Shine Shine Shine

by Lydia Netzer

  She lay back, finally, with a deep sigh, and it was quiet. He had no idea what she had been saying, but she seemed relieved.

  He went up on one elbow, turned his body to face her. Now was the time for him to create an utterance, something to say.

  “Sunny,” he said. His voice caught and he coughed. She went up on one elbow, too, now facing him. Her brow furrowed.

  He looked at her, the big dark alien eyes, the delicate nose and rosebud mouth. He traced the fine line of her jaw, saw the soft wrinkle where it met her ear, the skin of her neck so pale and invisible, her jutting collarbone, her beautiful tiny breasts. He felt a feeling in his heart that was powerful love.

  “Yes?” she said.

  “Sunny, are you all finished with having sex with other men?”

  She smiled. She laughed.

  “Well, I don’t know,” she said. “Are you all finished having sex with other women?”

  He stared at her. He didn’t know what to say back. He hadn’t had sex with any other women.

  Her eyebrows went up; that meant she was surprised. “Maxon?” she said.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Oh, baby, are you telling me you haven’t had sex with anyone but me?”

  “I have not,” he said. He was unsure whether she was pleased or disappointed.

  “The very last time you had some sex was with me at the 4-H fair?”

  “Yes.”

  “All those years ago?”

  “Yes.”

  “And no one else? Oh, Maxon.”

  No one else. He saw her eyes get wet, and her lips pursed together. She put one finger on the back of his neck, and traced it down past his shoulder, over his rib cage, down the side of his hip, and the outside of his leg as far as she could reach. He said nothing, did not move, but inside he was shuddering with relief, being touched by her again. She reached over and put her lips on his face, on his eyebrows, on the side of his chin. His breath came faster. But he had to stop it. She was so warm, so near to him, that he might go into a dream. He might fall off a precipice and wake up to find himself still unmarried, still on the same rung of the ladder, no closer to the top.

  “Wait,” he said. “Wait.”

  He sat up, and reached into the pocket of his shorts where they were folded in a neat stack of his clothes next to him on the rock. She watched him, saying nothing. She had what people call a twinkle in her eye. He pulled out a shining metal cylinder and said, “Sunny, will you marry me?”

  She pushed herself up on one hand, her legs elegantly drawn up against each other. “What’s this, Maxon?”

  “Oh, this? It’s a titanium capsule. You use it to store unstable compounds. It’s waterproof, I thought the ring might get wet so…”

  “So is that a titanium capsule in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?” she laughed. Her smile was wide, her face beautiful. Her body was lithe like a long coil, it swung toward him in a wave. She put her hand on his chest and drew it down, down his front, where her fingers feathered over the front of his boxers.

  “Sunny,” he said again, “will you marry me?” He unscrewed the container and drew out the ring, carefully, carefully; it must not fall into the water.

  She slipped her hand into his shorts and with the other hand in his hair, she pulled his mouth to hers, and put a burning kiss on him. She was now next to him, her body pressed to him, he could feel her pulse elevated, her breathing frequency intensified. Her fingers went around his testicles and softly rubbed there, underneath. This was a new thing. She must have learned it at college.

  He broke away from her kiss, and said, his breaths coming in gasps, “Sunny. I need you to look me in the eye. And answer me. I need an answer.”

  Look me in the eye. Answer me. I need an answer. All times this had been said to him. Now he was saying it.

  “Yes, you ass,” she said, throwing her arm around his neck and wrapping the other around his waist. “Yes, I will marry you. I am all done having sex with other people. Yes, yes, yes.”

  They would get married. They would move into their beautiful A-frame. And even if Maxon’s work called them away to the big city, they would keep their house, on their hill, forever. He knew it.

  He put the ring on, and then she fell on him like a starving dog, and blew his mind.

