Bewilderment

by Richard Powers

  The video cuts to clips from early in his training. It’s a different boy, hunched in a scooped plastic chair, evading a questioner in diffident monotones. He bites his lip and snarls at small setbacks. The world is out to punish him. Then footage of him painting, blissed out on line and color. I’ve watched the video more times than I can count. I’m responsible for a thousand of the clip’s hits all by myself. But seeing the two boys side by side still stuns me.

  Then he and Dee Ramey are by the lake again. “You seemed so hurt and angry.”

  A lot of people are hurt and angry.

  “But you’re not, anymore?”

  He giggles, a wild contrast to the boy in Currier’s clips. No. Not anymore.

  On a bench under the trees, Dee Ramey holds one of his notebooks in her lap, turning pages. He’s explaining the drawings. That’s an annelid. Incredible, you gotta admit. That is a brittle star. These things? They’re water bears. Also known as tardigrades. They can survive in outer space. Serious. They could float to Mars.

  Cut to a medium shot, and he takes her down a footpath to show her something. The camera pulls in for a close-up: a patch of plants whose round-toothed leaves bead all over with tiny globes from that morning’s rain. He points to the pods of fruit still hanging from its branches. Go like this around one. Careful! Don’t brush it!

  It’s like he’s telling a joke and can barely conceal the punch line. Dee squeals in amazement when the touch of her cupped hands makes the pod pop. She opens to look: weird green coils lie exploded on her palm. “Wow! What is that?”

  Crazy, right? Jewelweed. You can eat the seeds!

  He picks through the detonated, steampunk curls and extracts a pale green pill. Dee Ramey mugs for the camera—“I hope you’re right”—and pops it in her mouth. She looks surprised. “Mm. Nutty!”

  I don’t remember ever teaching my son about that plant. I do remember the day I learned about it from the woman who became his mother. The years since then lie like shrapnel in my open hand.

  In the video, my son never mentions the plant’s other name: touch-me-not. All he says is, Lots of good eats out here, if you know where to look.

  EVERYBODY’S BROKEN, he tells her. They sit on the beach on an upside-down kayak and watch the single low sun throw colors. Two boats in full sail skim alongside one another, back to the docks before the light is gone.

  That’s why we’re breaking the whole planet.

  “We’re breaking it?”

  And pretending we aren’t, like you just did. The shame in her face shows up only in freeze-frame. Everybody knows what’s happening. But we all look away.

  She waits for him to elaborate. To say what’s wrong with people and what might cure them.

  He says, I wish I had my sunglasses.

  She laughs. “Why?”

  He points toward the lake. There’s fish in there! We could see them, with sunglasses. Have you ever seen a northern pike?

  “I don’t know.”

  His face clouds over with incomprehension. You would know. You’d know, if you saw a pike.

  A couple with two small kids walk the beach near them. Jay greets them with enthusiasm. He’s forgotten the camera crew. His arms spin around the compass points in pleasure. The parents smile as he points out three kinds of ducks and imitates their calls. He tells them about daphnia and other water crustaceans. He shows them how to find sand fleas. The little boy and girl hang on his words.

  Dusk falls in time-lapse. The show’s theme music starts up, far away. Jay and his new best friend sit on their upturned boat. The lights of the city blink on in a ring around them. He says, My dad’s an astrobiologist. He’s looking for life up there. It’s either nowhere, or it’s all over the place. Which do you want it to be?

  She looks up, where he’s pointing, into the dark sky. Her expression wobbles, as if she’s training to match the pattern of a feeling her mouth and eyes refuse to recognize. Maybe she’s thinking about how she’s going to violate her promise to me by keeping those last few words of his in the finished video. They’re just too good to be lost to something so small as ethics.

  Dee Ramey speaks over the shot of her upward stare. “Most of us think we’re the only ones out here. But not Jay.”

