Robin sat curled under my arm on the living room sofa and explained it to me, on a night when we decided to stay home on Earth. Like Dr. Currier says. Maybe it could be useful.
-
I DIDN’T GRASP WHAT WAS HAPPENING TO ROBIN until I saw the rough cut. In the video, his name is Jay. He comes into the frame, and the shot begins to breathe. He turns to look at the ducks and the gray squirrels and the lindens along the lake, and his gaze turns them into aliens for the camera to reappraise.
Next, he’s lying in the fMRI tube in Currier’s lab, moving shapes around on his screen with his mind. His face is round and open but a little devilish, pleased with his skill. Dee Ramey, in voice-over, explains how Jay is learning to match another set of frozen feelings laid down years before. But her explanation is beside the point. He’s a child, in the full grip of creation.
Then he’s sitting across from Dee Ramey, on a bench under a spreading willow. She asks: “But how does it feel?”
His nose and mouth twitch a little. His excited hands twist with explanation. You know how when you sing a good song with people you like? And people are singing all different notes, but they sound good together?
The journalist looks sad for half a moment. Maybe she’s thinking how long it has been since she sang with her friends. “Does it feel like talking to your mother?”
His brows pinch; he doesn’t quite like the question. Nobody’s saying anything out loud, if that’s what you mean.
“But you can feel her? You can tell it’s her?”
He shrugs. Vintage Robin. It’s us.
“You feel like she’s there with you? When you train?”
Robin’s head swivels on the stalk of his neck. He’s looking at something way too big to tell her. He reaches one hand above his head to catch the lowest branches of the willow and let it slip back through his fingers. She’s here right now.
The video blinks first and cuts away.
-
THEY WALK ALONG THE LAKESHORE. Jay lifts one hand to the small of her back, as if he’s a doctor breaking news that’s delicate but not disastrous. She says, “You must have been hurting so much.”
I want to scream at her, every time. But he’s paying attention to the world, not her question.
“When did the hurt start? When your mother passed, or before?”
He frowns at that word passed. But he figures it out on the fly. My mother didn’t pass. She died.
Dee Ramey stutter-steps and stops. Maybe his words stun her into listening. Maybe they excite her, their weirdness promising a couple thousand more thumbs-up. Maybe I’m being cruel.
“But you’ve learned to match the patterns of her brain activity. So now that part of her is inside you, right?”
He smiles and shakes his head, but not in disagreement. He knows now that no grown-up gets it. He holds out his hands to the grass and sky and oaks and lindens lining the lake. Paws up in the crisp air, he waves them to include our distant invisible neighborhood, the university, the houses of friends, the Capitol, and states beyond our state. Everybody’s inside everyone.
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.