He hunched over. Anything would help. Thousands of creatures are going extinct every year. And so far I’ve raised zero dollars and zero cents to help them.
He was right, on all counts. He lifted the tube in the air, challenging. My chin rose and fell half an inch, and he was out the door.
My morning passed in nervous distraction. By one-thirty I was so worked up I called the school and told them to tell Robin I’d pick him up when the day was over. I was waiting in the parking lot, practicing nonchalance and bracing for the worst, when he let himself into the car.
“How did it go?”
He held up the mailing tube, as if to show all the paintings still rolled up inside it. Still zero dollars and zero cents.
“Digame.”
For a mile, he wouldn’t. He beat the tube on the dash at a steady andante. I had to touch him on the shoulder to get him to quit. He breathed like he was on a ventilator.
They thought I was just being weird. They started in on me. “Dr. Strange.” Like that, okay? Then they started calling the paintings things.
“What kind of things?”
Josette Vaccaro might have bought one, if nobody else had been there. I finally said I’d give whatever pictures they wanted, and they could pay whatever. Jayden said he’d give me a quarter for the Amur leopard. So I sold it to him.
“Oh, Robbie.”
Ethan Weld thought that was funny, so he offered five cents for the eastern gorilla. He said he wanted it to remember me by when I went extinct. Other kids started giving me change, and I thought: Better than nothing, right? At least I can send something in. Then Kayla made me return all the money and take the pictures back.
I still wasn’t used to students calling their teachers by first names. “She was trying to rescue you.”
She gave me a demerit. She said it was against the rules to sell things on the school grounds, and I should have known that from the class handbook. I asked her if she knew that half the large animal species on the planet would be gone by the time we reached her age. She said we were on social science, not biology, and don’t talk back, or I’d get another demerit.
I drove. I doubted there was a useful thing to say. I was done with humans. We pulled into our driveway. He put his hand on my upper arm.
There’s something wrong with us, Dad.
Right again. Something wrong with the two of us. Wrong with all seven and two-thirds billion. And it would take something faster, stronger, and more efficient than DecNef to save anyone.
IN EARLY MARCH THE PRESIDENT INVOKED the National Emergencies Act of 1976 to arrest a journalist. She’d been publishing accounts from a White House leaker and refused to reveal her source. So the President ordered the Justice Department to order the Treasury to release any Suspicious Activity Reports on her. Based on those reports and on what the President called “credible tips from foreign powers,” he took her into military custody.
The media cried bloody murder. At least, half the media did. The top three opposition candidates for the next fall’s election said things the President condemned as “aiding and abetting America’s enemies.” The minority Senate leader called the action the gravest constitutional crisis in our lifetime. But constitutional crises had become commonplace.
Everyone waited for Congress to move. There was no movement. Senators in the President’s party—old men armed with polls—insisted that no laws had been broken. They scoffed at the idea of First Amendment violations. Violent clashes rolled through Seattle, Boston, and Oakland. But the general public, including me, once again proved how good the human brain was at getting used to anything.
Everything had happened in broad daylight, and against shamelessness, outrage was impotent. The crisis gave way to another flavor of craziness two days later. But for two days, I was strapped to the news. I’d sit in the evenings, doom-scrolling, while Robbie painted endangered species at the dining room table.
Sometimes I worried that Decoded Neurofeedback had left him too calm. It didn’t seem natural for any boy his age to be so single-minded. But, addicted to the national emergency, I was no one to talk.
One night, the news channel I distrusted the least cut from the fading constitutional crisis to an interview with the world’s most famous fourteen-year-old. The activist Inga Alder had launched a new campaign, biking from her home near Zurich to Brussels. Along the way, she was recruiting an army of teenage cyclists to join her and shame the Council of the European Union into meeting the emissions reductions they had long ago promised.
The journalist asked her how many bicyclists had joined her caravan. Miss Alder frowned, looking for a precision she couldn’t give. “The number changes each day. But today we are over ten thousand.”