When Maxon’s hand touched the cargo module, he did not feel relief. He felt: Here is the cargo module. Now how do I get into it? When he discovered that he could not get into the cargo module via either of the hatches, he did not feel fear. He felt: What is another way that I can get into it? He kept moving his hands, moving like a spider across the face of it, from handle to handle, edge to edge, seeking a new idea. His white suit wrinkled at his joints, making bent tubes for his body parts to be in. His helmet dome reflected the surface of the module, reproducing it in golden tones. Both of the hatches were locked. He had failed to consider this outcome.
The cargo module itself was about the size of a box on a semi truck. It had been shot into lunar orbit unmanned, using an unprecedented amount of fuel, and had found its orbit without incident. Now here it was up in space, in the blackness hung with stars, where there was no wind to whistle through its latches, no air to breathe, no song to sing.
Maxon let go of the handle, and he did not fall off or spin away, but just hung there, drifting. He had turned off the communication radio in his helmet that kept him in contact with Gompers and Phillips. The noises they were making didn’t even sound like words. It wouldn’t be the first time he suspected someone of talking nonsense, just strings of language in random order, to befuddle him. They knew he was not a good listener. They had been told to follow specific syntactic patterns when speaking to him. He had turned his jetpack off. There was no electricity in him at all.
The silence of space was upon him. Now the difference between life and death, for him, was the motion of a fingertip. He was without tether, without support. If he reached out his index finger and pushed, his Newtonian mass would repel backward, every action having an equal and opposite reaction. In this case, with the action being flicking the side of a box with his index finger, and the reaction being his own death and the failure of the nascent lunar colony, Maxon really had to put a lot of faith in Newton when it came to the equal and opposite part. But that’s how he won the Nobel Prize: picking a rule and sticking with it, right down to the last logical consequence.
He wondered, what would Sunny do, with him lost and floating off into space, orbiting the moon like a speck in a sack, his death unmarked in time, an unspecified number of days hence, when he stopped having electrical impulses in his brain, and continued to rot, but just at a faster pace. She had not specifically said, “I want you to orbit the moon until you die,” and he could not read between lines. He could only create his own conclusion based on evidence, and based on the rules that had been established. Without him, she could marry someone more appropriate, more functional. “My first husband went into space and died,” she might say. “Then I got a better husband, one more suited to the life I want for myself and my children.” Maybe it would be better, for Sunny, if he did not come back. Maybe it would be better, for the Earth, if colonizing the moon was not possible.
He was sure that Sunny would be okay. She had told him on multiple occasions that the thing that was ruining her life was him. What worried Maxon, about this scenario, was all the beautiful robots. And he feared that if he pushed himself backward, and fell into orbit, then in forty-five minutes to an hour he would come up with the solution that could have saved them all. Then he would be forced, for as long as he could still breathe in and out, to deal with the frustration of not being able to put that correct solution into action. And that was a feeling with which he did not want to become acquainted. You can’t kill yourself just by willing yourself dead. Eventually you pass out and start breathing again. He waited for the solution to come to him. But if he waited too long, the space walk would be over, his oxygen would be out, and he would not have returned to the rocket.
“Dad,” said a voice. It was the voice of Bubber.
Maxon turned his head inside his shiny globe, then grabbed a ledge on the side of the module and turned his suited body around. He saw another space suit, smaller, but just the same as his. Just the same shape of golden globe head. Just the same jointed arms and white gloves, but in tiny, perfect form.
“Bubber?” he called. His jaw almost cracked when he moved his mouth to speak, he had been clenching it so tight. His voice sounded loud in his own helmet; he did not hear it echoed over the radio link, because the radio link was turned off.
“Hi, Dad,” said the child-sized space suit.
“How did you get out here?” asked Maxon. “Am I dreaming?”
“No,” said Bubber. “You are awake.”
The hiss of oxygen coming into his helmet, his own breath coming out of his mouth, and Bubber’s voice, clear as letters on a page, coming from … where?
“Am I dead?” asked Maxon.
“No,” said Bubber. “You are alive.”
“Are you dead?” Maxon asked.
“Dad, enough,” said Bubber.
The child-sized space suit approached him, and he could see a reflection of his own body in the helmet. It reached out its hand to him. He grabbed the hand, felt the stiffness in the other suit’s fingers through his own gloves.
“I am used to you being at home,” said Bubber. “You should be home.”
“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?”
“What,” said Maxon.
“That … smell. The smell outside.”
“Smells like oil, tetracycline, carbon monoxide, and decomposing biomatter.”
