Shine Shine Shine (15 page)

The first guests to arrive were Rache and her husband, Bill, and then Jenny and her husband, Roland. Others arrived. The women allowed Sunny to take their cardigan wraps, and took their saran-wrapped plates into the kitchen. There were little dipped cookie platters and bowls of starfruit stabbed with colored toothpicks. The men nodded and smiled and looked around, then began talking to each other, settling into matching leather armchairs. Conversation went appropriately. Sunny found herself saying the things she should say, things of which the neighbors would approve. She realized she was saying them with a confident energy she had previously felt only in situations where she was not wearing a wig. It made her feel good, having this dinner party. It made her feel like she belonged in the wig, belonged to the world of people who have lived their whole lives under hair.

It’s not a wig, it’s a hat. It’s not a hat, it’s a head of hair. It’s not a head of hair, it’s a uniform,
she thought. Meanwhile her mouth was saying something about the yard guy they all used. Her mouth was agreeing. She should use him, too? Oh, she would call him. Inside she knew she would hire him, find fault with him, fire him. She would find a new yard guy, someone they all would adore. They wouldn’t want to be seen with any other guy doing their lawn. In a month her guy would be edging corners for the mayor. Sunny filled her lungs with air. Her feet hardly touching the kitchen tile. Her hand gracefully landing on the counter, imitating Rache’s gesture as she swept away an invisible piece of dust from the glistening edge of the sink.

Then the door to the office swung open. Maxon came out. She noticed for the first time that day that he was wearing a Joy Division T-shirt and bright blue sweatpants. No, she shook her head at him. You can’t come out here wearing that. You go back in the office. But he did not look at her. He had a large whiteboard under his arm and a red marker in his hand. The room paused and all the neighbors looked at him, and Sunny looked at him, and she was afraid. On the whiteboard was a labyrinth. And she couldn’t believe he’d brought his labyrinth out to the party.

Sunny knew this form of labyrinth was a medieval meditation aid, one way in, one way out. A labyrinth is not like a maze with dead ends. It is just switchback after switchback leading you to the inevitable center. She knew this because she and Maxon were talking about it all the time, at this point in their lives. They kept informing each other all about it. They kept drawing them, on napkins, on the front of the dishwasher, on Sunny’s scalp.

Actually the whole labyrinth thing had originally been her idea, as she had done a wig in this style while in college, the lines and corners of a skewed oval labyrinth stretching over the bones and planes of her skull. In the center of the labyrinth there was a little bug with its head drawn stuck into her scalp. But Maxon hadn’t been able to let it go, kept photographs of her labyrinth, modified it, cross-checked it with the famous labyrinth he’d seen at Chartres, becoming obsessed with the idea of the decision-making process as a single line, not a series of branches, not a flow chart at all, but a single strand folding back on itself. He was working on structuring his artificial-intelligence logic around this idea—that the robot would not face a series of choices that fork off, but that the robot was experiencing a single train of thought, along which decisions were made. As soon as those decisions were made, the unused choice no longer existed, had not really existed in the first place. “If you look at it this way,” Maxon had said, “it all becomes very simple. You need about half the code you think you need. People just can’t get away from the old either/or.”

“People in general? Or coders,” Sunny had wanted to know.

“Coders are people,” said Maxon.

Now Maxon went to the refrigerator and opened it. He stood with the whiteboard in one hand, the scribbled-over labyrinth pitched toward his face, and pulled out a bag of snap peas. Sunny realized he had forgotten about the dinner party. He ripped the peas open with his teeth, set the bag on the counter, and dug into it, still gazing at the whiteboard, the marker now behind his right ear. One of the men cleared his throat, and said, “Hey, man.”

Maxon’s startle was real. He leaped back, dropped the whiteboard on the floor with a loud clatter, and stared wild-eyed at the group in the living room. His eyes landed on Sunny. She was shaking her head, slowly shaking her head. She thought that maybe she encouraged him too much. Because here he was opening his mouth, ready to carry his conversational weight.

“Oh, HEY!” said Maxon, way too loud. “HEY, YOU GUYS.”

He picked up the whiteboard, choked on a pea. He turned his head and Sunny saw there was a Bluetooth headpiece in his ear.

“Maxon, turn off your ear,” said Sunny, motioning to him to take out his earpiece. He jerked it out as if it were a scorpion biting him, and dropped it on the counter. As conversation resumed in the room, Maxon drifted over to Sunny, his hand reaching out for her, to go around her waist. She saw the hand coming toward her, smeared with the dust from using his hand to erase the red marker, and she knew he had probably drawn that labyrinth fifty or a hundred times since he went in there after lunch. The red marker dust would get all over the cute jacket she was wearing, arms pushed up to the elbow artfully, zipper swinging youthfully around her pregnant belly. She took his elbow and clutched it in both hands, pulled him close. She patted his back.

“It’s good, it’s going great,” he said to her under his breath. “Going really great.” He glared at the labyrinth, one dusty red finger going back to it, finding a path in it.

“That’s good, baby,” she said quietly. “Why don’t you get back in there? You can take a plate.”

But Maxon’s gaze had found the curio cabinet, and he was staring at the Mont Blanc pen in there.

