churches in China. It was a time for persecution and torment. The Christians had to come in under the cover of secular jobs, when they could get them. Or they had to surrender the gospel to the natives, and hope they would continue to dispense it among themselves. Bob Butcher was now overtly a scientist, but he was still secretly a missionary, holding meetings in the bedroom of their new two-room house in Hakha. Communicants huddled around the spindly bed.
The husband and wife lived this lowly way for a dozen years. Emma planted tea in their little garden. Bob whispered sermons and clinked test tubes together, distilling oils. Always the couple would go to sleep peacefully, separately, in their own space. Then in the night, there would often be the urgent waking, the desperate clutching, big hands around her upper arms or grasping her hips, his hot mouth on her, separating her, driving into her. And then all the grateful exclamations. “Thank you. Oh, god, thank you.” Sometimes she could feel she was still in a dream. Sometimes she woke up full when his rigid thrust was already inside her, his body already drenched in sweat.
Bob had had a vasectomy after his first wife died on the delivery table. He knew, at the time, that it was God’s will. Emma had known there would never be babies, had felt it her calling to be his wife, this man whose tragedy had taken away his will to reproduce. When she thought about children, she wished the idea away, thinking of their sex together as so separate from the kids she saw all around. Then she became miraculously pregnant at the age of thirty-seven. No one expected it. The couple celebrated mildly, each privately horrified. The husband announced his accomplishment to his secret congregation. “My wife, Emma, is going to have a baby,” he said to them. They nodded quickly, smiled, and showed their approval by patting each other on the arm.
Would she die in delivery? Would the baby be a sweaty, demonstrative little man? No. Sunny was born, she grew, and she learned to walk in the village. She sat with her beautiful kimonos among the ratty dogs. Nu washed the diapers, burned fruit to the gods on the back porch. The daylight hours under the mountain increased. In the village, their secret mission was safe, because most of the Chin State of Burma was stubbornly Christian. No matter how many Bibles were burned, more Bibles could be got from India, or smuggled in from the USA. Everything was safe and the family would stay on indefinitely, until Sunny was an old woman, and her head wraps got dirty and her mother died.
3
Sunny was a woman without any hair. She was born without hair, and had never grown any. Not eyelashes, not armpit fuzz, not leg hair. No hair on her head anywhere. At times in her life, she had wondered if the world could ever be truly beautiful for her, for a girl this bald. At other times, though, she had felt that her life was like any other. Now she was nearing the age of thirty. Although she was not the only bald woman in the world, there had never been very much research done about what was wrong with her. It was difficult to say. Kind of freaky, how they couldn’t explain it. From childhood and girlhood, and on through the time of getting married and having a child, this strange baldness kept sickening her. Her mother was sick with something more regular. She had cancer. Her life was coming to an end. That was also difficult to say.
It’s dark inside the body. The things that go on there cannot be seen. When anyone has an organ going bad, or some blockage, or a leak, those things happen silently, and without light. No one can witness those things. The wet silence takes over, in there. Are there any noises? Does the liver have a sense of touch? Every baby spends its first months in there, in the dark. Every son waves its arms in front of a blind face, and every daughter opens a blank mouth to make no noise. And inside the baby, another blackness. But no sound. A human grows and fades in the blackness and silence inside its skin. Sunny had come up bald from the cradle, and stayed bald throughout her life. She had been born at some point, and at some point in the future she would die. What happened in between was one long, hairless episode.
While regular people had hair on their heads, she had none. Driving around in cars, walking through stores, she had a secret there that something was wrong. Something was not right. Because of the wig, no one in Virginia knew the secret, except the few close people who had to know it. Her husband. Her doctor. Her mother and child. It wasn’t available to everyone just for the looking, like the woman with the strange growth over half her face, or the man with the ear scar, or the guy with the blown-off hand. It was a different kind of secret, down deep under the wig.
When the wig came off and fell into a puddle, no one was around to help her out. Maxon was up in space, thinking of robots. The children were there, of course, but they didn’t know what to do to help. Bubber could scream, and rage, and tell time without looking at a clock. The baby inside could wave her hands, and make wishes, but no one could put a hand out and keep the wig on her head, when it wanted to come off. The car accident was too unexpected.
The Land Rover was coming at them. First there was Sunny’s closed throat and her braced arms fighting the steering wheel. Then there was the crunching sound, and the jolt. The air bag blew up. The wig flew off. Everything stopped moving. Sunny found her voice immediately, almost before the silence.
“We’re okay, we’re okay, everything’s okay, it’s okay, you’re okay,” said Sunny. “Are you okay?”
“Stop!” said Bubber.
“Bubber. Somebody hit us with their car, but everything is fine. We’re okay.”
Without looking back she reached toward him and put her hand on his knee, pressing down hard so he could really feel it.
“Stop, stop! Stop that
“YOU,” shouted Bubber through his tinted window. “YOU HIT OUR VAN. YOU SHOULDN’T HAVE DONE THAT.”
“Bubber, stop,” said Sunny. She choked and gagged.
“Mommy, are you going to throw away? THROWING AWAY IN YOUR HAND IS WRONG.”
“No,” she said. “You stay in the van. Stay in your seat.”
She took a look around. She forced both hands back to the steering wheel, to stop them from reaching up to feel her scalp. She tried to press down on the gas and move the van out of the street, or maybe all the way home. She fantasized that they would drive past the wig and leave it there. At home, safe, she could crawl through the cat hole, get under the house. She could live underground in the dark crawl space forever. Maybe snap and snarl at strangers, eat stray dogs, visit Maxon at night through one of the air vents. She would go back into her habitat when he went to sleep. She would darken her skin with the clay that made their backyard so inhospitable to ferns. Neighbors would hear stories about the red-faced zombie that walked back and forth to the mailbox sometimes in the dead of night, mailing off postcards. She could evolve into an opossum. She could evolve into a squirrel. Of course, the van would not move, so she turned off the engine.
Sunny popped her door open. There were neighbors coming out of their houses now. Somebody was running toward her. She felt sick, like she was going to really vomit. She undid her seat belt and removed it from around her belly. Her middle felt full of angry fire, full of rushing currents, as if a comet were charging around inside her, as if the baby had really turned into a fire monster. There was a pain wrapping around her back. She stepped out on one shaky leg and then another. She straightened her sunglasses on her nose. Standing in the middle of her neighborhood, she watched her friends and neighbors coming out of their houses like dirty peasants: apologetic, dingy, afraid. She felt the wind on her head. It felt, of course, good to get the wig off. It always did. That part was indisputable.
She looked up and down her street. The trees were losing their leaves. A Dumpster sat in the street, collecting the refuse of someone’s renovations. Gnarled roots of the trees took up all the space between the sidewalk and the curb, infested with sprouting ferns or little trees, rotten acorns. The driveways, once so regular, were now confusingly askew. The houses tipped toward each other, their mottled roofs sliding off like books on the heads of gawky teenagers. She heard a siren. She heard a baby squawk. She tottered away from the van, afraid to fall along some tangent to the Earth, and slip right off it, to her death.
A man was loping toward her down the sidewalk. She knew this man, immediately. He was the network- news neighbor, Les Weathers: tall, burly, and blond. He must have just got home from work. He still wore the blue suit, yellow tie, silk handkerchief. His hair was still pasted back from his bronzed face in a flat plastic wave. His
