Shine Shine Shine

by Lydia Netzer

  Only his shoulders and head rested on the ground. He hung there until he died, and only her mother was able to approach him, and then only from the other side of iron bars. The cell was dark and moldy. The prisoner wore no clothes. The agony, she wrote in her poem, was only increased by mosquitoes. The filth, she informed her readers, was only relieved by death. For crimes against the government, for subversive activity, for endangering the republic, and for Christianity, her father was hung up to rot.

  Her mother walked all the way from Mandalay to Rangoon, heavy in pregnancy, and delivered her baby in the dark, in a thicket behind the ruined palace. She tucked the baby into her own lungi, cleaned herself up, and that very night she went to visit her husband. She was shown to his cell, where he was kept alone at the end of a long low building. In the doorway, she called to him. She pushed the baby in between the bars, to show the father what he had made. A crow sat silently in the window. A snake slipped down the wall. The baby cried and writhed there in the dark, and the father turned his tortured head and cracked his lips into a smile, seeing her. That baby, said Sunny while the class was discussing her work, was me. That baby was me. She left out the eclipse in this version of her story. She thought it would sound too unrealistic.

  The poem was published in the college’s literary magazine, the student editors invited Sunny to read it in a little chapel on campus. At the end of her reading of the poem, there was silence in the chapel, and then applause.

  *

  WHEN SUNNY AND MAXON moved to Virginia, Sunny threw a housewarming party for herself. She invited everyone on their street, and everyone came. She had enough martini glasses for everyone. The house was perfect, like a spread in Architectural Digest. Pistachio cream rugs, a wide walnut plank floor, brushed-nickel cups for the recessed lights, and a golden ficus, glossy curved leaves like a money tree in the corner. Everything was new, down to the distressed-leather buster chair and ottoman, but it looked a hundred years old, like a house in which life-altering decisions had been made, a house that had been left and returned to, from faraway travels. A house in which treaties had been signed. A genuine house.

  They had disposed of their old coffee table, a huge chunk of green glass. It wasn’t child safe at all, but that was the least of its issues. “It doesn’t look right,” she said to Maxon. “And to be frank, baby, neither do you.” Maxon, like the great green coffee table, would not have been featured in Architectural Digest. Sunny didn’t want to sell it, so she rolled it out into the alleyway and left it, like a translucent question mark in the city.

  She would never have rolled Maxon out into an alleyway. However, if she had been able to confine Maxon to his study on that night, she would have closed the big heavy door on him, and stuck duct tape around the seams of it, so that not even the slightest bit of air or hint of Maxon would come out.

  It’s not like he had even wanted to come. It’s not like he had said, “Can I come?” In fact he had said very clearly, “I do not feel comfortable with anyone coming into this house. It appears you have invited the whole neighborhood.”

  “Maxon, the more the merrier,” Sunny had trilled, smiling down into the sink, washing carrots.

  “That’s a terrible phrase,” he had said. He grabbed a diet Coke from the fridge.

  “But really, it’s socially accurate,” said Sunny, “and in this case the numbers are in your favor.”

  “How’s that,” he said, snapping open the can. She gesticulated with a shaved carrot, a twinkle in her eye.

  “The more people, the less you have to talk, actually, right? If I invited one person over, you’d have to talk plenty. But with twenty people here, you can disappear into the sofa. Nod, smile, and no one will notice.”

  Maxon swept the magnets off the fridge, the recycling calendar, the postcards, and attacked it with his dry-erase marker. He always had one somewhere. She loved to watch him work, loved to see him put it into his own language. In a moment like this, when everything went flying, she knew they were really communicating.

  “So, like this?” he said.

  “And w is the number of words I’m responsible for?” He paused, waiting, his marker still hovering over his last equation.

  “Yeah, I mean it can go up to fifty percent if n equals two. You know, like a dinner date. But if n equals twenty, negligible.”

  “Great,” he said. “Well, okay. I see your point. But for the moment I’m going back to my office, where n equals one.”

  “Maxon, where n equals one there should be no talking!”