“What’s that?” he said.

“Oh, that’s the cabinet, Maxon,” said Sunny. She made a desultory gesture and rolled her eyes toward their new neighbors, as if to say,
Well yes, he is odd. But he’s so smart, what can you do?

“No,” said Maxon, his hand now on the clasp of the cabinet, “I mean that pen. What’s it doing in there?”

“Oh, the pen,” said Sunny. She could feel a little bit of sweat between her head and the wig, and the wig tottered over her. She felt top-heavy, weak, like her baby had become a balloon, her wig made of cement, and she might fall over a balustrade, fall into the abyss. The room was quiet. Everyone was wondering.

“What’s a pen doing in the curio cabinet?” said Maxon. “That’s just weird.”

“No, it’s—” Sunny began. “The catalog—”

“It is kind of weird,” Roland put in helpfully, rising to look into the cabinet, “unless—is it your grandfather’s pen, or something?”

The fact that a pen should not be kept in a cabinet, even though it was pictured that way in the catalog, was immediately obvious to Sunny, although it had not been at all obvious before. Maxon looked at her, and the neighbors looked at her, their blond hair streaming from the pores and plugs of their heads.

“These pinecones are from the woods where I grew up,” said Sunny brightly. “And this nat,” she went on, pointing down to the little cross-legged sculpture with the pointy hat. “This nat is from Burma. I was born there. This is a forest guardian spirit—”

“Burma?” asked Rache.

“Yes, Burma. Now it’s Myanmar. But I was born there. And my father died there.”

“I’m sorry,” Rache went on, putting a hand on Sunny’s cute jacket. Her hand, like everyone else’s hand, was finely dusted with light pretty hairs. Sunny’s hand was not. But no one could tell that. They just wanted to know how her father died.

“He was a missionary,” said Sunny. “He was working there, building the Christian church in Burma. But it was illegal, under the Communists. To have a church. So he got arrested. Unfortunately.”

She was rushing the story, screwing it up. But Maxon was taking the pen out of the cabinet, turning it over in his hand, trying to get it writing on his wrist. He wasn’t listening. Maybe he thought he had heard it all before. She felt so exposed by him, as if her underwear were sticking out the top of her pants, as if the roof of the house had blown off, as if she had said a bad word in church.

“And put in jail,” she said. “Jail.”

“Wow, prison overseas,” said Rache. “That’s pretty scary. Did he die in the jail?”

“Well,” said Sunny, “he did escape.”

“Really?” said Bill in his stentorian tone. “How did he manage that?”

“It wasn’t very secure, this prison,” said Sunny. At least they weren’t talking about the pen anymore. Who spends that much money on something called a writing instrument? “He was being held in Rangoon. An old British fort, really run-down. He actually got out by wedging his sleeve between the side of the door and the wall, when the door was slammed shut. Then he worked it open after the guard was gone, because the lock was jammed. Somehow he got free of the building, he, uh, you know, crept down the darkened hallway and stuff. But once he was out, he wasn’t really safe, of course. He had to get to the jungle. It was dark. Nighttime. He crawled on his face until he could feel that thick, full darkness of the Burmese lowland forest. And he knew he was safe.”

Now her audience was really with her. All of their owl eyes were turned toward Sunny.

“He got up and ran through the forest, kind of drunk with freedom. Like he didn’t even care what he was doing or where he was going. And he didn’t realize, he didn’t really know, there was a ravine there. It was so dark, he just fell right into it and right to the bottom of this ravine. And broke his leg. His leg was broken in such a way that it was clear his leg was not going to work well enough to climb himself out of that ravine. He thought he would wait until morning and then listen, maybe there was a teak camp nearby. Maybe there was some fisherman on his way to the river.”

Maxon seemed likely to wander back into the office. She raised her voice and he stopped.

“Maybe a child running from one place to another, that he could call to for help. He knew he could not get out of that crack in the rocks on his own. But he was afraid if he called, that it would attract the soldiers. He thought that if he was quiet, they might not realize he was gone, they might not be looking for him. But then he wondered if he would survive the night in the ravine, with the animals, the insects … there are a lot of threats in the jungle of Burma, and if you’re not prepared, you can be in really bad trouble.”

“But what about his leg?” said Jenny querulously, and ate a bite of an almond pretzel.

“His leg was in bad shape, sort of zigzagged underneath him,” she said. Maxon leaned against the counter, his face now showing full attentiveness, one line of wrinkle between his eyebrows, indicating that the person he was listening to was saying something of interest. “He could barely keep quiet about it. He tried to stay calm, tried to focus on something besides his leg, but his consciousness was slipping away. I think he must have been going into shock. I think he passed out.”

Jenny nodded, put the rest of the pretzel distractedly back on the plate.

“As it turned out, they did come, the soldiers, that night. They came with flashlights, and through his closed eyes he could see the beam sweeping back and forth, up above. In his pain, and maybe a little bit of shock, he felt himself coming to his senses, and when he saw the light he called to it. It was a reflex, like swearing when you stab yourself in the hand with your own fountain pen. It was enough to alert those soldiers to his presence, and they swept the light down into the cleft of that rock, and there he was.”

“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.”

*   *   *

I
T 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.