specifics: the corner of her eyes, the peak of her brow bone, the fold of her ear. He had not been watching her that closely. He had made assumptions based on her outlines. He felt he had to take everything in more specifically.
She said, “What?”
He said nothing. He unbuttoned his top collar and buttoned it again. There had been episodes, many, many bad episodes, with him chewing on his collars, so he kept them buttoned, right to the top. Wore nothing with a loose neckline. Nothing he could chew, even if he really wanted to. He would chew a pencil or a fingernail but not his clothes, not his clothes. He wasn’t allowed to chew his clothes.
“Are you nervous or something? Haven’t you done this like a million times?” she asked him.
“I’m not nervous,” he said. “I’m just making sure you’re not nervous. I know how astronomy can make people use phrases like ‘the grand scheme of things’ and ‘suddenly I realized.’” She giggled, slid her backpack onto her lap and hugged it, stretched back in the chair and looked up.
“I’m fine,” she said. “Dumbass. Just ready for the show to begin. I’ve been waiting to see it, you know. The famous projectionist.”
The time had come to turn off the lights and start the planetarium show. There was a prerecorded message to be played about staying quiet in the theater and leaving only for emergency reasons. With fifteen people total in the planetarium Maxon doubted there would be an emergency situation—statistically, it was highly improbable. He began his pre-show talk where he described the night sky as they would be seeing it at that time of year right here in Yates County. He had decided he would put in a little secret for her, that when he pointed out the Big Dipper he would say, “Right there over the barn.” When he said it, he watched her, and perceived her head nodding a little bit; from the back of her head he could see her cheeks stretch and widen a little. He knew that meant she had enjoyed the reference. He turned on the automated part of the show, settled into his chair, and watched her. She sat there, like a bulb within a bulb, shadows playing across the white of her skull like leaf patterns on the forest floor. There, above, the inorganic version, and here below, the human dome.
He envisioned himself with a Sharpie and a straightedge, drawing the stars on her skull, poking the firmament into her head. West and East her ears, North the tip of her nose. He would draw them as they would be seen in fall before hunting season, the best time of year. He would feel the Sharpie pulling smoothly along her skull; it would catch on nothing, like a whiteboard, allowing perfect shapes and lines. When he was done, he would turn on the light inside her head, and his work would reflect around the dome of the planetarium, no silly god names, no ridiculous anthropomorphizing of star clusters, just a star map with stars connected according to a logical rule. Which youngest, which most perfectly made, which most likely to expire. Instead of a crab or a lady or a bull, there would be algorithms played across the sky. Constellations were a joke, a nursery rhyme for grannies. Sunny’s planetarium show would contain none of these goofy contrivances. It would be perfect. A mathematical expression.
The soundtrack beeped and plopped along: a comet, a meteor, a galaxy. Then the show was over. After everyone left she still stayed in her seat until he had switched off the projectors and made his way over to her. He sat down in the next seat again.
“I think I might want to draw a star map on your head with a Sharpie,” he said. “Would that be all right?”
She pushed at his shoulder affectionately and when she touched him it was as if her hand had an electric wire in it.
“What, do you want to put pinholes in me and screw a bulb into my brain?” she said.
But she lay back in the chair again; her backpack slid to the floor. He was pleased with how close her idea was to his idea.
“I don’t think I would need pinholes,” said Maxon, his voice catching on itself, his hands suddenly charged; he had to hold them in his lap or they would be yanked up to the ceiling. “I think you would just shine.”
She sat up in her chair. He looked at her and realized she was staring at him full on. Her eyes were wet and seemed bigger. Her chin dropped, her lips moved, but for a few seconds no words came out.
“That’s really cool, Maxon,” she said. “That’s a really cool thing you just said. That’s the kind of thing that people like.”
Her voice was very low, and he said, “Did you like it?”
“Maxon,” said Sunny. “I have been thinking about trying something out.”
“What?” he croaked.
She put her hand out to his jaw and touched it, with her fingertips she drew his face in toward her. He felt the electric-wire feeling again, like she was shocking him off the ends of her fingers. She was only touching him on the face. He did not understand why he would feel a triangle feeling tightening in his groin, a triangle around his pelvis, tightening.
“I have been thinking about kissing you, Maxon. On the face. Would that be okay?”
“Yes,” he said. He felt he might fall off the planetarium seat, because he was not well situated.
“On the mouth, okay?” she said gently.
“Yes,” he repeated.
His face went closer and closer to hers until he breathed in a breath where he could smell her clothes, he could see the rim of Sunny’s eye, so perfectly an arc with no lashes or brow to interrupt it, and then she kissed him, right on the mouth. The warmth of her lips pressed into him; it was not like skin and skin, it was something different, something more penetrating. He felt stirred, like a battery had exploded now in his torso. He felt things switching on inside him, and down the insides of his legs. He reached out for her, took her by both arms, and with his wonky awkward knees and long legs for once cooperating, he dragged her up to stand against him. They stood kissing there, under the dome of the planetarium, her arms around his waist, him clutching her tight, and he never, ever wanted to stop.
At that moment, Maxon knew that Sunny was his reproductive mate, and that he should find a way to solidify their relationship with words and gestures.
“Sunny,” he said, when they finally broke away from each other.
“Yes,” she said. She was smiling. She was radiating kindness and happiness. Her arms still around him were stroking his back, drawing her fingertips down from his shoulders to his belt, soothing him, teasing him, lighting him on fire.
“Do you want to say, ‘Sunny, I love you’?” prompted Sunny.
“Sunny, I love you,” he said hoarsely.
“I think I love you, too, Maxon,” she said. She was thirteen years old and maybe she was unmoved in the ways he was moving, but she pushed her hands against his chest, as if aware of the sudden thing that she had over him. “I’m going to marry you, man!”
MAXON IN THE ROCKET could remember that energy between them, that way he felt electrified by her as all his switches turned on. All life is binary. On and off. There is no middle setting. Alive or dead. In love or not in love. Kissing or not kissing. Speaking or not speaking. One choice leads to another with no forks in the road. There are a thousand tiny yes and no decisions that make up every movement, but they are all just that: yes and no. For Maxon, awkward and waiting in the planetarium booth, it had been off. For Maxon, standing with his arms around Sunny, kissing her for the first time for real, it was then on. It never turned off again in his whole life. It was a switch that was duct-taped to one side with a sign beside it that said DO NOT TOUCH. It was nothing he could ever undo, no matter what she had said to him, or how much she had railed against him later. It was there because it had never left.
17
The mother did not die. Inside her, something had been suspended. She had lost the ability to move on. She had become interrupted. The breaths she took in were rasping and horrible to hear. The nurses shook their heads and pulled the curtain. The life clung to its trappings; the mind clung to the body, raking at it, tearing it up in its desperate clutches. She would not die, she would not leave the world like this, so unfinished.
