In her mind, Sunny did not really accept that her father was dead. She did not learn that lesson of the dangling bodies. She believed in her heart that he had survived, and lived. Maybe he had never been put up there, swinging high from the pagoda. After all, no one had seen his face. Maybe he had stayed in the prison, escaping years later. He had wandered off into the jungle, confused, or more likely sad. To imagine him as a fugitive in this world was more pleasant than the alternative. There wasn’t really a great visual memory of him left, even right away after he died. Her memory at that time did not include details. But she knew of him, his broad outlines, the roaring energy around him. She liked to think of him as free, as a panther.
If her father was out there hunting the woods of Burma, looking for home, then she was not ever really alone on this earth. He might eventually work things out, and be coming for her. He might be ready to reach out to her at any time. In city traffic, in any passing car, he could be there turning his certain shape of face to the glass, seeking her out. Of course, he would also have his reasons for staying in the shadows. He would need to be cautious. After all, what had happened to him once might happen to him again. There could be consequences to human contact.
She was never able to identify his face in a passing vehicle. But this did not stop her from wondering if her face had captivated other people she saw, men of a fatherly age. She thought she might catch someone’s eye, someone who had never seen a face like hers before. The person might say, “Follow that girl, because I have to know where she lives.” Someone solid and distinguished might show up at the doorstep, fall in love with her mother, and become her new father. Maybe he would turn out to be the same old one after all, wearing a clever disguise. There were men, throughout her life, that were fatherlike. A man with gray hair. A professor who told her, The subject is not worth doing, if it’s not fucking full of memorizing right at the beginning. Everything worthy starts out that way.
The tragedy of her father’s absence had never actually been an acutely tragic event for her. As she grew up and came to understand the world, he was a part of it. An already dead part. His absence was the landscape of her family. Increasingly, as the years went on, she didn’t really know what she was missing, but that didn’t stop her from missing it. She fixated on him. She prayed to him. She attempted to research him, found obscure publications of his in scientific journals. The language was so formal, she could barely understand it. But she told herself, This is familiar. This is mine, bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh. She thought, There was a feeling he had, when he wrote this, when he was alive. He communicated it to me, even though everyone else who reads the article only gets a lot of information about this scientific test subject, and his reactions to all these oils. She dreamed her father was still out there, publishing under a pseudonym, more chemical properties of Burmese flora, the exquisite blooms of a jungle orchid coming to grips with his mortar and pestle.
Her belief that her father was still living did not stop her from telling stories about his death. She learned quickly when she started school that having a father who was killed by Communists immediately magnified her fame. Of course in her school she had already gained a certain notoriety from the mere fact of being bald.
In school, she would reference Bob Butcher in passing, and call him “My father who died” or “My father who was killed by Communists” or “My dead father.” There were other children in her middle school whose fathers were gone. There was one other child whose father was dead, of a heart attack, at age forty-five. That poor kid, having stood over his father’s grave, and cried with real tears and snot, was not able to translate this experience into any sort of social status, because he was always coming in with a little dairy farm on his brown shoes, and it didn’t matter to the other kids, whatever thing was festering in him. He could visit his father’s grave, and no one put their arm around him. But there was a lot of curiosity, about Sunny’s family in general, coming from the community. So eventually Sunny was asked, by one of the girls from Foxburg whose families still had money, to tell everyone exactly how her father died, anyway. “What’s the deal with your dad,” said this girl to Sunny. “How did he die anyway?”
Sunny, her social instinct strong even at the age of eleven, was able to deflect. Rather than giving up her mystery in the moment, she was wise enough to say, “Yes, I will tell you, but not today.” She chewed her gum cryptically, rolled her eyes, slammed her locker shut. Then she delivered a brilliant smile, and pushed off down the hall.
“I will tell you,” said Sunny when pressed again by this other local rich girl with a very severe ponytail and curls. “Next week at some point, probably, down by the track. During track practice. Meet me.”
