There was a planet that couldn't figure out where everyone was. It died of loneliness.
That happened billions
of times in our galaxy alone.
I never believed the diagnoses the doctors settled on my son. When a condition gets three different names
over as many decades, when it requires two subcategories to account for completely contradictory
symptoms, when two different physicians want to prescribe three different medications, there's something
wrong.
His second pediatrician was keen to put my Robin "on the spectrum, I think." I wanted to tell the man that
everyone alive on this fluke little planet of ours was on the spectrum; that's what a spectrum is. Then I
wanted to punch him. What was there to explain? Synthetic clothing gave him hideous eczema. His
classmates harassed him for not understanding their vicious gossip. His mother was crushed to death when
he was seven. What more reason for disturbed behavior did any doctor need?
Father-son relationships can be tough. And they’re even harder for Theo Byrne, an accomplished
astrobiologist, and his 10 year-old son Robin, who… has been put “on the spectrum.” They often drive away
to be with nature, and spend time with the limitless possibilities of this universe and the next. Together, they
draw up entire worlds and planets and galaxies. Because there is nothing like Bewilderment, A Novel by
Richard Powers.
Watching medicine fail my child, I developed a crackpot theory: Life is something we need to stop
correcting. My boy was a pocket universe I could never hope to fathom. Every one of us is an experiment,
and we don't even know what the experiment is testing.
My wife would have known how to talk to the doctors. Nobody's perfect, Alyssa liked to say. But, man, we
all fall short so beautifully.
There had been more trouble with his classmates, and Robbie was suspended… again. His principal had
brought me in for a lecture.
“I’m not passing judgement on your parenting.” Which, of course, she was.
I pulled him from school for a week and brought him to the Smokies. He seemed happy, which had been the
whole point of this special trip. We pitched the tent close to the riverbank and spread our sleeping rolls on
the ground.
I had sworn loudly when I had seen the river. The whole stretch of stream was covered in cairns.
What’s wrong with them, Dad?
“Those cairns were your mother’s worst nightmare. They destroy the homes of everything alive in that river.
Imagine creatures from another world tearing up our neighborhoods, again and again and again.”
We have to take them down.
“We can’t today, Robbie. The water is pure snowmelt. Let’s come back in July.”
Soon it was dark. We lay side by side, under our galaxy’s four hundred billion stars. The blue-black wash
where stars remade the rules in all quarters of the night.
So there are billions of stars in the Milky Way?
This boy made the world good for me. "Hundreds of billions."
He nodded in the dark, confirmed. Lying so close, I felt his thoughts racing outward into the darkness.
That one, there. What's happening on that one?
"On that one, people can split in half and grow back as two separate beings. With all their memories intact,
but only once in life."
And that one? How about over there?
"On that one, microbes all over a person's skin always give away exactly what they're feeling."
Cool. I'd like to live there. On that one, your memories never get weaker, and they never go away.
"Ouch. A broken bone? A fight you have with somebody?"
The way Mom's skin smelled.
They share a lot, Astronomy and Childhood. Both search for facts beyond their grasp. Both theorize widely
and let possibilities multiply without limits. And both are humbled every few weeks.
The silence woke me. I'd been asleep for longer than I thought. And Robin wasn't there. I dressed and left
the tent. The moon in the clear sky turned the Earth into a blue-gray aquatint. Navigating the roots and rocks
was as easy as walking by streetlight. I called but heard nothing back, over the sound of the rapids. "Robin?
Robbie! Buddy?"
A muffled moan came from the stream. Five feet into the river, I hit slickness. He was curled over a boulder
in the middle of the flow. He'd been dismantling cairns. Turning the river back into a safe home.
He was soaked up to the top of his rib cage. His whole body was quaking. He tried to reach out, but his arm
swung limply in the air. Slurred sounds came from his mouth, nothing like words. He felt so cold.
Time came apart. I couldn’t decide what I was supposed to do. I looked up. The tent with my dry thermal
sleeping bag was just above the bank. But Robin. A voice said, Try. Alyssa. I left him curled on the rock and
stumbled to shore. The tent zipper tore as I fought with it. I wrapped the sleeping bag around my neck and
somehow thrashed my way back to the boulder without falling. I wrestled the bag around him and sealed it.
Then I covered him with my body, sheltering him as best as I could, searching for the sound of his breath
above the rushing water.
A long time passed before I could accept that he no longer needed me.
There was a planet that couldn't figure out where everyone was. It died of loneliness. That happened billions
of times in our galaxy alone.
