His nose and mouth twitch a little. His excited hands twist with explanation. You know how when you sing a good song with people you like? And people are singing all different notes, but they sound good together?
The journalist looks sad for half a moment. Maybe she’s thinking how long it has been since she sang with her friends. “Does it feel like talking to your mother?”
His brows pinch; he doesn’t quite like the question. Nobody’s saying anything out loud, if that’s what you mean.
“But you can feel her? You can tell it’s her?”
He shrugs. Vintage Robin. It’s us.
“You feel like she’s there with you? When you train?”
Robin’s head swivels on the stalk of his neck. He’s looking at something way too big to tell her. He reaches one hand above his head to catch the lowest branches of the willow and let it slip back through his fingers. She’s here right now.
The video blinks first and cuts away.
THEY WALK ALONG THE LAKESHORE. Jay lifts one hand to the small of her back, as if he’s a doctor breaking news that’s delicate but not disastrous. She says, “You must have been hurting so much.”
I want to scream at her, every time. But he’s paying attention to the world, not her question.
“When did the hurt start? When your mother passed, or before?”
He frowns at that word passed. But he figures it out on the fly. My mother didn’t pass. She died.
Dee Ramey stutter-steps and stops. Maybe his words stun her into listening. Maybe they excite her, their weirdness promising a couple thousand more thumbs-up. Maybe I’m being cruel.
“But you’ve learned to match the patterns of her brain activity. So now that part of her is inside you, right?”
He smiles and shakes his head, but not in disagreement. He knows now that no grown-up gets it. He holds out his hands to the grass and sky and oaks and lindens lining the lake. Paws up in the crisp air, he waves them to include our distant invisible neighborhood, the university, the houses of friends, the Capitol, and states beyond our state. Everybody’s inside everyone.
The video cuts to clips from early in his training. It’s a different boy, hunched in a scooped plastic chair, evading a questioner in diffident monotones. He bites his lip and snarls at small setbacks. The world is out to punish him. Then footage of him painting, blissed out on line and color. I’ve watched the video more times than I can count. I’m responsible for a thousand of the clip’s hits all by myself. But seeing the two boys side by side still stuns me.
Then he and Dee Ramey are by the lake again. “You seemed so hurt and angry.”
A lot of people are hurt and angry.
“But you’re not, anymore?”
He giggles, a wild contrast to the boy in Currier’s clips. No. Not anymore.
On a bench under the trees, Dee Ramey holds one of his notebooks in her lap, turning pages. He’s explaining the drawings. That’s an annelid. Incredible, you gotta admit. That is a brittle star. These things? They’re water bears. Also known as tardigrades. They can survive in outer space. Serious. They could float to Mars.
Cut to a medium shot, and he takes her down a footpath to show her something. The camera pulls in for a close-up: a patch of plants whose round-toothed leaves bead all over with tiny globes from that morning’s rain. He points to the pods of fruit still hanging from its branches. Go like this around one. Careful! Don’t brush it!
It’s like he’s telling a joke and can barely conceal the punch line. Dee squeals in amazement when the touch of her cupped hands makes the pod pop. She opens to look: weird green coils lie exploded on her palm. “Wow! What is that?”
Crazy, right? Jewelweed. You can eat the seeds!
He picks through the detonated, steampunk curls and extracts a pale green pill. Dee Ramey mugs for the camera—“I hope you’re right”—and pops it in her mouth. She looks surprised. “Mm. Nutty!”
I don’t remember ever teaching my son about that plant. I do remember the day I learned about it from the woman who became his mother. The years since then lie like shrapnel in my open hand.
In the video, my son never mentions the plant’s other name: touch-me-not. All he says is, Lots of good eats out here, if you know where to look.
EVERYBODY’S BROKEN, he tells her. They sit on the beach on an upside-down kayak and watch the single low sun throw colors. Two boats in full sail skim alongside one another, back to the docks before the light is gone.
That’s why we’re breaking the whole planet.