The doctor knew all about Sunny, because he had examined her and everything. But the receptionist did not know. So she was another person to be shocked by bald Sunny that day. It was spreading like a ripple. Lots to talk about. Lots to remember later, to report at the dinner table. Sunny sat like a rip in one of the landscape paintings on the wall, a little hub of disbelief in the center of a perfectly good hallucination. She got up, picked up her bag, and marched through the door without being called back by the nurse. She went straight into the doctor’s office. He looked up from his tape player. He had luxurious curls all over his head, honey brown, shiny, floating around his skull like a sandy cloud. And there in front of him she baldly said, “I can’t have this baby. You have to stop it. It cannot happen.”
It was something she’d known the moment she felt the first contraction, sitting there in the curb beside her wrecked van, with the cool puddle water dripping down the back of her neck. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to have a baby anymore. It was that she couldn’t have a baby.
She had been living so quietly, so wigged, in such a perfect shape, for many years, as if asleep. Dreaming of a husband, a baby, a choice of ceiling fans, an entire cabinet just for different foils and plastic wraps. There, in her sleep, she had been drifting and rotating through a set of arcs and orbits within which she could provide the proper wife and mother behaviors. When the wig flew off, she woke up out of her sleep, she dropped out from her orbit, scattered across the sky on every different vector, every crazy angle. She felt sure that there was a small and human-shaped person inside of her. She knew that there was a hole the size of a quarter through which that person was supposed to get out. This was not mathematically possible. This wasn’t healthy. No one could expect her to do this. It was as if she fell back through the years to the point she’d never been a mother at all. Never had hair at all. Just a scared kid.
“Sunny, why are you not wearing your wig?” the doctor asked.
“It fell off,” said Sunny. “During the car accident, it fell off, into some mud. So I threw it in the Elizabeth River on the way over here.”
“And now you’re feeling like you can’t have the baby?”
“Yes. It’s not natural. It’s not normal.”
“Well,” said the curly-haired doctor, “I hardly think that’s correct. You’re just shaken up. We need to check you out, of course, get those contractions stopped. But you’ll be fine.”
Sunny sat down in a chair. Her bald head shone in the pink light of the un-hospital consultation room with its totally-real wooden desk and green shaded not-fluorescent lights.
“I am not a person who gives birth,” said Sunny. “I’m not equipped for it. I’m not right for it.”
“You’ve done it before, Sunny. Obviously.”
“That was different. Maxon was here. And everything was working then. Now nothing is working. I’ve spent a long time preparing myself, and, you know, all that has to be redone. All that work is lost. It is wiped out. I have to start over and do more work. I need more months to prepare.”
“A baby isn’t like a whiteboard,” said the doctor. “You don’t just start over.”
“I’m afraid for the baby,” said Sunny. And she thought,
At this point another contraction came, and Sunny grabbed the tastefully upholstered arms of the consultation chair. She ground her teeth together. The doctor leaned toward her sympathetically.
“Let’s look at the ultrasound and check the baby’s positioning,” said the doctor. “And then we’ll get you off your feet and onto fluids. Then we’ll see where we’re at.”
Sunny started to cry. Her face became red and wrinkled. She knew it.
Later, she lay on the ultrasound table, wearing a hospital gown. Having no hair makes a woman look indeterminate, with regard to gender. When she was lying on the examination table, wearing her blue striped hospital gown, her bald head exposed to the world, it would have been hard to say whether Sunny was a female or a male. It didn’t help that she was tall and had narrow hips. Even pregnant, she had a flat chest. She could have been a kind of gawky alien man lying there, swollen with an alien child. Underneath her gown she had on gigantic surgical pants. When the doctor came in, and asked if she was ready, he seemed to be taking a good hard look at Sunny. Sunny’s nose was good, her chin delicate, her eyes deep and dark, and her mouth rosy. Without eyebrows and eyelashes, though, it was the face of a statue, up on top of that man or woman body.
The doctor rolled up on a round stool beside the bed, and folded the gown up over Sunny’s chest. Down on her great white belly there was still a hole, a little indentation from where she was attached to her mother in the womb. What happens to the pipe underneath the belly button, once the umbilical cord is cut? Sunny knew that hers was still there. It would be there forever, leading nowhere. Leading out. During pregnancy, the hole had turned inside out. It had done this with Bubber and it did it again now. The truth she had realized, while pregnant with Bubber, was that down deep at the bottom of that awful, shameful hole where her mother had been attached, roped onto her, was a small, small mole. This small, dark mole at the bottom of her belly button became real to her only when pregnancy turned her belly button inside out, and she saw it for the first time. This was something about pregnancy which research could not explain. How the perfect parabola of her pregnancy belly could be augmented by this extra bump, and how that bump could have its own bump. She said to Maxon that if she walked straight into a wall, that mole would make first contact. And Maxon said, “Babe, why walk into a wall, if it’s just going to cause you to question the integrity of your parabola?” And then she said, “Okay, a tangent line then. A tangent line.”
The doctor powered up the ultrasound machine, drew it close to her side, and squeezed some clear lubrication onto her skin. He put the white wand down into the cold jelly and turned to face a grainy little monitor. “Yes,” he said. “Yes.” He moved the wand back and forth, back and forth, and turned it rhythmically. Lying down flat on her back, Sunny’s body felt better. There were no contractions. The grainy shapes on the monitor changed and flowed over each other pleasantly. Only a trained eye could have identified organs being shown. For Sunny, they could be lunar mountains. Fish guts. Dark forests. If Maxon were beside her, would he be squeezing her hand? If Les Weathers were beside her, would he really be Les Weathers, Channel 10 News?
“Don’t you want to see your baby?” said the doctor.
“Well, is it all right?” she said.
“Look,” he said.
If Maxon was looking at that moment into a computer monitor up in space, in the crew cabin of the spaceship that was carrying him to the moon, then maybe he was seeing what she was seeing. He could focus his eyes purposefully on the white noise on the monitor in the spaceship, and see the baby’s features blurring out to meet him. “Hey!” he would call out, his face creasing in a wide, toothy grin. He might shout. He might pump his fist in the air, full of joy, like with a high score, something unrelated to work. But he will not call his astronaut buddies to come and look, show off the screen like a wallet flipping open. No. He will not open her up to his friends and show off what he had put there, what was growing there because of him. No, no, he sits silently, shoulders hunched over, glasses askew, and takes it in all by himself. He would not call anyone over. He has to take a measurement, note a change in the diameter of the skull since the last reading. He puts out a finger to touch the beating heart. Covers it with his finger and uncovers it. Covers it and uncovers it.
She finally turned and examined the screen. Her insides felt foreign, made out of plastic, manufactured elsewhere, implanted by strangers, distant.
“There,” the doctor said, and pointed to a swirl of light. “There is the baby, and there is its heart. It’s beating, you know?”
The organ that was the baby’s heart went black and white in a rhythm.
“Your baby still has lots of amniotic fluid to move around in,” said the doctor. “But the baby is in breech position. Where we’d like to see the head down here, by the birth canal, we find it up here, on top.”
“So?” asked Sunny.
“We need to stop the labor.” The doctor paused. “You didn’t want to know your baby’s gender, when we did your other ultrasound. Do you want to know now?”
“Tell me,” said Sunny.
“Your baby is a little girl.”
A girl. It was as if she couldn’t move. Her veins were cold with love and fear.
IN THE WEEKS BEFORE the launch of the rocket, Maxon and Sunny received requests from media outlets, asking for interviews. To populate the moon with robots and then with humans: this was potentially a story. There was no other NASA wife as perfectly presentable. There was no other NASA couple as lithe and tall. When Maxon
