When she got to the doctor’s office, she sat down in the waiting room, in a chair with her back to the window, her face to the door. She had to sit down because another contraction was coming. The receptionist didn’t know who she was. Maybe the receptionist thought she was a man. Sunny reached a white hand out to the round end table. The hand wanted to grab a lamp. The hand wanted to smash a lamp. It couldn’t be helped that the place looked like a furniture store, with everything so perfect, perfect. Area rugs, bronze statuettes; the room sang in harmony with itself. With different carpet, it would have made a good living room in Sunny’s neighborhood. It was a doctor’s office passing as a living room. A decorator trying to think like a pregnant woman.
“Hello, are you all right?”
“No,” said Sunny.
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, I’m not fit. Not this body. Not this head. Not this person. I’m not fit to be a mother. You don’t know what I really am.
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 and Sunny appeared in pictures together, there was a certain sexiness about them that led people to wonder what intrigued them about this whole moon situation. Was it really the fact that a rocket was taking robots to live up on the moon? Or was it just this handsome elegant woman and her tall, haunted astronaut man?
Cooperating with the NASA publicity department, Maxon went to New York for eighteen hours to visit the talk shows. He joked and smiled, made small talk, and comically misunderstood sexual innuendoes. But Sunny refused to do any appearances at first. She said, “I am pregnant. I can’t fly.” When the Today show agreed to send a crew to her house, she balked at that, too. She didn’t want to disrupt the life of her child any more than his father would disrupt it by going into space. She said this, and the people that she was talking to seemed to understand.
Finally she agreed to be interviewed on the local news in Norfolk. In this way, she would not seem to be avoiding notice. She would seem to be a trooper. That’s what they would call her. She would glitter with sacrifice. She wore her most amazing wig, the kind of style you can only achieve with a two-hundred-dollar styling appointment, or with real human hair permanently affixed in a shape. She wore coral, which was said to warm under studio lights. She wore pearls.
The network was housed in a brick building on Granby Street, unremarkable except for the news channel logo attached to its roof. Inside, the studio was a large dry room, painted dark, high ceilings hung with canister lights. Cables in braids roped from camera to set and around the floor, like black rivers across the dark room, and she picked her way across them to the set, supported on one side by Maxon.
“What are you going to wear, Maxon?” she had said that morning.
“My space suit,” he said. “That’s what I always wear when I’m astronauting.”
“You don’t even have the space suit here,” she said, too distracted with her eyebrows to acknowledge his joke.
“Well, I’m going to wear red overalls and a straw hat.”
“Oh yeah?”
“And sing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’”
“Maxon, I don’t want to do this,” she said.
“Why? You’ll do great. Look how great you are, all the time. Nothing rattles you. You’re a machine.”
“Maxon, why would you even say something like that?”
“Like what?”
Sunny peeled off an eyebrow and put it back on, a tiny bit higher up on her brow.
“I’m afraid to do it, because I’m afraid I’m going to cry or throw up or something.”
“Why?”
“You’re going into space. I’m worried. People worry about their spouses going on business trips to Kansas City.”
“Well, Kansas City is perilous. The gravity there is nine-tenths of what it is in Virginia.”
“That’s not even true.”
“I bet I can get the news guy to believe it.”
“Shut up.”
“I bet I can though.”
Eventually he had chosen to wear a NASA polo shirt and navy dockers. As they took their places on the set, she appraised his appearance and found him acceptable.
“You look good,” she told him. “Just don’t start talking about the robot that can really understand the tango and we’ll be fine.”
“You’ll be fine,” said Maxon. “The robot that can really understand the tango was my only material.”
Les Weathers bounded onto the set, fresh from hair and makeup, no doubt. He was still wearing his tissue-paper shields tucked into his collar to keep his crisp white shirt from getting smudged with foundation.
“Hey, guys! How we doing today?” he said. He grinned his enormous grin and grasped hands with first Maxon, then Sunny. His hand was warm, strong, generous. She knew that Maxon did not like to shake hands. Seeing Maxon’s sharp white fist close around Les Weathers’s suntanned paw made Sunny stare for a moment. Maxon was not tanned below the line his bicycle gloves made on his wrist. Here is the man I married, she thought. He has a fist like the talons of a hawk. Here is the man I did not marry. He has the skin tone of a lion in full sun. She wondered if they put foundation on Les Weathers’s hands.
“Great,” said Maxon. “Doing great.”
