while the black stars burn (9 page)

I stare at their exposed flesh. They’re absolutely
loaded
with the virus. Suddenly, the cause of my mother’s fevers and surgeries is clear to me—she’s been letting the doctors turn her into a walking bioweapon.

I cut out some of their arteries and leave them to soak in a cauldron of warm water; I will use this to make the batter for the thin pancakes used to scoop up the food. The pancakes cook at about 200 degrees and, with luck, the artery-water will render them virulent. I take several pounds of fat from my mother and the Marines and pulverize it in the food processor until it’s a fine paste. This will enrich the sauces and the lentil paste, after they have cooked and cooled down a bit.

I work constantly, sweating from the heat of the kitchen and my own anticipation. The cut over my heart breaks open, staining the front of my shirt with blood.

I get the banquet prepared barely in time. It’s beautiful; I haven’t done this well in weeks. There’s enough food for half of them to have seconds.

As I set the plates on the conveyor belt, I say grace.

“We thank thee, Lord, for these Thy gifts which they are about to receive from Thy bounty and through Christ, our Lord, amen.”

My mother is standing beside me. She squeezes my shoulder gently.

“It’s a very good dinner, dear,” she tells me. “I wouldn’t have put quite so much pepper in the lentils, but a very good dinner just the same.”

“Thanks, Mom.” I pause, not knowing how to express how terribly sorry I am for what I’ve just done to her. When I look over, I realize she’s not really there. She’ll never be there again.

*

After the wait in the hallway, I am sent to the best room. I cut myself for a while, carving a cross into my chest, then take a long, hot shower and lie down. I’m still shaking, my heart pounding. Will it work? What will they do to me if it doesn’t?

Whatever happens, this is the end of my career as a cook.

I lie awake, mind churning. I’ve cooked my own mother. Sliced her, and diced her, and made her into a beautiful gravy-covered communion for our new lords. Will I be freed, when so many better people have suffered and died? Or will I join them in a horrible death? Which fate do I really prefer?

And I can’t stand this God-damned
waiting
! If I am to die, then I want to
die
already! If I am to live, then I want
out
!

My thoughts wind me so tight I can’t stay still. I get up, pace, babble nonsense rhymes to myself, anything to drown out the roar in the back of my head.

When the timed alarm finally sounds and the door opens, I race into the kitchen, my skin prickling with manic fear.

The carving block is bare. I have no corpse, no instructions. The refrigerator hasn’t been re-stocked.

“What!” I scream at the loudspeakers. “No meat? How can I make your pudding when you won’t leave me any meat!”

I run to the conveyor belt and peer down the ten-foot-long shaft. I see dim light, but no movement.

“Allee allee out’s in free!” I call.

No response, no sound. The thought of crawling through this thing to the dining room is unspeakably terrifying. But what’s terror worth when you’ve cooked your mommy?

I climb onto the conveyor belt. Sensing my weight, the motor starts automatically and slowly carries me into the shaft. The heat lamps lining the ceiling come on, filling the shaft with red-orange light. Almost instantly, the shaft is sweltering. The light burns into my back, my scalp, my face. Sweat pours off me, and my itchy cuts start leaking blood again. I’m stewing in my own skin. It suddenly occurs to me that I should be on a platter with a nice side of cranberry sauce. The thought makes me giggle, and for a long time I can’t stop.

An eternity later, I come out of the shaft into the huge, airy dining room. The breeze hitting my roasted face is wonderfully cool and feels like the breath of God.

The room is filled with rows and rows of long wooden tables without chairs. There are a few dirty plates still scattered on the tables. The place is dead quiet, abandoned. Dull light from the overcast sky filters through high bay windows. Even this weak radiance makes me squint like a newborn baby; it’s been years since I’ve seen the sun.

“Hey! Come and eat me, already!” My voice echoes hollowly.

I turn around, and see a set of double doors. One is ajar, swinging gently in the breeze. I jump off the conveyor belt and run to the door, my arms raised as if I am a dove about to take flight. I push out into the warm Caribbean air. I smell the ocean, and flowers.

