by Lydia Netzer
Yet in high school he found there was more to charming teachers than just running the code:
Now there was a physics teacher who hated him for no discernible reason. There was a gym teacher who threw him to the ground and then walked away fuming. There was a group of girls who laughed when there was no joke. But he was first in line to train as a technician in the massively expensive, sublimely extravagant planetarium.
This is the way it was in Yates County. Bald girls. Wild boys formed from math. Geniuses all around, just waiting to be discovered, or waiting to rot in trailers behind their parents’ barns, die penniless, mourned only by the Amish from whom they bought all those eggs.
There was a script that went along with the planetarium job, a spiel for visiting elementary-school students or Scout troops, which he memorized as easily as he memorized everything else. He could deliver it in any inflection. The kind patron, the bored ingenue, the enthusiastic lover of science. Or in a completely flat monotone the other volunteers found incredibly creepy. There were several different programs and there was also a light show for weekend nights, with lasers. Maxon was pretty sure that people were doing drugs before they came to see the laser show. Maxon himself never did any drugs or altered his mind in any way. He drank water, straight from the spring. He ate anything that was available. He had brown, wavy hair in tight proximity to his head, where it grew thickly in between the times when he shaved it. He had round dark eyes, long black lashes, and he was tall, rickety, bony and gaunt.
He loomed. He became pale and then freckled with the seasons. The recent victim of an extreme growth spurt, he frequently tripped. When she came into the planetarium, she was a freshman, he a sophomore. She was unschooled in the ways of planetarium operation, he an expert. He played the host, offered her the best seat in the house. Then someone else came in, a few people, it was a Tuesday evening at 7:00 p.m. He’d had nothing to eat for dinner and only a Diet Coke for lunch. He felt light-headed, flustered in his body. His flat, smooth exterior showed nothing of this. But it was there, down underneath, a fluttering feeling.
When Maxon grew so much so fast at age fourteen, he found he was awkward with Sunny. There was a physical thing happening inside him, during that freshman year, that he had not anticipated. Something grew up in his belly as his bones were stretching. His voice dropped. He became a new person. Sunny was tall, too; brisk and fragile, but she pretended not to notice. But there was a different urgency in the room when they were alone together. They no longer wanted to make puzzles for each other. They no longer had their minds around their pretend. The time they spent apart was spent in different directions, so when they came home, they had moved along separate vectors, and were estranged. Maxon’s brain was unaware of the movement. His eye recognized a Sunny in the Sunny slot, and his ear could hear her voice, the things it was saying to him. However, his body sensed it, down underneath his brain and everything that was going on that was reasonable.
He knew they were different people from the little kids that had rolled rocks to make dams in the creek, every muscle straining, every vein visible. He knew they were different people even from the shy two holding hands down the path to the waterfalls, afraid for each other to fall down the side of the mountain. He did not know entirely what they were changing into but he was aware it had to do with reproduction and genitalia. So he was clear on that.
Since they were old enough to escape the yard they had ridden together, her on a horse and him on a bicycle, all on and off the back roads of the area, on railroad trestles, down gulches and up ravines. There was nowhere Pocket wouldn’t go, and there was nowhere that Maxon wouldn’t ride his bicycle. Had the mother known where they were, she would have spat fear, but when they went out for a ride they didn’t know where they were going, only that they were going, moving, off at a gallop, and free. When the bicycle broke, he pirated himself the parts from another, and he always made it work, or he would run beside her carrying it, still able to say “yes” and “no” when it was appropriate to say those things.
There were days he rode off by himself, when she had something else to do, and on those days he went faster, descended at a death-defying pace, stood up on the pedals to ascend those walls of hills, spinning out on gravel, charging down the backsides of mountains. When he could, he watched cycling on TV. He liked to see the humans with their machines, clipped in to the pedals so the man and the machinery were one thing, the wheels an extension of the man’s own feet. He liked the grind. He wanted to ride over the mountains of the world, over the entire world and all its elevations. As he gained strength in his body, his mind changed, acquired new patterns, and somehow when they came together to ride now, after years of partnership, he was always faster, and she would fall into a pout.
On the day in the planetarium, they hadn’t ridden out together in months. There was something new there, happening, that he couldn’t understand.
Others came in but nobody sat near Sunny. They filed in slowly, took other seats, like they were avoiding her but maybe not with disgust, maybe with reverence. Parents and students together, or a couple of older students on their own. A Boy Scout troop came in, from the Presbyterian church in Knox, and sat all along one row, a man in uniform on each end of them. The others didn’t approach her, but made a ring around her in the dim light, the white dome of the planetarium covering the room. Maxon came over and sat down next to her in the next fold-down seat.
“The program takes thirty-seven minutes,” he said.
“Okay,” she said. She smiled, seemingly normal, but he was watching the outline of her lips in the dark. They had grown; they appeared more full. They had definitely enlarged. He squinted, tilted his head, and went closer for a better look. Her eyes, too, had become more reflective. He pulled back, suspicious. She was foreign in her specifics: the corner of her eyes, the peak of her brow bone, the fold of her ear. He had not been watching her that closely. He had made assumptions based on her outlines. He felt he had to take everything in more specifically.