“No, it doesn’t, ass. It smells good. Virginia doesn’t smell like this.”
“The air in Norfolk, Virginia, has eight percent more sodium chloride in it.”
“Be nostalgic, Maxon. Remember something.”
They were driving on rolling hills, in and out of farmland and woods, down Route 38 and all across Yates County. They passed dilapidated barns on the verge of falling down, gutted roadside stores, little creeks, cows in rows, and pointy little white churches. Sunny felt a familiar and unwelcome warmth and connection to the place. She felt guilty she had not been home more often. She had left her mother alone. All because she did not want to face her in a wig. That was wrong.
“Okay,” said Maxon. “I remember when the guy who lived right there turned out to be a pervert.”
“Bad,” said Sunny. “Nostalgia is supposed to be warm. It’s supposed to create a warm feeling.”
“Okay,” said Maxon, “I remember that in August of 1991, it was so hot we couldn’t go upstairs for a week.”
“Not literal warmth!” said Sunny, smacking him in the arm. “Please tell me you don’t need this explained.”
“I don’t remember anything,” said Maxon. “I’ve erased those years.”
“Don’t you love me, Maxon?” said Sunny, falling into a familiar trope. It was this way she signaled to him that she was done talking. It was one of many scripts she had written for them that they played out on a regular basis.
“I do,” he said.
“How much?”
“Tons,” he said.
“How many tons?”
“A Brazilian tons.”
At the corner of Route 38 and a road called Bear Run, she suddenly clutched his arm.
“Maxon. I have an idea. Let’s go see your mother instead.”
ONE MILE OFF THE main road, over a hill and down through the woods and over a one-lane bridge that crossed a mountain stream, they pulled up to Maxon’s old house. The original house was barely visible, piled all around with firewood in measured, regular stacks. The old barn, once stuffed so full of oily implements, piles of forgotten roofing tiles, tins of unguents, copper pipes, and other detritus, was now wide open, stacked with clean, orderly lumber. Out in the pasture that had once been dotted with foraged cars and mangy sheep was what appeared to be a fully functional mill, a rain of sawdust issuing from an opening on one side, a forklift in operation bringing in new wood. Maxon’s makeshift bicycle shop was gone. In its place, a lath cutter.
“I don’t want to see my mother,” said Maxon.
“What the hell has she done with the place?” marveled Sunny, stepping out of the car. “We were just here, five years ago, Maxon. It was a pit.”
“She married that guy from Butler,” said Maxon. “Come on, let’s go. This is uncomfortable. I don’t know what to say.”
“Say, ‘Hello, Mother. I am just stopping by to say hello, since I was in the area. This is my wife and child.’ And then wait and see what she says. I’ll help you.”
“She’s never seen the—” Maxon began.
“The what?” Sunny asked. “Child or wig?”
Maxon got out of the car, too, stood with one hand clamped on the roof, one hand clamped around the doorframe still. In the back of the car, Bubber woke up.
“Get Bubber out, would you?” said Sunny, brushing off her beautiful cream-colored maternity pantsuit, smoothing it over her belly. “Let’s go knock.”
But they didn’t have to. A man was coming up out of the barn, covered in a fine dust of wood shavings. He was maybe sixty. He took his hat off as he approached.
“Y’uns want firewood?” he asked politely. “I got lots, real dry.”
“No,” said Sunny. “We’re here to see Mrs. Mann.”
“You know Laney?” he said. He looked incredulous.
“We do,” said Sunny, her arm now wrapped protectively around a sleepy Bubber. She picked up the boy, held him on her hip, kissed him soundly on the head. “Is it okay if we go up to the house?”
“Uh, it’s Laney Snow now. I’m her husband. Nice to meet you, Ben Snow.”
They shook hands. Maxon looked at her, and his face correctly registered surprise.
“Mom,” said Bubber quietly. “I have to go potty.”
“Oh, sure,” the man said. “He can use the bathroom up ’ere too. Let me show y’uns in. Laney’ll be real glad to see you. She’s been doin’ books all day, she’s pretty close to crazy with all them numbers and what all. Be glad to see some visitors.”
The man took them toward the door of the old house. Instead of the frenetic clutter Sunny remembered, it was clean, neat. Still old, but cared for.
“Hey, Laney,” he yelled, swinging open the door. “You got friends here to see you, girl. Get on out here and say hello.”
“Come in,” came a high voice from inside the house. “Come on in, I’m in the kitchen.”
Maxon hung back, saying he would wait outside, but Sunny pinched his arm, propelled him onward until they were standing in a bright little kitchen.
