The country had been so volatile when we left, and days of spotty reception left me anxious about what was waiting for us back out here. I waited until we got out of Tennessee to tune in the news. Two headlines in, I regretted it. Hurricane Trent’s hundred-mile-an-hour winds returned a good stretch of the South Fork of Long Island to the sea. U.S. and Chinese fleets were playing nuclear cat-and-mouse off Hainan Island. An eighteen-deck cruise ship named Beauty of the Seas exploded off St. John’s, Antigua, killing scores of passengers and wounding hundreds more. Several groups claimed responsibility. In Philadelphia, stoked by social media flame wars, True America militias attacked a HUE demonstration and three people were dead.
I tried to change the station, but Robbie wouldn’t let me. We have to know, Dad. It’s good citizenship.
Maybe it was. Maybe it was even good parenting. Or maybe it was a colossal error in judgment, to let him go on listening.
Following the fires that had taken out three thousand homes across the San Fernando Valley, the President was blaming the trees. His executive order called for two hundred thousand acres of national forest to be cut down. The acres weren’t even all in California.
Holy crap, my son shouted. I didn’t bother with a language check. Can he do that?
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.