A voice said, Try. I left him curled on the rock and stumbled through the rapids to shore. I scrambled up the rocky, tree-lined bank. The tent zipper tore as I fought with it. I grabbed the sleeping bag and ran back to the river. On the bank, I wrapped the bag around my neck and somehow thrashed my way back to the boulder without falling. I wrestled the bag around him and sealed it. Then I covered him with my body. I sheltered him as best I could, searching for the sound of his breath above the rushing water.
A long time passed before I could accept that he no longer needed me.
THERE WAS A PLANET that couldn’t figure out where everyone was. It died of loneliness. That happened billions of times in our galaxy alone.
THE UNIVERSITY GAVE ME COMPASSIONATE LEAVE. After the funeral, after long days with Robbie’s relatives and everyone who counted us as friends, I felt no need to speak to anyone ever again. It was enough to stay inside, to read his notebooks and look through his drawings, and to write down everything I could remember about our time together.
People brought food. The less I ate, the more they brought. I couldn’t bring myself to pay a bill or cut the grass or wash a dish or watch the news. Two million people in Shanghai lost their homes. Phoenix ran out of water. Bovine viral encephalopathy jumped from cattle to people. Weeks passed before anyone realized. I slept in the day and stayed up at night, reading poems to a room full of sentient beings who were everywhere but here.
I didn’t answer my phone. Now and then I skimmed voice mails and glanced at texts. Nothing needed answering. I wouldn’t have had answers, anyway.
Then one day, a message from Currier. If you’d like to be with Robbie, you can be.
“OKAY,” SAYS THE MAN I NO LONGER HATE. “Relax and hold still. Watch the dot in the middle of the screen. Now let the dot move to the right.”
I don’t know how. He says it’s the easiest thing in the world. Wait until it starts to move itself. Then stay in that state of mind.
He’s risking a lot for me, breaking the law. We’ll all be breaking it, soon enough. But Martin is more than merely criminal. He’s spending a budget that he doesn’t have, powering these machines with energy that will soon be hard to come by at any price. He runs the scanner himself, having laid off all his staff. Like so many others, his lab is folding.
I lie in the tube and tune myself to a print of Robbie. One that they recorded last August, when he was at his best. Just being in this space helps me breathe. I learn to move the dot, to grow it and shrink it and change its color. Two hours fly by. Currier says, “Would you like to come again tomorrow?”
I’m not sure why he’s helping me. It’s more than pity. Like lots of scientists, he’s a sucker for redemption. And for some reason, he’s deeply invested in my progress. It would take much more advanced brain science than his to explain that one. It’s a question for astrobiology, in fact. Goldilocks planets can turn rain and lava and a little energy into agency and will. Natural selection can prune selfishness into its opposite.
I come the next day, and the day after that. I learn to raise and lower the pitch of the clarinet, to slow it down and speed it up and turn it into a violin, simply by letting my feelings match his. The feedback guides me, and all the while, my brain learns how to resemble what it loves.
AND THEN ONE DAY, MY SON IS THERE, inside my head as sure as life. My wife, too, still inside him. What they felt, then, I now feel. Which is bigger, outer space or inner?
He doesn’t say a thing. He doesn’t have to. I know what he wants from me. He only wants to see what’s out there. Light travels at three hundred thousand kilometers a second. It takes ninety-three billion years to cross from one end of space to the other, past black holes and pulsars and quasars, neutron and preon and quark stars, metallics and blue stragglers, binaries and triple-star systems, globular and hypercompact clusters, coronal, tidal, and halo galaxies, reflection and plerion nebulae, stellar, interstellar, and intergalactic disks, dark matter and energy, cosmic dust and filaments and voids, all spun from the laws folded up into vibrations far smaller than the smallest units we have names for. The universe is a living thing, and my son wants to take me for a quick look around while there’s still time.
We rise together into orbit high above the place we’ve been visiting. The thought occurs to him, and I have it. Can you believe where we just were?
Oh, this planet was a good one. And we, too, were good, as good as the burn of the sun and the rain’s sting and the smell of living soil, the all-over song of endless solutions signing the air of a changing world that by every calculation ought never to have been.