Sunny never did any sports in middle school or high school, but she did watch the track team practice, dutifully, most every day. She had a crush on one of the boys. There were kids coming over, like they always did, waiting for their mothers to pick them up, or skipping out on play practice, or pep band or whatever. But now they would sit there near to Sunny, where she was perched up on the bleachers, watching the distance runners loping around. They looked expectantly at her, but she didn’t have much to say on the matter. Around the middle of the week, someone said, “Well, are you going to tell us pretty soon?” And Sunny said, abruptly, that this would be the day she would tell. She slammed her math notebook shut and put it aside, chewed her pencil absently, then threw it over her shoulder.
“My father died,” she said, “on a plateau. He was high up in Tibet.” The warm breeze blew across the green valley, up from the river. The track was nestled in a little dell, down behind the school. In this land of rolling hills, there was hardly an acre of level ground in the entire county, making swimming pools almost an impossibility. The children around her turned their faces toward her, their skeletons obscured by the shape of their hair. A couple were wearing hats, too. Their butts made the wooden bleachers creak, the chipped green paint getting into the seams of their jeans. “That’s near China,” she added. “Outside.” One of the kids nodded. One of the kids looked at another kid and quietly muttered, “No, it’s not.” The track kids pounded past, another lap of the asphalt counted. Sunny cleared her throat.
“It was winter in Tibet,” she went on, “and the Communists had guns.” Now the kids sat up a bit more and paid attention. Sunny clasped her hands together and turned them inside out, stretching out her elbows. She yawned.
“How many Communists were there?” asked one girl.
“Three,” said Sunny. “There were three Communists, in brown military uniforms. The uniforms of the Chinese Liberation Army of the People’s Democracy. They were supposed to be exterminating all the missionaries, even the ones who had families to support. My father had left us to escape the Communists. He had been hiding in a Buddhist monastery, but when the Communists came to the monastery, they found him there. He was in a dark room, between two clay jars of water. Probably praying or something. They came into the room, and tipped the jars over one by one onto the floor. The clay lids were breaking, water spilling everywhere, all over the place. My father stood up, in the middle of all this breaking pottery and monastery stuff, and said, ‘I’m here.’ And they dragged him out, up the mountain and onto a high flat rock. There were monks, um, dying all around. Getting bayoneted.”
“But what did he do?” asked a boy in red shorts. “Why was he in trouble?”
“For not being a Communist, obviously,” said Sunny kindly, and the other kids looked at this red-shorts kid like he was a complete idiot.
“So they dragged him up there on this high rock, one on each side and one marching behind. That was uncomfortable. And they threw him down on a flat place on the ground. ‘Do you believe in communism?’ they said to him. ‘No,’ said my father. ‘I will never believe in communism!’”
Sunny’s voice echoed across the track. She put up a bony fist and shook it. “They kicked him in the stomach, and began to walk around him in a circle, kicking him. ‘Do you believe in communism?’ they kept saying, but he would always say ‘No!’ and then they would kick him again. Their boots were dry and hard, and they had short legs. But there was no dust around, there’s no dust in Tibet because there is no dirt, only rock. These soldiers, their faces were flat and Chinesey, but really tough and mean. Finally they turned toward him, pointing all their guns right at his head, and they pulled him up so he was kneeling on the rock, and then they shot him. Dead.”
“Holy crap,” said one boy, impressed. A horn honked in the parking lot, as somebody’s mother had arrived. The track team had separated out now, a long trail dripping back from the lead group. At the front of the pack, Sunny watched a long, lean boy with a shaved head run mechanically past. Others followed, breathing hard, marking out another mile.
“In Tibet you can’t bury people,” Sunny went on. “You can’t dig; the rock is too hard. So they chopped him up into pieces with these big steel machetes, and left him there, for the vultures. They didn’t talk while they were doing it, they just kind of chop, chop, chopped. The rock turned all bloody with his blood, making red pools here and there on the rock. And then they went off down the mountain. After the vultures had eaten him, his bones dried, and eventually they blew off that rock, and became just part of the gravel. White bones.”
“How could you even know that,” said the cynic in red shorts.
“Shut up, man!” said the kid next to him, and pushed him off the bleachers.
“Sunny, that’s horrible,” said the girl with the curly ponytail. “You must feel so bad.”
Sunny nodded and watched the runners. She laced her fingers over the scarf behind her neck. Her eyes were wet.
