He whistled again in the very plain room on the ninth floor overlooking the Potomac. His civics lesson stretched out in radial boulevards below. He put his hand to the window and gazed at all the possibilities. Let’s go!
We never made it past the Bone Hall on the second floor of the Museum of Natural History. The parade of skeletons hooked Robin by the brain stem and wouldn’t let him go. He stood with his sketchbook in front of the case of perciform fishes, lavishing attention on the turn and taper of every rib. I couldn’t stop staring at him from across the hall. In his loosened windbreaker and baggy jeans, he looked like an elder of one of those tiny, superannuated, wayfaring races that have been making records for billions of years, curating an account of a planet that had once thrived brilliantly but vanished without a trace.
We found a restaurant that served herbivores and walked back to the hotel. Up in our room, he grew earnest again. He sat on the edge of his bed with his hands folded in front of his face. Dad? I wanted to wait until tomorrow to show you, but I should probably just show you now?
Crossing to his luggage, he extracted the roll of butcher paper, a little crumpled from the journey. He set it on the floor at the foot of the beds, placed a pillow on one curled end, and unrolled. The banner was longer than the two of us stretched end to end. And it was covered in paints, markers, and inks of all colors. Down the length of it ran the words:
LET’S HEAL WHAT WE HURT
He had filled the scroll with bright, bold design. It seemed another thing he’d learned directly from Aly, who worked on a canvas too large for me to see. Creatures ringed the letters, as though drawn by a hand more mature than his. Stands of staghorn coral were bleaching white. Birds and mammals fled a burning forest. Ten-inch-long honeybees lay on their backs along the bottom of the banner, legs up and little X’s in their eyes.
That’s supposed to be pollinator decline. You think people will get that?
I couldn’t say. I couldn’t even talk. But then, he wasn’t really waiting for my answer.
You can’t depress people, though. That just scares them. You gotta show them the good life.
He lifted one end of the banner and told me to grab the other. We flipped the whole scroll over. If the first side was hell, this was the peaceable kingdom. This time the words filled the banner’s middle, one row above the other:
MAY ALL BEINGS BE FREE FROM SUFFERING
Creatures crowded in on either side: feathered and fur-covered, spiny, star-shaped, lobed and finned, bulky or sleek and streamlined, bilateral, branching, radial, rhizomatic creatures, known and unknown, creatures in the wildest array of colors and forms, all deployed between the deep green forest and the ocean blue. The sessions with Aly’s brain print had made his painting more luminous, freed up his hand and eye.
He looked down at the work from above, picturing how it should have been. I didn’t know how to spell sentient.
“You could have asked me.”
But then you’d know.
“Robbie. This is better.”
You think? Be honest, Dad. I only want honesty.
“Robbie. I’m telling you.”
He looked down, squinting. He shook his head. If people only knew, you know? We’re all bajillionaires. He held his hands out in front of him, as if they were full of germ plasm and treasure.
“What do you want to do with it?”
Oh, yeah. I thought, after you’re done talking to the panel, that you and me could hold this up outside somewhere, with cool buildings in the background, and we could get somebody to take pictures. Then we could upload them using my name for the tags, and when people search for that freaking clip of me, they’d see this instead.
We rolled up the scroll and got ready for bed. In the dark, the hotel room glittered with dozens of LEDs of obscure purpose. Propped up in our twin beds, we might have been in the command center of a warp-drive exploratory vessel, tethered for a moment at a watering hole somewhere along an endless surveying mission.
My son’s voice tested the dark. So those people? Are they for real?
“Which people, buddy?”
All those people who linked to my clip?
His voice was tinted with scientific doubt. My heart sank and my head revved. “What about them?”
How many of them were just laughing at me?
The room hummed at half a dozen different frequencies. Every reply seemed gutless. I took too long, and he had his answer. “People, Robbie. They’re a questionable species.”
He thought about this. He weighed what it meant to become a public commodity. His face soured.