Shine Shine Shine (18 page)

She also had a woolen poncho with a hood. In the wintertime, when it was bitterly cold, she would put on the poncho, pull up the hood, and go out riding her bicycle in that Ohio wind. Under the poncho, she could be anyone. It was then that she stalked him, the person she called in her mind “Hair Person.” He had long, wavy, rock-star hair. The hair that he had was so luxurious that when she saw him for the first time, from the back, she thought he was a woman. Her first reaction was to sneer. She looked askance at women with long hair. Like they were overcompensating. But a man with hair he could sit on, such a waterfall of frothing, floating hair was attractive.

He was a thin man with metal glasses and a pencil shape to his body. His only fascinating feature was the hair that hung down in soft, fluffy, crinkly waves below his belt. Besides that, he had nothing to recommend him. But she thought of dressing herself in that hair. She imagined him pressed down on top of her, that hair falling down on each side of them, enclosing her in his hairfall. She would say to him, “Stay in me for a little longer,” so she could feel his hair on her head. She had never talked to Hair Person, had never addressed him. She only rode her bicycle past his dorm-room window, one rectangle of many, breathless, twisted in her stomach, painfully in love. When she went right past it, she glanced in and would see him at his desk, or lounging with his guitar, or the light would be out; he must be asleep or out. Eating. Standing in the shower, shrouded in it, or drying it in sections, brushing it.

At times like this, Maxon was far away from her. She could remember him, of course, but she didn’t want him close to her. This is why her mother had recommended, “Go away to college. Try something new. Date someone. Date everyone. Try your hand at dating.”

The night her love for Hair Person ended was such a cold night. Determination clenched between her teeth, she had parked at one end of Hair Person’s dorm, and started down the hallway past his room. He was not as tall as Maxon, not as broad. Maybe he was not as tall as Sunny even. But that hair. As she approached the door of his dorm room, she heard a few soft chords on the guitar, and she dared, breathless, to stop and push the door open a few inches. He was sitting where she had seen him sitting when she looked in from outside, his guitar draped across his tiny legs. For months, she had looked at him through the window in the dark, in his Pink Floyd T-shirt and his faded jeans. Now they were alone in his dorm room, which smelled a little sour, like the boys’ dorms always did.

“Hello,” she said stupidly. “Is there anybody in there?”

“Oh, hey,” he said. As if he recognized her.

She pulled down the hood of her poncho. Several boys jogged down the hallway in towels from the shower behind her. She stood at the doorway.

“Can I come in?” she said.

“Sure,” he said, not looking at her. Sunny took a few steps into the room and pushed the door half-closed behind her. His waves of hair flattened against the cement-block wall behind him, fell down around the sturdy, square chair, upholstered in resilient yellow rayon weave. Sunny felt a little sick.

“Nice guitar,” she said. She sat down on the other yellow chair, which must have belonged to Hair Person’s roommate. She and her roommate had similar chairs. It was what everyone had, the same everywhere, like the metal beds. She folded her long legs into the chair and hooked the toes of her boots behind the arms of it, the way she did in her own chair. What would she do if Hair Person’s roommate came in just now? What if he came in and called Hair Person something like Rich, or Phil, or Matty? Hair Person said in a desultory way that his nice guitar was a vintage piece. They looked at each other, and then the phone rang. It was attached to the wall above his head, hanging on the hook there.

“’Scuse me,” he said. He reached up with one finger and hooked the phone receiver off the wall and brought it down to his ear. “Hello?” he said into it. Then he rolled his eyes. He told the person on the phone “You’re drunk” a number of times, and asked the person to repeat themselves, and then told them he would call them back. He hung up the phone, looked at Sunny nervously. His eyes looked, for the first time, instead of like liquid pools, like kind of shifty squirrel eyes.

“That was my girlfriend. She goes to school in Findlay,” said Hair Person. Sunny nodded. He added, “She’s drunk.”

“I gathered,” said Sunny. She pulled the hood of her poncho back up and unfolded her legs. “I better go.”

“Just because I have a girlfriend,” said Hair Person, “doesn’t mean we can’t hang out.”

He carefully put his guitar down, leaning it facedown against the bed so that its strings were touching the frame. Then he turned back toward her and steepled his fingers. His legs made two points, directed away from each other, with the knees like arrows. The knees themselves were so delicate, like knives under the frayed denim.

“What’s your name?” said Sunny.

“Chris,” he said. “You’re Sunny, right? Sunny?”

“Chris,” said Sunny, feeling the word roll around in a predictable shape inside her mouth and out the front. “No, I don’t think we can hang out. It’s no big deal. I just … wanted to ask your name. I’ll see you around.”

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.

*   *   *

P
REGNANT, 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.