She said, “What?”
He said nothing. He unbuttoned his top collar and buttoned it again. There had been episodes, many, many bad episodes, with him chewing on his collars, so he kept them buttoned, right to the top. Wore nothing with a loose neckline. Nothing he could chew, even if he really wanted to. He would chew a pencil or a fingernail but not his clothes, not his clothes. He wasn’t allowed to chew his clothes.
“Are you nervous or something? Haven’t you done this like a million times?” she asked him.
“I’m not nervous,” he said. “I’m just making sure you’re not nervous. I know how astronomy can make people use phrases like ‘the grand scheme of things’ and ‘suddenly I realized.’” She giggled, slid her backpack onto her lap and hugged it, stretched back in the chair and looked up.
“I’m fine,” she said. “Dumbass. Just ready for the show to begin. I’ve been waiting to see it, you know. The famous projectionist.”
The time had come to turn off the lights and start the planetarium show. There was a prerecorded message to be played about staying quiet in the theater and leaving only for emergency reasons. With fifteen people total in the planetarium Maxon doubted there would be an emergency situation—statistically, it was highly improbable. He began his pre-show talk where he described the night sky as they would be seeing it at that time of year right here in Yates County. He had decided he would put in a little secret for her, that when he pointed out the Big Dipper he would say, “Right there over the barn.” When he said it, he watched her, and perceived her head nodding a little bit; from the back of her head he could see her cheeks stretch and widen a little. He knew that meant she had enjoyed the reference. He turned on the automated part of the show, settled into his chair, and watched her. She sat there, like a bulb within a bulb, shadows playing across the white of her skull like leaf patterns on the forest floor. There, above, the inorganic version, and here below, the human dome.
He envisioned himself
with a Sharpie and a straightedge, drawing the stars on her skull, poking the firmament into her head. West and East her ears, North the tip of her nose. He would draw them as they would be seen in fall before hunting season, the best time of year. He would feel the Sharpie pulling smoothly along her skull; it would catch on nothing, like a whiteboard, allowing perfect shapes and lines. When he was done, he would turn on the light inside her head, and his work would reflect around the dome of the planetarium, no silly god names, no ridiculous anthropomorphizing of star clusters, just a star map with stars connected according to a logical rule. Which youngest, which most perfectly made, which most likely to expire. Instead of a crab or a lady or a bull, there would be algorithms played across the sky. Constellations were a joke, a nursery rhyme for grannies. Sunny’s planetarium show would contain none of these goofy contrivances. It would be perfect. A mathematical expression.
The soundtrack beeped and plopped along: a comet, a meteor, a galaxy. Then the show was over. After everyone left she still stayed in her seat until he had switched off the projectors and made his way over to her. He sat down in the next seat again.
“I think I might want to draw a star map on your head with a Sharpie,” he said. “Would that be all right?”
She pushed at his shoulder affectionately and when she touched him it was as if her hand had an electric wire in it.
“What, do you want to put pinholes in me and screw a bulb into my brain?” she said.
But she lay back in the chair again; her backpack slid to the floor. He was pleased with how close her idea was to his idea.
“I don’t think I would need pinholes,” said Maxon, his voice catching on itself, his hands suddenly charged; he had to hold them in his lap or they would be yanked up to the ceiling. “I think you would just shine.”
She sat up in her chair. He looked at her and realized she was staring at him full on. Her eyes were wet and seemed bigger. Her chin dropped, her lips moved, but for a few seconds no words came out.
“That’s really cool, Maxon,” she said. “That’s a really cool thing you just said. That’s the kind of thing that people like.”
Her voice was very low, and he said, “Did you like it?”
“Maxon,” said Sunny. “I have been thinking about trying something out.”
“What?” he croaked.
She put her hand out to his jaw and touched it, with her fingertips she drew his face in toward her. He felt the electric-wire feeling again, like she was shocking him off the ends of her fingers. She was only touching him on the face. He did not understand why he would feel a triangle feeling tightening in his groin, a triangle around his pelvis, tightening.
“I have been thinking about kissing you, Maxon. On the face. Would that be okay?”
“Yes,” he said. He felt he might fall off the planetarium seat, because he was not well situated.
“On the mouth, okay?” she said gently.
“Yes,” he repeated.
His face went closer and closer to hers until he breathed in a breath where he could smell her clothes, he could see the rim of Sunny’s eye, so perfectly an arc with no lashes or brow to interrupt it, and then she kissed him, right on the mouth. The warmth of her lips pressed into him; it was not like skin and skin, it was something different, something more penetrating. He felt stirred, like a battery had exploded now in his torso. He felt things switching on inside him, and down the insides of his legs. He reached out for her, took her by both arms, and with his wonky awkward knees and long legs for once cooperating, he dragged her up to stand against him. They stood kissing there, under the dome of the planetarium, her arms around his waist, him clutching her tight, and he never, ever wanted to stop.
