She needed the car, for a reception afterward. That justified the hassle of parking downtown. I walked with her out to the driveway. With one hand on the driver’s-side door, she leaned forward and pointed campily in the air. All right, then. Avengers, assemble! She kissed me, nibbling my lip. Then she headed off to the Capitol. I would not see her again on this planet, except to identify the body.
THE FOOT TRAFFIC PICKED UP. People started to notice Robin. Several women approached near enough to make sure he was okay. Men walked by. One coiffed, gray-haired lady in a black skirt suit who looked like Aly’s mother came up to him like she was ready to dial 911. I stood to intervene, but Robin talked her down. She dove into her purse and produced a handful of bills, which she tried to press on him. He glanced at me, begging, but he knew the rules. The protest permit strictly prohibited fundraising.
He managed to hand out some flyers, mostly to bemused people who didn’t hang around to read them. The flyers rarely made it past the trash cans at the corners of the landscaped park. I figured his exploration of participatory democracy might last an hour, followed by a very short oral report at school the next day. But some combination of holy cause and many sessions of neural feedback turned my boy into a Zen bulldog. He dug in, developing a repertoire of playful patter with which he accosted people across the expanses of concrete and cut stone.
I sat on a backless bench with my laptop, tweaking a simulation of the atmospheres that might evolve on a Super Earth just discovered thirty light-years away. I got hungry before he did. I crossed to him, holding up the thermos of cold juice and the bag lunch he’d made for us the night before. He wolfed down half of a hummus-avocado sandwich, then ordered me back to my observation post, shaking his sign to make up for his few minutes away.
After lunch, time slowed down like some relativity thought experiment. I balanced my phone-tethered notebook computer on my lap and pretended to work while keeping one eye on my activist-in-training.
My in-box piled up with unaddressed urgencies. The department’s Chinese graduate students had had their student visas revoked. Even Jinjing, my assistant and die-hard Packers fan, who knew more about this country than I did: more collateral victims in the President’s two-front war against foreign powers and the scientific elites who supported them. Apparently God had made life on one planet only, and only one country of that planet’s dominant species needed to manage it. The department called an emergency faculty meeting for late that afternoon.
When I looked up to check on Robin, he had buttonholed a white-haired black man in a crisp gray suit. My son was shaking his hand-painted sign, scattering facts and figures. The man listened, suspicious. He began grilling Robin.
I closed my computer and walked over. “Everything all right here?”
The man turned to size me up. “Is this your son?”
“I’m sorry. Do you have a problem with something he’s doing?”
“I have a problem with you.” His voice was stentorian and suffered no fools. “Did you put him up to this? Why isn’t he in school? Is this your idea of manipulating strangers? What exactly are you trying to do?”
This is my protest, Robin said. I told you already. He has nothing to do with it.
“You left him out here unsupervised.”
“I did nothing of the sort. I was sitting right over there.”
The man turned to Robin. “Why didn’t you tell me that?”
We did everything legally. I’m just trying to get people to believe the truth.
The man turned back to me. He pointed at the sign. “Help me, i’m dying. You don’t think there’s something wrong with letting a young child stand in a public place, all by himself, holding—”
“Excuse me.” I held my shaking hands behind my back. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d interrupted anyone. “Who are you to tell me how to raise my child?”
“I’m the chief of staff of the assembly minority leader, and the father of four successful children. What are you teaching this boy, letting him stand out here by himself, holding this? You should be connecting him with existing groups. He could be helping to organize other kids. Write letters. Work on specific and useful projects.” He looked me in the eye and shook his head. “I should report you for cruelty.”
Then he turned and climbed the steps and vanished into government. I wanted to shout after him: What do you mean, “successful children”?
I looked at Robin. He was crumpling a corner of his poster. His first crushing legislative defeat, and his bill hadn’t even been drafted.
I told you not to come over, he shouted. I was handling it.
“Robin. You’ve been here for a long time. Let’s go home.”
He didn’t look up. He didn’t even shake his head. I’m staying. And I’m coming back tomorrow.
“Robin. I need to get to a meeting. We have to leave now.”
Hatred for his own kind rose in his eyes, as plain as the words on his placard. His brain was struggling to raise and lower its own pitches, to move the dots around, to grow and shrink them in the theater of his own head. His shoulders collapsed, and he turned away. He seemed ready to run or yell or smash his sign against the ground. When he spoke again, his voice was small and lost.
How did Mom do it? Every day. For years.
I COULDN’T FIND THE PLANET ISOLA. I looked across large swaths, for many years. My son came along to keep me company and witness my confusion.
“It should be right around here. All the data say so.”
He no longer put much stock in data. My son was losing his faith in other planets.
The strange thing was, we could see it from far away. Transit photometry and radial velocity and gravitational microlensing all agreed on its exact location. We knew its mass and radius. We’d calculated its rotations and revolutions down to very small margins of error. But when my son and I came within a few thousand kilometers, it disappeared. The space where it should have been turned empty in every direction.
He took pity on my trouble with the obvious. They’re hiding, Dad. The creatures on Isola are going into our minds and cloaking themselves.
“What? How?”
