Shine Shine Shine

by Lydia Netzer

  Sunny stood up and moved toward the door. He watched her, leering. She didn’t know if he was done talking or not. He didn’t indicate. She felt sick, smelling something sweet and old. Only when she was outside in the cold again, breathing the sharpness into her lungs, could she shrug off that suffocating feeling. Men would date her. It wasn’t that. They would date her and fuck her, too. She felt that, in the room with Hair Person. Not because they were familiar with her, but because they were unfamiliar. Not because she was close enough to a real girl but because she was far from it. Then the only remaining question: Would she fuck someone else, before she went back to Maxon? Or would she fuck only him, from the beginning to the end. It was the only remaining mystery of her life at college. But when she went back to her room and called him on the phone, she only said she had a shitty day, and that he should tell her everything that had happened to him that day, starting from the beginning, and leaving out nothing, until she fell asleep from the sheer comfort of the minutiae, all the little details, precious details of his distant life.

  With Maxon, she always knew when he was done talking, because he had showed her the formula once:

  Her mother could say that Maxon would not make a good husband, but she could not provide a viable alternative.

  *

  PREGNANT, LONELY, SITTING IN his office in the middle of the morning, with nothing on her to-do list but birthing his baby and raising his crazy child, Sunny considered hacking Maxon’s desk apart with an ax, to see what was in that locked drawer. Maybe she would have done it, if she had had an ax. If she hadn’t heard Bubber screaming.

  So this is what happens, she thought, staggering to her feet and lurching into the other room. She clutched the doorframe with both hands, suddenly woozy. I hope I can restrain him. I hope I am strong enough. Without a plan, she rushed into the den, thumping heavily across the floor. She expected to see him foaming, red-faced, mad as a wild boar over something invisible, some thread in the carpet that wouldn’t line up. Instead, he was twisted on the floor, laughing so hard his face was purple. She followed his gaze. A guinea pig in an astronaut suit and helmet was flying through space on the television. It was a real guinea pig in a cartoon helmet, a juxtaposition that had thrown Bubber into this spasm. To anyone looking, he might have been dying.

  She had certainly never heard him laugh like that. It was almost frightening. Yet she remembered that when he was a baby, there was a full belly laugh that used to make them all laugh; it was so confusing and erupted from him. She watched his stomach convulse as he rolled on the floor. She should help him, but the extremity of it impressed her, alarmed her. What is laughter but a manageable convulsion? What is crying but a mild seizure? Drugged, he could fake it, he could learn to produce crying, laughing. What’s the difference between a real laugh and a forced one? If it can be controlled, must it be fake? Maybe the difference between the believable emotional expression and the unbelievable one could be the ability or lack thereof to reproduce it. Was that fair? He sat up when he saw her, and gasping, he said, “Mom, look. It’s a robot.” The guinea pig moved in jerks, from crude animation and fat pig parts. She sat down on the ottoman, and Bubber backed up against her knees. She put her hand on his head and felt it was damp, he had been laughing so hard. His face was slack, relaxed, his eyes clear. Sunny thought, Wow, this is my little boy. This is him, he laughs hysterically. She felt exhilarated. What else could he do?

  “Are you bald? Losing your hair?” said the television. Sunny clutched Bubber’s ears, covering them with her hands. Her eyes locked on the screen. “There’s no need to suffer the embarrassment of hair loss and no need to destroy yourself with harmful chemicals. Dr. Chandrasekhar’s Orchid Cure can restore your hair and your self-esteem with all-natural plant extracts.” Up until now, the screen had shown a waterfall splashing into a rock-lined pool. Around the pool sat women in traditional Burmese attire, with long glorious hair falling down to their knees. The women themselves were not Burmese; they were blond, redheaded, and brunette. They stroked and stroked their hair, arranging it with orchids and vines. “I’m Dr. Chandrasekhar,” said the TV, and a disembodied head appeared in the middle of the waterfall. It was an elderly Indian man, pleasantly mustached and wearing a lab coat. “I have developed my Orchid Cure formula for thirty years, to bring you the finest Eastern herbs and…” He went on talking, but Sunny wasn’t listening. “He’s brown,” she said out loud. “He’s brown. He’s really Indian. He’s not my father. He’s brown. What happened to him? What happened?”

