I turned away from the screen and glanced into the living room. Aly was sitting in her beloved egg chair, swinging her legs, as if it were almost time to have a glass of wine and find a sonnet for Chester. She looked over at me and flashed that startling smile—the small white teeth, the wide, pink gum line. She shook her head, not understanding how I could be so distressed over a conversation of so little consequence. I wanted to ask her if she loved me as much as she loved her dog. I wanted to ask her if that opossum had been worth abandoning her husband and child. But the question that came into my head—does that count for asking, with a ghost?—was even worse. Aly. Is he mine?
On cue, my trained mind reader appeared in the office doorway, brandishing his Planetary Exploration Transponder.
Dad. You won’t believe this. Half of Americans think we’ve already been visited by beings from other worlds.
The conference on my screen broke up in laughter. The man who lost his son to Big Oil called out from across the country. How would you like to talk to some folks in Washington?
THE NEXT-DOOR NEIGHBOR CALLED to say that Robin was out behind the house. “He’s very still. He’s not moving. I think there’s something wrong with him.”
I wanted to say: Of course, there’s something wrong with him. He’s looking at things. But I thanked her for the information. She was just doing her part in the perpetual neighborhood watch, making sure no one ever travels too far.
I went out into the crepuscular yard to find the offender. He’d gone out in the later afternoon with a box of chalks to sketch the birch, which was still trading in late-summer greens. He took a little canvas stool. I found him sitting in the chill grass and sat down next to him. My jeans were damp in seconds. I forgot that dew forms at night. We only discover it in the morning.
“Let’s see.” He handed over his pastel hostage. The tree was gray by now, as was his drawing. “I’m going to have to trust you on this one, buddy. I can’t see a thing.”
His small laugh got lost in the roar of leaves. Weird, Dad, isn’t it? Why does color disappear in the dark?
I told him the fault was in our eyes, not in the nature of light. He nodded, like he’d reached that conclusion already. His head aimed straight in front of him at the exhaling tree. Off to each side of his face, his hands patted the air for secret compartments.
This is even weirder. The darker it gets, the better I can see out of the sides of my eyes.
I tested; he was right. I vaguely remembered the reason—more rods on the edges of the retina. “That might make a good treasure hunt.” He didn’t seem interested in anything but the experience itself.
“Robbie? Dr. Currier wants to know if he can show your training videos to other people.”
I’d been evading the question for two days. I hated the idea of other people appraising the changes in Robin. I hated Currier for destroying my memories of Aly. Now he had my son.
I lay back on the wet grass. I owed Currier nothing but hostility. And still, I felt an obligation so large I couldn’t name it. No good parent would turn his child into a commodity. But ten thousand children with Robin’s new eyes might teach us how to live on Earth.
He faced the tree, still experimenting, watching me from the corner of his eye. What other people?
“Journalists. Health workers. People who might set up neurofeedback centers around the country.”
You mean a business? Or does he want to help people?
My question, exactly.
Because, you know, Dad. He helped me. A lot. And he brought Mom back.
Some large invertebrate in the dirt sank its mandibles into the back of my calf. Robin dug his fingernails into the soil and pulled up ten thousand species of bacteria wrapped in thirty miles of fungal filament in his small hand. He shook out the fistful of dirt and came down on the grass to lie beside me. He propped his head on the pillow of my arm. For a long time, we just looked up at the stars—all the ones we could see and half the ones we couldn’t.
Dad. I feel like I’m waking up. Like I’m inside everything. Look where we are! That tree. This grass!
Aly used to claim—to me, to state legislators, to her colleagues and blog followers, to anyone who would listen—that if some small but critical mass of people recovered a sense of kinship, economics would become ecology. We’d want different things. We’d find our meaning out there.
I pointed up to my favorite late summer constellation. Before I could name it, Robin said, Lyra. Some harp thingie?
It was hard to nod, with my head against the ground. Robin pointed to the far corner of the sky, and moonrise.