They’ve been around for a billion years. They’ve learned some things.
He was tired now, impatient with my failure to see. What were the odds of any contact ending well? All human history answered that one.
That’s why the universe is silent, Dad. Everyone’s hiding. All the smart ones, anyway.
“BUT WE’VE SEEN REAL PROGRESS,” Martin Currier insisted. “You can’t deny that. More than anyone expected.”
We sat in a lunch booth in an abandoned dim sum shop almost shuttered by the Asian student visa crisis. The entire campus—all of American academia—was reeling. Those foreign students whose visas hadn’t been curtailed were hiding out indoors. The crowded, cosmopolitan summer session had thinned out to a few safe white people.
Currier’s chin nudged his point home. “No one promised you a cure.”
I wanted to slap the bottom of his coffee cup as he lifted it to his face. “He won’t get out of bed. I have to go to war just to get him up and dressed. He doesn’t want to go outside. He’s ready to go to sleep again as soon as we have lunch. Thank God it’s summer vacation, or his school would be riding me again.”
“And it’s been like this . . . ?”
“For days.”
Currier lifted a dumpling to his lips with chopsticks and chewed. Some lump of gluten and pride, insoluble in tea, stuck in his Adam’s apple. “Maybe it’s time to think about a very low-dose regimen of an antidepressant.”
The word filled me with animal panic. He saw.
“Eight million children in the country take psychoactive drugs. They’re not ideal, but they can work.”
“If eight million children are taking psychoactive drugs, something isn’t working.”
The senior research professor shrugged. Concession or objection—I couldn’t tell. I searched a for a way out. �
�Could Robbie be . . . I don’t know. Starting to tolerate or habituate to the sessions? Could the effects be wearing off faster?”
“I can’t imagine. In most subjects, we see durable improvement lasting for weeks after each training.”
“Then why is he sliding down again?”
Currier raised his gaze to the television screen on the wall opposite our table. In the record heat, clusters of lethal bacteria were spreading up and down the Florida coast. The President was telling reporters, Maybe it’s entirely natural. Maybe it isn’t. People are saying . . .
“Maybe his reactions are entirely understandable.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, although my neck hair knew.
His frown was remarkably like his smile. “Clinicians and theorists are rarely going to agree on what constitutes mental health. Is it the ability to function productively in hard conditions? Or is it more a matter of appropriate response? Constant, cheerful optimism may not be the healthiest reaction to . . .” He nodded at the TV.
I had an awful thought: Maybe the last few months of neural feedback were hurting Robbie. In the face of the world’s basic brokenness, more empathy meant deeper suffering. The question wasn’t why Robin was sliding down again. The question was why the rest of us were staying so insanely sanguine.
Currier flipped a hand in the air. “He’s scoring much higher on self-control and resilience. He’s so much better at coping with uncertainty than he was when he first came to see us. All right: So he’s still angry. He’s still depressed. Honestly, Theo? I’d be concerned if he weren’t upset, these days.”
We finished eating. Martin argued over the morality of my paying for our tab, but the fight wasn’t vigorous. We walked back across campus. I’d made a mistake, going out without sunblock. It was only June, but I couldn’t breathe. Currier struggled, too. He held a surgical mask to his face. “Sorry. I know how ridiculous this looks. But my allergies are off the charts.” At least we weren’t in Southern California, where weeks of Code Red air from wildfires had sealed millions inside.
The protection of DecNef seemed to be ending. For a while it had kept Robin happy and me safe from having to drug my son. Now even Currier was suggesting it. One small conflagration at school and the choice would no longer be mine.
“He keeps asking me how Aly fought a losing battle for years without getting beaten by it.” Currier’s expression was unreadable behind his mask. I pressed on blindly. “I wonder the same thing. She used to get angry. She got depressed. A lot.” I didn’t much care to tell her old birding friend about her night terrors. “But she blew right through.”
His smile was audible, even behind his mask. “His mother had some prize brain-body chemistry.”
We paused on University Avenue near the Discovery Center, where our paths divided. I braced myself for another suggestion that it was time for the trial-and-error of child brain cocktails. But Currier removed his mask and nursed an expression that I couldn’t decode.
“We could learn her secret. Robin could tell us himself.”
“What in the world are you talking about?”
“I still have Aly’s run.”
Angers flooded me from many directions, none of them useful. “You what? You saved our recordings?”
“One of them.”
I knew without asking. He’d pitched my Admiration and Grief and her Vigilance. He’d kept her Ecstasy.
“You’re saying you could train Robin on Aly’s old brain scan?”
Currier sized up the wonder of it down on the pavement near his feet. “Your son could learn how to put himself into an emotional state his mother once generated. It might be motivating. It could answer his question.”
The colors of Plutchik’s wheel spun around me. Stabs of orange interest gave way to shards of green fear. The past was turning as porous and ambiguous as the future. We were making it up, the story of life in this place, as surely as I made up the bedtime stories of alien life my son hadn’t yet outgrown.
I looked down both long diagonals of the sidewalk intersection: not an Asian student in sight. I’d missed something obvious, in over thirty years of reading and two thousand science fiction books: there was no place stranger than here.
