Karen delivered his order without a word or a glance. She placed it on the place mat and turned on her heels just as cool and professional as she could be. But as she moved away, the man began to softly sing a refrain: "Sometimes I wonder why I spend the lonely nights dreaming of a song. The melody haunts my reverie…"
Karen pretended not to hear and headed across the floor and into the kitchen without looking back.
Freddie glanced up from the stove at her. "Hey, you okay? You look like you seen a ghost."
Karen was leaning against the wall staring out through the window. The eyes. That slightly crooked mouth. The little scar at the corner of his left eyebrow.
"Can't be," she said aloud.
"What 'can't be?'"
She shook her head to say it was nothing.
That song. "Stardust." Suddenly she was in the gym at Alfred E. Burr Junior High school dancing to Helen O'Connell and the Jimmy Dorsey Band. It was their favorite. She had said his eyes were like Stardust.
Impossible! He's too young. Too young!
"That guy giving you some crap?"
"No, for chrissakes!" She didn't know why she flared up, but suddenly she felt upset and disoriented. She went out the back door and lit a cigarette trying to find her center again.
The parking lot was beginning to fill up. In the eastern sky, trees had lost their leaves and made scraggly patterns against the street lights. As she stared she was suddenly in a wooden backyard swing set on Brown Street in Canton 's south end. He was beside her, smiling that silly crooked smile. And those Stardust eyes. He was saying something about going to college and becoming a scientist someday, and how the next moment he was kissing her.
It came back to her in such a rush she felt faint.
She went back inside, crossed through the kitchen. Freddie asked her something, but she dismissed him with her hand and went into the staff toilet. Inside she fixed her hair and put fresh lipstick on. The face in the mirror looked at best five years this side of its age. And he looked like a kid.
It couldn't be him. So why was she shaking all of a sudden and fixing her face and gargling with mouth-wash?
This was nuts!
She passed through the service door.
He had finished his meal, but was still sitting there and facing her. The same eyes. Same cleft in the chin. Same scar. She felt a strange fright, because it didn't make any sense. He looked half her age. While she tried to find the right words, she spotted something in his hand.
Then she realized that he wasn't smiling. And his eyes were huge and round. His mouth opened and a string of saliva poured oud onto his shirt. And rising from his throat was a deep wet groan. Suddenly his chest began to heave.
Karen's first thought was he was choking, that he couldn't catch his breath, that she had to apply the Heimlich maneuver because his face was draining of color.
But then his body began to convulse as if experiencing electric shock. In a clean sweep of his hands, the dishes scattered to the floor, as his feet kicked in some awful reflex. But what made Karen scream was how his face tensed in agony and his head jerked back as if trying to free itself from his neck.
"Somebody get a doctor. Hurry."
My God! she thought, he's having a heart attack. She shouted to one of the waiters to call an ambulance.
Instantly the place was in a commotion, people shouting and jumping up to help, one man saying he was a physician.
While people swirled around her and the doctor tried to loosen the man's tie, Karen was frozen in place. Something was happening to the man's face.
As he weaved and bobbed his head, Karen could swear that the skin of his face was changing, shifting, beginning to darken with splotches. But more than that, it appeared to be moving, buckling, as if loosening from the inside-as if there were suddenly too much skin to cover his skull.
At first she couldn't believe what she was seeing, all too distracted by the convulsions and gurgling from his chest. Then she noticed his hands. The skin was changing-wrinkling and withering as if the flesh inside were dissolving, leaving a translucent parchment through which veins made long blue vees across the backs of his hands. Others noticed also, and their voices hushed as they stopped to take in the spectacle. Then people began to scream, calling for the doctor to do something.
But this was not a heart attack, nor a stroke, nor an aneurysm, nor anything else Karen could imagine. Nor anything any of the others who pressed against her could imagine, including the doctor. Futilely he had loosened the man's tie, knowing he was witnessing nothing he had seen before, nothing that his medical texts ever prepared him for-nothing that had anything to do with normal human pathology. What disease could reduce a human body to such a stage of debilitation and with such brutal virulence? No virus, bacteria, or plague he knew of. Whatever had struck the man had blitzed his cells at the DNA level.
While others gasped and shouted, Karen stood nailed to the floor, a scream bulbed in her throat as she watched the man age half-a-century before her eyes, simultaneously fleshing out and withering into a bloated mummy of his former self. Just minutes ago he had sat here a big handsome young guy. Now he was collapsed into the corner of the booth, his shoulders hunched forward, neck sunk into his frame, sightless rheumy eyes gaping at the onlookers, his mouth rimmed with cracked flesh frozen in a silent scream.
Then a long thin cry rose from Karen's lungs as she plied open the withered claw clutched around the black-and-white photograph he had brought her-one she knew so well, a bit faded and cracked but not enough to conceal the image of them in tuxedo and gown at their junior prom, "Stardust Night-1948"-a duplicate of which she had in her scrapbook at home with the inscription on the back: With love forever, Dexter.
3
Half-consciously Chris Bacon plucked a white hair from his eyebrow in the rearview mirror. "How old would you say you are if you didn't know how old you are?"
"Is this some kind of trick question?" his wife Wendy asked.
"No."
"Well, some days I feel about ninety," she chuckled.
"You know what I mean."
"I don't know, honey… Thirty-something, I suppose." Today was her forty-second birthday, although she looked at least ten years younger. She was slim and attractive, and her skin was smooth and fair. She had shiny chestnut-colored hair and large intelligent eyes of almost the same color. Her full expressive mouth, high cheekbones, and V-shaped chin gave her a regal quality that helped preserve her youthfulness. It also helped that Wendy took good care of herself and jogged regularly. "Why?"
"What if you could feel thirty-something the rest of your life?"
"I guess it depends on how long the rest of my life is."
"What if you could live, say, another hundred years and still feel thirty?"
Something in Wendy's expression said she was becoming uncomfortable with the subject. "But that's not going to happen."
"Let's say it could."
Wendy thought for a moment. Then she said, "Why would I want to live another hundred years?"
"Why? You mean you'd prefer three score and ten instead of twice that?"
"Well, only because everybody else I ever knew would be dead. I'd be a living anachronism. What kind of a life would that be?"
"How about if everybody had the same privilege?"
"Wouldn't that be worse? By the end of the century, there'd be ten billion people on the planet."
"What if it weren't accessible to everybody? I mean, just the people you love."