroom—where else?
I can learn by myself, Dad. Give me the name, and I’ll tell you what it looks like.
I flipped through the book, now filled with tiny checkmarks next to the species he knew. One of his parents was already homeschooling him.
I want to be an ornithologist. They don’t teach you that in the fourth grade.
The field guide felt as heavy as it would have on Jupiter. “School prepares you for a lot more than just your job.” He looked at me, concerned for how lame and tired I sounded. I fumbled my fingers into the hashtag sign he’d taught me. “Life skills, Robbie. Like learning how to get along with other kids.”
If it really taught kids that, I wouldn’t mind going. He scooched over on the bed and consoled my shoulder. Here’s how I look at it, Dad. I’m almost ten. You want me to learn everything I need for being an adult. So school should teach me how to survive the world ten years from now. So . . . what do you think that’ll look like?
The noose tightened, and I couldn’t slip it. He must have learned the argument from all those Inga Alder videos.
Really. I need to know.
Earth had two kinds of people: those who could do the math and follow the science, and those who were happier with their own truths. But in our hearts’ daily practice, whatever schools we went to, we all lived as if tomorrow would be a clone of now.
Tell me what you think, Dad. Because that’s what I should be learning.
I didn’t need to say anything out loud. With his newly learned powers, Robbie had only to look in my eyes, move and enlarge his inner dot, and read my mind.
Remember how Pawpaw just kept getting sicker and sicker and wouldn’t go to the doctor, and then he died?
“I remember.”
That’s what everybody’s doing.
I didn’t much want to remember my father. Nor did I want to discuss bottomless catastrophe with my nine-year-old. The house was peaceful and the night was calm. I fingered Aly’s book, with its dozens of new checkmarks.
“Bachman’s warbler.”
Bachman’s warbler, he repeated, as if in a spelling bee. Male? Black cap, fading to gray. Green body, yellow belly, white under the tail.
I’d gone to the wrong school. He’d learned more in one summer, on his own, than he’d learned in a year of classroom. He’d discovered, on his own, what formal education tried to deny: Life wanted something from us. And time was running out.
Critically endangered, he concluded. Possibly extinct.
“You win,” I said, as if there had ever been a contest. “And lesson one is figuring out how this homeschooling thing works.”
WE FILED OUR FORM OF INTENT with the Department of Public Instruction. I built a little curriculum: reading, math, science, social studies, and health. Mine was better than what he’d been getting. The day we withdrew him from school, he ran around the house singing “When the Saints Go Marching In.” He mimed all the instruments and knew all the words.
The change took time, sweat, and many more babysitters. My hours were somewhat flexible, and he loved to come to campus with me. In a pinch, I set him up at the library. But my other students didn’t get the best of me that semester. My own work for publication ground to a standstill. I had to cancel appearances at conferences in Bellevue, Montreal, and Florence.
It surprised me that we only needed 875 hours of instruction a year. Since Robbie now wanted to learn things even on weekends, that came to less than two and a half hours a day. He had no trouble keeping up with the public curriculum. He polished off his online self-exams with glee. We traveled everywhere that reading, math, science, social studies, and health let us travel. We studied at home, in the car, over meals, and on long walks through the woods. Even shooting penalty kicks against each other in the park became a lesson in physics and statistics.
I built him a Planetary Exploration Transponder—basically my aging tablet computer, gussied up with enamel paint to look futuristic and cool. I created a special sign-on for him, locked down to a grade school browser that limited him to a handful of child-geared sites and a few educational games. He didn’t mind the constraints. Near-Earth orbit was still orbit.
Between trying to tutor him through his curriculum, preparing two undergrad lectures and a grad seminar in biomarkers, continuing to flail against the Asian grad student visa crisis, and writing copious emails to colleagues apologizing for missed deadlines, I felt like NASA in the wake of the Challenger. Stryker gave up on me and dissolved our research partnership. For the first time since coming to Wisconsin, I had to file an annual activity report with no significant publications.
Robin woke me up one Saturday, half an hour before the sun, ending the first few hours of deep sleep I’d had in days. At least he was waking me with joy and not a tantrum. Where am I going today, Dad? Come on. Give me a new treasure hunt.
I searched for something that would keep him busy long enough for me to clear my own backlog of work.
“Draw me the outlines of eight countries in West Africa. Then fill them each with four drawings of their native plants and animals.”
