Shine Shine Shine

by Lydia Netzer

  “Ah, savant,” said Sunny. “But surely that’s not a problem. So, you must have something else?”

  “Well, here’s the last one,” said Miss Mary, holding up a sheet for them all to look at together. “Here I asked him to draw his friends.”

  On the paper was a hexagon. On each of the points was a circle with a capital letter inside. The points were connected around the outside, and also through the center, some of them. The different connecting lines were of different widths. Next to some of them were numbers, or letters. There were rows of letters separated by commas. Some points were not connected to each other. Down at the bottom were different names followed by a list of Xs. Ben XX. Sarah XXXXX. Jacob X. Zoe XXXX. Sam XXX. Like that. It reminded Sunny of a lot of the work that Bubber had done on his own with ciphers. He was always coming up with his own way of writing things down.

  “What is this?” said Miss Mary, pointing to the hexagon.

  “Well, I don’t know,” said Sunny, “but if I had to guess I’d say he has six friends, and these lines and symbols depict the way they are related to each other. Or, maybe he has five friends and he’s this one here, connected to all five. Yes, this circle has a B on it.”

  “But you can see what I mean,” said Miss Mary.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You have this,” Miss Mary waved her hand at the papers she had produced, “and then you have his auditory response scores, which are like that of a deaf child.”

  “He’s not deaf,” said Sunny.

  “No, he’s not deaf, but he still can’t hear. He can’t respond. He doesn’t answer. He screams if he can’t have the chair he wants, even if the chairs are all blue. Even if the pencils are all red, he screams if he can’t have the one he wants. Yesterday he threw Miss Kim’s coffee mug on the floor and shattered it. She was afraid! Bubber’s behavior is outside the range of what we are prepared to deal with—and—”

  Mr. Dave interrupted her. “Mrs. Mann,” he said, “we all just love Bubber. He is really the most remarkable child.”

  “Obviously he does know their names,” Sunny said. “Or at least the letter their names begin with.”

  “We have tried to tell you, Mrs. Mann, that Bubber needs a higher level of intervention. Bubber is so special. Your doctors—”

  “They’re not all the same color blue, though,” said Sunny. “And the pencils are not all the same length. He perceives differences that other children don’t perceive. That’s all. You want him on more drugs? Is that it? He’s already on Adderall, Dexedrine … The only thing left is…”

  “Haldol,” suggested Mr. Dave in the mildest tone, as if he had been offering sailing as a pastime for a sunny afternoon.

  “Your husband is an engineer?” asked Miss Mary.

  “He’s an astronaut,” said Sunny. Not entirely true.

  “Well, technology,” said Mr. Dave.

  “So?”

  “Just another piece of the puzzle,” said Miss Mary.

  Sunny remembered the final terrible thing she had said to Maxon on the day before he went into space: It is all your fault, him being this way. It’s you. You fucked up. You did it! It’s your fucking genes, your brain, it’s like little baby Maxon all over again. Tell me you don’t see it. Tell me you don’t see yourself when you look at him. You did this. You did this to our child, it’s who you are, you’re all over him. Now show me a facial expression that goes along with that information.

  “Miss Mary, I want to thank you for your input,” said Mr. Dave. “And now I need a chance to speak to Mrs. Mann.”

  Miss Mary went out, leaving the drawings on the desk. Sunny picked them up. Then they were alone, she and Mr. Dave. Just two bald people talking over their options. In the next room, a small boy with a bright shock of orange hair sticking straight up out of his head was pushing a paintbrush around on a piece of paper, monitored by a blonde in her forties with pigtails.

  “Mrs. Mann,” said Mr. Dave, “we would like to work with you here. We can change Bubber’s therapy schedule, take more time for him to be one-on-one with the teachers. But I need you to talk to your doctors and refocus your medications. It’s time.”

  Sunny stood up. She could feel her teeth wanting to grind each other into powder.

  “Where is my child?” she said.

  When Mr. Dave brought Bubber out into the lobby, he was jumping on one leg.

