We discovered creatures high up in Tedia’s jagged young mountains. They were tubular and branchy and they held so still for so long that we mistook them for plants. But they greeted us, putting the word Welcome directly into our heads.
They probed my son. I could feel their thoughts go into him. You want to know if you should warn us.
My frightened son nodded.
You want us to be ready. But you don’t want to cause us pain.
My son nodded again. He was crying.
Don’t worry, the doomed tubular creatures told us. There are two kinds of “endless.” Ours is the better one.
SUMMER FLOODS THROUGHOUT THE GULF contaminated the drinking water of thirty million people, spreading hepatitis and salmonellosis across the South. Heat stress in the Plains and the West was killing old people. San Bernardino caught fire, and later, Carson City. Something called Theory X had armed militias patrolling the streets of cities throughout the Plains states, searching for unspecified foreign invaders. Meanwhile, a novel stem rust triggered wheat crop failure throughout China’s Huangtu Plateau. In late July, a True America demonstration in Dallas turned into a race riot.
The President declared another national emergency. He mobilized the National Guard of six states, sending the troops to the border to combat illegal immigration:
THE GREATEST THREAT TO THE SECURITY OF EVERY AMERICAN!!
Wild weather throughout the Southeast triggered an outbreak of Amblyomma americanum, the Lone Star tick. Robbie loved the story. He asked me to read him anything I saw about it. It might not be a bad thing, Dad. It might even save us.
He said strange things these days. I didn’t always challenge him. This time I did. “Robbie! What a horrible thing to say!”
Seriously. The infection makes people allergic to meat. No more meat eaters could be an amazing thing. Our food would go ten times farther!
The words made me queasy. I wanted Aly to intervene with the boy. But that was the problem: she was intervening already.
He trained a fourth time on the template of his mother’s ecstasy. And then a fifth. Each session left him a little more happily baffled. He spoke less and less, even as he looked and listened more. He drew into his notebook with the speed of a growing plant.
He came into my study after dinner, where I sat writing code. Was I better yesterday than I am today?
“What do you mean?”
Like, yesterday I felt like nothing could touch me. Today? Arrrggh!
He roared the roar of impatient rage his mother always did, when confronted with inane bureaucracy. But even as he sank his claws in me and shook with a frustration he couldn’t name, his aura felt large and loose. He’d grown easy in his new skin.
The days brightened. He sat with his digital microscope for hours at a time. He could stare at simple things and sketch for the better part of an afternoon. The backyard birdhouses, the contents of an owl pellet, even the mold on an orange entranced him. He still fell into old fears and angers. But they leached out of him faster, and low tide left behind all kinds of treasures in the exposed and tranquil pools.
The boy who stood on the steps of the Capitol waving his handmade placard was gone. I ought to have been relieved. But I’d go to bed at night feeling something toward my once-anxious child that seemed an awful lot like mourning.
I did a terrible thing. I sneaked a look in his notebooks. Over the millennia, millions of parents have done worse, though usually for better reasons. I couldn’t pretend he needed policing. I had no reason to eavesdrop on his thoughts. I simply wanted to listen in on his ongoing séance with Aly.
It happened on the first of August, when he asked if he could camp in the yard. I love it out there at night. So much going on. Everything talking to everything else!
You could hear the sounds from the house well enough: the choirs of tree frogs, the massed cicada choruses, and the solos of night birds that hunted them. But he wanted to be inside the sounds. It surprised me, my timid son asking to spend the night outdoors by himself. I was glad to encourage him. The world might be dissolving, but our backyard still felt safe.
I helped him pitch the tent. “Sure you don’t want company?” I wasn’t really offering. My mind was already planning my illicit evening reading.
I waited until his tent light went out. His notebooks were on top of his student desk, propped up between geode bookends. He trusted me. He knew I’d never spy on him. I found his current one, its cover emblazoned with the words PRIVATE OBSERVATIONS OF ROBIN BYRNE. I pored through the pages, feeling no guilt at all until I saw what they contained. Not a single word about his mother, or about me, either, for that matter. Not a line of his own private hopes or fears. The entire book was devoted to drawings, notes, descriptions, questions, speculations, and appreciation—the proof of other life.