THE QUESTION GOT HIM OUT OF BED. He looked at me, his face a nursery of stars. They have Mom’s brain? She’s in the experiment?
I answered with every adult reservation, but it didn’t matter. He all but jumped me.
Holy crow. Dad! Why didn’t you tell me?
He took my face in his palms and made me swear solemnly that I wasn’t lying. It was like the two of us had stumbled on a video clip that no one knew existed, the record of a day that had been sealed off forever. Peace came over him, as if all would be well now, whatever the outcome. He turned his head to look out through his bedroom window at the summer rains. His eyes had a calm resolve, resigned to anything existence might throw at him. He’d never be laid low again.
I WAS PACING IN THE LAB’S FOYER when he came from the first session. He’d trained for ninety minutes. Colored dots, musical pitches, and other feedback helped him to find and match the patterns of his mother’s brain. I smiled, faking a calm I didn’t have. Robin must have known I was crazy for anything he could tell me.
Ginny brought him from the test room. Her arm draped over his shoulder while his hand reached up to clutch the sleeve of her lab coat. Ginny looked as casual as I was trying to be. She leaned down and asked, “You cool, Brain Boy? Want to sit in my office for a minute?”
He loved to sit at Ginny’s desk and read her collection of hipster comics. Ordinarily he’d have jumped at the offer. He shook his head. I’m cool. Then, as his mother had reminded him a million times in life, he added, Thank you.
For an hour and a half, he’d been feeling his way around Aly’s limbic system. Each time he’d raised and lowered pitches or steered icons toward targets on the screen he was steering himself into the bliss that had been Alyssa’s once, years ago—a lark we’d taken part in on an otherwise ordinary day. In Robin’s head, if nowhere else, he was talking to his mother again. I needed to know what she was saying.
He saw me from across the laboratory suite. His face lit with excitement and hesitation. I saw how badly he wanted to tell me where he’d just been. But he didn’t have words for that planet.
He let go of Ginny’s sleeve and slid out from under her arm. Her professional face betrayed a stab of abandonment. Robin approached me, something new in his walk. His stride was looser, more experimental. Ten feet away he shook his head. Reaching me, he grabbed my upper arm and pressed his ear against my chest.
“Good one?” The syllables came out of me, anemic.
It was her, Dad.
I flushed in the back of my legs. It occurred to me, too late, what an overactive imagination like Robin’s might do with so rich an inkblot.
“It felt . . . different?”
He shook his head, not at the question but at my dissembling. We made another appointment for the next week. I chatted with Ginny and a pair of postdocs. It felt like my classic nightmare where I’m lecturing in public and only belatedly discover my skin is green. Robin patted me on the back and nudged me toward the hallway, out of the emotional incubator, into the world.
We walked to the parking lot. I peppered him with questions, everything but what I was too adult to ask. He answered with monosyllables, more stymied than impatient. Only when I put my pass in the parking garage machine and the gate lifted did he open up.
Dad? You remember that first night in the cabin, in the mountains? Looking through the telescope?
“I do. Very well.”
That’s what it was like.
He held his hands in front of his face and spread them. Some memory amazed him, either blackness or stars.
I turned on Campus Drive toward home, keeping my eyes on the road. Then, in a voice I barely recognized, the alien on the front seat next to me said, Your wife loves you. You know that, right?
I
WATCHED FOR SOME DIFFERENCE. Maybe I cued myself, knowing whose feelings he was learning to emulate. But it seemed to take just two sessions for the black cloud he’d sunk into after his disastrous stint at the Capitol to break up into wisps of cirrus.
I came to wake him on a late June Saturday. He groaned at the shock of consciousness and sudden sun. But now, at least, he lifted his head off the pillow and grinned as he moaned.
Dad! Am I training today?
“Yes.”
Yay! he said, in a funny little voice. Because, you know, I could really use it.
“Could you use a little paddle in the boat afterwards?”
Serious? On the lake?
“I was thinking just out in the backyard.”
He growled deep in his throat and bared his teeth at me. You’re lucky I’m not a carnivore.
Choosing his clothes for the day left him wistful. Ah, this shirt. I forgot about this one. This is a good shirt! How come I never wear this shirt? He came out to the living room half-dressed. Remember that pair of furry socks Mom gave me, with separate toes, and little claws on each one? What happened to those?
The question made me flinch. I’d trained on his old brain for so long. I was sure a squall was coming. “Oh, Robbie. That was a hundred sizes ago.”
I know. Geez. I was just curious. I mean: Are they still somewhere? Is some other kid wearing them and thinking he’s half-bear?
“What made you think of those?”
He shrugged, but not in evasion. Mom. Eerie thoughts came over me. But before I could challenge him, he asked, What’s for breakfast? I’m starving!
He ate everything I put in front of him. He wanted to know what was different about the oatmeal (nothing) and why the orange juice was so tangy (no reason). He sat at the table after I cleared it, humming some melody I couldn’t make out. The raging curiosity I felt over the source of Aly’s recorded Ecstasy that long-ago day flooded through me again. My son—her son—had glimpsed it, but he couldn’t tell me.
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