Shine Shine Shine

“Sorry, buddy,” said Maxon. “I’m having a little trouble.”

“I can help you,” said Bubber.

What was astonishing to Maxon, taking in this information, and reading this data, was that Bubber sounded so normal. So completely utterly like a normal human being. Not like he was simulating human talking. Not like he was scripting. Just normal, like an average child. An average child in spectral form in a space suit orbiting the moon on a doomed mission to colonize it. With real inflections and tones. Maxon knew how to tell the difference between people like him, who were faking it, and real live humans, who were not.

Working with NASA, he had run into quite a few people he could really relate to. People with brain chemistry so similar to his own. Some of them banded together, some of them clung to the nearest normal person they could find, some of them just stayed alone. None were happy. None had Sunny. Maxon thought for the first time about who Bubber would marry. He hadn’t thought about it, because the earthly Bubber, drugged and amiable, would not have inspired this question. The earthly Bubber would never marry anyone. He would need to be cared for, permanently, by his parents. When they died, he would go into a home.

“I’m sorry, buddy,” said Maxon.

“Sorry for what?” said Bubber.

“I feel sorrow for what you are.”

“What am I?”

“Well, there’s something wrong with you.”

“What?”

“The same thing that’s wrong with me. What’s wrong with you is wrong with me.”

“There’s nothing wrong with you, Dad. You’re great.”

“Maybe not out here, but back at home, there is.”

* * *

IT REMINDED MAXON OF the last effective conversation he’d had with Sunny about Bubber’s medication, before she’d finally told him he was not qualified to have an opinion, being crazy himself.

“What if he’s actually more evolved? What if I’m actually more evolved?” Maxon had shouted. He was standing outside the door to his office, and they were arguing about Haldol. Often when he came out of his office, he only made it a few feet out into the hall before he had to go right back in.

“This will work,” Sunny said. “He will be okay. This will fix it.”

“I don’t want to fix it,” Maxon yelled, his veins popping. He slammed his fist into the wall. “Do you even remember what he was like before we started testing him, and all this medication? Do you even remember that experience, what it was like having that child?”

“You’re violent,” said Sunny dryly. “Maybe you need Haldol too.”

“I don’t need drugs,” Maxon asserted.

“Yeah, because my mother spent her whole life fixing you, and you know what? You know what, smartass?” Now Sunny was getting riled, and she yanked at the yarn ball feeding the knitting she was attempting to do. Maxon came two steps down the hall away from his office, away from his office and toward her living room. She was wearing her chopsticks wig, two wooden sticks stuck through a beautiful twist of blond hair. She was wearing her eyebrows, but one of them had come half off while she was steaming broccoli, so it dangled.

“What?” he said.

“You’re still not fixed!” she shouted, poking her needles savagely. “You’re still not fucking fixed! You’re crazy as a goddamned bedbug! Well, I’m not raising that kid to be a nutcase. He’s not that kid, I’m not that mom, and you better try as hard as damn hell not to be that dad. We’re not Mr. and Mrs. Wacko. With our junior- and senior-model lunatic, and our resident sideshow freak. I’m not doing it.”

Maxon stepped back, deflated. He did not know how to articulate what he saw. He could draw it, but he sensed that would be weird. This was not a time to decorate the dishwasher, but when he saw Mr. and Mrs. Wacko and the junior-model lunatic, they were the new age nuclear family. All in space suits. No one using or understanding facial clues. In space, who cares? Literal, systematic, addicted to protocol. Unemotional, intelligent, math-minded. The future family. Not autism, not insanity, but the next evolution, engineered for space travel, space living, the habitation of a lunar colony.

“Get Mr. and Mrs. Wacko along with a dozen or so of their autistic brood, and plant them on the moon, and they’ll do just fine,” he said. “Evolution, Sunny. Evolution. Did you think it just stopped?”

“Come here,” she said, softening. She motioned for him to come and sit next to her on the sofa. He could now see she was watching something on television, even hear some of the words coming out of the speaker.

“Sorry,” he said. “Sorry for yelling.”

“It’s okay, baby,” Sunny said. “I’m just going to put Haldol in your thermos.”

“No fucking Haldol,” said Maxon. “For him or me, seriously.”

“Okay, no Haldol,” she said, climbing into his lap. “You need a shave.”

* * *

“DAD,” SAID BUBBER IN the space suit.

“Son,” said Maxon.

“You need to find a way into that cargo module,” said Bubber.

“I haven’t found that yet,” said Maxon. Every time he spoke, it sounded like a raspy interruption, like the silence had made its own sound and the talking was bothering it.

“Dad, think,” said Bubber patiently. “How were you planning to get it open before? You must have had some kind of way to get it open.”

“This wasn’t supposed to happen,” said Maxon. “This was not in the script.”

“So, you weren’t supposed to get it open at all?”

“No,” said Maxon. “The command module was going to dock with the cargo and we were going to open the shaft, between them…”

“You could be the command module,” said Bubber. “You could dock.”

“But the air shaft, there won’t be a seal.”

“Who cares?” said Bubber. “I don’t need it, the robots don’t need it, and you don’t need it.”

Maxon thought.

“So, where will it dock?” Bubber asked.

“Follow me,” said Maxon.

Of course, Bubber was right. Bubber’s brain had worked like a brain should work. He could get in through the docking channel, by applying stimulus to the appropriate places, the way they would have opened it if they’d docked. He didn’t need a hatch. Within minutes, he was booting up a Hera, fitting her with the titanium and aluminum she’d need to make them a comm unit. He looked back out the docking channel to see if Bubber was still there. He was, floating in space, giving Maxon a thumbs-up, which was a good way of saying, “I’m okay.”

“Thanks, little guy,” said Maxon. “It seems so obvious now.”

“No problem, Dad,” Bubber said. “Hey, it still took you only thirty-three minutes.”

That was so like Bubber. To time it without a watch.

* * *

MONTHS AGO, THEY WERE on their way to get the mother from Pennsylvania. The neighbors said she was too sick to continue living in her own house. Of course, Sunny did not believe this.

“Mom,” she had said on the phone. “What are you eating? What did you eat today?”

“I drank an Ensure,” said the mother. “I’m fine. Hannah is here. She makes me drink it.”

Hannah was the Amish girl who came in to clean the house, cook the meals, and do whatever else. Sunny didn’t know what all. She was supposed to take the place of Nu.

“You need to eat more than just Ensure, Mom,” said Sunny. “I’m coming up there.”

When they got off Route 80, Sunny sat up straighter. She folded her arms over her chest. She fixed her wig in the rearview mirror and then changed her mind and replaced it with a different one. She made Maxon adjust it. Bubber, in the back of the minivan, was asleep. Maxon was at the wheel. The minute they got off the freeway, she could smell the deep piney smell of the woods, the loamy damp smell that was her childhood, and Maxon’s, and all the time they spent running alongside the creek, climbing trees. The air was more moist here than it was back in Virginia. The ferns were denser, the trees greener. Anyone would say it was a beautiful spot.

“Do you smell that?”