  15

  The rock that hit the rocket had been hiding behind the moon. It was only the size of a fist. Inside it, down deep in the core, surrounded by weird heavy metals and crystalline rock, was a drop of a substance so primitive it was unrecognizable. It would never be recognized. It was a bit of matter, a grain of dust from the beginning of the solar system itself. Presolar. A presolar particle, trapped in a rock in crazy orbit around the sun. It was one in a million, one in a hundred million, like a raging genius in the human race, or a crazed savant skipping outside the bell curve. The rocket, approaching lunar orbit, cut through the emptiness like a gleaming, nanomatronic sliver in an artery, so tiny, such a fragment of metal on its path. The meteor was even smaller, a rogue molecule, loose in extraterrestrial solution. A subliminal particle on the atom of the solar system. A bit of thought loose in the brain. The size of the meteor was judged, later, to be nine centimeters in diameter. They did not see it at all; nobody saw it on any electronic screen. The astronauts and Maxon had put on their space suits. They had strapped themselves down, in the control module, just like takeoff. Just like the moment when the tower of fuel under them had exploded, shooting them straight up, face-first, into the ozone. The babble of Mission Control in their ears had directed the astronauts through the checks, the tests, prior to their arrival. The storage pod was already orbiting the moon, so they would sync with it, if all the numbers were aligned properly. The voice of Mission Control, calm and calming, droned on down the procedure for initiating lunar-orbit insertion. When the procedure was finished, when they had fired the rocket again, they would be orbiting, too.

  The meteoroid was close, getting closer, but still secret, undetected by the astronauts in space or the humans on Earth, who were operating the astronauts remotely. It was such a little one, though. It was a meteor that no one would notice or care about, if it were wrapped in a cozy blanket of Earth’s air. The atmosphere can burn up most things before they bother Earth. Yet in space, the smallest little thing moving at the correct velocity in the most dangerous direction can penetrate like a bullet. A grain of sand can leave a two-inch crater in the hull of a spaceship. What could a baseball do? It’s one thing when you walk outside, turn your face up, and say, “Wow, just look at all those stars.” It’s another when a hunk of metal from before time drives itself into your intestines.

  The pilot of the rocket was named Tom Conrad and he was a lieutenant commander in the U.S. Air Force. He was an automated person, his moves dictated by a roomful of scientists in Texas, by a protocol, by a list of procedures. Favorite of Gompers, the commander, and vocal critic of Phillips, the engineer, Conrad was as effective a pilot as there was in the world. Maxon was the only civilian on board. Conrad, Phillips, Gompers, they were good guys, stand-up characters. Everyone is friends in space; a few little blobs of life in a vastness of cold death will always pal around together.

  Maxon clicked on his face mask, clicked into his restraints, buckled down into the chair. He became one with the rocket, connected to it, part of the hardware, indistinguishable. He was no longer floating, no longer human. He was a smudge on the rocket, a little bit of flesh inside it. He heard his breathing, inside that shatterproof helmet, that flesh bucket. Outside the ringing in his ears, outside the noise of Mission Control, relaying instructions to the pilot, to the engineer, to the real astronauts, while Maxon had been told, so lovingly, so kindly, to sit tight. The men on the ground always talked to the astronauts
as if they were children, performing dogs. They were an extension of humanity, a little finger of biology in the vast mechanical space. Overdirected. Overthought. Ultimately, so insignificant.

  When the meteor struck, the voice in the radio had just said, “Okay, check.” Then there was a bump; it was felt by the astronauts as a ripple in the core of the rocket. There was nothing they could have done, on the fly, to override the program and violate the list of available alternatives. The thing had to impact. There was no such thing as an evasive maneuver. They felt it hit, they heard the metal groan, and they felt a lift, a sickening moment of lurch, like a car going fast over the top of a country hill. Then the rocket began to tilt, but they didn’t feel it. They were in it, part of it, connected to it, laced into it with nylon straps and boots.