  “MOMMY,” he called, and leaped into her arms. “Top came off.”

  She squatted down to catch him, and he rubbed his little hand casually over her head. She took the watercolor he had been working on. It was still dripping. She could see a rocket and the labels and words he had tried to form with the too-fat brush, bleeding into each other. “Rocket,” he said, too loud. She squeezed him hard and, as pregnant as she was, she picked him up, and his little backpack, and carried him out of there. She thought to herself, We will never return here. We will find another school, one that appreciates the lunatic labels and has the right length of blue pencils. Even if we have to go to the moon.

  A week ago, a day ago, with blond waves touching her shoulders and curling around her ears, she would have stopped at the desk, bent over at the waist, arranged another appointment. She would have acquired a different small brown bottle, administered doses, continued to smile and drop off and pick up and accommodate and advance. She would have gone home, would have prompted her gangly husband with the appropriate things to say and do at a cocktail party, dressed him, impressed on him the importance of sticking to the basics. Now, she felt differently about everything. More impatient, more severe. She felt she had been living under clouds, underwater, hearing at low volume, seeing at a distance. Without the wig, what she saw was all very awful. Yes, the whole world. There just wasn’t any point in pretending that it was fine. She felt like shit for talking so harshly to Maxon. She wished for any way that she could take it all back.

  8

  She tried to see the world as Bubber saw it. Every road sign, billboard, every marker of a store, house, or car, was a grouping of letters and numbers. What did he see in these small collections? Did they jump out at him, letter by letter, like orange butterflies or like speeding bullets? Were they rainbows glimmering or were they strobe lights illuminating his brain? Did they look like harp strings sound? Looking straight at all the letters, everywhere they showed up, could get overwhelming for anyone. She wondered if Bubber would ask to live a different life, if he could. If Bubber would change himself in any way, given the choice. Or if he would come off the pill bottle and be crazyass Bubber who rocks and sings.

  A child like Bubber could read like another child could hear, as beautifully and as involuntarily. Everything he read, he remembered. Very simple. Very elegant. It was a strange genetic thing, or it had happened to him when he was a baby. It was curable with pills, or it wasn’t. It was autism, or it was something else that everyone was calling autism. It was nothing ever before seen on Earth, so special, so new. Sunny felt responsible, and sorry, but also secretly she felt dark and proud. Maybe there were no societies for this, and no awareness. Maybe there was no annual fund-raiser. This was a human child with a brain confined in a blue helmet. She would never write another invitation to a silent auction. She would never keep another appointment with a doctor. She wouldn’t be so dumb and hairy as that.

  *

  YEARS AGO, WHEN SHE was still without children, Sunny had also been wigless. She hadn’t even considered putting on a wig. It was not the way she was raised, to put wigs on her head. She went through school, through college, living on Earth, without gluing eyelashes onto her face, without sticking on two eyebrows. Her mother said that putting on a wig would be equivalent to wearing a clown suit. In junior high school, when everyone has at least one moment of weakness, she cried and asked for a wig. Her mother asked if she would also like some big red shoes, a squirting flower, and a beeper nose. Would she like a tiny car, a farting pillow, and a yappy dog. She said no. She was a bald high-school valedicto
rian.

  Later, in college, her bald head gave her an idea for an interesting wig that she wanted to make. She began designing wigs for other people. Art wigs, not meant to cover hair loss, or simulate hair. A silver battleship, constructed of foil squares, each a millimeter bigger than its neighbor. A tiger head built with copper wire. A bouquet of fractal flowers. A pi symbol of feathers. Some people called them hats, but to Sunny, they were wigs, and that’s what she called them. She was the bald wigmaker. It was a great thing. She had a show at a college gallery. Her wigs were light and comfortable, but she never wore them. It would be like trying to tickle herself. No one can tickle themselves. It doesn’t work. She went to college for math and art. She married Maxon. Still no wigs. Then one day Maxon had decided they should have a baby.

  “The time is right for us to have a baby,” he said.

