Bewilderment

by Richard Powers

Watching medicine fail my child, I developed a crackpot theory: Life is something we need to stop correcting. My boy was a pocket universe I could never hope to fathom. Every one of us is an experiment, and we don’t even know what the experiment is testing.

Nobody’s perfect, she liked to say. But, man, we all fall short so beautifully.

“Hey. I am a biologist, aren’t I?” Ass . . . trobiologist. His grin tested whether he’d just crossed a terrible line. I gaped, equal parts stunned and amused. His problem was anger, but it almost never turned mean. Honestly, a little meanness might have protected him.

I didn’t know how to be a parent. Most of what I did, I remembered from what she used to do. I made enough mistakes on any one day to scar him for life. My only hope was that all the errors somehow canceled each other out.

From behind us, upstream, the future flowed over our backs into the sun-spattered past.

Her eyes crinkled in love. So we’re the scaffolding, is that it? And they’re the building? Her scaffolding laughed again and climbed on top of mine.

My anger was going nuts. I tried to let my good parts breathe, like you said to. But my hands got confused.

Every aggressive word from a friend over lunch, every click on his virtual farm, every species he painted, each minute of every online clip, all the stories he read at night and all the ones I told him: there was no “Robin,” no one pilgrim in this procession of selves for him ever to remain the same as. The whole kaleidoscopic pageant of them, parading through time and space, was itself a work in progress.