Lydia Netzer - Shine Shine Shine

A child like Bubber could read like another child could hear, as beautifully and as involuntarily. Everything he read, he remembered. Very simple. Very elegant. It was a strange genetic thing, or it had happened to him when he was a baby. It was curable with pills, or it wasn’t. It was autism, or it was something else that everyone was calling autism. It was nothing ever before seen on Earth, so special, so new. Sunny felt responsible, and sorry, but also secretly she felt dark and proud. Maybe there were no societies for this, and no awareness. Maybe there was no annual fund-raiser. This was a human child with a brain confined in a blue helmet. She would never write another invitation to a silent auction. She would never keep another appointment with a doctor. She wouldn’t be so dumb and hairy as that.

YEARS AGO, WHEN SHE was still without children, Sunny had also been wigless. She hadn’t even considered putting on a wig. It was not the way she was raised, to put wigs on her head. She went through school, through college, living on Earth, without gluing eyelashes onto her face, without sticking on two eyebrows. Her mother said that putting on a wig would be equivalent to wearing a clown suit. In junior high school, when everyone has at least one moment of weakness, she cried and asked for a wig. Her mother asked if she would also like some big red shoes, a squirting flower, and a beeper nose. Would she like a tiny car, a farting pillow, and a yappy dog. She said no. She was a bald high-school valedictorian.

Later, in college, her bald head gave her an idea for an interesting wig that she wanted to make. She began designing wigs for other people. Art wigs, not meant to cover hair loss, or simulate hair. A silver battleship, constructed of foil squares, each a millimeter bigger than its neighbor. A tiger head built with copper wire. A bouquet of fractal flowers. A pi symbol of feathers. Some people called them hats, but to Sunny, they were wigs, and that’s what she called them. She was the bald wigmaker. It was a great thing. She had a show at a college gallery. Her wigs were light and comfortable, but she never wore them. It would be like trying to tickle herself. No one can tickle themselves. It doesn’t work. She went to college for math and art. She married Maxon. Still no wigs. Then one day Maxon had decided they should have a baby.

“The time is right for us to have a baby,” he said.

The two of them sat together on the public beach in Evanston, one soft spring afternoon. A warm breeze ruffled Lake Michigan but did not stir the sand. A perfect day to lie down flat and let your knees relax, let your belly get warm. Sunny wore a mint green bikini. Maxon wore a holey T-shirt and brown cargo shorts, and sat cross-legged next to her. Sunny unfolded herself all the way from one end of the beach towel to the other, her long limbs stretching out and exposing the undersides of their joints. The ties of the bikini made square knots, not bows. Her sunglasses were two big circles, joined at her nose. Above them, the white dome of her bald head rose, shining with sunblock. She had been doing manikin poses, which always made Maxon smile.

“I don’t wanna,” Sunny drawled. “Don’t make me, you mean man.”

“That’s an inappropriate response to my statement. That response corresponds with my asking you to clean out the car,” said Maxon. “In this case, you can’t just not wanna.”

“I don’t wanna do that either. Stop talking about it.”

She reached up and patted his back, rubbing her hand back and forth over the spine where it stuck out in a row of bones.

“It’s time to have a baby,” said Maxon. “I want us to have one. And I think you should listen to me.”

“Imagine me,” said Sunny, tracing an imaginary lump in her belly with both hands, “with a big white hill right here.”

“You have a big white hill right here already,” said Maxon, tapping her on the skull with one poking finger. “Maybe you can gestate the baby in your head.”

Sunny rolled luxuriously onto her belly and exposed her back to the sky. “Can you imagine what kind of freak baby would crawl out of there,” she asked him lazily. “Do you really want to unleash that on the world?”

AT FIRST SUNNY BASED her reluctance on arithmetic. They sat in their apartment in Chicago, rolling around their office in their office chairs. The office was the biggest room in the place, with huge industrial windows all along one side. In it, a dehumidifier hummed and dead plants turned to dust. Maxon brought home plants from time to time, under the impression that house plants were a thing that apartments were supposed to have. Sunny surreptitiously killed them with cleaning products, or encouraged the cat to use them as urinals. Once, she killed a medium-sized orange tree in the den. It took a long time to die, and then it stayed there, dead, for six months. Sunny didn’t like house plants, back then. She thought plants should be outside where the dirt is. Later, she realized that you have to have plants. But this was back then, before that kind of realization started happening to her.

“One plus one equals not three,” said Sunny, rolling back and forth with her heels stuck on the gouged hardwood. “One plus one equals two. You, and me. Two. One plus one equals two.”

“Oh, for goddamn hell, spread your legs, woman,” said Maxon, of course joking. He was using his joking voice. In his hands he had a metal puzzle and he was working it, unworking it, working it, and unworking it.

“I will immediately spread, and I mean wide, if you can show me a system where one plus one equals three.”

“It doesn’t,” said Maxon. “But what about this?”

He whipped out a marker, went over to the whiteboard, and drew two points with a line between them. He was wearing painter’s pants, low-slung on his hips, and a white T-shirt with faded black cuffs, a worn university logo over his wide and concave chest.

“Here is we,” he said. “You and me. And our great relationship.”

“Wonderful,” said Sunny. “Label me.”

Maxon labeled her point with an S.

“No, I’m not S anymore, I’m W. Wife.”

Maxon used his fist to erase, and changed the label. He labeled himself H for husband.

“Now here,” said Maxon, placing another point on the line halfway between W and H, “is where we germinate the baby. Right here.”

“So the baby is going to come between us. Great. Why did you want a baby again?”

“Because babies are what’s supposed to happen now. It’s what humans do next.”

“So you say.”

“Wait,” said Maxon. “Watch. Watch. Here’s our two points, but we have to push them together. Push, push, push, you know, pushing?”

“I’m familiar,” said Sunny.

“And as we come together, this little baby point moves out, gets squished down, perpendicular, to form … a … triangle.”

Maxon finished drawing the new diagram, with W and H and the new point, C, in a triangle shape, and lines connecting W and H to C.

“Now look at this,” said Maxon, connecting W to H again. “Closer than ever.”

“Two times closer,” said Sunny.

“Ready now?”

“No.”

She took his marker out of his hand and pushed him into a chair. Slinky, sleek, in a red dress with an elastic top that brushed the floor. She drew another triangle, this one labeled M, F, and C, then drew an arrow from one triangle to another.