  22

  When Maxon’s hand touched the cargo module, he did not feel relief. He felt: Here is the cargo module. Now how do I get into it? When he discovered that he could not get into the cargo module via either of the hatches, he did not feel fear. He felt: What is another way that I can get into it? He kept moving his hands, moving like a spider across the face of it, from handle to handle, edge to edge, seeking a new idea. His white suit wrinkled at his joints, making bent tubes for his body parts to be in. His helmet dome reflected the surface of the module, reproducing it in golden tones. Both of the hatches were locked. He had failed to consider this outcome.

  The cargo module itself was about the size of a box on a semi truck. It had been shot into lunar orbit unmanned, using an unprecedented amount of fuel, and had found its orbit without incident. Now here it was up in space, in the blackness hung with stars, where there was no wind to whistle through its latches, no air to breathe, no song to sing.

  Maxon let go of the handle, and he did not fall off or spin away, but just hung there, drifting. He had turned off the communication radio in his helmet that kept him in contact with Gompers and Phillips. The noises they were making didn’t even sound like words. It wouldn’t be the first time he suspected someone of talking nonsense, just strings of language in random order, to befuddle him. They knew he was not a good listener. They had been told to follow specific syntactic patterns when speaking to him. He had turned his jetpack off. There was no electricity in him at all.

  The silence of space was upon him. Now the difference between life and death, for him, was the motion of a fingertip. He was without tether, without support. If he reached out his index finger and pushed, his Newtonian mass would repel backward, every action having an equal and opposite reaction. In this case, with the action being flicking the side of a box with his index finger, and the reaction being his own death and the failure of the nascent lunar colony, Maxon really had to put a lot of faith in Newton when it came to the equal and opposite part. But that’s how he won the Nobel Prize: picking a rule and sticking with it, right down to the last logical consequence.

  He wondered, what would Sunny do, with him lost and floating off into space, orbiting the moon like a speck in a sack, his death unmarked in time, an unspecified number of days hence, when he stopped having electrical impulses in his brain, and continued to rot, but just at a faster pace. She had not specifically said, “I want you to orbit the moon until you die,” and he could not read between lines. He could only create his own conclusion based on evidence, and based on the rules that had been established. Without him, she could marry someone more appropriate, more functional. “My first husband went into space and died,” she might say. “Then I got a better husband, one more suited to the life I want for myself and my children.” Maybe it would be better, for Sunny, if he did not come back. Maybe it would be better, for the Earth, if colonizing the moon was not possible.

  He was sure that Sunny would be okay. She had told him on multiple occasions that the thing that was ruining her life was him. What worried Maxon, about this scenario, was all the beautiful robots. And he feared that if he pushed himself backward, and fell into orbit, then in forty-five minutes to an hour he would come up with the solution that could have saved them all. Then he would be forced, for as long as he could still breathe in and out, to deal with the frustration of not being able to put that correct solution into action. And that was a feeling with which he did not want to become acquainted. You can’t kill yourself just by willing yourself dead. Eventually you pass out and start breathing again. He waited for the solution to come to him. But if he waited too long, the space walk would be over, his oxygen would be out,
and he would not have returned to the rocket.

  “Dad,” said a voice. It was the voice of Bubber.

  Maxon turned his head inside his shiny globe, then grabbed a ledge on the side of the module and turned his suited body around. He saw another space suit, smaller, but just the same as his. Just the same shape of golden globe head. Just the same jointed arms and white gloves, but in tiny, perfect form.

  “Bubber?” he called. His jaw almost cracked when he moved his mouth to speak, he had been clenching it so tight. His voice sounded loud in his own helmet; he did not hear it echoed over the radio link, because the radio link was turned off.

  “Hi, Dad,” said the child-sized space suit.

  “How did you get out here?” asked Maxon. “Am I dreaming?”

  “No,” said Bubber. “You are awake.”

  The hiss of oxygen coming into his helmet, his own breath coming out of his mouth, and Bubber’s voice, clear as letters on a page, coming from … where?

