Every year there is a slightly smaller GNP for the decaying oil town with no more oil in it. Gradually the houses fell into disrepair. Gradually everything slowed down. While the farmers in Crowder County sat smug on their silos of grain, the remnant in Yates County roosted in the finery of days past, and the ground watered by wealth, prestige, and privilege brought forth a curiously high percentage of geniuses. Maybe it was a result of the bizarrely grandiose public establishments, gifts of dead oil magnates. What rural public high school has a planetarium? The school in Yates County, where Sunny and Maxon had their education, was different in a number of ways. A commitment to high-tech updates was one, funded by long-dead benefactors. Its high concentration of statistical geniuses was another. The causal relationship between these two anomalies was uncertain.
In any case, this was where Sunny and Maxon grew up among those brought shockingly low, and those random scatterings of monstrous intellects. From the Amish farms, from the trailer parks, from the rotted old estates with broken windows and railings they sprouted up, shooting through the local schools with such powerful force they were shot out, far out into the world, and landed as chiefs of surgery in Chicago, research scientists in LA, sociologists in Denver. Maxon was not the first to rise up from such oily, strange beginnings to win a Nobel Prize. They were a rare breed, fed on the scraps of the oil wealth, nurtured in the overprivileged schools, always with the urgent aim of escape from the decaying place of their birth.
In the moment of impact, where the stars fell on him, Maxon remembered a day in the high-school planetarium, and the way Sunny’s head had looked, in the center of that planetarium. She was sitting so upright in a chair, and looking so bald, like a cartoon of an idea. Aha! A lightbulb, her neck the part you screw in, her skull the glass bulb, her brain, her soul, her generosity the filament. Sitting there in the dark, in the light of the thousand stars, shot up by his lamp, he, the bold projectionist, illuminated the stars. What a way to pick up women.
HE WENT TO HIGH school first. By the time Sunny got there, he was a sophomore. There were kids there from around the county, mostly kids known to Maxon but some not. He went scowling through his first year there without her. He made enemies. He scorned teachers. He put people in their place. He sneered at their unread, unresearched, lazy intellects. The mother had tried to train him in all the ways he needed to behave in school. In elementary school, this was a success. To keep him from running in the hallways, she said, “Maxon, your rate of speed is independent of your lack of obstacles. Just because you can run fast doesn’t mean you should.” Later, he wrote down the math:
Much later, this rule would be coded into a robot. But now, in high school, there were more complexities to social interaction than just walking down the halls, smiling when he was smiled at, frowning when he was frowned at, matching his facial expression to the facial expression of the person he was talking to, as he had been taught. “Maxon,” said the mother, “if the person is crying, that means you cry. If the person is laughing, that means you laugh. There is no danger in emulating your companion. There is only danger in emulating poorly.”
Yet in high school he found there was more to charming teachers than just running the code:
Now there was a physics teacher who hated him for no discernible reason. There was a gym teacher who threw him to the ground and then walked away fuming. There was a group of girls who laughed when there was no joke. But he was first in line to train as a technician in the massively expensive, sublimely extravagant planetarium.
This is the way it was in Yates County. Bald girls. Wild boys formed from math. Geniuses all around, just waiting to be discovered, or waiting to rot in trailers behind their parents’ barns, die penniless, mourned only by the Amish from whom they bought all those eggs.
There was a script that went along with the planetarium job, a spiel for visiting elementary-school students or Scout troops, which he memorized as easily as he memorized everything else. He could deliver it in any inflection. The kind patron, the bored ingenue, the enthusiastic lover of science. Or in a completely flat monotone the other volunteers found incredibly creepy. There were several different programs and there was also a light show for weekend nights, with lasers. Maxon was pretty sure that people were doing drugs before they came to see the laser show. Maxon himself never did any drugs or altered his mind in any way. He drank water, straight from the spring. He ate anything that was available. He had brown, wavy hair in tight proximity to his head, where it grew thickly in between the times when he shaved it. He had round dark eyes, long black lashes, and he was tall, rickety, bony and gaunt.
He loomed. He became pale and then freckled with the seasons. The recent victim of an extreme growth spurt, he frequently tripped. When she came into the planetarium, she was a freshman, he a sophomore. She was unschooled in the ways of planetarium operation, he an expert. He played the host, offered her the best seat in the house. Then someone else came in, a few people, it was a Tuesday evening at 7:00 p.m. He’d had nothing to eat for dinner and only a Diet Coke for lunch. He felt light-headed, flustered in his body. His flat, smooth exterior showed nothing of this. But it was there, down underneath, a fluttering feeling.
When Maxon grew so much so fast at age fourteen, he found he was awkward with Sunny. There was a physical thing happening inside him, during that freshman year, that he had not anticipated. Something grew up in his belly as his bones were stretching. His voice dropped. He became a new person. Sunny was tall, too; brisk and fragile, but she pretended not to notice. But there was a different urgency in the room when they were alone together. They no longer wanted to make puzzles for each other. They no longer had their minds around their pretend. The time they spent apart was spent in different directions, so when they came home, they had moved along separate vectors, and were estranged. Maxon’s brain was unaware of the movement. His eye recognized a Sunny in the Sunny slot, and his ear could hear her voice, the things it was saying to him. However, his body sensed it, down underneath his brain and everything that was going on that was reasonable.
He knew they were different people from the little kids that had rolled rocks to make dams in the creek, every muscle straining, every vein visible. He knew they were different people even from the shy two holding hands down the path to the waterfalls, afraid for each other to fall down the side of the mountain. He did not know entirely what they were changing into but he was aware it had to do with reproduction and genitalia. So he was clear on that.
Since they were old enough to escape the yard they had ridden together, her on a horse and him on a bicycle, all on and off the back roads of the area, on railroad trestles, down gulches and up ravines. There was nowhere Pocket wouldn’t go, and there was nowhere that Maxon wouldn’t ride his bicycle. Had the mother known where they were, she would have spat fear, but when they went out for a ride they didn’t know where they were going, only that they were going, moving, off at a gallop, and free. When the bicycle broke, he pirated himself the parts from another, and he always made it work, or he would run beside her carrying it, still able to say “yes” and “no” when it was appropriate to say those things.
There were days he rode off by himself, when she had something else to do, and on those days he went faster, descended at a death-defying pace, stood up on the pedals to ascend those walls of hills, spinning out on gravel, charging down the backsides of mountains. When he could, he watched cycling on TV. He liked to see the humans with their machines, clipped in to the pedals so the man and the machinery were one thing, the wheels an extension of the man’s own feet. He liked the grind. He wanted to ride over the mountains of the world, over the entire world and all its elevations. As he gained strength in his body, his mind changed, acquired new patterns, and somehow when they came together to ride now, after years of partnership, he was always faster, and she would fall into a pout.
On the day in the planetarium, they hadn’t ridden out together in months. There was something new there, happening, that he couldn’t understand.
Others came in but nobody sat near Sunny. They filed in slowly, took other seats, like they were avoiding her but maybe not with disgust, maybe with reverence. Parents and students together, or a couple of older students on their own. A Boy Scout troop came in, from the Presbyterian church in Knox, and sat all along one row, a man in uniform on each end of them. The others didn’t approach her, but made a ring around her in the dim light, the white dome of the planetarium covering the room. Maxon came over and sat down next to her in the next fold-down seat.
“The program takes thirty-seven minutes,” he said.
“Okay,” she said. She smiled, seemingly normal, but he was watching the outline of her lips in the dark. They had grown; they appeared more full. They had definitely enlarged. He squinted, tilted his head, and went closer for a better look. Her eyes, too, had become more reflective. He pulled back, suspicious. She was foreign in her
