Bewilderment Read online

  “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.

  “I write programs that try to take everything we know about all the systems of any kind of planet—the rocks and volcanoes and oceans, all the physics and chemistry—and put them together to predict what kind of gases might be present in their atmospheres.”

  Why?

  “Because atmospheres are parts of living processes. The mixes of gases can tell us if the planet is alive.”

  Like here?

  “Exactly. My programs have even predicted the Earth’s atmosphere at different times in history.”

  You can’t predict the past, Dad.

  “You can if you don’t know it yet.”

  So how do you tell what kind of gases a planet has from a hundred light-years away when you can’t even see it?

  I exhaled, changing the atmosphere inside our tent. It had been a long day, and the thing he wanted to know would take ten years of coursework to grasp. But a child’s question was the start of all things. “Okay. Remember atoms?”

  Yep. Very small.

  “And electrons?”

  Very, very small.

  “Electrons in an atom can only be in certain energy states. Like they’re on the steps of a staircase. When they change stairs, they absorb or give off energy at specific frequencies. Those frequencies depend on what kind of atom they’re in.”

  Crazy stuff. He grinned at the trees above the tent.

  “You think that’s crazy? Listen to this. When you look at the spectrum of light from a star, you can see little black lines, at the frequency of those stairsteps. It’s called spectroscopy, and it tells you what atoms are in the star.”

  Little black lines. From electrons, a gazillion miles away. Who figured that out?

  “We’re a very clever species, we humans.”

  He didn’t reply. I figured he’d drifted asleep again—a good end to a fine day. Even the whippoorwill agreed and called it a night. The hush in its wake filled with the bandsaw buzz of insects and the river’s surge.

  I must have dropped off, too, because Chester was sitting with his muzzle on my leg, whimpering as Alyssa read to us about the soul recovering radical innocence.

  Dad. Dad! I figured it out.

  I slipped upward from the net of sleep. “Figured out what, honey?”

  In his excitement, he let the endearment slide. Why we can’t hear them.

  Half asleep, I had no clue.

  What’s the name for rock-eaters, again?

  He was still trying to solve the Fermi paradox—how, given all the universe’s time and space, there seemed to be no one out there. He’d held on to the question since our first night in the cabin, looking through our telescope at the Milky Way: Where was everybody?

  “Lithotrophs.”

  He smacked his forehead. Lithotrophs! Duh. So, say there’s a rocky planet full of lithotrophs, living in solid rock. You see the problem?

  “Not yet.”

  Dad, come on! Or maybe they live in liquid methane or whatever. They’re super-slow, almost frozen solid. Their days are like our centuries. What if their messages take too long for us to even know that they’re messages? Like maybe it takes fifty of our years for them to send two syllables.

  Our whippoorwill started up again, far away. In my head, Chester, infinitely long-suffering, was still struggling with Yeats.

  “It’s a great idea, Robbie.”

  And maybe there’s a water world, where these super-smart, super-fast bird-fish are zooming around, trying to get our attention.

  “But they’re sending too fast for us to understand.”

  Exactly! We should try listening at different speeds.

  “Your mother loves you, Robbie. You know that?” It was our little code, and he abided it. But it did nothing to calm his excitement.

  At least tell the SETI listeners, okay?

  “I will.”

  His next words woke me again. A minute, three seconds, half an hour later: Who knew how long?

  Remember how she used to say: “How rich are you, little boy?”

  “I remember.”

  He held up his hands to the moonlit mountain evidence. The wind-bent trees. The roar of the nearby river. The electrons tumbling down the staircase of their atoms in this singular atmosphere. His face, in the dark, struggled for accuracy. This rich. That’s how rich.

  WHEN HE FINALLY LET ME SLEEP, I couldn’t. The two of us were doing fine, camping in the woods with a few cooked beans and a sketchbook. But the minute we returned to civilization, I’d be neck-deep in work and Robin would be back in a school he hated, surrounded by kids he couldn’t help spooking. Eden would be clear-cut again, back in Madison.

  Everything about parenting terrified me, long before the day Alyssa burst into my office in Sterling Hall and shouted, “Ready or not, Professor—company’s coming!” I hugged her, to an ovation from my amused colleagues. But that was the last time I executed my paternal responsibilities with unambiguous success.

  I could no more raise a child than I could speak Swahili. The prospect terrified Alyssa, too, in her own ecstatic way. But somehow the collective wisdom of family, friends, doctors, nurses, and Internet advice sites sufficiently emboldened us to ignore everyone and muddle through on our own best guesses. Tens of thousands of generations of clueless humans had managed to work out the kinks in child rearing well enough to keep the game in play. We wouldn’t be the worst, I figured. As it turned out, Alyssa and I never had time to keep our parenting score. Life became a fire drill from the moment Robin came out of the incubator.