And something rotting. I nearly trip over a Jagaren that lies just outside the door. I squat and stare at the corpse. The stout body is covered with deep, oozing ulcers, and the ground is littered with its molt of feathery scales. The flies have found it, and are bustling for a sip of ichor and a chance to lay eggs in the fishy flesh. The maggots will have quite a feast.

I leave the corpse and walk down the path to a gazebo that overlooks the ocean. The sun is a red orb just above the horizon, lighting the streaked clouds with delicate purples and pinks. I don’t know whether it’s rising or setting.

In the distance, I hear helicopters.

Cthylla

An urn in the lovely Chapel of the Chimes bears the epitaph “Natalya Moroz, Artist and Muse and Misguided Soul.” An incomplete summation of a life that burned short and very bright. But the label does not tell anything close to the whole story of the ashes in this lovely work of ceramic and paint. For that, we need to take a closer look at a young woman named Kamerynne Craigie, whose story we know from diary entries, recovered texts and email....

When she was 8, Kamerynne Craigie heard a joke at school: “Did you hear about the British rock star who married the supermodel? Their baby had his looks and her talent!”

It wasn’t the kind of joke that 8-year-olds think up; some kid heard it from a comic on cable TV. But there, in their Silicon Valley private school, the joke seemed edgy and grown-up and so the boy brayed it out at lunch and everybody laughed, even some of the kids whose parents actually were musicians with model wives. Kamerynne laughed, too, halfheartedly, not really understanding it until another boy told her, “It’s cuz the Rolling Stones all had kids that are really ugly and they can’t play guitar.”

But something about it didn’t sit right. Afterward her mind held onto the joke, turning it over and over like a Rubik’s cube she couldn’t solve more than one side of.

When she was thirteen, her Aunt Cherity died. The Saturday after the funeral, Kamerynne was in the shower and finally realized:
The joke is about me. I’m that joke.

The revelation was so profound that she stumbled back against the tile wall, slid down into the tub and blinked numbly while the water droplets slapped against her face.

I’m that joke.

Her father, Cameron Craigie, was a computer genius. He’d dropped out in his freshman year at Cal Tech to start up a software company in a friend’s garage, back when that was a legitimate career move for whiz kids. Kamerynne had his frizzy brown hair and chubby cheeks, and she made As and Bs in school, just as he had, but nobody had ever suggested that genius was a thing she was capable of.

Her mother Grayce wasn’t a genius, but she was beautiful and talented and everyone loved her. She’d even been nominated for an Oscar for her role as the lead in an indie film called
Cthylla
, but she didn’t win. Her father met Grayce at the movie’s Sundance party, nine months before Kamerynne was born. As far as Kamerynne knew, they hadn’t shared a bed since then, but they both grew up in old-fashioned households and they believed in the institution of marriage, particularly when a child was involved. Past that, neither of them carried any particular expectations into the marriage, and they were able to coexist pleasantly as roommates in his Mill Valley ranch house.

Her father seemed content with Kamerynne—“Let a kid be a kid,” he’d always say—but as the years went on her mother bore a palpable air of disappointment. Kamerynne tried singing and school plays but she had a hard time remembering lyrics and lines and standing up in front of a bunch of strangers inevitably tied her tongue. Nobody seemed eager for her to get up on stage anyhow, not with her unfashionable pudge and poofy hair.

When Kamerynne was very young, her mother used to call her “my little changeling” and it wasn’t until the girl read a book of fairy tales that it dawned on her that the term had nothing to do with diapers. After the Oscar nomination, her mother got a lot of acting offers. She wasn’t ever the leading lady, but she was often her best friend or a quirky neighbor. So Grayce Aberdine (she kept her maiden name) always had a shoot someplace, or an appointment with her shrink or her acting coach, or she was off at a spiritual retreat.

I’m that joke
, Kamerynne thought again. She’d looked up a picture of Keith Richards’ son Marlon once at the school library. He wasn’t bad-looking, she thought, certainly not
ugly
like the girl next to her declared he was, and she figured he was surely better at guitars than she’d ever be at acting or coding. But whatever pretty good thing he did wasn’t good enough for the world when you had famous, brilliant parents.

