I had an awful thought: Maybe the last few months of neural feedback were hurting Robbie. In the face of the world’s basic brokenness, more empathy meant deeper suffering. The question wasn’t why Robin was sliding down again. The question was why the rest of us were staying so insanely sanguine.
Currier flipped a hand in the air. “He’s scoring much higher on self-control and resilience. He’s so much better at coping with uncertainty than he was when he first came to see us. All right: So he’s still angry. He’s still depressed. Honestly, Theo? I’d be concerned if he weren’t upset, these days.”
We finished eating. Martin argued over the morality of my paying for our tab, but the fight wasn’t vigorous. We walked back across campus. I’d made a mistake, going out without sunblock. It was only June, but I couldn’t breathe. Currier struggled, too. He held a surgical mask to his face. “Sorry. I know how ridiculous this looks. But my allergies are off the charts.” At least we weren’t in Southern California, where weeks of Code Red air from wildfires had sealed millions inside.
The protection of DecNef seemed to be ending. For a while it had kept Robin happy and me safe from having to drug my son. Now even Currier was suggesting it. One small conflagration at school and the choice would no longer be mine.
“He keeps asking me how Aly fought a losing battle for years without getting beaten by it.” Currier’s expression was unreadable behind his mask. I pressed on blindly. “I wonder the same thing. She used to get angry. She got depressed. A lot.” I didn’t much care to tell her old birding friend about her night terrors. “But she blew right through.”
His smile was audible, even behind his mask. “His mother had some prize brain-body chemistry.”
We paused on University Avenue near the Discovery Center, where our paths divided. I braced myself for another suggestion that it was time for the trial-and-error of child brain cocktails. But Currier removed his mask and nursed an expression that I couldn’t decode.
“We could learn her secret. Robin could tell us himself.”
“What in the world are you talking about?”
“I still have Aly’s run.”
Angers flooded me from many directions, none of them useful. “You what? You saved our recordings?”
“One of them.”
I knew without asking. He’d pitched my Admiration and Grief and her Vigilance. He’d kept her Ecstasy.
“You’re saying you could train Robin on Aly’s old brain scan?”
Currier sized up the wonder of it down on the pavement near his feet. “Your son could learn how to put himself into an emotional state his mother once generated. It might be motivating. It could answer his question.”
The colors of Plutchik’s wheel spun around me. Stabs of orange interest gave way to shards of green fear. The past was turning as porous and ambiguous as the future. We were making it up, the story of life in this place, as surely as I made up the bedtime stories of alien life my son hadn’t yet outgrown.
I looked down both long diagonals of the sidewalk intersection: not an Asian student in sight. I’d missed something obvious, in over thirty years of reading and two thousand science fiction books: there was no place stranger than here.
THE QUESTION GOT HIM OUT OF BED. He looked at me, his face a nursery of stars. They have Mom’s brain? She’s in the experiment?
I answered with every adult reservation, but it didn’t matter. He all but jumped me.
Holy crow. Dad! Why didn’t you tell me?
He took my face in his palms and made me swear solemnly that I wasn’t lying. It was like the two of us had stumbled on a video clip that no one knew existed, the record of a day that had been sealed off forever. Peace came over him, as if all would be well now, whatever the outcome. He turned his head to look out through his bedroom window at the summer rains. His eyes had a calm resolve, resigned to anything existence might throw at him. He’d never be laid low again.
I WAS PACING IN THE LAB’S FOYER when he came from the first session. He’d trained for ninety minutes. Colored dots, musical pitches, and other feedback helped him to find and match the patterns of his mother’s brain. I smiled, faking a calm I didn’t have. Robin must have known I was crazy for anything he could tell me.
Ginny brought him from the test room. Her arm draped over his shoulder while his hand reached up to clutch the sleeve of her lab coat. Ginny looked as casual as I was trying to be. She leaned down and asked, “You cool, Brain Boy? Want to sit in my office for a minute?”