  But it turns out children have a tolerance for mistakes that I never imagined. Who’d have believed a four-year-old could pull a grill full of hot charcoal down onto himself and walk away with no lasting harm beyond a brand like a shiny pink oyster on his lower back?

  On the other hand, the ways of going wrong never failed to stun me. I once read my six-year-old The Velveteen Rabbit and only learned from my eight-year-old about the months of nightmares it had given him. Two years of night terrors he’d been too ashamed to tell me about: that was Robin. God only knew what the eleven-year-old might confess to me about the things I was right n
ow doing wrong. But he’d survived his mother’s death. I figured he’d survive my best intentions.

  I lay in our tent that night, thinking how Robbie had spent two days worrying over the silence of a galaxy that ought to be crawling with civilizations. How could anyone protect a boy like that from his own imagination, let alone from a few carnivorous third-graders flinging shit at him? Alyssa would’ve propelled the three of us forward on her own bottomless forgiveness and bulldozer will. Without her, I was flailing.

  I twitched in my sleeping bag, trying not to wake Robin. A chorus of invertebrates swelled and ebbed. Two barred owls traded their call-and-response: Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you-all? Who would ever cook for this boy, aside from me? I couldn’t imagine Robin toughening up enough to survive this Ponzi scheme of a planet. Maybe I didn’t want him to. I liked him otherworldly. I liked having a son so ingenuous that it rattled his smug classmates. I enjoyed being the father of a kid whose favorite animal for three straight years had been the nudibranch. Nudibranchs are deeply underappreciated.

  Late-night anxieties of an astrobiologist. I smelled the trees respiring and heard the river where Alyssa and I first swam together, polishing its boulders even in darkness. A noise came from the bag next to me. Robin was pleading in his sleep. Stop! Please stop! Please!

  ONE OF THE SOLUTIONS TO THE FERMI PARADOX was so strange I never dared tell Robin. He would have had bad dreams for months. One quadrillion neural connections lay on the inflatable camping pillow next to me: one synapse for every star in two thousand five hundred Milky Ways. Lots of ways to overheat.

  But here’s the solution I never told him: Say life is easy to kick-start from out of nothing. Say it’d been springing up in every crack of the cosmic sidewalk for billions of years before the Earth appeared. After all, it sprang up here the moment this planet stabilized, from the same stuff that exists everywhere in the universe.

  And say that over the eons, countless millions of civilizations arose, many of them lasting long enough to venture into space. Spacefaring creatures found each other, linked up, and shared knowledge, their technologies accelerating with each new contact. They built great energy-harvesting spheres that enclosed entire suns and drove computers the size of whole solar systems. They harnessed the energy from quasars and gamma ray bursts. They filled galaxies the way we once spread across continents. They learned to weave the fabric of reality itself.

  And when this consortium mastered all the laws of time and space, they fell into the sadness of completion. Absolute Intelligence surrendered to nostalgia for the camping and woodcraft of its own lost origins. They created consoling playthings—countless sealed-off planets where life could evolve again in its pristine state.

  And say that life in one of those terrariums evolves into creatures with two thousand five hundred times as many synapses as there were stars in a galaxy. Even with such brains, it would take those creatures millennia to discover that they were trapped forever in a simulated wilderness, looking out onto a virtual firmament, trapped in childhood, alone.

  The catalog of solutions to the Fermi paradox calls this the Zoo Hypothesis. Zoos made Robin queasy. He couldn’t stand to see sentient beings confined.

  My own parents raised me a Lutheran, but I lost all religion at the age of sixteen. All life long I’ve believed that when a person dies, all the beauty and insight and hope—but also all pain and terror—everything stored in her one thousand trillion synapses disperses into noise. But that night in the Smokies, in our two-person tent, I couldn’t help petitioning the person who knew Robin best in all the world. “Alyssa.” My wife of eleven and a half years. “Aly. Tell me what to do. We’re fine together, in the woods. But I’m afraid to take him home.”

  AT THREE A.M., IT POURED. I scrambled into the rain to put the fly on. The bedlam terrified Robin at first. But, running around in the downpour, he began cackling like a crow. He was still laughing when we got back in the tent, soaked to the bone in a puddle of our foolish optimism.

  “I guess I should have insisted on the fly.”

  Worth it, Dad. I’d leave it off again!

  “You would, would you? You and your inner amphibian.”

  We cooked oatmeal over the portable stove and broke camp late that morning. The trail looked different from the other direction. We headed back up and over the ridge. It surprised Robin, how much was still growing, so late into the season. I showed him witch hazel, waiting to flower in January. I told him about the snow scorpionfly, which would skate on ice and feed on moss all winter.