  The two of them sat together on the public beach in Evanston, one soft spring afternoon. A warm breeze ruffled Lake Michigan but did not stir the sand. A perfect day to lie down flat and let your knees relax, let your belly get warm. Sunny wore a mint green bikini. Maxon wore a holey T-shirt and brown cargo shorts, and sat cross-legged next to her. Sunny unfolded herself all the way from one end of the beach towel to the other, her long limbs stretching out and exposing the undersides of their joints. The ties of the bikini made square knots, not bows. Her sunglasses were two big circles, joined at her nose. Above them, the white dome of her bald head rose, shining with sunblock. She had been doing manikin poses, which always made Maxon smile.

  “I don’t wanna,” Sunny drawled. “Don’t make me, you mean man.”

  “That’s an inappropriate response to my statement. That response corresponds with my asking you to clean out the car,” said Maxon. “In this case, you can’t just not wanna.”

  “I don’t wanna do that either. Stop talking about it.”

  She reached up and patted his back, rubbing her hand back and forth over the spine where it stuck out in a row of bones.

  “It’s time to have a baby,” said Maxon. “I want us to have one. And I think you should listen to me.”

  “Imagine me,” said Sunny, tracing an imaginary lump in her belly with both hands, “with a big white hill right here.”

  “You have a big white hill right here already,” said Maxon, tapping her on the skull with one poking finger. “Maybe you can gestate the baby in your head.”

  Sunny rolled luxuriously onto her belly and exposed her back to the sky. “Can you imagine what kind of freak baby would crawl out of there,” she asked him lazily. “Do you really want to unleash that on the world?”

  *

  AT FIRST SUNNY BASED her reluctance on arithmetic. They sat in their apartment in Chicago, rolling around their office in their office chairs. The office was the biggest room in the place, with huge industrial windows all along one side. In it, a dehumidifier hummed and dead plants turned to dust. Maxon brought home plants from time to time, under the impression that house plants were a thing that apartments were supposed to have. Sunny surreptitiously killed them with cleaning products, or encouraged the cat to use them as urinals. Once, she killed a medium-sized orange tree in the den. It took a long time to die, and then it stayed there, dead, for six months. Sunny didn’t like house plants, back then. She thought plants should be outside where the dirt is. Later, she realized that you have to have plants. But this was back then, before that kind of realization started happening to her.

  “One plus one equals not three,” said Sunny, rolling back and forth with her heels stuck on the gouged hardwood. “One plus one equals two. You, and me. Two. One plus one equals two.”

  “Oh, for goddamn hell, spread your legs, woman,” said Maxon, of course joking. He was using his joking voice. In his hands he had a metal puzzle and he was working it, unworking it, working it, and unworking it.

  “I will immediately spread, and I mean wide, if you can show me a system where one plus one equals three.”

  “It doesn’t,” said Maxon. “But what about this?”

  He whipped out a marker, went over to the whiteboard, and drew two points with a line between them. He was wearing painter’s pants, low-slung on his hips, and a white T-shirt with faded black cuffs, a worn university logo over his wide and concave chest.

  “Here is we,” he said. “You and me. And our great relationship.”

  “Wonderful,” said Sunny. “Label me.”

  Maxon labeled her point with an S.

  “No, I’m not S anymore, I’m W. Wife.”

  Maxon used his fist to erase, and changed the label. He labeled himself H for husband.

  “Now here,” said Maxon, placing another point on the line halfway between W and H, “is where we germinate the baby. Right here.”

  “So the baby is going to come between us. Great. Why did you want a baby again?”

  “Because babies are what’s supposed to happen now. It’s what humans do next.”

  “So you say.”

  “Wait,” said Maxon. “Watch. Watch. Here’s our two points, but we have to push them together. Push, push, push, you know, pushing?”

  “I’m familiar,” said Sunny.

  “And as we come together, this little baby point moves out, gets squished down, perpendicular, to form … a … triangle.”

  Maxon finished drawing the new diagram, with W and H and the new point, C, in a triangle shape, and lines connecting W and H to C.

