Shine Shine Shine (28 page)

“Well, when will you tell me? When she’s dead?”

“I don’t think I can ever tell you. And you have to go. But I want you to know that I wrote a poem for you. You should know that.”

Later he called her on the phone, and asked her to forgive him. And then he went back to Massachusetts, and she did not see him again for years.

*   *   *

B
ENEATH THE YELLOWED CEILING
light, at an old Formica table, the woman that had been Laney Mann sat before a ledger book, a receipt book, a checkbook, and a pile of paper scraps, a No. 2 pencil in one hand and a pink eraser in the other. She looked up. Sunny was amazed. Where there had been hulking flesh, there was now a trim old lady. Where there had been strange facial hairs, there were now gentle wrinkles. The gaping holes in the rotten teeth now invisible behind a meek smile, neat hair tucked into a braid.

“Well, innit nice,” she said, as if automatically; then when she saw Maxon she stopped.

“Maxon?” she said.

“So how y’uns know each other?” asked her husband.

“Why listen, Ben,” she began. She half stood up, her hand reaching out to Maxon, who still stood by the door. “This here is my son Maxon that you never met. You know, he’s the youngest of ’em. He’s, ahhh…”

“A scientist,” put in Sunny helpfully.

“Yeah, he been a scientist down there in Virginia,” said Laney. “What you working on, lemme see, I know, I learnt this from Emma. Rockets, right? You gonna fly a rocket?”

“Yes,” said Maxon.

“Where, right up to the moon?” asked Ben.

“Yes,” said Maxon.

“Well, innit nice!” said his mother. “That’s real nice!”

Everyone looked at Maxon.

“Hello, Mother,” he said. “I am just stopping by, since I am in the area. This is my wife and child.”

Laney picked up the teakettle and began to fill it from the jug on the countertop. She looked Sunny over and nodded approvingly, clucking to herself.

“Well, honey, I’m real glad you didn’t stay married up with Emma’s girl. She was … well, I was always real grateful how Emma paid up for your school and all your travels. But she always knew you kids could be with others that were, ah, better suited. That kind of thing just ain’t right. So now look, you got such a pretty new wife, little boy, you’re doing real good.”

Maxon stood, stunned, his face registering nothing. Sunny felt a prickle of triumph. The wig worked. She was immune.

“Who’s this Emma’s girl,” she asked Laney, helping her reach a box of tea the old woman was stretching for on an upper shelf, before she could retrieve her footstool. “Your first wife? Huh, Maxon? Was she pretty? Should I be worried?”

“No, no,” said Laney, counting out her little bags of Lipton. “Poor thing, she was … bald.” She whispered the last word, one hand discreetly over her mouth. When she was trying to be subtle, Sunny could see the remnants of the old Laney, the fat and desperate Laney, laid over her face. The eyes leaping from side to side. The chewing movements, when there was nothing in her mouth.

“Bald, you mean bald like she shaved her head?” Sunny said, pushing the envelope, reveling in the feeling of real human hair cascading expensively down the sides of her face, rippling over her collarbones, pooling on her shoulder blades.

“Let’s just not say nothing ’bout it, dear,” said Laney, poking a tea bag into each of four mismatched cups. “Whatchoo say your name was? Maxon, whatser name?”

Maxon made a gurgling sound, and Sunny interjected, “Alice. My name’s Alice.”

“Well, Alice, it’s just all done in the past. Nothing but past. There’s a lot we just leave behind, right, Maxon? A lot we just set right there in the past.”

“I don’t drink tea,” Maxon said.

“Well, would you like Kool-Aid? I got some Kool-Aid for your boy. Real nice apple Kool-Aid. You like Kool-Aid, honey?”

*   *   *

T
HEY PICKED UP
S
UNNY’S
mother from the house across the valley. They shut up the house, turned off the water, drained the pipes, and dripped antifreeze into the drains, all while the emaciated Emma sat on her sofa, wrapped up comfortably, listening to Bubber read to her, letter by letter, from a book of chemical formulas and equations. It was the one he had picked from the shelf, and Emma had said, fine, fine, whatever he likes. Sunny watched her doting like a grandmother, fondling his ears, cupping his head in her hands, and she felt bad for denying her mother all of this love for the last four years. Her reaction to the wig hadn’t even been that bad. Four years ago, when the wig was new, her mother had been irate. Now she just looked kind of sad, and asked Maxon if he liked it, and Maxon didn’t know what to say.