At that moment, Maxon knew that Sunny was his reproductive mate, and that he should find a way to solidify their relationship with words and gestures.
“Sunny,” he said, when they finally broke away from each other.
“Yes,” she said. She was smiling. She was radiating kindness and happiness. Her arms still around him were stroking his back, drawing her fingertips down from his shoulders to his belt, soothing him, teasing him, lighting him on fire.
“Do you want to say, ‘Sunny, I love you’?” prompted Sunny.
“Sunny, I love you,” he said hoarsely.
“I think I love you, too, Maxon,” she said. She was thirteen years old and maybe she was unmoved in the ways he was moving, but she pushed her hands against his chest, as if aware of the sudden thing that she had over him. “I’m going to marry you, man!”
*
MAXON IN THE ROCKET could remember that energy between them, that way he felt electrified by her as all his switches turned on. All life is binary. On and off. There is no middle setting. Alive or dead. In love or not in love. Kissing or not kissing. Speaking or not speaking. One choice leads to another with no forks in the road. There are a thousand tiny yes and no decisions that make up every movement, but they are all just that: yes and no. For Maxon, awkward and waiting in the planetarium booth, it had been off. For Maxon, standing with his arms around Sunny, kissing her for the first time for real, it was then on. It never turned off again in his whole life. It was a switch that was duct-taped to one side with a sign beside it that said DO NOT TOUCH. It was nothing he could ever undo, no matter what she had said to him, or how much she had railed against him later. It was there because it had never left.
17
The mother did not die. Inside her, something had been suspended. She had lost the ability to move on. She had become interrupted. The breaths she took in were rasping and horrible to hear. The nurses shook their heads and pulled the curtain. The life clung to its trappings; the mind clung to the body, raking at it, tearing it up in its desperate clutches. She would not die, she would not leave the world like this, so unfinished.
On the surface of her, there was nothing going on. Not a twitch, not a grimace. But underneath that thick membrane of body, there was turmoil. On one side the destruction of cancer, the withering of the organs; they fell one by one like cities. On the other side, the bolstering of the will. She was counting, she was remembering, she was listing, to make sure she was alive. She would build it back, cell by cell, tissue strand by strand, until she was conscious. Until she was walking around. Until she was hearing news again, making decisions, watching the children growing up.
Outside in the parking lot, the bald daughter and the granddaughter inside her were sitting in the car. Sunny could not stay entirely away, but she could not go entirely inside. She could not make her feet carry her into the hospital, and yet when the car was running, the turns that led to there were inevitable. A few times she drove past and did not make that final turn in. Or she would go in and park, but not enter the building. She could feel the connection, through the window she thought might be her mother’s death chamber, one of fifty rectangles in the brick.
She imagined that after the baby came out, she would put Bubber and the baby in the house and leave Rache with them. With Rache in the house, alone with the children, the cracks in the walls would recede. The children would be safe. She could go back to the hospital, to the mother, and sit beside her, breathe warm air into the room where she lay. She hoped that a nurse was doing this in her absence. That someone would have pity on the dying woman whose bitch daughter had abandoned her to die alone. Well, she’s pregnant. Well, she’s bald. Well, she’s got a lot going on. That child. That man. Still, inexcusable, the nurse would say, and press her mother’s swollen hand. Sunny hoped.
*
THERE WERE TIMES DURING Maxon’s childhood when he spent every day with her. But then, when they were playing, Maxon would look up at the clock, see that it was after 4:30, and begin to run as fast as he could for home. His dad would get home at 5:00, he said, and he had to be there, to work. Having his son over across the way was galling to the father, unbearable.
His father was suspicious of Emma and her intentions. “What do they want with you, boy?” he would say
. “They want a boot boy? They want somebody to send down the wells?” His father was also suspicious about the brown woman that lived with them in their house. Nu was an anomaly, the only person in the county who wasn’t “white.” While most of the neighbors accepted her and asked her patient questions about where she had lived in Burma, others never believed she wasn’t just a common Negro. Maxon’s father was one of these, and talked with spit flecks on his lips about the evils of letting a Negro or a Mexican take root in the county. The truth was that Nu had come from Burma to help Emma raise Sunny because Emma was pretty sure she shouldn’t do it by herself.
When Emma returned from Burma, she wanted, most of all, to raise Sunny in an environment tolerant of eccentricities, where she could be as normal as possible. She could think of no better place for Sunny than the obscure, detached, rural county where Bob Butcher had grown up. Bob had always talked about it, rhapsodized about it, its tiny pointed country churches, its oil wells everywhere. Emma knew that if she took Sunny to Yates County, Sunny would be one of them, a family member. She would become a local fixture, like the people Bob had laughed about with the perpetual garage sale outside their house, or the eccentric millionaire, holed up in a stone mansion on a hill, who had invented Post-its. Her people were there. She would be at home.
She bought the Butcher farm from Bob’s parents. They were happy to sell it to her; they had long since moved to Florida, where they could be in the sun and near their other son, the good son who hadn’t gone off and gotten killed for being a missionary. Selling the farm to Emma meant being done with her and her odd child, so they did it without hesitation.