  Too soon, we were back at the trailhead. The sight of the road through the trees crushed me. The cars, the asphalt, the sign listing all the regulations: after a night in the woods, the trailhead parking lot felt like death. I did my best not to show Robin. He was probably protecting me, too.

  We hit traffic on the road back to our rented cabin. I pulled up behind a Subaru Outback loaded down with high-performance mountain bikes. The queue stretched in front of us, out of sight: half a mile of backed-up SUVs, all starved for the last little scraps of eastern wilderness.

  I looked over at my passenger. “You know what this is? Bear jam!” I’d told him we might see one, here in the densest population of black bears on the continent. “Hop out. Walk down a ways and see. But stay close to the road.”

  He studied me. Serious?

  “Of course! I’m not going to leave you here. I’ll stop and pick you up when I reach you.” He didn’t move. “Go on, Robbie. There’s all kinds of people up there. The bears won’t hurt you.”

  His look withered me: he wasn’t worried about the quadrupeds. But he let himself out of the car and stumbled ahead, alongside the stopped cars. The small victory should have cheered me.

  Traffic crept along. People started honking. Cars tried to U-turn on the narrow mountain road. Cars pulled off onto the shoulder, haphazard, their passengers milling out into traffic. People grilled each other. Bear. Where? A mother and three little ones. There. No, there. A ranger tried to get the cars to move on through. The queue ignored her.

  Minutes later, I reached the throng. People pointed into the woods while others lifted binoculars to their eyes. People aimed tripod-mounted cameras with howitzer lenses. A line of people warded off nature with their cell phones. It looked like a crowd outside an office building watching a person on the tenth-floor ledge.

  Then I noticed the family of four, drifting diffidently back into the undergrowth. The sow cast a look over her shoulder at the assembled humans. I saw Robin in the crowd, gazing down, in the wrong direction. He turned and saw me and trotted toward the car. The traffic was still stopped dead. I rolled down the window. “Stay and look, Robbie.”

  He jogged to the car, got in, and slammed the door behind him.

  “Did you see them?”

  I saw them. They were fantastic. His voice was belligerent. He stared straight ahead, at the Outback still in front of us. I felt an incident coming on.

  “Robbie. What’s wrong? What happened?”

  His head turned away and he shouted, Didn’t you see them?

  He stared at his hands in his lap. I knew enough not to push things. The spectacle over, traffic started to move at last. Half a mile down the road, Robbie spoke again.

  They must really hate us. How would you like to star in a freak show?

  He stared through the side window at the snaking river. Minutes later, he said, Heron. The word was nothing but flat fact.

  I waited for two more miles. “They’re very smart, you know. Ursus americanus. Some scientists say they’re almost as smart as hominids.”

  Smarter.

  “How do you figure?”

  We’d popped out of the park and were driving back through the gauntlet of recreational economy. Robin held his hands out toward the evidence. They don’t do this!

  We passed the fudge shop and the hamburger stand, the tube rentals, dollar store, and bumper cars. We made a left past the visitor center, back uphill to our cabin. “
They’re just lonely, Robbie.”

  He looked at me as if I’d renounced my citizenship in the clan of sentient beings. What are you talking about? They weren’t lonely. They were disgusted.

  “Don’t shout, okay? I’m not talking about the bears.”

  The puzzle slowed him down, at least.

  People are lonely because we’re jerk-faces. We stole everything from them, Dad.

  Warnings were everywhere, from his rigid fingers and twitching lips to the purple flush rising around his neck. Another few minutes would undo all the gentleness of the last few days. I didn’t have the stamina for two hours of wounded screaming fit. Years of experience had taught me that my best course now was distraction.

  “Robbie, listen. Suppose the Allen Telescope Array had a press conference tomorrow where they announced indisputable evidence of intelligent aliens.”

  Dad.

  “It would be the most exciting day on Earth. One announcement would change everything.”

  He stopped twitching, still disgusted. But curiosity beat disgust in Robin, nine times out of ten. So?

  “So . . . say they held a press conference and said alien intelligence was discovered all over the Smokies and—”

  Gee, God . . . ! He jabbed his hands in the air. But I’d successfully derailed him. I could see his eyes toy with the idea. His mouth twitched in resentful amusement. That line of people along the side of the road holding out their cell phones were turning back into kin. He saw it now: We humans were dying for company. Our species had grown so desperate for alien contact that traffic could back up for miles at the fleeting glimpse of anything smart and wild.

  “No one wants to be alone, Robbie.”

  Compassion struggled with righteousness and lost. They used to be everywhere, Dad. Before we got to them. We took over everything! We deserve to be alone.