  The shot reverses, and it’s Robbie again, gazing at her with the same indiscriminate love he felt for everyone, in that narrow run of days. His face seems lit from the inside. She looks back down at him, a crumpled smile at dusk. Her later self goes on talking while the one on the screen stays mute.

  “To spend time with Jay is to see kin everywhere, to take part in a giant experiment that doesn’t end with you, and to feel loved from beyond the grave. I, for one, would love to hear that feedback.”

  But Robin has the last word. Serious, he says, smiling up at her in pure encouragement. Which do you think would be cooler?

  CURRIER CALLED a week after Ova Nova posted the video. His voice skidded around the emotional color wheel. “Your boy’s viral.”

  “What are you talking about? What happened?” I thought some brain infection had shown up on one of Robbie’s scans.

  “We’ve gotten inquiries from half a dozen companies on three different continents. That’s not counting all the individuals who want to sign up for the training.”

  I considered and rejected all kinds of replies. At last I landed on, “I truly hate you.”

  There was a silence, more thoughtful than awkward. Then Currier must have decided I was just being rhetorical. He set to work as if I’d said nothing, filling me in on all that had happened in the last few days.

  Ova Nova had dropped the video as part of a bundle called “The World Is Ending Again. What Now?” They launched the suite with a sweeping social media campaign. Other outfits picked up the news, if only to meet their own daily quota of announcements. Robbie’s video caught the rapidly strobing attention of an influencer. This woman had her own lucrative video channel where she went around the world helping people get rid of things they never really wanted. Countless people around the globe were addicted to her tough love, and two and a half million of those people counted themselves as her friends. The influencer posted a link with an image of Robbie holding his hands together around a jewelweed pod. Her caption read:

  IF YOU HAVEN’T PUT YOUR HEART THROUGH A GOOD MANGLE YET THIS MORNING, TRY THIS.

  The influencer followed up the invitation with several enigmatic emojis. All kinds of other influencers and non-influencers started to repost her post, and the resulting streaming jam caused the Ova Nova servers to choke for an hour. Nothing built more interest in free content than the supply briefly running out.

  According to Currier, the hip flooded in on Tuesday and Wednesday. Thursday and Friday, the mainstream arrived, and the late-to-the-party showed up over the weekend. Apparently, someone ripped the video and uploaded it to a pair of archive sites. Somebody else trimmed out a clip of Robin and ran it through a filter, making his eerie words sound even eerier. People were using it on message boards, in chats and text, at the bottom of their mail signatures . . .

  I held the phone with one hand and poked a search into my tablet with the other. Three common words, in quotes, and there Robbie was, looking and sounding like a visitor from a galaxy far, far away.

  “Shit.”

  Laughter trickled from Robbie’s room. I heard that!

  “What do you suggest I do about this? What am I supposed to tell him?”

  “Theo. The thing is, we’re also hearing from journalists.”

  Which meant they’d be on my front stoop in another few heartbeats. “No,” I said, almost spitting. “No more. I’m done with this. We’re not talking to anyone else.”

  “That’s fine. I’d advise you not to, in fact.”

  Currier sounded almost composed. But then, he stood to profit massively from the flash fad. Robin did not.

  I couldn’t tell how much trouble we were in. Maybe the whole viral thing would blow over as quickly as it had blown up. Most of
the people who were thumbing the clip and passing it along probably didn’t even bother watching it all the way through. It was just a bit of weather, and there would be several more clips to thumb and pass along before the day was out.

  But while Currier told me not to worry, mass cascades of error-correcting bits surged in waves of electromagnetic radiation around the planet’s surface. They blasted in vertical geysers 35,786 kilometers upward into space and rained back down at 300 million meters per second. They coursed in bundles of parallel light through fiber conduits only to fan out in bursts of radio across the open air at the whim of tens of millions of grazing fingers coaxing electrons from hundreds of millions of spots on capacitive touch screens a few inches high. Robin’s streams were the slightest blip in the race’s desperate search for mass diversion. As a fraction of the feed produced and consumed that day, a few hundred billion bits of information were like a single pip on the surface of a strawberry at the end of an eight-course dinner. But these bits were my son, and, reassembled, they held the record of his face on a late afternoon by the side of a lake telling a perfect stranger, Everybody’s inside everyone.