  She let him go. But she had to allow him to come out if he wanted to come. They knew who he was. Maybe they would put his behavior in context. As the hour arrived, she put the finishing touches on her own wig, asked the maid to pay special attention to the baseboards, and hoped after all that Maxon would not emerge. Maybe if the house looked magnificent enough, they would not notice his absence.

  The favorite final touch, she thought, was a glass cabinet that held their curios: a Burmese nat, a basket of pinecones from the woods by her mother’s house, and on the top shelf a ten-thousand-dollar Mont Blanc pen. The pen had never been used, so it sat there in a spotlight, completely full of ink. She had found it in a catalog full of other such things, pens so expensive they must be kept in cabinets, wallets made of lambskin, all the things that real people use, responsible parents, not weirdos who wandered in from another planet or continent and decided to have kids. Sunny looked on it with love, as if it were her real husband, this pen, so perfectly made and elegantly wrought. Hello, she would say to her guests. I’m Sunny Mann, and this is my husband, Maxon. She would point to the pen. All of the guests would incline their heads toward the pen and nod and smile. The pen would glisten perfectly. It would not say anything strange or crack its thumbs loudly.

  Sunny was pregnant, just getting used to the feeling of a wig on her head, and just getting used to the feeling of another person moving around inside her, nourished from her bloodstream, holding its breath, waiting to emerge. She was really trying to make everything all right for the baby to come out. She was really trying to correct the wrongs that had been established in the universe, all of the missing fathers and the baldness and the condition people kindly called “eccentricity” now that Maxon was a millionaire.

  The first guests to arrive were Rache and her husband, Bill, and then Jenny and her husband, Roland. Others arrived. The women allowed Sunny to take their cardigan wraps, and took their saran-wrapped plates into the kitchen. There were little dipped cookie platters and bowls of starfruit stabbed with colored toothpicks. The men nodded and smiled and looked around, then began talking to each other, settling into matching leather armchairs. Conversation went appropriately. Sunny found herself saying the things she should say, things of which the neighbors would approve. She realized she was saying them with a confident energy she had previously felt only in situations where she was not wearing a wig. It made her feel good, having this dinner party. It made her feel like she belonged in the wig, belonged to the world of people who have lived their whole lives under hair.

  It’s not a wig, it’s a hat. It’s not a hat, it’s a head of hair. It’s not a head of hair, it’s a uniform, she thought. Meanwhile her mouth was saying something about the yard guy they all used. Her mouth was agreeing. She should use him, too? Oh, she would call him. Inside she knew she would hire him, find fault with him, fire him. She would find a new yard guy, someone they all would adore. They wouldn’t want to be seen with any other guy doing their lawn. In a month her guy would be edging corners for the mayor. Sunny filled her lungs with air. Her feet hardly touching the kitchen tile. Her hand gracefully landing on the counter, imitating Rache’s gesture as she swept away an invisible piece of dust from the glistening edge of the sink.

  Then the door to the office swung open. Maxon came out. She noticed for the first time that day that he was wearing a Joy Division T-shirt and bright blue sweatpants. No, she shook her head at him. You can’t come out here wearing
that. You go back in the office. But he did not look at her. He had a large whiteboard under his arm and a red marker in his hand. The room paused and all the neighbors looked at him, and Sunny looked at him, and she was afraid. On the whiteboard was a labyrinth. And she couldn’t believe he’d brought his labyrinth out to the party.

  Sunny knew this form of labyrinth was a medieval meditation aid, one way in, one way out. A labyrinth is not like a maze with dead ends. It is just switchback after switchback leading you to the inevitable center. She knew this because she and Maxon were talking about it all the time, at this point in their lives. They kept informing each other all about it. They kept drawing them, on napkins, on the front of the dishwasher, on Sunny’s scalp.