SUNNY TOLD THE STORY again in college. She wrote a poem about it for an elective poetry workshop she was taking. In this version of the story, her father hung from his heels from a bar on a wall in a Burmese prison.
Only his shoulders and head rested on the ground. He hung there until he died, and only her mother was able to approach him, and then only from the other side of iron bars. The cell was dark and moldy. The prisoner wore no clothes. The agony, she wrote in her poem, was only increased by mosquitoes. The filth, she informed her readers, was only relieved by death. For crimes against the government, for subversive activity, for endangering the republic, and for Christianity, her father was hung up to rot.
Her mother walked all the way from Mandalay to Rangoon, heavy in pregnancy, and delivered her baby in the dark, in a thicket behind the ruined palace. She tucked the baby into her own lungi, cleaned herself up, and that very night she went to visit her husband. She was shown to his cell, where he was kept alone at the end of a long low building. In the doorway, she called to him. She pushed the baby in between the bars, to show the father what he had made. A crow sat silently in the window. A snake slipped down the wall. The baby cried and writhed there in the dark, and the father turned his tortured head and cracked his lips into a smile, seeing her. That baby, said Sunny while the class was discussing her work, was me. That baby was me. She left out the eclipse in this version of her story. She thought it would sound too unrealistic.
The poem was published in the college’s literary magazine, the student editors invited Sunny to read it in a little chapel on campus. At the end of her reading of the poem, there was silence in the chapel, and then applause.
WHEN SUNNY AND MAXON moved to Virginia, Sunny threw a housewarming party for herself. She invited everyone on their street, and everyone came. She had enough martini glasses for everyone. The house was perfect, like a spread in Architectural Digest. Pistachio cream rugs, a wide walnut plank floor, brushed-nickel cups for the recessed lights, and a golden ficus, glossy curved leaves like a money tree in the corner. Everything was new, down to the distressed-leather buster chair and ottoman, but it looked a hundred years old, like a house in which life-altering decisions had been made, a house that had been left and returned to, from faraway travels. A house in which treaties had been signed. A genuine house.
They had disposed of their old coffee table, a huge chunk of green glass. It wasn’t child safe at all, but that was the least of its issues. “It doesn’t look right,” she said to Maxon. “And to be frank, baby, neither do you.” Maxon, like the great green coffee table, would not have been featured in Architectural Digest. Sunny didn’t want to sell it, so she rolled it out into the alleyway and left it, like a translucent question mark in the city.
She would never have rolled Maxon out into an alleyway. However, if she had been able to confine Maxon to his study on that night, she would have closed the big heavy door on him, and stuck duct tape around the seams of it, so that not even the slightest bit of air or hint of Maxon would come out.
It’s not like he had even wanted to come. It’s not like he had said, “Can I come?” In fact he had said very clearly, “I do not feel comfortable with anyone coming into this house. It appears you have invited the whole neighborhood.”
“Maxon, the more the merrier,” Sunny had trilled, smiling down into the sink, washing carrots.
“That’s a terrible phrase,” he had said. He grabbed a diet Coke from the fridge.
“But really, it’s socially accurate,” said Sunny, “and in this case the numbers are in your favor.”
“How’s that,” he said, snapping open the can. She gesticulated with a shaved carrot, a twinkle in her eye.
“The more people, the less you have to talk, actually, right? If I invited one person over, you’d have to talk plenty. But with twenty people here, you can disappear into the sofa. Nod, smile, and no one will notice.”
Maxon swept the magnets off the fridge, the recycling calendar, the postcards, and attacked it with his dry-erase marker. He always had one somewhere. She loved to watch him work, loved to see him put it into his own language. In a moment like this, when everything went flying, she knew they were really communicating.
“So, like this?” he said.
“And w is the number of words I’m responsible for?” He paused, waiting, his marker still hovering over his last equation.
“Yeah, I mean it can go up to fifty percent if n equals two. You know, like a dinner date. But if n equals twenty, negligible.”
“Great,” he said. “Well, okay. I see your point. But for the moment I’m going back to my office, where n equals one.”
“Maxon, where n equals one there should be no talking!”