Easy-peasy, he declared, charging out of the room for his trusted PET. By three p.m., the job was done. At the pace he was setting, he threatened to have the 875 hours of fourth grade finished by the end of summer.
I HAVE A GREAT IDEA, Robbie said. Dr. Currier’s lab could take a dog. A really good dog. But it could be a cat or a bear or even a bird. You know that birds are a lot smarter than anybody thinks? I mean, some birds can see magnetism. How cool is that?
I’d taken him to my office for the afternoon while I got things ready for the new academic year. He was playing with a toy programmable scale that showed your weight on Jupiter, Saturn, the moon, or anywhere in the solar system.
“Take a dog and do what, Robbie?” His thoughts these days often grew richer than he could say.
Take him and scan him. Scan his brain while he was really excited. Then people could train on his patterns, and we’d learn what it felt like to be a dog.
I failed to rise above adult condescension. “That’s a cool idea. You should tell Dr. Currier.”
His scowl was gentle compared to what I deserved. He’d never listen to me. Which is sad, you know? I mean, think about it, Dad. It could just be a regular part of school. Everyone would have to learn what it felt like to be something else. Think of the problems that would solve!
I can’t remember how I answered him. Three weeks later, I learned that a prominent ecologist at the University of Toronto used parts of my atmospheric models to map how the Earth’s own ecosystems might evolve under steadily rising temperatures. Dr. Ellen Coutler and her grad students saw thousands of interconnected species failing in a series of cascading waves. Not a gradual decline: a cliff.
Robbie was right: we needed universal mandatory courses of neural feedback training, like passing the Constitution test or getting a driver’s license. The template animal could be a dog or a cat or a bear or even one of my son’s beloved birds. Anything that could make us feel what it was like to not be us.
HE DROPPED A GLASS BOWL on the kitchen tiles. It shattered into pieces. One sliver cut his bare heel as he jumped back. A year ago, he would have spun out in tears or rage. Now he simply grabbed his hurt foot and held it in the air. Oh, snap! Sorry, sorry! After we washed and bandaged him, he insisted on sweeping up his mess. A year ago, he wouldn’t have known where to find the broom.
“Impressive, Robbie. Like you’re coming at this whole life thing with a totally different game plan.”
He burrowed a slo-mo fist into my soft underbelly and laughed. Actually? It’s kind of like that. Old Robin would be all: Waaah! He pointed up at the ceiling. New Robin is up there, looking down on the experiment.
He tented his hands in front of his lips. It was the funniest gesture, like he was channeling Sherlock Holmes. Like he and I were old dudes, reflecting on the long and winding road that had deposited
us in front of a fireplace in the common room of an assisted living facility. Remember how Chester would tear up a book or pee on the carpet? You couldn’t really get mad at him because, he was just a dog, right?
I waited for him to complete the thought. But it turned out the thought was already complete.
I BROUGHT ROBBIE IN for his last training of the summer. By then the whole lab was in awe of him. Ginny gave Robbie comics and took me down the corridor, out of earshot. She stood shaking her head, not sure how to say what she needed to. “Your son. I just. Love your son.”
I grinned. “Me, too.”
“He’s getting amazing. When he’s around, I feel, I don’t know . . .” She looked at me, her eyes at a loss. “Like I’m a little more here? He’s contagious. A viral vector. We all feel happier when he’s here. We all start looking forward to him two days before he comes in.” Embarrassed but happy, Ginny backed away and returned to the training.
I watched the session from the control room. Robin had become a virtuoso. His pleasure was proportionate to the ease with which he animated his screen on nothing but thought. He and the AI improvised a duet, each harmonizing with the other. I looked on from the outside, unable to hear a note of the unfolding symphony. Robin’s face ran the gamut of squints, scowls, and smirks. He seemed to be chattering with someone in a language that had only two native speakers.
I’d seen this before. Robin was almost seven. He and Alyssa were doing a jigsaw puzzle on a folding card table, under a brass elbow lamp. The pieces were large and their count was low. Aly could have done the whole thing by herself in two minutes. But she was holding back, slowing down, keeping him in the game, making an evening of it. And he repaid her in all the colors of a child’s delight. The two of them played off one another, amusing themselves with silly anatomical descriptions of the pieces they were looking for, racing each other to the shrinking pool of candidates. Four months later, Aly would be gone. That evening disappeared with her, until it came back to me unbidden as I watched Robin playing with her all over again.
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