The news announcer answered for me. In the name of national security, the President could do pretty much anything.
The President is a dung beetle.
“Don’t say that, bud.”
He is.
“Robin, listen to me. You can’t talk like that.”
Why not?
“Because they can put you in jail, now. Remember when we talked about it, last month?”
He fell back in his seat, having second thoughts about good citizenship.
Well, he is. A you-know-what. He’s wrecking everything.
“I know. But we can’t say so out loud. Besides. You’re being totally unfair.”
He looked at me, baffled. Two beats later, he broke into a spectacular grin. You’re right! Dung beetles are pretty amazing.
“Did you know that they navigate by mental maps of the Milky Way?”
He looked at me, mouth agape. The fact seemed too weird to be invented. He pulled out his pocket notebook and made a note to fact-check me when we got home.
-
UP THROUGH THE DIMINISHING HILLS of Kentucky, past the Creation Museum and Ark Encounter, through counties that had little use for science of any kind, we listened to Flowers for Algernon. I’d read it at age eleven. It was one of the first books in my two-thousand-volume library of science fiction. I bought it in a used bookstore—a mass market paperback bearing a creepy image of a face halfway between mouse and man. Paying for it with my own money felt like cracking the code of adulthood. Holding it open in my hands, I wormholed into a different Earth. Small, light, portable parallel universes turned out to be the only thing in this life I’d ever collect.
Algernon didn’t quite start me down the path of science. That was the “sea monkeys,” a kind of brine shrimp shipped to me in an astonishing state of cryptobiosis. By Robbie’s age, I’d already tabulated my first data sets on their hatching rates. But Algernon lit up my proto-scientific imagination and made me want to experiment on something the size of my own life. I hadn’t read the story in decades, and a twelve-hour drive seemed the perfect excuse to revisit with Robin in tow.
The story gripped him. He kept making me pause for questions. He’s changing, Dad. You hear his words getting bigger? A little later, he asked: Is this for real? I mean: Could it ever be for real, someday?
I told him everything could be for real, somewhere, someday. That may have been a mistake.
By the time we reached southern Indiana’s long stretch of factory farms, he was swept up, limiting his commentary to cheers and jeers. We went for miles at a shot, Robin leaning forward, a hand on the dash, forgetting even to look out the window. He was spawning synapses as fast as Charlie Gordon, whose IQ rose to precarious heights. Robbie winced through Charlie’s rejection at the hands of his coworkers. The moral ambiguity of the experimenting scientists Nemur and Strauss hurt him so much I had to remind him to breathe.
When Algernon died, he made me stop the recording. Really? He couldn’t wrap his head around the fact. The mouse is dead? His face flirted with quitting the story altogether. But Algernon had already ended much of the innocence Robin still possessed. The mind’s eye had two bafflements: coming out of the light and going into it.
“You know what that means? You see what’s coming?” But Robin couldn’t see the consequences for Charlie. Nor did he much care. I resumed the story. A minute later, he made me pause again.
But the mouse, Dad. The muh-hu-hu-mouse! His voice mock-mourned, like a smaller, younger kid. But not far down, the play was real.
We stopped for the night at a motel near Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. He wouldn’t sleep until the story ended. He lay on his bed, suffering through Charlie’s final decline with sphinxlike stoicism. At the end, he nodded, and motioned for lights-out. I asked him what he thought, but he simply shrugged. Only in the dark did it come out of him.
Did Mom ever read this story?
The question blindsided me. “I don’t know. I think so. Probably. It’s kind of a classic. Why do you ask?”
Why do you think? he said, sharper than perhaps intended. When he spoke again, he was contrite. He was going into the light, or coming out of it. I couldn’t tell which. You know. The mouse, Dad. The mouse.
-
WE GOT TO MADISON A LITTLE AFTER NOON on the day I’d promised to get Robin back to school. I got the automated text saying he was absent without excuse and asking if I knew that (Please reply Y or N). I should have brought him straight to class. But there were only a few hours left of school, and I was feeling how I always felt whenever I had to hand him over to people who didn’t get him. I wanted him to myself a little longer.
I brought him to campus with me. I dreaded going in after so long away. We got my mail, and I checked in with my grad assistant, Jinjing, who’d taught my undergrad classes in my absence. Jinjing fussed over Robin like he was her own little brother back in Shenzhen. She took him to see the display case of meteorites and the photos from Cassini. I took the opportunity to get chewed out by Carl Stryker, my colleague and coauthor on a paper about detecting biosignature gases from lensing-revealed exoplanets that I was holding up.
“MIT is going to scoop us,” Stryker said. Of course it was. MIT or Princeton or the EANA was always scooping us. It wasn’t enough for anyone simply to do science. Everything was a race for priority, for professional advancement, for a share of the shrinking grants pool and a raffle ticket to Stockholm. The truth was, Stryker and I were never going to win the Swedish Sweepstakes. But continued funding was nice. And I was jeopardizing that by failing to refine my model data for the article.
“Is it the boy, again?” Stryker asked.
I wanted to say: He has a name, jerk-face. But yes, I said, it was the boy, silently begging my collaborator to cut me a little slack. Stryker didn’t have much slack to give. Fifteen years ago, the exoplanet bonanza had turned the grants agencies as generous toward astrobiology as the Renaissance courts had been to any adventurer with a caravel. But Earth was shakier now, and the funding winds had changed.
“We need the edits by Monday, Theo. I’m serious.”
I told him I could manage by Monday. I left Stryker’s office wondering what my career in this infant field might have been like, had I never married. A little luckier, maybe. But nothing in existence could ever be luckier than Alyssa and Robin.
-
MY LIFE WENT THROUGH ITS OWN LITTLE HADEAN EON, back in my Muncie childhood. Hell everywhere. The details are blissfully fuzzy now. I grew up fast. By rough count, my mother harbored six different personalities inside herself, and half of them were capable of doing me and my two older sisters real harm. By the time my father commenced his slow suicide by painkillers, I’d already traded in boy soprano for the more demanding hobby of sitting in my room and panicking.
When I was thirteen, Dad made us kids scrub up and sit behind him in court as he was sentenced for embezzling. The ploy must have worked because he got only eight months. But we lost the house, and my father never again earned more than minimum wage. I wouldn’t have made it through those years without brains in a vat, Dyson spheres, arcologies, spooky action at a distance, Afrofuturism, Retro-pulp, and psi machines. From Alpha-beams to the Omega Point, I lived in a parallel place that spawned scenarios of such infinite variety that they made a laughingstock of the little parochial rock in the galactic sticks where I lived. Nothing could hurt me so long as consensual reality was just a tiny atoll in an ocean without shores.