Shine Shine Shine

“I’m fine. Just, you know, the wig went flying off my head yesterday. We had a car accident, Bubber and I. The wig—well, I decided to leave it off.”

Mr. Dave nodded in an understanding way. Mr. Dave’s voice had never been raised. He had never shouted at her and pumped his fist in her face and made spit flecks come out the sides of his mouth. They’d had their disagreements, but he had always stayed quiet. She wondered if Mr. Dave was capable of getting riled. She had always appreciated his calm demeanor.

“Does Bubber realize you’ve made this decision?” he asked.

“Well, yes, he knows,” said Sunny. “He was there when it flew off.”

“Did he seem upset by it?” asked Mr. Dave. “Bubber was very angry today. We were wondering if it had something to do with your husband.”

“My husband is in space. He went up in a rocket yesterday.”

“I know,” said Mr. Dave.

“Well, we didn’t think it would be a good idea for Bubber and I to go down to see the launch. We thought it was too much.”

“Okay,” said Mr. Dave. “I see.”

Sunny tried to sit down in one of the chairs in the lobby, but Mr. Dave asked her to follow him deeper into the building, into his office, where there were better chairs.

The psychiatrist was there already. She had long gray hair, parted down the middle, making a curtain around her oversized glasses, her dark pink mouth, her lined cheeks. She closed a file she was holding open in her lap, and stood up. She smiled a big yellow smile and stuck out a hand.

“You know Miss Mary,” said Mr. Dave.

“I’m so happy to see you again, Mrs. Mann,” said the psychiatrist. “I’ve had such an interesting time talking to your son, Robert.”

“We call him ‘Bubber.’ Where is Bubber?”

“He is still back with Miss Tanya,” said Mr. Dave. “They’re having some extra art time so we can have our meeting.”

“I wasn’t aware he was being tested again,” said Sunny. “I didn’t realize you could do that without telling me.”

“It’s okay,” said Mr. Dave. “We just wanted to get a good look at what was going on with Bubber before we decided what was best for him.”

“And what is going on with Bubber?”

“Won’t you sit down?” Miss Mary invited her to join them at the desk. She held out a sheet of paper to Sunny. “Mrs. Mann, I asked Bubber to draw me a picture of his favorite pet today, and this is what he gave me.”

The drawing was definitely Rocks the dog, done in pen and ink. He was black-and-white, with a squashed-up nose, pointing bat ears, no tail. The drawing was childish, with simple lines and exaggerations. However, it was as if the dog’s skin were invisible, and all the organs inside the dog had also been drawn in, too, also in childish lines and exaggerations, but with no system left unrepresented, including the lymphatic. Organs were overlapped and blood vessels ran from point to point. Each one was clearly labeled, all names spelled rigorously according to phonetic logic. The dog had produced a dialogue bubble, and inside were the words “Bow wow.”

Miss Mary handed Sunny another sheet. “Here’s one he gave me, when I asked him to draw Mommy.”

Sunny took the next sheet. There was a tiny stick person in one corner with an obligatory scoop of hair on each side of its head, a triangle to represent a skirt, and a label: Mommy. The entire rest of the page was filled up with something that looked like a map overlaid with a topographical drawing. There were buildings, farms, and many, many tiny trucks along the roads that radiated from the buildings to the farms. All was done in a quick, infantile scrawl, but the details were all there. Every wheel of the trucks, and the cargo was varied. A pig, a stack of sacks, a strange machine. Labels. Parenthetical explanations. Signs.

“He sees me with hair,” said Sunny. She was awestruck. She thought how her mother would feel about this. Would a grandmother feel disappointment, resignation? Would she say that it was as if all her efforts with Sunny had been in vain? In the mind of the grandchild, the daughter had a wig on. Had she failed as a mother? She remembered the second terrible thing she had said to Maxon on the day before he went into space: My mother never thought you would make a husband. You and your goddamned robots. She told me not to marry you, and look at us now. We’ll never be right. None of us.

“Well,” said the psychiatrist, taking the papers back from Sunny’s hand, “our school is full of children with special talents, but clearly Bubber is some kind of a savant. A four-year-old just doesn’t draw pictures like that.”

“Ah, savant,” said Sunny. “But surely that’s not a problem. So, you must have something else?”

“Well, here’s the last one,” said Miss Mary, holding up a sheet for them all to look at together. “Here I asked him to draw his friends.”

On the paper was a hexagon. On each of the points was a circle with a capital letter inside. The points were connected around the outside, and also through the center, some of them. The different connecting lines were of different widths. Next to some of them were numbers, or letters. There were rows of letters separated by commas. Some points were not connected to each other. Down at the bottom were different names followed by a list of Xs. Ben XX. Sarah XXXXX. Jacob X. Zoe XXXX. Sam XXX. Like that. It reminded Sunny of a lot of the work that Bubber had done on his own with ciphers. He was always coming up with his own way of writing things down.

“What is this?” said Miss Mary, pointing to the hexagon.

“Well, I don’t know,” said Sunny, “but if I had to guess I’d say he has six friends, and these lines and symbols depict the way they are related to each other. Or, maybe he has five friends and he’s this one here, connected to all five. Yes, this circle has a B on it.”

“But you can see what I mean,” said Miss Mary.

“What do you mean?”

“You have this,” Miss Mary waved her hand at the papers she had produced, “and then you have his auditory response scores, which are like that of a deaf child.”

“He’s not deaf,” said Sunny.

“No, he’s not deaf, but he still can’t hear. He can’t respond. He doesn’t answer. He screams if he can’t have the chair he wants, even if the chairs are all blue. Even if the pencils are all red, he screams if he can’t have the one he wants. Yesterday he threw Miss Kim’s coffee mug on the floor and shattered it. She was afraid! Bubber’s behavior is outside the range of what we are prepared to deal with—and—”

Mr. Dave interrupted her. “Mrs. Mann,” he said, “we all just love Bubber. He is really the most remarkable child.”

“Obviously he does know their names,” Sunny said. “Or at least the letter their names begin with.”

“We have tried to tell you, Mrs. Mann, that Bubber needs a higher level of intervention. Bubber is so special. Your doctors—”

“They’re not all the same color blue, though,” said Sunny. “And the pencils are not all the same length. He perceives differences that other children don’t perceive. That’s all. You want him on more drugs? Is that it? He’s already on Adderall, Dexedrine … The only thing left is…”

“Haldol,” suggested Mr. Dave in the mildest tone, as if he had been offering sailing as a pastime for a sunny afternoon.

“Your husband is an engineer?” asked Miss Mary.

“He’s an astronaut,” said Sunny. Not entirely true.

“Well, technology,” said Mr. Dave.

“So?”

“Just another piece of the puzzle,” said Miss Mary.

Sunny remembered the final terrible thing she had said to Maxon on the day before he went into space: It is all your fault, him being this way. It’s you. You fucked up. You did it! It’s your fucking genes, your brain, it’s like little baby Maxon all over again. Tell me you don’t see it. Tell me you don’t see yourself when you look at him. You did this. You did this to our child, it’s who you are, you’re all over him. Now show me a facial expression that goes along with that information.

“Miss Mary, I want to thank you for your input,” said Mr. Dave. “And now I need a chance to speak to Mrs. Mann.”