  “Am I dead?” asked Maxon.

  “No,” said Bubber. “You are alive.”

  “Are you dead?” Maxon asked.

  “Dad, enough,” said Bubber.

  The child-sized space suit approached him, and he could see a reflection of his own body in the helmet. It reached out its hand to him. He grabbed the hand, felt the stiffness in the other suit’s fingers through his own gloves.

  “I am used to you being at home,” said Bubber. “You should be home.”

  “Sorry, buddy,” said Maxon. “I’m having a little trouble.”

  “I can help you,” said Bubber.

  What was astonishing to Maxon, taking in this information, and reading this data, was that Bubber sounded so normal. So completely utterly like a normal human being. Not like he was simulating human talking. Not like he was scripting. Just normal, like an average child. An average child in spectral form in a space suit orbiting the moon on a doomed mission to colonize it. With real inflections and tones. Maxon knew how to tell the difference between people like him, who were faking it, and real live humans, who were not.

  Working with NASA, he had run into quite a few people he could really relate to. People with brain chemistry so similar to his own. Some of them banded together, some of them clung to the nearest normal person they could find, some of them just stayed alone. None were happy. None had Sunny. Maxon thought for the first time about who Bubber would marry. He hadn’t thought about it, because the earthly Bubber, drugged and amiable, would not have inspired this question. The earthly Bubber would never marry anyone. He would need to be cared for, permanently, by his parents. When they died, he would go into a home.

  “I’m sorry, buddy,” said Maxon.

  “Sorry for what?” said Bubber.

  “I feel sorrow for what you are.”

  “What am I?”

  “Well, there’s something wrong with you.”

  “What?”

  “The same thing that’s wrong with me. What’s wrong with you is wrong with me.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with you, Dad. You’re great.”

  “Maybe not out here, but back at home, there is.”

  *

  IT REMINDED MAXON OF the last effective conversation he’d had with Sunny about Bubber’s medication, before she’d finally told him he was not qualified to have an opinion, being crazy himself.

  “What if he’s actually more evolved? What if I’m actually more evolved?” Maxon had shouted. He was standing outside the door to his office, and they were arguing about Haldol. Often when he came out of his office, he only made it a few feet out into the hall before he had to go right back in.

  “This will work,” Sunny said. “He will be okay. This will fix it.”

  “I don’t want to fix it,” Maxon yelled, his veins popping. He slammed his fist into the wall. “Do you even remember what he was like before we started testing him, and all this medication? Do you even remember that experience, what it was like having that child?”

  “You’re violent,” said Sunny dryly. “Maybe you need Haldol too.”

  “I don’t need drugs,” Maxon asserted.

  “Yeah, because my mother spent her whole life fixing you, and you know what? You know what, smartass?” Now Sunny was getting riled, and she yanked at the yarn ball feeding the knitting she was attempting to do. Maxon came two steps down the hall away from his office, away from his office and toward her living room. She was wearing her chopsticks wig, two wooden sticks stuck through a beautiful twist of blond hair. She was wearing her eyebrows, but one of them had come half off while she was steaming broccoli, so it dangled.

  “What?” he said.

  “You’re still not fixed!” she shouted, poking her needles savagely. “You’re still not fucking fixed! You’re crazy as a goddamned bedbug! Well, I’m not raising that kid to be a nutcase. He’s not that kid, I’m not that mom, and you better try as hard as damn hell not to be that dad. We’re not Mr. and Mrs. Wacko. With our junior-and senior-model lunatic, and our resident sideshow freak. I’m not doing it.”

  Maxon stepped back, deflated. He did not know how to articulate what he saw. He could draw it, but he sensed that would be weird. This was not a time to decorate the dishwasher, but when he saw Mr. and Mrs. Wacko and the junior-model lunatic, they were the new age nuclear family. All in space suits. No one using or understanding facial clues. In space, who cares? Literal, systematic, addicted to protocol. Unemotional, intelligent, math-minded. The future family. Not autism, not insanity, but the next evolution, engineered for space travel, space living, the habitation of a lunar colony.