  “Now look at this,” said Maxon, connecting W to H again. “Closer than ever.”

  “Two times closer,” said Sunny.

  “Ready now?”

  “No.”

  She took his marker out of his hand and pushed him into a chair. Slinky, sleek, in a red dress with an elastic top that brushed the floor. She drew another triangle, this one labeled M, F, and C, then drew an arrow from one triangle to another.

  “How do we get here from there?” she asked. “Mother, father, child. How do we get there?”

  “I think you should start with husband over wife,” he suggested.

  “Why is it H over W? Why not W over H?” she asked.

  “You don’t inseminate a wife with the wife on top. The wife has to be on the bottom.”

  “So, H over W equals F over M?”

  “Yes. We have solved everything.”

  “It can’t be that simple.”

  “Really, it is that simple,” said Maxon. “That’s why so many stupid people can do it.”

  “Gosh, wait. No, there is a problem. It’s not that, what you’re thinking it is, but there is something else missing. Something significant.” Now she used her fist to erase some of what she had written, then wrote down:

  “W plus what?”

  “You will see,” she said grimly. “You will see.”

  First, she made Maxon start growing his hair out. He had been shaving it for years. Now, she made him not shave it. It started growing in. Sunny pondered it, scrubbed her hands over it, tugged on it, fluffed it up. In the morning, she rolled her office chair over to sit in front of him, and put their foreheads together. She rubbed her head against his, feeling the hair coming in. They had always played this game, where they rotated their office chairs around their heads, as if bound together, as if conjoined twins, their chairs as black plastic moons, their heads in the center, Maxon’s hand behind her skull, her hand behind his, until she got dizzy and was laughing too hard. But now she didn’t laugh. Because his hair prickled her. She thought how it must be like growing grass out of your skin, like growing cornstalks. It must be sort of terrible. A dirt you could never get clean. An infestation. A problem. She and Maxon did silly things like that. Like kids do. She thought that when she and Maxon had hair and were parents they would not play their chair-spinning game. They would have to mind their cornstalks, keep on feeling them and brushing them down.

  When Maxon’s thick golden-brown hair was one inch long and beginning to curl over his forehead, she knew she was ovulating. She drove to the wig store and bought
a wig. The purchase of her first wig was a moment she had anticipated since she was old enough to realize she was bald and a wig would hide that. She dreamed of walking around in a crowd, unnoticed. She thought about herself sitting on a bench in a row of other people, all with their knees along the same line, all with their heads reaching the same point on the wall behind the bench, all identical. Sunny would have to look hard at her own eyes to identify which body was hers. Yet when she stood there in the wig store, she felt a little bit upset. She knew that her mother would be angry with her, if she knew about this. She knew her mother would say she was being a fool. Of all the kind and encouraging things that had been said to her over the long bald years, the one she remembered most was her mother’s praise: You are who you are, Sunny. You are who you are. And I’m proud of you. Everything about you is part of you. It is all part of Sunny.

  In the wig store, there was no explanation needed. Walking into a wig store as a bald person, there is only one thing you can possibly want to buy. It is not a hat. It is not a scarf. It is a wig. Sunny chose a blond wig of long straight hair, because it looked the most like the kind a kindergarten teacher might choose. It looked like the hair that could be found on the mother of a little baby. Everyone thought that she wanted to put on the wig right away and go out of the store with it on. But no. She did that later. First, she had one more drive down the street, one more walk down the sidewalk, wearing only her own head. One more hop and skip up the stairs to their big apartment. Then she got into her bedroom, and shut out the light, took off all her regular clothes, and fitted the wig on her head. When she turned the light back on, the wig was in place. After that, she wore the wig. She could see it on her head if she looked in a mirror.

  Maxon came home from a bike ride, with hair all over himself, as she had directed, and he was surprised to see her. She was still naked, just her and the wig, waiting for him. He stood in the bedroom doorway, filling it. He was sweating, tall and tight in his Lycra, holding his helmet. He put one hand out to each side, as if she were a wave breaking over him, all her nakedness, all her new hair.