She let him go. But she had to allow him to come out if he wanted to come. They knew who he was. Maybe they would put his behavior in context. As the hour arrived, she put the finishing touches on her own wig, asked the maid to pay special attention to the baseboards, and hoped after all that Maxon would not emerge. Maybe if the house looked magnificent enough, they would not notice his absence.
The favorite final touch, she thought, was a glass cabinet that held their curios: a Burmese nat, a basket of pinecones from the woods by her mother’s house, and on the top shelf a ten-thousand-dollar Mont Blanc pen. The pen had never been used, so it sat there in a spotlight, completely full of ink. She had found it in a catalog full of other such things, pens so expensive they must be kept in cabinets, wallets made of lambskin, all the things that real people use, responsible parents, not weirdos who wandered in from another planet or continent and decided to have kids. Sunny looked on it with love, as if it were her real husband, this pen, so perfectly made and elegantly wrought. Hello, she would say to her guests. I’m Sunny Mann, and this is my husband, Maxon. She would point to the pen. All of the guests would incline their heads toward the pen and nod and smile. The pen would glisten perfectly. It would not say anything strange or crack its thumbs loudly.
Sunny was pregnant, just getting used to the feeling of a wig on her head, and just getting used to the feeling of another person moving around inside her, nourished from her bloodstream, holding its breath, waiting to emerge. She was really trying to make everything all right for the baby to come out. She was really trying to correct the wrongs that had been established in the universe, all of the missing fathers and the baldness and the condition people kindly called “eccentricity” now that Maxon was a millionaire.
The first guests to arrive were Rache and her husband, Bill, and then Jenny and her husband, Roland. Others arrived. The women allowed Sunny to take their cardigan wraps, and took their saran-wrapped plates into the kitchen. There were little dipped cookie platters and bowls of starfruit stabbed with colored toothpicks. The men nodded and smiled and looked around, then began talking to each other, settling into matching leather armchairs. Conversation went appropriately. Sunny found herself saying the things she should say, things of which the neighbors would approve. She realized she was saying them with a confident energy she had previously felt only in situations where she was not wearing a wig. It made her feel good, having this dinner party. It made her feel like she belonged in the wig, belonged to the world of people who have lived their whole lives under hair.
It’s not a wig, it’s a hat. It’s not a hat, it’s a head of hair. It’s not a head of hair, it’s a uniform, she thought. Meanwhile her mouth was saying something about the yard guy they all used. Her mouth was agreeing. She should use him, too? Oh, she would call him. Inside she knew she would hire him, find fault with him, fire him. She would find a new yard guy, someone they all would adore. They wouldn’t want to be seen with any other guy doing their lawn. In a month her guy would be edging corners for the mayor. Sunny filled her lungs with air. Her feet hardly touching the kitchen tile. Her hand gracefully landing on the counter, imitating Rache’s gesture as she swept away an invisible piece of dust from the glistening edge of the sink.
Then the door to the office swung open. Maxon came out. She noticed for the first time that day that he was wearing a Joy Division T-shirt and bright blue sweatpants. No, she shook her head at him. You can’t come out here wearing that. You go back in the office. But he did not look at her. He had a large whiteboard under his arm and a red marker in his hand. The room paused and all the neighbors looked at him, and Sunny looked at him, and she was afraid. On the whiteboard was a labyrinth. And she couldn’t believe he’d brought his labyrinth out to the party.
Sunny knew this form of labyrinth was a medieval meditation aid, one way in, one way out. A labyrinth is not like a maze with dead ends. It is just switchback after switchback leading you to the inevitable center. She knew this because she and Maxon were talking about it all the time, at this point in their lives. They kept informing each other all about it. They kept drawing them, on napkins, on the front of the dishwasher, on Sunny’s scalp.
