After Sundown

by Mark Morris

  The movie star sits upright at the centre of the bed, sheets whipped up around her like meringue. Gleaming specks of gold and jet and emerald and diamond are scattered across the white. Velvet pouches and silk-lined boxes are piled beside her.

  “I’ve told you not to take your jewellery to bed,” Cara says. “Something will get lost.”

  The movie star holds out the remote control to Cara, appealing. Her anger has melted into sadness. These mercurial shifts of feeling make her mesmerising on the screen. She is a clear pool in which dark fish swim. Cara mutes the news and puts on the shiny chrome kettle, which the movie star never leaves home without. She slices lemon and plucks mint leaves from the plant on the windowsill. As the water heats Cara returns each piece of jewellery gently to its box. Then she puts the boxes back in the safe, listing them as she does it.

  “Gold collar set with pearls,” she says. “Drop earrings, white gold and yellow diamond. Platinum cuff with sapphires.” The movie star nods along and ticks each item off on her fingers. “Gold ring with diamond solitaire,” Cara says. “Ruby pendant.” The ritual imparts a pleasant sense of order.

  When all eight pieces are in the safe, the movie star gets out of bed with a sigh. Cara turns her back while she enters the safe combination and locks it. The kettle begins to emit light wisps of steam. It makes no sound as it boils. Money can buy silence, even from a kettle. Cara pours out two cups and adds the lemon and mint. Their clean scent fills the air.

  The movie star holds her cup tightly in both hands like a child. She gestures towards the silent screen which shows a sun-baked village and a thin man picking sticks out of the dust. “Look at this,” she says. “The state of everything. It makes me so angry, keeps me up at night.” She looks into the large mirror beside the bed, pulls an eyelid up, peers at her clear, white eyeball.

  “You should get some sleep,” Cara says. Her own eyelids give with the sandy weight of exhaustion.

  “I can’t,” the movie star says. “This room! It faces north and the windows don’t open. I can’t think in here. Smothering. What is your room like?”

  “A single,” says Cara. “Not a suite like this.”

  “What direction does it face?”

  “West, I think.” Cara knows that it faces west. Some muffled instincts remain to her. She still feels the pull of sunrise and sunset like a twist in her belly.

  “Let’s go to your room,” the movie star says.

  They pad along the corridor like cats in their bare feet. The movie star leans heavily on Cara’s shoulder.

  * * *

  Cara moves her discarded pyjamas off the single bed. The movie star gets into it. She pulls the sheets up to her chin. She looks very beautiful. “That’s better,” she says. “Can’t you feel how much better the energy is in this room?” Cara sits in a chair and waits.

  The movie star starts to talk in a low voice about her mother, and how she misses her. She talks about how it feels to love someone and fear them at the same time, because they can hurt you so badly. Cara listens. The movie star talks about the producer, who is messing with the script, giving her male co-star the best lines. Cara nods and makes more hot lemon. The little white hotel kettle whistles and roars. “You’re lucky to be so small,” the movie star says. “My legs are too long for most beds.” She wiggles her toes, which peep out pink from beneath the duvet. “This is nice. I like it when it’s just the two of us.”

  At length the movie star’s words begin to slur and her head droops. She rests her cheek on the pillow and sleeps.

  Cara rises silently. She goes to the bathroom and takes the little green bottle from the cabinet. She paints her sore gums with the brush that comes with the bottle. At first it tickles, then the cold feeling rushes in, making her mouth numb and icy. She takes the pills. Blue, then white, then white and yellow. Her reflection regards her; her small thin face like a serious antelope. Dark hair cropped boy-short like all the other assistants in LA this summer. She looks too young to be taken seriously.

  The movie star snores gently. Cara sets the alarm, and then curls up in the armchair by the window. I am lucky, she reminds herself, as she does each night before sleep and in the morning on waking. One of the lucky ones.

  She drifts as the sun comes up, spilling shattered fragments of light on the broad running river below.

  * * *

  The shooting day goes well. In the evening, the movie star hums as Cara makes pine needle and calendula tea. The movie star holds each butterscotch candy in her mouth for three seconds before removing it. Then she adds it to a glistening pile on the little silver plate at her side. A piece of steamed salmon sits untouched under its silver lid on the white-clothed table. “I need tomorrow’s call sheet,” she says.

