“Yep. Pretty crazy.”
Wait. It’s like something. It reminds me of something else. He paddled the air with one hand and sawed at his chin with the other—warning me to let him think. He snapped a finger. Like one of your worlds. “Imagine a planet where the people plug their brains into one another.”
“This isn’t quite like that.”
Do you think that scanner could teach me to paint better?
It seemed like something Currier might try one day. “You paint perfectly. They could use your brain to train other people to paint better.”
He beamed and ran to get his portfolio to show me his latest masterpiece, a birdwing pearlymussel. He had birds and fish and fungi now, and he was working on snails and bivalves.
We’re going to need a big table at the market, Dad.
I held the painting with both hands, thinking: No therapy could be better than this. But then my boy looked down and smoothed the paper with his guilty hands, and I saw the marks of enraged crumpling. He traced his fingers on the painting with contrition. I wish I could see one of these. For real, I mean.
I GAVE CURRIER’S HANDOUTS to Dr. Lipman, along with three articles touting the therapeutic potential of the research. She seemed satisfied. Excited by the prospect of finger-painting with his brain, Robbie had two mercifully quiet weeks. For two weeks, I returned to my neglected duties and undid the damage to my in-box.
For Thanksgiving, we drove to Aly’s parents on Chicago’s West Side. The postwar, crowded suburban Tudor was the usual pressure cooker of glucose-fueled cousins, around-the-clock wall-sized sports no one was watching, and political shouting matches. Half of Aly’s extended family backed one of the opposition candidates now gearing up for the primaries. The other half backed our defiant President in his return to the world of half a century ago. By noon on Thursday, the White House’s new decree requiring everyone in the country to carry proof of citizenship or visas had Robin’s blood relations sniping at each other across the trenches of a static front.
His grandmother spoke the Thanksgiving dinner prayer. The whole table said amen and began passing the food in four different directions. Robbie said, Nobody’s listening to that prayer, you know. We’re on a rock, in space, and there are hundreds of billions of other rocks just like ours.
Adele was horrified. She gaped at me. “Is that any way to raise a child? What would his mother say?”
I didn’t tell her what her daughter would have said. Robin did that for me. My mother’s dead. And God didn’t help her.
The bickering table fell silent. Everyone looked to me to correct my son. Adele was on him before I could say a thing. “You need to apologize to me, young man.” She turned to me. I turned to Robin.
I’m sorry, Grandma, he said. And the whole table went back to bickering. Only his favorite aunt and I, seated at each side of him, heard him mutter under his breath like Galileo, but you’re wrong.
Throughout the meal, Robin pecked away at his beans, cranberries, and militantly gravy-free potatoes. His grandpa Cliff kept riding him, from across the table. “Have a little turkey, man. It’s Thanksgiving!”
When Robin finally blew, it was geothermal. He started screaming, I don’t eat animals. I don’t eat animals! Don’t make me eat animals!
I had to take him outside. We walked around the block three times. He kept saying, Let’s go home, Dad. Let’s just go home. It’s easier to be thankful there.
We got back to Madison and finished the holiday alone together. He started the treatment the following Monday afternoon. He slid into the same fMRI tube his mother once disappeared into. The techs asked him to hold still, close his eyes, and say nothing. But when they played him the Moonlight Sonata, my son laughed and shouted, I know that song!
“WATCH THE DOT IN THE MIDDLE OF THE SCREEN.” Robin lay tiny in the scanner, staring at the image on the monitor above him. Pads held his head swaddled in place. Martin Currier sat at the panel in the control room. I sat next to him. He coached Robin through the earbuds. “Now let the dot move to the right.”
My son fidgeted. He wanted to click a mouse or reach up and swipe the screen. How?
“Remember, Robbie. No talking. Just relax and hold still. When you’re in the right mood, the dot will know it and start to move. Just stay with it and let it travel. Try to keep it at a middle height. Don’t let it go too far up or down.”
Robin held still. We watched his results on a monitor in the booth. The dot jigged and jagged like a water strider on the surface of a pond.