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 now 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.”