He loved to sit at Ginny’s desk and read her collection of hipster comics. Ordinarily he’d have jumped at the offer. He shook his head. I’m cool. Then, as his mother had reminded him a million times in life, he added, Thank you.
For an hour and a half, he’d been feeling his way around Aly’s limbic system. Each time he’d raised and lowered pitches or steered icons toward targets on the screen he was steering himself into the bliss that had been Alyssa’s once, years ago—a lark we’d taken part in on an otherwise ordinary day. In Robin’s head, if nowhere else, he was talking to his mother again. I needed to know what she was saying.
He saw me from across the laboratory suite. His face lit with excitement and hesitation. I saw how badly he wanted to tell me where he’d just been. But he didn’t have words for that planet.
He let go of Ginny’s sleeve and slid out from under her arm. Her professional face betrayed a stab of abandonment. Robin approached me, something new in his walk. His stride was looser, more experimental. Ten feet away he shook his head. Reaching me, he grabbed my upper arm and pressed his ear against my chest.
“Good one?” The syllables came out of me, anemic.
It was her, Dad.
I flushed in the back of my legs. It occurred to me, too late, what an overactive imagination like Robin’s might do with so rich an inkblot.
“It felt . . . different?”
He shook his head, not at the question but at my dissembling. We made another appointment for the next week. I chatted with Ginny and a pair of postdocs. It felt like my classic nightmare where I’m lecturing in public and only belatedly discover my skin is green. Robin patted me on the back and nudged me toward the hallway, out of the emotional incubator, into the world.
We walked to the parking lot. I peppered him with questions, everything but what I was too adult to ask. He answered with monosyllables, more stymied than impatient. Only when I put my pass in the parking garage machine and the gate lifted did he open up.
Dad? You remember that first night in the cabin, in the mountains? Looking through the telescope?
“I do. Very well.”
That’s what it was like.
He held his hands in front of his face and spread them. Some memory amazed him, either blackness or stars.
I turned on Campus Drive toward home, keeping my eyes on the road. Then, in a voice I barely recognized, the alien on the front seat next to me said, Your wife loves you. You know that, right?
I WATCHED FOR SOME DIFFERENCE. Maybe I cued myself, knowing whose feelings he was learning to emulate. But it seemed to take just two sessions for the black cloud he’d sunk into after his disastrous stint at the Capitol to break up into wisps of cirrus.
I came to wake him on a late June Saturday. He groaned at the shock of consciousness and sudden sun. But now, at least, he lifted his head off the pillow and grinned as he moaned.
Dad! Am I training today?
“Yes.”
Yay! he said, in a funny little voice. Because, you know, I could really use it.
“Could you use a little paddle in the boat afterwards?”
Serious? On the lake?
“I was thinking just out in the backyard.”
He growled deep in his throat and bared his teeth at me. You’re lucky I’m not a carnivore.
Choosing his clothes for the day left him wistful. Ah, this shirt. I forgot about this one. This is a good shirt! How come I never wear this shirt? He came out to the living room half-dressed. Remember that pair of furry socks Mom gave me, with separate toes, and little claws on each one? What happened to those?
The question made me flinch. I’d trained on his old brain for so long. I was sure a squall was coming. “Oh, Robbie. That was a hundred sizes ago.”
I know. Geez. I was just curious. I mean: Are they still somewhere? Is some other kid wearing them and thinking he’s half-bear?
“What made you think of those?”
He shrugged, but not in evasion. Mom. Eerie thoughts came over me. But before I could challenge him, he asked, What’s for breakfast? I’m starving!
He ate everything I put in front of him. He wanted to know what was different about the oatmeal （nothing） and why the orange juice was so tangy （no reason）。 He sat at the table after I cleared it, humming some melody I couldn’t make out. The raging curiosity I felt over the source of Aly’s recorded Ecstasy that long-ago day flooded through me again. My son—her son—had glimpsed it, but he couldn’t tell me.
I took Robbie in to the neuro lab for another session with his mother’s brain print. He and Ginny fell into their familiar routine. I watched him for a few minutes as he moved shapes around on his screen by telekinesis. Then I walked down the hall and dropped in on Currier.