THE LAST TIME SHE had been in this kitchen, it was the summer after Maxon’s first year of college. When school got done in May, he’d gone straight to Europe, cycling and backpacking up and down the Alps and the Pyrenees, following bike races and sleeping anyplace he could plug in his laptop. He came home in August, with just a week to spare before he went back to school. She expected him to come rushing right over, burst into the kitchen, ask Nu for something to eat. She waited, but he stayed away, for three days, and no one at the Mann house would answer the phone. She felt irritated and confused. After all, she was going off to college herself in a few weeks. He had written her, e-mailed her, called her on the phone. Why would he not want to see her, to say hello and good-bye?
Her disappointment finally led her to action, and she marched across the valley, yanked open the door to his house, and went right in. She found him alone, sitting at the kitchen table in the middle of towering piles of paper and rubbish. The kitchen was dim, grim, and dirty; there were piles of dishes and papers, bags of fabric, garbage, and what looked like a squirrel’s nest on the counter. The space right around him was clear, and he was typing on his laptop, his head bent low over its blue light. He wore faded jeans and nothing else, and his head was shaved, tanned in stripes from his bicycle helmet. She knew he had been shaving it for her. The sight of his rib cage, his sternum, his collarbones, made her physically ache for him. She wanted to hold him, and feel him breathing.
But he was upset; he told her she had to go. “Sunny,” he said. “You can’t be here.”
“Why not?” she said. “I don’t understand.”
He stood up and came toward her, as if he was going to touch her, grab her, clamp her in his arms, but he stopped.
“Wait. I have to tell you something,” he said. “I was in France a few weeks ago. And I wrote a poem.”
“You wrote a poem?” In the middle of her confusion, she had time to be incredulous.
“Yes, I wrote one.”
“An actual poem, like with words and feelings and stuff?”
“With words.”
“Can I see it?”
“No, I didn’t write it down.”
“Well, can you tell me what it was? Do you remember it? How are you going to remember it?”
“I remember it.”
“But you won’t tell me what it was?”
“No.”
“Why not, Maxon?” She felt like she was going to cry.
“Your mother wouldn’t like it,” said Maxon. “She wouldn’t want it. She doesn’t want me to see you at all.”
“Well, when will you tell me? When she’s dead?”
“I don’t think I can ever tell you. And you have to go. But I want you to know that I wrote a poem for you. You should know that.”
Later he called her on the phone, and asked her to forgive him. And then he went back to Massachusetts, and she did not see him again for years.
BENEATH THE YELLOWED CEILING light, at an old Formica table, the woman that had been Laney Mann sat before a ledger book, a receipt book, a checkbook, and a pile of paper scraps, a No. 2 pencil in one hand and a pink eraser in the other. She looked up. Sunny was amazed. Where there had been hulking flesh, there was now a trim old lady. Where there had been strange facial hairs, there were now gentle wrinkles. The gaping holes in the rotten teeth now invisible behind a meek smile, neat hair tucked into a braid.
“Well, innit nice,” she said, as if automatically; then when she saw Maxon she stopped.
“Maxon?” she said.
“So how y’uns know each other?” asked her husband.
“Why listen, Ben,” she began. She half stood up, her hand reaching out to Maxon, who still stood by the door. “This here is my son Maxon that you never met. You know, he’s the youngest of ’em. He’s, ahhh…”
“A scientist,” put in Sunny helpfully.
“Yeah, he been a scientist down there in Virginia,” said Laney. “What you working on, lemme see, I know, I learnt this from Emma. Rockets, right? You gonna fly a rocket?”
“Yes,” said Maxon.
“Where, right up to the moon?” asked Ben.
“Yes,” said Maxon.
“Well, innit nice!” said his mother. “That’s real nice!”
Everyone looked at Maxon.
“Hello, Mother,” he said. “I am just stopping by, since I am in the area. This is my wife and child.”
Laney picked up the teakettle and began to fill it from the jug on the countertop. She looked Sunny over and nodded approvingly, clucking to herself.
“Well, honey, I’m real glad you didn’t stay married up with Emma’s girl. She was … well, I was always real grateful how Emma paid up for your school and all your travels. But she always knew you kids could be with others that were, ah, better suited. That kind of thing just ain’t right. So now look, you got such a pretty new wife, little boy, you’re doing real good.”
Maxon stood, stunned, his face registering nothing. Sunny felt a prickle of triumph. The wig worked. She was immune.
“Who’s this Emma’s girl,” she asked Laney, helping her reach a box of tea the old woman was stretching for on an upper shelf, before she could retrieve her footstool. “Your first wife? Huh, Maxon? Was she pretty? Should I be worried?”