  Actually the whole labyrinth thing had originally been her idea, as she had done a wig in this style while in college, the lines and corners of a skewed oval labyrinth stretching over the bones and planes of her skull. In the center of the labyrinth there was a little bug with its head drawn stuck into her scalp. But Maxon hadn’t been able to let it go, kept photographs of her labyrinth, modified it, cross-checked it with the famous labyrinth he’d seen at Chartres, becoming obsessed with the idea of the decision-making process as a single line, not a series of branches, not a flow chart at all, but a single strand folding back on itself. He was working on structuring his artificial-intelligence logic around this idea—that the robot would not face a series of choices that fork off, but that the robot was experiencing a single train of thought, along which decisions were made. As soon as those decisions were made, the unused choice no longer existed, had not really existed in the first place. “If you look at it this way,” Maxon had said, “it all becomes very simple. You need about half the code you think you need. People just can’t get away from the old either/or.”

  “People in general? Or coders,” Sunny had wanted to know.

  “Coders are people,” said Maxon.

  Now Maxon went to the refrigerator and opened it. He stood with the whiteboard in one hand, the scribbled-over labyrinth pitched toward his face, and pulled out a bag of snap peas. Sunny realized he had forgotten about the dinner party. He ripped the peas open with his teeth, set the bag on the counter, and dug into it, still gazing at the whiteboard, the marker now behind his right ear. One of the men cleared his throat, and said, “Hey, man.”

  Maxon’s startle was real. He leaped back, dropped the whiteboard on the floor with a loud clatter, and stared wild-eyed at the group in the living room. His eyes landed on Sunny. She was shaking her head, slowly shaking her head. She thought that maybe she encouraged him too much. Because here he was opening his mouth, ready to carry his conversational weight.

  “Oh, HEY!” said Maxon, way too loud. “HEY, YOU GUYS.”

  He picked up the whiteboard, choked on a pea. He turned his head and Sunny saw there was a Bluetooth headpiece in his ear.

  “Maxon, turn off your ear,” said Sunny, motioning to him to take out his earpiece. He jerked it out as if it were a scorpion biting him, and dropped it on the counter. As conversation resumed in the room, Maxon drifted over to Sunny, his hand reaching out for her, to go around her waist. She saw the hand coming toward her, smeared with the dust from using his hand to erase the red marker, and she knew he had probably drawn that labyrinth fifty or a hundred times since he went in there after lunch. The red marker dust would get all over the cute jacket she was wearing, arms pushed up to the elbow artfully, zipper swinging youthfully around her pregnant belly. She took his elbow and clutched it in both hands, pulled him close. She patted his back.

  “It’s good, it’s going great,” he said to her under his breath. “Going really great.” He glared at the labyrinth, one dusty red finger going back to it, finding a path in it.

  “That’s good, baby,” she said quietly. “Why don’t you get back in there? You can take a plate.”

  But Maxon’s gaze had found the curio cabinet, and he was staring at the Mont Blanc pen in there.

  “What’s that?” he said.

  “Oh, that’s the cabinet, Maxon,” said Sunny. She made a desultory gesture and rolled her eyes toward their new neighbors, as if to say, Well yes, he is odd. But he’s so smart, what can you do?

  “No,” said Maxon, his hand now on the clasp of the cabinet, “I mean that pen. What’s it doing in there?”

  “Oh, the pen,” said Sunny. She could feel a little bit of sweat between her head and the wig, and the wig tottered over her. She felt top-heavy, weak, like her baby had become a balloon, her wig made of cement, and she might fall over a balustrade, fall into the abyss. The room was quiet. Everyone was wondering.

  “What’s a pen doing in the curio cabinet?” said Maxon. “That’s just weird.”

  “No, it’s—” Sunny began. “The catalog—”

  “It is kind of weird,” Roland put in helpfully, rising to look into the cabinet, “unless—is it your grandfather’s pen, or something?”

  The fact that a pen should not be kept in a cabinet, even though it was pictured that way in the catalog, was immediately obvious to Sunny, although it had not been at all obvious before. Maxon looked at her, and the neighbors looked at her, their blond hair streaming from the pores and plugs of their heads.