Actually the whole labyrinth thing had originally been her idea, as she had done a wig in this style while in college, the lines and corners of a skewed oval labyrinth stretching over the bones and planes of her skull. In the center of the labyrinth there was a little bug with its head drawn stuck into her scalp. But Maxon hadn’t been able to let it go, kept photographs of her labyrinth, modified it, cross-checked it with the famous labyrinth he’d seen at Chartres, becoming obsessed with the idea of the decision-making process as a single line, not a series of branches, not a flow chart at all, but a single strand folding back on itself. He was working on structuring his artificial-intelligence logic around this idea—that the robot would not face a series of choices that fork off, but that the robot was experiencing a single train of thought, along which decisions were made. As soon as those decisions were made, the unused choice no longer existed, had not really existed in the first place. “If you look at it this way,” Maxon had said, “it all becomes very simple. You need about half the code you think you need. People just can’t get away from the old either/or.”
“People in general? Or coders,” Sunny had wanted to know.
“Coders are people,” said Maxon.
Now Maxon went to the refrigerator and opened it. He stood with the whiteboard in one hand, the scribbled-over labyrinth pitched toward his face, and pulled out a bag of snap peas. Sunny realized he had forgotten about the dinner party. He ripped the peas open with his teeth, set the bag on the counter, and dug into it, still gazing at the whiteboard, the marker now behind his right ear. One of the men cleared his throat, and said, “Hey, man.”
Maxon’s startle was real. He leaped back, dropped the whiteboard on the floor with a loud clatter, and stared wild-eyed at the group in the living room. His eyes landed on Sunny. She was shaking her head, slowly shaking her head. She thought that maybe she encouraged him too much. Because here he was opening his mouth, ready to carry his conversational weight.
“Oh, HEY!” said Maxon, way too loud. “HEY, YOU GUYS.”
He picked up the whiteboard, choked on a pea. He turned his head and Sunny saw there was a Bluetooth headpiece in his ear.
“Maxon, turn off your ear,” said Sunny, motioning to him to take out his earpiece. He jerked it out as if it were a scorpion biting him, and dropped it on the counter. As conversation resumed in the room, Maxon drifted over to Sunny, his hand reaching out for her, to go around her waist. She saw the hand coming toward her, smeared with the dust from using his hand to erase the red marker, and she knew he had probably drawn that labyrinth fifty or a hundred times since he went in there after lunch. The red marker dust would get all over the cute jacket she was wearing, arms pushed up to the elbow artfully, zipper swinging youthfully around her pregnant belly. She took his elbow and clutched it in both hands, pulled him close. She patted his back.
“It’s good, it’s going great,” he said to her under his breath. “Going really great.” He glared at the labyrinth, one dusty red finger going back to it, finding a path in it.
“That’s good, baby,” she said quietly. “Why don’t you get back in there? You can take a plate.”
But Maxon’s gaze had found the curio cabinet, and he was staring at the Mont Blanc pen in there.
“What’s that?” he said.
“Oh, that’s the cabinet, Maxon,” said Sunny. She made a desultory gesture and rolled her eyes toward their new neighbors, as if to say, Well yes, he is odd. But he’s so smart, what can you do?
“No,” said Maxon, his hand now on the clasp of the cabinet, “I mean that pen. What’s it doing in there?”
“Oh, the pen,” said Sunny. She could feel a little bit of sweat between her head and the wig, and the wig tottered over her. She felt top-heavy, weak, like her baby had become a balloon, her wig made of cement, and she might fall over a balustrade, fall into the abyss. The room was quiet. Everyone was wondering.
“What’s a pen doing in the curio cabinet?” said Maxon. “That’s just weird.”
“No, it’s—” Sunny began. “The catalog—”
“It is kind of weird,” Roland put in helpfully, rising to look into the cabinet, “unless—is it your grandfather’s pen, or something?”
The fact that a pen should not be kept in a cabinet, even though it was pictured that way in the catalog, was immediately obvious to Sunny, although it had not been at all obvious before. Maxon looked at her, and the neighbors looked at her, their blond hair streaming from the pores and plugs of their heads.
“These pinecones are from the woods where I grew up,” said Sunny brightly. “And this nat,” she went on, pointing down to the little cross-legged sculpture with the pointy hat. “This nat is from Burma. I was born there. This is a forest guardian spirit—”
“Burma?” asked Rache.
“Yes, Burma. Now it’s Myanmar. But I was born there. And my father died there.”