  Currier said, “Let’s stay calm and see how this plays out.”

  Hanging up on him got easier with practice.

  COG CAME TO MADISON. They’d been through before, but not for a few years. Back then, they filmed my elevator pitch about using absorption lines in the light passing through a planet’s atmosphere to detect life from a quadrillion miles away. Since then, COG had gone from being the poetry slam of academic lectures to becoming the chief way that most of the world learned about scientific research.

  Every COG talk was delivered to a live audience in less than five minutes. The highest user-rated filmlets in the COG Madison site bubbled up to a site called COG Wisconsin. The tops in COG Wisconsin percolated up into COG Midwest, then COG U.S., and finally the coveted COG World Class. Only viewers who made it through a whole minute of a given clip could vote on it. The voters themselves climbed leaderboards for giving out the most evaluations. In this way, knowledge democratized and sciences went crowdsourced and bite-sized. My own talk topped out at COG Wisconsin, held back from the regional round by thousands of users furious that I could talk about the universe without ever mentioning God.

  The organizers for COG MAD 2 sent me an email. I skimmed the first few lines and shot back my regrets, reminding them I’d taken part the last time. Two minutes later, I got a follow-up, clarifying the email I’d rushed through too quickly. They weren’t recruiting me. They wanted Robin Byrne to make a cameo in a talk by Martin Currier on Decoded Neurofeedback.

  I was furious. I ran a quarter mile across campus to Currier’s lab. Luckily, the trot left me too winded to attack him when I found him in his office. I did manage to shout, “You stupid shit. We had a deal.”

  Currier flinched but held his ground. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “You gave COG my son’s identity.”

  “I did no such thing. I never even talked to them!” He pulled out his phone and punched up his email. “Ah. Here they are. They want to know if I would like to join your son onstage.”

  The penny dropped for both of us. COG had come straight to me. They had done nothing more than what Dee Ramey and Ova Nova had already done. Discovering the real Jay was now trivial, with so much to go on. My boy was outed. So many ships had sailed.

  My hands were shaking. I picked up a logic toy from his desk—a wooden bird you were supposed to free from a nest made of a dozen sliding wooden pieces. The only problem was that nothing wanted to slide. “He has become public property.”

  “Yes,” Currier said. For him, it was almost apology. He watched my face, psychologist by training. I was busy proving to my own satisfaction that the bird’s nest was broken and couldn’t be solved. “But he has given a lot of people hope. People are moved by this story.”

  “People are moved by gangster films and three-chord songs and commercials for cell phone plans.” I was getting worked up again. Panic did that to me. Currier just studied me, waiting, until I opened my mouth and words came out. “I’ll ask Robin. None of us gets to decide this for him.”

  Currier frowned but nodded. Something in me appalled him, and for good reason. I felt as if I were my own son, about to turn ten, seeing through adulthood for the first time.

  ROBIN WAS THOUGHTFUL but cautious. Do they want me, or do they really want Jay?

  “They definitely want you.”

  Cool. But what do I have to do?

  “You don’t have to do anything. You don’t even have to say yes if you don’t want to.”

  They want me to talk about the training and Mom’s brain and stuff?

  “Dr. Currier would describe all that, before you went on.”

  So what am I supposed to do?

  “Just be yourself.” The words turned meaningless in my mouth.

  His eyes got that faraway look. My timid boy, who spent years avoiding contact with strangers, was calculating how much fun it might be to spill the secret of life to the general public from the lip of a large stage.

  A week before the event, I started to decompensate. I regretted letting him agree to anything. If he bombed, it could scar him for life. If he crushed it, he’d climb up the ladder of COG regions and be loved by ten times more people than loved him now. Both possibilities made me ill.