They paid the disgruntled Hannah, packed up the car, and locked the house. The mother, in the backseat next to Bubber, was quickly asleep, propped up on pillows and swathed in the ancestral quilts.

“I think she looks pretty good,” said Sunny. “What do you think?”

“She looks pretty good,” said Maxon.

“And your mother, can you believe it?”

“What?”

“She looks so good! And married to that nice guy, running a business, who would have ever thought it?”

“I hate her now more than I ever did before,” he said.

It was dark now, the headlights swept before them in the road, lighting up battered road signs, carcasses in the ditch, one hand-lettered sign with an arrow on one end that said CLARKSON RONDAYVOO
.
The up-and-down motion reminded Sunny of driving around when they were teens, Maxon always stone sober, allowing her to be a little drunk, a safe amount of drunk, enough to cling to him and laugh, put her feet up on the dashboard and sing along to radio songs.

“Because of her loving Alice so much?” Sunny asked quietly. “Or because of, just everything?”

Maxon said nothing. She looked over at the familiar outline of his profile against a window in twilight, his jaw so tough, his fists wrapped around the steering wheel like they were strangling it, every knuckle tight, every vein popped out. He filled the whole seat, right up to the top. His curls almost touched the ceiling in the van. She put her hand in his hair and stroked his scalp, let her hand trace down the back of his neck. She saw his knuckles relax.

“Don’t be mad,” said Sunny. “She’s proof that people can change. Look what she was, and look what she is now. She’s completely different, Maxon. Don’t you see that? She’s completely, totally different and from what? From finding the right guy, from doing the right things, from putting her feet in the road that leads to normal. She did all the outward things to be the thing she’s trying to be, and now she’s good at it. She’s normal. Anyone would say it, driving up there. No one would ever suspect what she was.”

“She’s the same,” said Maxon. His knuckles poked out again, angry. “No one can change. Stop trying to change him. Why can’t you just love him exactly the way he is?”

“I do love him,” said Sunny, her hand still circling in Maxon’s hair, soothing him, loving him. She thought about how everything that was important to her, deep down inside, was in this car. She was glad they had gone to pick up her mother. Once she was healthy again, she could help with Bubber. She was an expert in teaching little boys how to behave. Had she not been so worried about showing her mother the wig, she would have enlisted her help years ago. “I love him so much that I want something better for him, something better than what we had. Everything about us is so complicated. I just want to save him from that. Let it be simple. Let it be obvious.”

Maxon didn’t know what to say, or he didn’t want to say it. He stayed quiet until she asked him to tell her he loved her, many miles down the road. And he did.

23

Maxon saw the Mare Orientale and knew that they were above the moon’s dark side. The Mare Orientale, one of the biggest of many scars on the moon’s gray face that had been brought about by meteor strikes. Planets are round, like the shape of an eye. And the galaxies unfold in spirals, like water in a funnel. The shapes, perfectly rendered, repeat throughout the universe. You could always know the shape of a planet, or the shape of a moon. Round. A droplet of water, the center of a flower, a ripple around a falling rock, the moon’s protected lava pipes where he’d planned to house his Heras—all perfect. A circle is the hardest shape to draw for a human, but the easiest shape to find naturally occurring. A circle is an easy shape for a robot to draw. Any shape is easy for a robot to draw.

Inside the cargo module, the Hera clicked and buzzed. She was cutting the pieces for the comm unit, meticulous work that she carried out meticulously. Maxon knew that her work would be perfect, but it was taking a long time. Meteor strikes, like thunderstorms, like meiosis, were unpredictable. Meteor strikes did not exist between lines of code, or in a laboratory setting, or in Maxon’s brain, usually. But the one meteor strike he had experienced was a recognition of the value of meteor strikes. He noted and wondered at the sight of the moon, where there was not one spot, not one square mile unmarred by the scar from a meteor. It was the home of random. It was defined by it.

Maxon turned his head to the moon’s horizon and saw a sliver of blue emerging, a sliver of white and blue. The Earth was rising.

“This is something not a lot of people have seen,” he said to Bubber. “You should pay attention to this sight of an Earthrise.”

“Okay,” said Bubber.