  “These pinecones are from the woods where I grew up,” said Sunny brightly. “And this nat,” she went on, pointing down to the little cross-legged sculpture with the pointy hat. “This nat is from Burma. I was born there. This is a forest guardian spirit—”

  “Burma?” asked Rache.

  “Yes, Burma. Now it’s Myanmar. But I was born there. And my father died there.”

  “I’m sorry,” Rache went on, putting a hand on Sunny’s cute jacket. Her hand, like everyone else’s hand, was finely dusted with light pretty hairs. Sunny’s hand was not. But no one could tell that. They just wanted to know how her father died.

  “He was a missionary,” said Sunny. “He was working there, building the Christian church in Burma. But it was illegal, under the Communists. To have a church. So he got arrested. Unfortunately.”

  She was rushing the story, screwing it up. But Maxon was taking the pen out of the cabinet, turning it over in his hand, trying to get it writing on his wrist. He wasn’t listening. Maybe he thought he had heard it all before. She felt so exposed by him, as if her underwear were sticking out the top of her pants, as if the roof of the house had blown off, as if she had said a bad word in church.

  “And put in jail,” she said. “Jail.”

  “Wow, prison overseas,” said Rache. “That’s pretty scary. Did he die in the jail?”

  “Well,” said Sunny, “he did escape.”

  “Really?” said Bill in his stentorian tone. “How did he manage that?”

  “It wasn’t very secure, this prison,” said Sunny. At least they weren’t talking about the pen anymore. Who spends that much money on something called a writing instrument? “He was being held in Rangoon. An old British fort, really run-down. He actually got out by wedging his sleeve between the side of the door and the wall, when the door was slammed shut. Then he worked it open after the guard was gone, because the lock was jammed. Somehow he got free of the building, he, uh, you know, crept down the darkened hallway and stuff. But once he was out, he wasn’t really safe, of course. He had to get to the jungle. It was dark. Nighttime. He crawled on his face until he could feel that thick, full darkness of the Burmese lowland forest. And he knew he was safe.”

  Now her audience was really with her. All of their owl eyes were turned toward Sunny.

  “He got up and ran through the forest, kind of drunk with freedom. Like he didn’t even care what he was doing or where he was going. And he didn’t realize, he didn’t really know, there was a ravine there. It was so dark, he just fell right into it and right to the bottom of this ravine. And broke his leg. His leg was broken in such a way that it was clear his leg was not going to work well enough to climb himself out of that ravine. He thought he would wait until morning and then listen, may
be there was a teak camp nearby. Maybe there was some fisherman on his way to the river.”

  Maxon seemed likely to wander back into the office. She raised her voice and he stopped.

  “Maybe a child running from one place to another, that he could call to for help. He knew he could not get out of that crack in the rocks on his own. But he was afraid if he called, that it would attract the soldiers. He thought that if he was quiet, they might not realize he was gone, they might not be looking for him. But then he wondered if he would survive the night in the ravine, with the animals, the insects … there are a lot of threats in the jungle of Burma, and if you’re not prepared, you can be in really bad trouble.”

  “But what about his leg?” said Jenny querulously, and ate a bite of an almond pretzel.

  “His leg was in bad shape, sort of zigzagged underneath him,” she said. Maxon leaned against the counter, his face now showing full attentiveness, one line of wrinkle between his eyebrows, indicating that the person he was listening to was saying something of interest. “He could barely keep quiet about it. He tried to stay calm, tried to focus on something besides his leg, but his consciousness was slipping away. I think he must have been going into shock. I think he passed out.”

  Jenny nodded, put the rest of the pretzel distractedly back on the plate.

  “As it turned out, they did come, the soldiers, that night. They came with flashlights, and through his closed eyes he could see the beam sweeping back and forth, up above. In his pain, and maybe a little bit of shock, he felt himself coming to his senses, and when he saw the light he called to it. It was a reflex, like swearing when you stab yourself in the hand with your own fountain pen. It was enough to alert those soldiers to his presence, and they swept the light down into the cleft of that rock, and there he was.”

  “Shit,” said Bill under his breath.