Lydia Netzer - Shine Shine Shine

“Shit,” said Bill under his breath.

“He called out to them, even when he saw that they were soldiers, and realized what he had done. He thought they would take him back to jail, maybe execute him, at least get him out of that ravine, and shift his weight off his broken leg. He felt his leg was being torn off at the hip. But they only talked to each other. It was Chinese and my father didn’t understand. They turned the flashlight back and forth over him. They saw him there, with his leg bent in the shape, like a sigma, and covered in pine needles, from where he had tried to dig himself out. Then they went away. Without saying anything to him, or giving him any sort of notice, they just sort of went away and left him there. They didn’t do anything to save him. They just decided to let him die.”

Maxon put his head in his hands, both elbows on the kitchen island, eyes hidden. Then he looked up, eyes clear.

“Wow,” said Maxon.

“And he died there, in that ravine, all by himself. Crushed on top of his broken leg.”

“I’m going back to my office,” said Maxon. “Have a great evening, everyone. Let’s just put this pen back in here for safety. It’s the one Uncle Chuck used to sign the Magna Carta, you know.”

IT WAS LATE AT night, three years later. Maxon had gone to bed. Sunny was in her dressing closet with her wigs. She was writing in Bubber’s treatment journal. On a long, low shelf across one full wall there were silent black-glass heads. She had bought these heads at Pier 1 in the nineties, when she was in college, when she had first started to make the wigs. They were some sort of decorative cheap art thing, but she loved them. They were inscrutable and serene. They were opaque and hairless. She looked at them and thought, All my life I have been so happy and so normal and so whatever. Like yeah, it’s all so merry and gay. Nothing is a problem. No baldness. No father dead from communism. Nothing strange about that. I haven’t ever felt the sting of it, not really. But this, here, this black head, this is what it means to be bald. This is what it means to be dead. This is what it means to be me. She would meditate on them in this way, while she was in those turbulent years before she got married to Maxon. Then they just became funny. Then they became ghosts.

She had ten of them, and they had traveled with her to college, and to Chicago, and then to Virginia, although it was a major pain in the ass to pack and ship them. At one point, she had referred to them as the muses. They were now just wig stands. Whatever they used to say to her, they were now silent. In fact, she had even turned their faces around to face the wall. The dressing closet was a room she had not known she needed until she had it. Once she had it, it became her telephone booth, her Batcave, her puff of smoke. She went in bald, came out perfect. While one wall was closets, divided neatly into sections for shoes, dresses, folded shirts, the other wall, lit by recessed spotlights in the ceiling, was the wig bank. She could leave it and close the door, invite her girlfriends in to look at the new ceiling fan over the bed, and they would never know that on the other side of that quiet barrier, there were ten black heads in ten wigs, completely silent.

It was here she came to write in Bubber’s treatment journal at the end of the day. It was here she kept all of her secret things, in little drawers under the wig countertop, all of her intimate possessions. She sat on a faded chaise lounge and tried to contemplate writing down how Bubber had spent his day. His doctor wanted a record. They had to know how the different medicines were affecting him. She had to keep track.

Today, she wrote, Bubber spent the day writing. He ate nothing but oyster crackers. He did not make eye contact. He only willingly hugged the dog. What does it mean for a two-year-old to spend the day writing? He would stand at the whiteboard easel in his footie pajamas, and fill it with letters. Aa, Bb, Cc, Dd, Ee, Ff, Gg, and so on. When it was full, he would erase it and start again. He would stand for hours and do this. If she gave him a ream of paper, he would fill it. First page: Aa AT. Second page: Bb BAT. Third page: Cc CAT. Endlessly. Wearing out markers. Filling the room. Exhausting himself. He woke up at one o’clock in the morning and was awake until four, reading books out loud with no one in the room. Creating the sounds of the letters with his mouth, reciting, reading, whatever you want to call it, it was Ten Apples Up on Top until the book fell apart. He was so little, he could barely pronounce the words, but he could read it fifty times without getting tired. They had one copy for upstairs, another copy for downstairs. That’s how it was. This is what happened after he mastered stacking blocks.

Sunny didn’t know how to write all that down. She couldn’t bring the doctors far enough into Bubber’s life, to see what was really going on. They would have to witness it and they couldn’t. She couldn’t show them, or even tell them about it. It was too distressing. She put the book away and got up. She went to the drawer under the wig counter and got out a piece of card stock, a mailer she’d received. The mailer read, “Lose Your Hair? Don’t Go There! Dr. Chandrasekhar’s Orchid Formula Cures Baldness.” On the front was a beautiful portrait of a woman with long flowing hair wearing a headdress of orchids. On the back was the address and all the information. She took the mailer out into the dark bedroom and slammed the door to her dressing room.

“Wake up, Maxon,” she said.

“Hey,” said Maxon. His voice sounded deep. Then after a pause he said, “What’s up?”

He didn’t roll over or move, stayed on his side facing away from her, deep in the comforter, with one hand clutching the finial on the top of the bedpost, the way he usually slept. As if he were hanging on, afraid of drowning in the mattress. She flicked on the overhead light.

“I’m going to try this baldness cure,” she said.

“Okay,” he said. “But that’s pretty dumb. But you know that.”

He rolled over; now both of his arms were on top of the comforter, pressing it down around his body.

“Yeah, no,” said Sunny. “I’m going to do this.”

“You know what, from now on, you’re going on a binary system. One for ‘good,’ zero for ‘bad.’”

He held up a finger to demonstrate “good,” then made a zero with his hand to demonstrate “bad.”

“No fair, you’ve always had me on that system.”

“Yes, but now you have visual cues.”

“Maxon, shut up, wake up, I’m going to buy this baldness cure.”

Maxon held up a zero, without opening his eyes.

“Fuck you, you don’t know what it’s like, why shouldn’t I try and fix it?”

“It’s not going to work. It’s a scam.”

“You haven’t even looked at it.”

Maxon sat up in bed, blinking uncomfortably, and held out his hand. He studied the mailer.

“Chandrasekhar, I know that name.”

“Oh, I probably mentioned it to you before. I wanted to try this years ago. Mother said no.”

“No, I’ve met this guy. Voodoohoodoo biochemist or something.”

“Where have you met him?” Sunny sat down on the bed next to Maxon.

“Ahhh, I met him at your mother’s house, while you were away at college.”

“WHAT?” Sunny shrieked. “At Mother’s house, you met this Chandrasekhar person? Maxon, that’s nuts. What are you talking about?”

“He was there, they were, you know, I think they might have been kissing or making out or something.”

Maxon handed the mailer back to her and lay back down in the bed, pulled the covers out, and turned over on his side.