They gazed at the Earth, so very small, the swirls and spirals of clouds twisted over the surface of blue and gold. Outer shape such a perfect curve, and yet all over it, a mess of vapor. Maxon looked down at the moon and thought,
The marks of meteors are circles too.
The most random, unpredictable, powerful event in the history of life, and it leaves a mark like a ripple in a pond.

“Dad,” said Bubber. “Are we running out of time?”

“Yes,” said Maxon. “I really don’t think there’s enough time.”

“What will run out first?”

“The air,” said Maxon. “I’ll run out of air.”

“Tell the robot to hurry up,” said Bubber.

“It can’t,” said Maxon. “Anyway, hurrying up will make a bad result.”

“Can you go back and get more air?” asked Bubber.

“I could,” said Maxon, “but I don’t want to leave her.”

The Hera unit clicked and whirred, now welding without sparks.

“Why don’t you just bring her back to the rocket? She doesn’t need a space suit.”

Maxon sniffed. He looked at the Earth, now full, just over the lunar horizon. It was a beautiful sight, so messy and perfect. He thought about the real Bubber, back at home. Maybe sitting in school with a blue pencil in his hand, maybe listening to his iPod and tapping his toe, driving Sunny crazy.

“Son, you’re a fucking genius,” he said. And he fired up his jetpack.

Soon, the four of them were headed back to the rocket together. Maxon in his jetpack, gently shepherding the Hera with the growing comm unit inside her. Bubber drifting off beneath him, hanging on to one shoe. A walk in the park. A trip to the ice-cream store.

“Dad,” said Bubber.

“Yes,” Maxon answered.

“Will I be able to go on the rocket?”

“Probably not. I don’t think I will still be hallucinating on the rocket.”

Maxon looked down at Bubber and realized that already the image was fading, the tiny space suit winking off and on, like a holograph. They were together for just one more minute. The Hera unit and Maxon, and the child Bubber and the nascent comm unit. Like a family.

“Well, I want to come back to space with you sometime,” said Bubber. “I like it. I didn’t get to go on the moon or anything, and I really want to.”

“Oh, you will,” Maxon reassured him. “You will be on the moon. You’re made for it, buddy. You’re made for it.”

Maxon clicked on his radio and immediately heard Phillips in his head, in midsentence.

“—the fuck are you doing?! You have got three and a half minutes of air left in that tank, Dr. Mann, do you hear me? Turn on your fucking radio!”

“It’s on, Phillips,” said Maxon. “I’ll be back in five.”

The image of Bubber was drifting ahead, out of Maxon’s reach.

“Wait up, bud,” he croaked.

“I know, Dad,” said Bubber. “But you have to hurry now. So match your speed to the speed of your companion. You know. It is a rule. Rate sub-robot equals rate sub-human. Otherwise, the robot is always going to win.”

“Wait, Bubber,” said Maxon, seeing black rings around his vision, like a mist descending from all points. “Synchronizing speed can only occur when the robot accelerates by an amount equal to the companion’s current speed minus the robot’s current speed.”

Bubber was out of reach, floating away from him. He blinked his eyes, trying to see clearly, trying to hold on. And he felt the most overwhelming sorrow, that in the end he had not managed it at all. He felt a hot stab of regret: for leaving the family, for going up in the rocket, for being susceptible to meteors and for the needs of his body. If it was possible for him to fail, he should never have come in the first place, should never have left her there alone, wanting him, waiting for the way their bodies seared together like two wounds healing. What arrogant faith had brought him here, prepared to break the future with his own head, incognizant of any possibility of failure? It was only when he was running out of air, his lungs pulling on nothing, his mouth open like some ghastly animal, that he realized it.
I am really human,
he thought.
I regret. This is what it’s like to be human, and die.
In a way, it was a tragedy. But in a way, it was a huge relief to finally know, he was not a robot after all.

He found that he could not see. He found that he was crying. By the time the hiss of air filled the airlock and Phillips clicked Maxon’s helmet open, he had already blacked out.

*   *   *

A
COUPLE OF MONTHS
before the rocket went off, they had such a bad fight. She was anticipating his departure. He knew, from what Emma had taught him, that Sunny would express worry for him in different ways. He watched her express the worry by checking many times with many different types of questions whether he was scientifically prepared or physically prepared for a week in space. Now he watched her express the worry by arguing with him. He was prepared to engage in an argument over something inconsequential.