“No, no,” said Laney, counting out her little bags of Lipton. “Poor thing, she was … bald.” She whispered the last word, one hand discreetly over her mouth. When she was trying to be subtle, Sunny could see the remnants of the old Laney, the fat and desperate Laney, laid over her face. The eyes leaping from side to side. The chewing movements, when there was nothing in her mouth.
“Bald, you mean bald like she shaved her head?” Sunny said, pushing the envelope, reveling in the feeling of real human hair cascading expensively down the sides of her face, rippling over her collarbones, pooling on her shoulder blades.
“Let’s just not say nothing ’bout it, dear,” said Laney, poking a tea bag into each of four mismatched cups. “Whatchoo say your name was? Maxon, whatser name?”
Maxon made a gurgling sound, and Sunny interjected, “Alice. My name’s Alice.”
“Well, Alice, it’s just all done in the past. Nothing but past. There’s a lot we just leave behind, right, Maxon? A lot we just set right there in the past.”
“I don’t drink tea,” Maxon said.
“Well, would you like Kool-Aid? I got some Kool-Aid for your boy. Real nice apple Kool-Aid. You like Kool-Aid, honey?”
THEY PICKED UP SUNNY’S mother from the house across the valley. They shut up the house, turned off the water, drained the pipes, and dripped antifreeze into the drains, all while the emaciated Emma sat on her sofa, wrapped up comfortably, listening to Bubber read to her, letter by letter, from a book of chemical formulas and equations. It was the one he had picked from the shelf, and Emma had said, fine, fine, whatever he likes. Sunny watched her doting like a grandmother, fondling his ears, cupping his head in her hands, and she felt bad for denying her mother all of this love for the last four years. Her reaction to the wig hadn’t even been that bad. Four years ago, when the wig was new, her mother had been irate. Now she just looked kind of sad, and asked Maxon if he liked it, and Maxon didn’t know what to say.
They paid the disgruntled Hannah, packed up the car, and locked the house. The mother, in the backseat next to Bubber, was quickly asleep, propped up on pillows and swathed in the ancestral quilts.
“I think she looks pretty good,” said Sunny. “What do you think?”
“She looks pretty good,” said Maxon.
“And your mother, can you believe it?”
“What?”
“She looks so good! And married to that nice guy, running a business, who would have ever thought it?”
“I hate her now more than I ever did before,” he said.
It was dark now, the headlights swept before them in the road, lighting up battered road signs, carcasses in the ditch, one hand-lettered sign with an arrow on one end that said CLARKSON RONDAYVOO. The up-and-down motion reminded Sunny of driving around when they were teens, Maxon always stone sober, allowing her to be a little drunk, a safe amount of drunk, enough to cling to him and laugh, put her feet up on the dashboard and sing along to radio songs.
“Because of her loving Alice so much?” Sunny asked quietly. “Or because of, just everything?”
Maxon said nothing. She looked over at the familiar outline of his profile against a window in twilight, his jaw so tough, his fists wrapped around the steering wheel like they were strangling it, every knuckle tight, every vein popped out. He filled the whole seat, right up to the top. His curls almost touched the ceiling in the van. She put her hand in his hair and stroked his scalp, let her hand trace down the back of his neck. She saw his knuckles relax.
“Don’t be mad,” said Sunny. “She’s proof that people can change. Look what she was, and look what she is now. She’s completely different, Maxon. Don’t you see that? She’s completely, totally different and from what? From finding the right guy, from doing the right things, from putting her feet in the road that leads to normal. She did all the outward things to be the thing she’s trying to be, and now she’s good at it. She’s normal. Anyone would say it, driving up there. No one would ever suspect what she was.”
“She’s the same,” said Maxon. His knuckles poked out again, angry. “No one can change. Stop trying to change him. Why can’t you just love him exactly the way he is?”
“I do love him,” said Sunny, her hand still circling in Maxon’s hair, soothing him, loving him. She thought about how everything that was important to her, deep down inside, was in this car. She was glad they had gone to pick up her mother. Once she was healthy again, she could help with Bubber. She was an expert in teaching little boys how to behave. Had she not been so worried about showing her mother the wig, she would have enlisted her help years ago. “I love him so much that I want something better for him, something better than what we had. Everything about us is so complicated. I just want to save him from that. Let it be simple. Let it be obvious.”
Maxon didn’t know what to say, or he didn’t want to say it. He stayed quiet until she asked him to tell her he loved her, many miles down the road. And he did.