“I’m sorry,” Rache went on, putting a hand on Sunny’s cute jacket. Her hand, like everyone else’s hand, was finely dusted with light pretty hairs. Sunny’s hand was not. But no one could tell that. They just wanted to know how her father died.
“He was a missionary,” said Sunny. “He was working there, building the Christian church in Burma. But it was illegal, under the Communists. To have a church. So he got arrested. Unfortunately.”
She was rushing the story, screwing it up. But Maxon was taking the pen out of the cabinet, turning it over in his hand, trying to get it writing on his wrist. He wasn’t listening. Maybe he thought he had heard it all before. She felt so exposed by him, as if her underwear were sticking out the top of her pants, as if the roof of the house had blown off, as if she had said a bad word in church.
“And put in jail,” she said. “Jail.”
“Wow, prison overseas,” said Rache. “That’s pretty scary. Did he die in the jail?”
“Well,” said Sunny, “he did escape.”
“Really?” said Bill in his stentorian tone. “How did he manage that?”
“It wasn’t very secure, this prison,” said Sunny. At least they weren’t talking about the pen anymore. Who spends that much money on something called a writing instrument? “He was being held in Rangoon. An old British fort, really run-down. He actually got out by wedging his sleeve between the side of the door and the wall, when the door was slammed shut. Then he worked it open after the guard was gone, because the lock was jammed. Somehow he got free of the building, he, uh, you know, crept down the darkened hallway and stuff. But once he was out, he wasn’t really safe, of course. He had to get to the jungle. It was dark. Nighttime. He crawled on his face until he could feel that thick, full darkness of the Burmese lowland forest. And he knew he was safe.”
Now her audience was really with her. All of their owl eyes were turned toward Sunny.
“He got up and ran through the forest, kind of drunk with freedom. Like he didn’t even care what he was doing or where he was going. And he didn’t realize, he didn’t really know, there was a ravine there. It was so dark, he just fell right into it and right to the bottom of this ravine. And broke his leg. His leg was broken in such a way that it was clear his leg was not going to work well enough to climb himself out of that ravine. He thought he would wait until morning and then listen, maybe there was a teak camp nearby. Maybe there was some fisherman on his way to the river.”
Maxon seemed likely to wander back into the office. She raised her voice and he stopped.
“Maybe a child running from one place to another, that he could call to for help. He knew he could not get out of that crack in the rocks on his own. But he was afraid if he called, that it would attract the soldiers. He thought that if he was quiet, they might not realize he was gone, they might not be looking for him. But then he wondered if he would survive the night in the ravine, with the animals, the insects … there are a lot of threats in the jungle of Burma, and if you’re not prepared, you can be in really bad trouble.”
“But what about his leg?” said Jenny querulously, and ate a bite of an almond pretzel.
“His leg was in bad shape, sort of zigzagged underneath him,” she said. Maxon leaned against the counter, his face now showing full attentiveness, one line of wrinkle between his eyebrows, indicating that the person he was listening to was saying something of interest. “He could barely keep quiet about it. He tried to stay calm, tried to focus on something besides his leg, but his consciousness was slipping away. I think he must have been going into shock. I think he passed out.”
Jenny nodded, put the rest of the pretzel distractedly back on the plate.
“As it turned out, they did come, the soldiers, that night. They came with flashlights, and through his closed eyes he could see the beam sweeping back and forth, up above. In his pain, and maybe a little bit of shock, he felt himself coming to his senses, and when he saw the light he called to it. It was a reflex, like swearing when you stab yourself in the hand with your own fountain pen. It was enough to alert those soldiers to his presence, and they swept the light down into the cleft of that rock, and there he was.”
“Shit,” said Bill under his breath.
“He called out to them, even when he saw that they were soldiers, and realized what he had done. He thought they would take him back to jail, maybe execute him, at least get him out of that ravine, and shift his weight off his broken leg. He felt his leg was being torn off at the hip. But they only talked to each other. It was Chinese and my father didn’t understand. They turned the flashlight back and forth over him. They saw him there, with his leg bent in the shape, like a sigma, and covered in pine needles, from where he had tried to dig himself out. Then they went away. Without saying anything to him, or giving him any sort of notice, they just sort of went away and left him there. They didn’t do anything to save him. They just decided to let him die.”