  They saw themselves go off course, humanity jiggered to the left, hard, and there was a hissing sound, and some of the lights on the control panel began to blink, and the pilot’s arms were moving quickly over buttons and dials, responding to the blinking, the information, like a spinning wheel on a sinking ship, going faster and faster. Maxon thought of dying in the same way that he thought of the spaceship imploding: ruining itself on itself, crushing like a can. The meteor was heavy metal. The skin of the rocket would not deflect it. There would be damage, but how much? Mission Control began to shriek. Like a parent whose child has run into the road. “Gompers? Status! George?” Then went silent.

  The meteor had hit the rocket. There was no turning back. The people were inside the rocket and were strapped to the rocket. It’s very hard to survive a meteor strike, in space. Everyone had always known this. Playing the numbers, they bet that a meteor would not hit, because space is so big, and meteors are so small, and rockets take up very little of space. Like a boat on the ocean, trying to stay away from one other boat, except times a thousand, times a million. It was so safe.

  Of course, nothing kills you right away, and the same can be said for meteors. They don’t have to kill you right away. This was the case in the rocket Maxon was sitting in, headed for the moon. It did not kill them right away. Yet they all four knew, and all the other humans back on Earth who were paying attention knew, that in that moment, the mission changed, and there was very little hope of a happy reunion. In the mad spinning mechanism, the cruel randomness of space, with its dire temperature shifts, its spinning infernos, its ferocious pellets, the chance of a human surviving was very small. The fact that most astronauts came back and were fine was a testament to just how tiny the steps taken by humans into space had been.

  So the little room got littler. The astronauts began to sweat. The air became tainted, as if they could taste the chemicals. Their feet longed for the bumpy heaviness of Earth. Their lungs yearned for the sweet, pure air of Manhattan, or even a coal mine, air that was made the real way, by plants and other people and cars and breezes and animals, not manufactured and tanked. Now they were not only cramped inside a spaceship, they were cramped inside a damaged spaceship. The panic was there at the back of their throats, with the desire to claw their way out, escape, restart, make different life choices.

  Gompers took control, barking orders and asking for status reports. Fred Phillips, so obnoxious on his downtime, became a mechanism of assessment, snapping out clipped answers and clicking away on a board of buttons and levers. Maxon could do nothing. His limbs went still. His worry was distant. He thought of Sunny sitting in a room at NASA in Langley, looking at an uplink to the rocket’s control room. She would see their four shining heads, round and hairless, closed to the elements. Would she think he looked bald? Would she think he looked familiar? Would the boy be there, in his helmet? Would Sunny be aware they were all encased in their own skulls? Maxon closed his eyes. Robots were more suited for this. Robots were more equipped. There was nothing a robot would regret, faced with its destruction in the aftermath of a meteor strike.

  This is the story of an astronaut who was lost in space, and the wife he left behind. Or this is the story of a brave man who survived the wreck of the first rocket sent into space with the intent to colonize the moon. This is the story of the human race, who pushed one crazy little splinter of metal and a few pulsing cells up into the vast dark reaches of the universe, in the hope that the splinter would hit something and stick, and that the little pulsing cells could somehow survive. This is the story of a bulge, a bud, the way the human race tried to subdivide, the bud it formed out into the universe, and what happened to that bud, and what happened to the Earth, too, the mother Earth, after the bud was burst.

  If Sunny were here, he would say, “Don’t be afraid. Think of the meteor as a giant meatball. One I will eat and gain twenty pounds.” She was always saying he was too skinny.

  16

  The saddest thing that anyone has ever seen is an oil town that is no longer booming.

  In 1859, crude oil was discovered in fat pockets under the foothills of the Appalachians in western Pennsylvania, in Yates County. Forward-thinking people stuck pipes down into the ground and began sucking out this oil as fast as possible, pouring it into barrels, and shipping it around. They were able to sell it for quite a fine profit. They organized themselves into boroughs and towns and even cities. They built monstrous, huge Victorian houses, lit them with strange and dangerous wiring, and perched them onto the sides of small mountains. Down at the bottom of the mountains the Allegheny River cut through. Time passed and as the oil came up out of the ground with less determination, they moved the pipes around, and switched to coal. They mined for coal under the ground and then strip-mined the top of the ground and then turned to lumber.