  The evening before the event, after Robin finished the day’s last math packet, he came to me in my study, where I sat behind a stack of ungraded undergrad exams, vigorously doing nothing. He walked around behind my chair and put his hands on my trapezius. Then he called out the commands I used to get him to relax, back in the day. Jelly up!

  I let my body go limp.

  Jam tight!

  I tensed again. We did a few rounds before he came around to sit sidesaddle on the arm of the chair. Dad. Chill! It’s all good. I mean, it’s not like I have to make a speech or anything.

  The moment he went to bed, I called the local COG organizer—a Trotsky-looking guy Martin and I dealt with. “I have one more stipulation. After you film the talk, if I’m not happy, you don’t post it.”

  “That’s up to Dr. Currier.”

  “Well, I need veto rights.”

  “I don’t think that’s possible.”

  “Then I don’t think my son is going onstage tomorrow.”

  Funny how you can always win negotiations you’re not crazy about winning.

  THREE HUNDRED PEOPLE filled the auditorium, with folks still drifting in as the morning’s presenters finished. Fifteen minutes before showtime, the three of us went backstage. A techie wired up Currier and Robin and walked them through their marks.

  “You’ll see a red clock down on the front of the stage. At four minutes and forty-five seconds . . .” The tech drew his index finger across his throat and gurgled. Marty nodded. Robbie laughed. I wanted to puke on the floorboards.

  I didn’t realize the talk was under way until Currier was standing center stage in the audience applause. I held my arm around Robin, as if he might dash onstage if I let go. The tech stood on his other side, brandishing a handheld monitor and whispering into a headset boom.

  Currier sounded fresh, given how often he’d pitched his research in public. He still talked about the work as if the results mystified him. He took fifty seconds to describe neurofeedback, another forty to explain the fMRI and AI software, and half a minute to summarize the effects. Minute three went to the clips of Robin. The audience was audibly impressed. So was my son, seeing them again, standing next to me in the wings of a dark, packed theater. Geez. That’s what happened to me?

  Minute four brought the reveal. Currier dropped it as if it were just another data point: the same mother whose death sent the boy into a downward spiral has returned to nurse his spirit into health. Robin twitched, under my arm. I looked down at the compact planet next to me, whose shoulder I was clasping too hard. But he was grinning, as if the boy saved from that
downward spiral fascinated him.

  In his last half minute alone onstage, Currier succumbed to interpretation. “We’ve barely glimpsed the potential of these techniques. Only the future will reveal their full possibilities. Meanwhile, imagine a world where one person’s anger is soothed by another’s calm, where your private fears are assuaged by a stranger’s courage, and where pain can be trained away, as easily as taking piano lessons. We could learn to live here, on Earth, without fear. Now please say hello to a friend of mine. Mr. Robin Byrne.”

  The diminutive figure next to me shrugged off my arm and was gone. I held on to the back of my neck as he crossed the stage. He looked so small. I once saw a child his size play Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 8 at Merkin Hall in New York. The girl’s hands barely stretched a fifth. I don’t know how she did it, or why her parents let her. I felt the same confusion now. My son had become a tiny prodigy on his own instrument. The audience clapped wildly as Robin trotted to the floodlit center stage. There, he stabbed a hand across his front and bowed deeply from the waist. The clapping and laughter grew.

  I’ve watched the film so often my memory is convinced I was out in the darkened hall. Currier must have thought that Robin would smile and wave, then the two of them would say goodbye. But they still had a long and fluid minute left.

  The whole auditorium wants him to ask: What’s it like? How does it feel? Is it still her? But Currier veers off into another place. He asks, “What’s the biggest difference between when you started the training and now?”

  Robin rubs his mouth and nose. He takes too long to answer. You can see Currier’s confidence waver and hear the audience grow restive. You mean in real life?

  The words slip through his teeth with a little lisp. The audience titters. Currier has no idea where Robin is going. But before he can get things back on the rails, my son declares, Nothing!