  “Get Mr. and Mrs. Wacko along with a dozen or so of their autistic brood, and plant them on the moon, and they’ll do just fine,” he said. “Evolution, Sunny. Evolution. Did you think it just stopped?”

  “Come here,” she said, softening. She motioned for him to come and sit next to her on the sofa. He could now see she was watching something on television, even hear some of the words coming out of the speaker.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Sorry for yelling.”

  “It’s okay, baby,” Sunny said. “I’m just going to put Haldol in your thermos.”

  “No fucking Haldol,” said Maxon. “For him or me, seriously.”

  “Okay, no Haldol,” she said, climbing into his lap. “You need a shave.”

  *

  “DAD,” SAID BUBBER IN the space suit.

  “Son,” said Maxon.

  “You need to find a way into that cargo module,” said Bubber.

  “I haven’t found that yet,” said Maxon. Every time he spoke, it sounded like a raspy interruption, like the silence had made its own sound and the talking was bothering it.

  “Dad, think,” said Bubber patiently. “How were you planning to get it open before? You must have had some kind of way to get it open.”

  “This wasn’t supposed to happen,” said Maxon. “This was not in the script.”

  “So, you weren’t supposed to get it open at all?”

  “No,” said Maxon. “The command module was going to dock with the cargo and we were going to open the shaft, between them…”

  “You could be the command module,” said Bubber. “You could dock.”

  “But the air shaft, there won’t be a seal.”

  “Who cares?” said Bubber. “I don’t need it, the robots don’t need it, and you don’t need it.”

  Maxon thought.

  “So, where will it dock?” Bubber asked.

  “Follow me,” said Maxon.

  Of course, Bubber was right. Bubber’s brain had worked like a brain should work. He could get in through the docking channel, by applying stimulus to the appropriate places, the way they would have opened it if they’d docked. He didn’t need a hatch. Within minutes, he was booting up a Hera, fitting her with the titanium and aluminum she’d need to make them a comm unit. He looked back out the docking channel to see if Bubber was still there. He was, floating in space, giving Maxon a thumbs-up, which was a go
od way of saying, “I’m okay.”

  “Thanks, little guy,” said Maxon. “It seems so obvious now.”

  “No problem, Dad,” Bubber said. “Hey, it still took you only thirty-three minutes.”

  That was so like Bubber. To time it without a watch.

  *

  MONTHS AGO, THEY WERE on their way to get the mother from Pennsylvania. The neighbors said she was too sick to continue living in her own house. Of course, Sunny did not believe this.

  “Mom,” she had said on the phone. “What are you eating? What did you eat today?”

  “I drank an Ensure,” said the mother. “I’m fine. Hannah is here. She makes me drink it.”

  Hannah was the Amish girl who came in to clean the house, cook the meals, and do whatever else. Sunny didn’t know what all. She was supposed to take the place of Nu.

  “You need to eat more than just Ensure, Mom,” said Sunny. “I’m coming up there.”

  When they got off Route 80, Sunny sat up straighter. She folded her arms over her chest. She fixed her wig in the rearview mirror and then changed her mind and replaced it with a different one. She made Maxon adjust it. Bubber, in the back of the minivan, was asleep. Maxon was at the wheel. The minute they got off the freeway, she could smell the deep piney smell of the woods, the loamy damp smell that was her childhood, and Maxon’s, and all the time they spent running alongside the creek, climbing trees. The air was more moist here than it was back in Virginia. The ferns were denser, the trees greener. Anyone would say it was a beautiful spot.

  “Do you smell that?”

  “What,” said Maxon.

  “That … smell. The smell outside.”

  “Smells like oil, tetracycline, carbon monoxide, and decomposing biomatter.”