Kamerynne sometimes wondered if she’d just been prettier, more like an actress, if things would have been different. She wondered if her mother would have found reasons to be home instead of off worshipping some goddess at the beach or centering her chakras. But on the other hand a lot of the kids complained about their moms getting up in their business all the time. The housekeepers who watched Kamerynne mostly let her do what she wanted as long as she got her homework done and finished the book lists her father left for her (he didn’t think the school focused enough on reading). Her dad was gone a lot, too, but he had his company to run. Years later, Kamerynne would come to realize that his absence was just as much a choice as her mother’s, but when she was 13 her mother’s behavior seemed simultaneously more deliberate and more erratic.

Her mother’s sister Cherity stepped in to fill the unspoken maternal void when Kamerynne was three. Where her mom was willowy and elegant, Cherity was stocky and strong. Her aunt played softball for a team called the Oakland Outlanders, and Kamerynne loved going to games. She and her aunt had the same way of smiling and laughing and they both really loved
The Muppet Show
. Once, when they were hiking in Redwood Park, someone mistook them for mother and daughter, and Kamerynne was secretly pleased.

But then her aunt started feeling too ill to play ball or go hiking, and she went to the doctor and found out she had blood cancer. She still took Kamerynne out places, not as often because the chemo really took it out of her, but everyone spoke of it as just a temporary thing. Kamerynne’s father had money for the most talented doctors and he promised that Cherity would get the very best care.

Almost exactly two years after her diagnosis, Cherity died.

As the water beat down on her, Kamerynne had her second epiphany of the morning:
I’m going to die, too.

She felt her mortality through and through, and it was abjectly terrifying. Her body would turn into something like that steak her mom had forgotten in the trunk of the Jaguar for a week, stinking and slimy and crawling with maggots. She’d cease to exist. Would her soul go to heaven? What if there
wasn’t
a heaven? What if
this
—this frustrating, confusing, unasked-for existence on Earth—was all she’d have?

Her parents had their fame. People wrote her mom fan mail and, because
Cthylla
had become a cult favorite, some people had tattooed her character’s face on their bodies. Nobody used her father’s face for a tattoo, but his picture had been on the cover of
Time
. His software ran computers that ran hospitals that kept people alive. They were both heroes. They’d be
remembered
.

What about her? Her teachers and her mother and father spoke of everyone having an individual calling, a place in the world. But what if that wasn’t true? What if she was only ever going to be pretty good at things that didn’t really matter, and there wasn’t a place for her soul to go afterward? Was there a reason she was here on Earth, other than that one night her mother and her father both went to a party, got a little tipsy and didn’t bother with condoms?

What if her life was just a meaningless accident?

It was suddenly hard to breathe. Inside her, it felt as though an enormous, cold, unfathomable blackness had opened up, and she was teetering, about to fall into it. She wanted to run screaming down the street, as though she could outrun death and the pain of mediocrity. But some kid at school had run naked down the street once and lurking paparazzi took pictures and his whole family was embarrassed. The kid had to see a shrink and surrender his thoughts and feelings every week like one of the kids in
Oliver Twist
giving his money to Fagin.

Kamerynne didn’t want to see a shrink. She was afraid that talking about her fears out loud might make them real, like saying “Bloody Mary” three times in front of a mirror. So she stood up on unsteady legs, turned off the water, got dressed, and went into her bedroom to play
Kirby’s Adventure
for the rest of the day.

*

Three years passed in which Kamerynne went to school, didn’t cultivate any friends, and played video games and read thick fantasy novels (when she wasn’t reading one of her father’s endless book assignments) to keep herself from thinking about death and the probable meaninglessness of her existence. She wasn’t getting into drugs or drinking like some of her classmates, so her parents mostly just vaguely fretted about her lack of fresh air and exercise and made the housekeeper take her to the gym three times a week. Her mother sometimes spoke of getting her some liposuction and plastic surgery when she was ready for college. Her father started sitting with her to show her how to code, and he took her to work with him more often, showing her bits and pieces of his business. She was being tested, she could tell, and although she tried to please him, she couldn’t work up much enthusiasm. And he seemed to sense that.