  Meanwhile in nearby Crowder County, they couldn’t find any oil. Whatever the reason, the Crowder County residents had to dig in and rely on agriculture to get them through the turn of the century. By the time the oil had run dry in Yates County, the farmers of Crowder County had scraped down the hillsides and layered fields of corn, soybeans, soup beans, all up and down. They were rich farms, sweet farms, mooing and rustling farms. They were farms solvent with non-oil money. And so when Pennzoil moved down South to become Texazoil, and the health and welfare of the citizens of Yates County came acutely into question, the farmers of Crowder County sat in stoic victory on their well-oiled threshers, pounding out their prosperity.

  But the barons of oil in Yates County were still rich. When they had gutted, disemboweled, razed, and plucked the land around them, they turned in on themselves in their Victorian homes, and when the money ran out, in approximately 1952, they mostly died. Now the people who had serviced all the barons of oil and coal and lumber still remained in the oil towns, and with the lords and ladies gone they took over the unwieldy Victorian houses and dealt with the inconvenient kitchen layouts and installed refrigerators in unlikely places and laid down cement in the basements and managed not to burn down the whole city.

  Everyone needs groceries and a place to buy tires, so the tire-store guy can sell to the grocer and vice versa. Every year there is a slightly smaller GNP for the decaying oil town with no more oil in it. Gradually the houses fell into disrepair. Gradually everything slowed down. While the farmers in Crowder County sat smug on their silos of grain, the remnant in Yates County roosted in the finery of days past, and the ground watered by wealth, prestige, and privilege brought forth a curiously high percentage of geniuses. Maybe it was a result of the bizarrely grandiose public establishments, gifts of dead oil magnates. What rural public high school has a planetarium? The school in Yates County, where Sunny and Maxon had their education, was different in a number of ways. A commitment to high-tech updates was one, funded by long-dead benefactors. Its high concentration of statistical geniuses was another. The causal relationship between these two anomalies was uncertain.

  In any case, this was where Sunny and Maxon grew up among those brought shockingly low, and those random scatterings of monstrous intellects. From the Amish farms, from the trailer parks, from the rotted old estates with broken windows and railings they spro
uted up, shooting through the local schools with such powerful force they were shot out, far out into the world, and landed as chiefs of surgery in Chicago, research scientists in LA, sociologists in Denver. Maxon was not the first to rise up from such oily, strange beginnings to win a Nobel Prize. They were a rare breed, fed on the scraps of the oil wealth, nurtured in the overprivileged schools, always with the urgent aim of escape from the decaying place of their birth.

  In the moment of impact, where the stars fell on him, Maxon remembered a day in the high-school planetarium, and the way Sunny’s head had looked, in the center of that planetarium. She was sitting so upright in a chair, and looking so bald, like a cartoon of an idea. Aha! A lightbulb, her neck the part you screw in, her skull the glass bulb, her brain, her soul, her generosity the filament. Sitting there in the dark, in the light of the thousand stars, shot up by his lamp, he, the bold projectionist, illuminated the stars. What a way to pick up women.

  *

  HE WENT TO HIGH school first. By the time Sunny got there, he was a sophomore. There were kids there from around the county, mostly kids known to Maxon but some not. He went scowling through his first year there without her. He made enemies. He scorned teachers. He put people in their place. He sneered at their unread, unresearched, lazy intellects. The mother had tried to train him in all the ways he needed to behave in school. In elementary school, this was a success. To keep him from running in the hallways, she said, “Maxon, your rate of speed is independent of your lack of obstacles. Just because you can run fast doesn’t mean you should.” Later, he wrote down the math:

  Much later, this rule would be coded into a robot. But now, in high school, there were more complexities to social interaction than just walking down the halls, smiling when he was smiled at, frowning when he was frowned at, matching his facial expression to the facial expression of the person he was talking to, as he had been taught. “Maxon,” said the mother, “if the person is crying, that means you cry. If the person is laughing, that means you laugh. There is no danger in emulating your companion. There is only danger in emulating poorly.”