I looked at Robin. He was crumpling a corner of his poster. His first crushing legislative defeat, and his bill hadn’t even been drafted.
I told you not to come over, he shouted. I was handling it.
“Robin. You’ve been here for a long time. Let’s go home.”
He didn’t look up. He didn’t even shake his head. I’m staying. And I’m coming back tomorrow.
“Robin. I need to get to a meeting. We have to leave now.”
Hatred for his own kind rose in his eyes, as plain as the words on his placard. His brain was struggling to raise and lower its own pitches, to move the dots around, to grow and shrink them in the theater of his own head. His shoulders collapsed, and he turned away. He seemed ready to run or yell or smash his sign against the ground. When he spoke again, his voice was small and lost.
How did Mom do it? Every day. For years.
I COULDN’T FIND THE PLANET ISOLA. I looked across large swaths, for many years. My son came along to keep me company and witness my confusion.
“It should be right around here. All the data say so.”
He no longer put much stock in data. My son was losing his faith in other planets.
The strange thing was, we could see it from far away. Transit photometry and radial velocity and gravitational microlensing all agreed on its exact location. We knew its mass and radius. We’d calculated its rotations and revolutions down to very small margins of error. But when my son and I came within a few thousand kilometers, it disappeared. The space where it should have been turned empty in every direction.
He took pity on my trouble with the obvious. They’re hiding, Dad. The creatures on Isola are going into our minds and cloaking themselves.
“What? How?”
They’ve been around for a billion years. They’ve learned some things.
He was tired now, impatient with my failure to see. What were the odds of any contact ending well? All human history answered that one.
That’s why the universe is silent, Dad. Everyone’s hiding. All the smart ones, anyway.
“BUT WE’VE SEEN REAL PROGRESS,” Martin Currier insisted. “You can’t deny that. More than anyone expected.”
We sat in a lunch booth in an abandoned dim sum shop almost shuttered by the Asian student visa crisis. The entire campus—all of American academia—was reeling. Those foreign students whose visas hadn’t been curtailed were hiding out indoors. The crowded, cosmopolitan summer session had thinned out to a few safe white people.
Currier’s chin nudged his point home. “No one promised you a cure.”
I wanted to slap the bottom of his coffee cup as he lifted it to his face. “He won’t get out of bed. I have to go to war just to get him up and dressed. He doesn’t want to go outside. He’s ready to go to sleep again as soon as we have lunch. Thank God it’s summer vacation, or his school would be riding me again.”
“And it’s been like this . . . ?”
“For days.”
Currier lifted a dumpling to his lips with chopsticks and chewed. Some lump of gluten and pride, insoluble in tea, stuck in his Adam’s apple. “Maybe it’s time to think about a very low-dose regimen of an antidepressant.”
The word filled me with animal panic. He saw.
“Eight million children in the country take psychoactive drugs. They’re not ideal, but they can work.”
“If eight million children are taking psychoactive drugs, something isn’t working.”
The senior research professor shrugged. Concession or objection—I couldn’t tell. I searched a for a way out. “Could Robbie be . . . I don’t know. Starting to tolerate or habituate to the sessions? Could the effects be wearing off faster?”
“I can’t imagine. In most subjects, we see durable improvement lasting for weeks after each training.”
“Then why is he sliding down again?”
Currier raised his gaze to the television screen on the wall opposite our table. In the record heat, clusters of lethal bacteria were spreading up and down the Florida coast. The President was telling reporters, Maybe it’s entirely natural. Maybe it isn’t. People are saying . . .
“Maybe his reactions are entirely understandable.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, although my neck hair knew.
His frown was remarkably like his smile. “Clinicians and theorists are rarely going to agree on what constitutes mental health. Is it the ability to function productively in hard conditions? Or is it more a matter of appropriate response? Constant, cheerful optimism may not be the healthiest reaction to . . .” He nodded at the TV.