“Thank you so much for agreeing to do this interview,” he said to Maxon. Then conspiratorially, to Sunny: “Go WNFO, right? What a scoop!”
“What a scoop,” said Maxon. “Go WNFO.”
“Les, you’re so kind to bring us in, and help us share Maxon’s rocket launch with the world. I really appreciate it,” said Sunny, unleashing a radiant smile. She lowered herself into a chair between Maxon and Les Weathers, crossing her ankles under her so that her cork-wedge sandals were tidily arranged. They were going to tape the interview, show it during the evening news, when there would be the largest number of viewers. This way it would be syndicated to all the affiliates across the country. Maybe the Today show would pick it up after all.
Depends on how the mission goes, said the producer. Now, what does that mean, asked Sunny.
Was Les Weathers about to become famous on the back of Maxon’s mission to the moon? One big story, the correct flashing teeth all lined up in a row, and a man with nice blond hair could be headed for the big time. But only if something terrible happened. Or at least something unexpected. The fate of the anchorperson depends on a tragedy or a revolution. Sunny looked at Maxon and back at Les Weathers, and felt a ripple of nerves across her chest.
“Are you all right?” asked Les Weathers.
“Oh, it’s the pregnancy,” she said. “I’m absolutely fine. Thank you for your concern.”
The producer told them where they were to look (Les Weathers, each other) and where they were not to look (the cameras), and how they should smile and be animated.
“Act like you’re talking to a friend, at a party,” said the producer. “We’re happy here. We’re going to the moon!”
They had already been pretending Les Weathers was their friend. This would not be hard.
The interview began. What does this mean for America? What does this mean for the world? Maxon produced answers from the script he had been rehearsing. It was almost as if he were sort of a humanist, affirming a manifest destiny in the stars. He described the bright future, successfully veiling his real self for the camera. For now he was not the terse, bony guy about to leave the Earth for the first time. He was buoyant, almost cheerful. He did not say, “I rounded up a gang of robots, and I’m headed for the moon, to take it over.” He did not say, “This is the way we evolve. This is the way our culture transforms.”
Instead he said it serious: “It is a great move for mankind.” He said it droll: “We’re finally furnishing our mother-in-law suite.” He said it poetic: “Machines on the gray desert of time’s horizon.”
Sunny smiled and nodded, her knees pressed lightly together, coral cardigan wrapping the sides of her pregnant belly. She felt a droplet of sweat begin to roll under her wig. The lights were hot.
“And how do you feel about all this?” Les asked Sunny warmly.
“Les,” she said, “I married a man in love with robots. Am I really surprised he’s making off with a robot harem, to populate the sky?”
And everyone laughed. Had Sunny married a man with a job as an anchorperson and a thick arm in a neatly pressed shirt, she would have been very shocked if he made off with a robot harem, to populate the sky. She would have expected to go to Norway, to have a literal mother-in-law suite, like the kind over a garage, not the kind on an astral body.
“Let’s talk about you, Sunny Mann,” said Les Weathers. “This launch comes at a difficult time for your family.”
He gestured awkwardly, charmingly toward her huge, pregnant belly, and smiled.
“Well, Maxon’s launch was scheduled well before mine,” Sunny purred. “And the moon waits for no one.”
“But aren’t you worried, leaving your wife at this time?” he pressed. Sunny stretched out a hand and took Maxon’s in hers. It was cool and dry. He had hard hands, long strong fingers.
“Les,” said Maxon, “the timing of the mission is dependent on the orbital path of the moon, which affects everything about the launch.”
This was bullshit, Sunny knew. She felt her heart thump in her chest.
“The slightest variation in timing could cause a differential in gravitational pull that would throw off the telemetry significantly. You know, for example, the variations in Earth’s gravity. Everyone knows Kansas has nine-tenths the gravity of Virginia. In some parts of Oklahoma, it’s even less.”
“Oh,” said Les Weathers. “I guess I didn’t know that.”
Maxon produced the facial expression that communicated, “I am letting you in on a secret.” Then he winked, right at the camera, where he wasn’t even supposed to look.
“I’m not worried about my delivery,” said Sunny. “I’m not worried about Maxon’s either. He’ll get his robots to the moon, and when he comes back, there will be a new baby here to welcome him back.”
“Do you know what you’re having, a girl or a boy?”
Sunny laughed mildly. “Les, we’ve been so busy preparing for Maxon’s trip, I have not even had time to find out if this baby is human.”