Maxon put his head in his hands, both elbows on the kitchen island, eyes hidden. Then he looked up, eyes clear.
“Wow,” said Maxon.
“And he died there, in that ravine, all by himself. Crushed on top of his broken leg.”
“I’m going back to my office,” said Maxon. “Have a great evening, everyone. Let’s just put this pen back in here for safety. It’s the one Uncle Chuck used to sign the Magna Carta, you know.”
IT WAS LATE AT night, three years later. Maxon had gone to bed. Sunny was in her dressing closet with her wigs. She was writing in Bubber’s treatment journal. On a long, low shelf across one full wall there were silent black-glass heads. She had bought these heads at Pier 1 in the nineties, when she was in college, when she had first started to make the wigs. They were some sort of decorative cheap art thing, but she loved them. They were inscrutable and serene. They were opaque and hairless. She looked at them and thought, All my life I have been so happy and so normal and so whatever. Like yeah, it’s all so merry and gay. Nothing is a problem. No baldness. No father dead from communism. Nothing strange about that. I haven’t ever felt the sting of it, not really. But this, here, this black head, this is what it means to be bald. This is what it means to be dead. This is what it means to be me. She would meditate on them in this way, while she was in those turbulent years before she got married to Maxon. Then they just became funny. Then they became ghosts.
She had ten of them, and they had traveled with her to college, and to Chicago, and then to Virginia, although it was a major pain in the ass to pack and ship them. At one point, she had referred to them as the muses. They were now just wig stands. Whatever they used to say to her, they were now silent. In fact, she had even turned their faces around to face the wall. The dressing closet was a room she had not known she needed until she had it. Once she had it, it became her telephone booth, her Batcave, her puff of smoke. She went in bald, came out perfect. While one wall was closets, divided neatly into sections for shoes, dresses, folded shirts, the other wall, lit by recessed spotlights in the ceiling, was the wig bank. She could leave it and close the door, invite her girlfriends in to look at the new ceiling fan over the bed, and they would never know that on the other side of that quiet barrier, there were ten black heads in ten wigs, completely silent.
It was here she came to write in Bubber’s treatment journal at the end of the day. It was here she kept all of her secret things, in little drawers under the wig countertop, all of her intimate possessions. She sat on a faded chaise lounge and tried to contemplate writing down how Bubber had spent his day. His doctor wanted a record. They had to know how the different medicines were affecting him. She had to keep track.
Today, she wrote, Bubber spent the day writing. He ate nothing but oyster crackers. He did not make eye contact. He only willingly hugged the dog. What does it mean for a two-year-old to spend the day writing? He would stand at the whiteboard easel in his footie pajamas, and fill it with letters. Aa, Bb, Cc, Dd, Ee, Ff, Gg, and so on. When it was full, he would erase it and start again. He would stand for hours and do this. If she gave him a ream of paper, he would fill it. First page: Aa AT. Second page: Bb BAT. Third page: Cc CAT. Endlessly. Wearing out markers. Filling the room. Exhausting himself. He woke up at one o’clock in the morning and was awake until four, reading books out loud with no one in the room. Creating the sounds of the letters with his mouth, reciting, reading, whatever you want to call it, it was Ten Apples Up on Top until the book fell apart. He was so little, he could barely pronounce the words, but he could read it fifty times without getting tired. They had one copy for upstairs, another copy for downstairs. That’s how it was. This is what happened after he mastered stacking blocks.
Sunny didn’t know how to write all that down. She couldn’t bring the doctors far enough into Bubber’s life, to see what was really going on. They would have to witness it and they couldn’t. She couldn’t show them, or even tell them about it. It was too distressing. She put the book away and got up. She went to the drawer under the wig counter and got out a piece of card stock, a mailer she’d received. The mailer read, “Lose Your Hair? Don’t Go There! Dr. Chandrasekhar’s Orchid Formula Cures Baldness.” On the front was a beautiful portrait of a woman with long flowing hair wearing a headdress of orchids. On the back was the address and all the information. She took the mailer out into the dark bedroom and slammed the door to her dressing room.
“Wake up, Maxon,” she said.
