Flight Behavior

by Barbara Kingsolver

Cordie loved disappearing. Which was funny, because not that long ago, Preston could throw that blanket over a toy she was crawling after and Cordie would sit up and howl with despair at its sudden disappearance. She didn’t know to look under the blanket, and Preston couldn’t resist repeating the experiment, amazed at his sister’s conviction that unseen things did not exist. Some time between then and now, Cordie had conquered the biggest truth in the world.

“Mr. Byron,” she said, “why did you let me rattle on like that through half of supper? When you ought to have been telling us about the monarchs?” He laughed and hung his head, feigning remorse to put her at ease, she could see that. “Forgive me, Dellarobia. It’s a selfish habit. I never learn anything from listening to myself.”

Realistically, it probably wasn’t slave children, but there had to be armies of factory workers making this slapdash stuff, underpaid people cranking out things for underpaid people to buy and use up, living their lives mostly to cancel each other out. A worldwide entrapment of bottom feeders.

“You’re saying people only tune in to news they know they’re going to agree with?” “Bingo,” said Pete. “Well, see, I agree with you,” she said. “I’ve thought that too. How often do you tune in to Johnny Midgeon?” “You’re right,” Pete said. “I don’t want to hear those guys.” “So,” she said, “you’re the same as everybody.” “Well, but it’s because I already know what they’re going to say.” “That’s what everybody thinks. Maybe you do, and maybe you don’t.”

“No. Certain things just go together.” “And when they do, they are correlated. It is the darling of all human errors to assume, without proper testing, that one is the cause of the other.”

“That is a concern of conscience,” he said. “Not of biology. Science doesn’t tell us what we should do. It only tells us what is.”

He wasn’t crazy about the interruption, but warmed to the occasion, as he was still the gentle teacher who’d pointed at Preston their first night at supper and declared him a scientist. A moment, Dellarobia now believed, that changed Preston’s life. You never knew which split second might be the zigzag bolt dividing all that went before from everything that comes next.

A boy put up his hand, pulled it down, then put it up again, and finally asked, “Are you the president?” Ovid laughed heartily. “No, I am not,” he said. “What makes you think I might be the president? Is it because my skin is dark?” The little boy appeared forthright. “Because you’re wearing a tie.”

It was hard to feel the remotest sympathy for any of the different fools she had been.

“People do wrong things all the time, Preston. Grown-ups. You’re going to find that out. You will be amazed. There’s some kind of juice in our brains that makes us only care about what’s in front of us right this minute. Even if we know something different will happen later and we should think about that too. Our brains trick us. They say: Fight this thing right now, or run away from it. Tomorrow doesn’t matter, dude.”