“Hey,” said Maxon. His voice sounded deep. Then after a pause he said, “What’s up?”
He didn’t roll over or move, stayed on his side facing away from her, deep in the comforter, with one hand clutching the finial on the top of the bedpost, the way he usually slept. As if he were hanging on, afraid of drowning in the mattress. She flicked on the overhead light.
“I’m going to try this baldness cure,” she said.
“Okay,” he said. “But that’s pretty dumb. But you know that.”
He rolled over; now both of his arms were on top of the comforter, pressing it down around his body.
“Yeah, no,” said Sunny. “I’m going to do this.”
“You know what, from now on, you’re going on a binary system. One for ‘good,’ zero for ‘bad.’”
He held up a finger to demonstrate “good,” then made a zero with his hand to demonstrate “bad.”
“No fair, you’ve always had me on that system.”
“Yes, but now you have visual cues.”
“Maxon, shut up, wake up, I’m going to buy this baldness cure.”
Maxon held up a zero, without opening his eyes.
“Fuck you, you don’t know what it’s like, why shouldn’t I try and fix it?”
“It’s not going to work. It’s a scam.”
“You haven’t even looked at it.”
Maxon sat up in bed, blinking uncomfortably, and held out his hand. He studied the mailer.
“Chandrasekhar, I know that name.”
“Oh, I probably mentioned it to you before. I wanted to try this years ago. Mother said no.”
“No, I’ve met this guy. Voodoohoodoo biochemist or something.”
“Where have you met him?” Sunny sat down on the bed next to Maxon.
“Ahhh, I met him at your mother’s house, while you were away at college.”
“WHAT?” Sunny shrieked. “At Mother’s house, you met this Chandrasekhar person? Maxon, that’s nuts. What are you talking about?”
“He was there, they were, you know, I think they might have been kissing or making out or something.”
Maxon handed the mailer back to her and lay back down in the bed, pulled the covers out, and turned over on his side.
“Oh no,” said Sunny. “Get up. Get up. Get up. No, no, you’re telling me there was a man at Mother’s house, and they were making out? And it was this baldness guy? You weren’t going to tell me? Do I just have to ask you questions about every hypothetically possible situation, to make sure you’re not forgetting to tell me something so major? Maxon, what are you even talking about? Tell it like a story, immediately.”
He sighed but did not turn around. “I went to the house. I went in without knocking. There was a man in the kitchen. He had his arm around your mother. She had redness in her face. I asked about the hot-water heater, she was having trouble with it. She said it was fine. He said he was Dr. Chandrasekhar, a biochemist from Burma, that he knew your father. They were friends. Colleagues. She asked me to leave. So I left.”
“Maxon, they were kissing?”
“Probably.”
“My mother, kissing some witch doctor from Burma, I hardly think so,” Sunny said to herself. “Unless.”
She didn’t say to Maxon that she thought she knew the reason. She thought, she had always thought, she had always known, that Dr. Chandrasekhar was her father in hiding. Now she was almost certain of it. The baldness cure, now the visit to her mother in Pennsylvania, it was all too strange. What chance was there that this man was really a colleague? Why get interested in the baldness then, when it had been her father’s obsession? She put the mailer away in the drawer and turned out the light. She would not ask her mother about this, pursue this lead. She would not go straight to Dr. Chandrasekhar and confront him. Shake his hand. Stare into his face and say, “Daddy? Daddy? Is it really you? Why did you leave us?” She would just keep thinking about it forever, processing it in her own head. Her father visiting her mother. The cure for baldness sent out on a mailer, like a love letter straight to her. She would keep it safe, not disturb it. It would be added to the narrative, one of the offshoots. Her diagram was not a labyrinth. There were many alternatives and they were all real. She felt energized by this new discovery, as if an unknown branch had sprung out from the tree, ripped into the sky, burst out with leaves, and stood there shaking and new.
“Maybe I won’t get that orchid stuff after all,” she said to Maxon as she flicked off the light. She came over to the bed, and said, “You want to take a crack at curing what ails me, baby?” As she got between the covers, in the shadow from the streetlight outside, she could see he was holding up one finger for “good.”