  “I’ll go and copy it,” Cara says. Each day the call sheet has to be taped to the movie star’s mirror, to the back of her bathroom door, placed in a clear folder in her handbag, and another left on the desk. The movie star can’t hold times and days in her head. Cara can. Maybe it’s because she doesn’t own anything. Her life is uncluttered.

  “Don’t take hours about it like last time.” The movie star sounds imperious but Cara sees her fear. When Cara leaves the room there will be a gap in which thoughts may creep in. Cara touches the back of the movie star’s slim brown hand and goes. Don’t let it be Greta on reception, she thinks. She is bad at human conflict. Be the nice girl with the round pink cheeks. As the elevator drifts down towards the lobby Cara closes her eyes and whispers, “Not Greta, not Greta, not Greta…” She tries to make a spell of it.

  Greta’s silver name badge gleams in the low light. Her false eyelashes look like peacock feathers. Her skin is smooth and beautiful. She looks tired. Before Cara can speak she holds up a pointed red nail. Her fingers fly over the nubs of the console.

  Greta does not like Cara. Cara is the conduit for all the movie star’s needs; three changes of suite, a screened off area in the dining room, so that no one can see her eat, silence in the corridor outside her room from 9:00 pm onwards. The movie star does not like to phone housekeeping. She needs to be seen. She prefers to go down to the lobby, glide past the people waiting at reception and ask for things in her clear voice. Despite the name tag, the movie star calls Greta “you – girl!” “You, girl – I need a bouquet of freesias in each room.” Or she talks to Greta through Cara. “Tell the girl I need fresh towels.”

  Greta gives a final violent tap on the space bar and looks at Cara, black eyebrows raised.

  “Could you please print four copies and send them up to her room?” Cara puts the memory port on the desk. It pulses gentle silver and white, as if it had a secret.

  “We don’t print,” Greta says. “Who uses paper anymore?”

  “The other receptionist did it for me yesterday,” Cara says.

  Greta raises her eyebrows. “And we don’t print from memory ports. Hotel policy. Infection, you know.”

  Cara is beginning to feel a helpless panic. This has taken too long already. The movie star is waiting. “It was ok yesterday.”

  “Then you are very, very lucky that there was no infection.” Greta’s voice is filled with quiet triumph. “That member of staff will be disciplined.”

  Cara goes up to her room, and puts the file on a data stick. She imagines the movie star’s anxiety mounting. Her need for Cara seems to creep under the door like mustard gas.

  Back at the desk, Greta says, “We charge a dollar a page. In cash. I can’t leave reception to take it to the room, so you’ll have to wait here.”

  Cara gives Greta eight dollars, which is all the money she has. The movie star doesn’t carry it. Cara feels like explaining, “You are not hurting her by doing this, not at all.” But offended dignity needs bloodshed, and Cara is available.

  * * *

  “I thought you were dead,” says the movie star. The mountain of sucked butterscotch
has grown. The steamed salmon fillet has been picked at and turned over to hide the gnawed places. The movie star eats like a dying animal – in secret, lashing out if discovered. “I was just about to report you absconded. Where have you been?”

  “Printing the call sheet,” says Cara. The movie star is always threatening to report Cara absconded. That doesn’t mean she won’t do it. She might, and then be very sorry afterwards. Cara smiles to cover the cold fear lancing through her chest. Then she quickly closes her lips. Her gums ache. “It was eight dollars for the printing.”

  “That’s absurd,” the movie star says. “I won’t pay it. I’ll dispute my bill with the manager. I need quiet now, to centre myself. Absolute quiet. You’ll be in your room?”

  “Of course,” Cara says.

  As Cara closes the door behind her the movie star is picking up the phone. She is calling the director, to tell him to change the shooting order.

  * * *

  Cara cannot leave her room, but she has a window. She can give the implant something pretty to watch. The night river runs by sleek and strong. A group of women walks along the bank, laughing. They are in their twenties perhaps, in the middle of their evening, flowing from one place to another.

  One has a clever face like a raccoon. She puts an arm around her friend’s waist. As she does, she lifts the back of her friend’s gauzy skirt and tucks it into her belt. The raccoon-faced girl laughs, the girls walking behind laugh too. The friend walks on oblivious, long brown legs ending in black panties. Cara wonders when each of the girls will die. In sixty years? Tonight? The certainty of their death, moving through them with every breath they take. Cara can’t remember what it felt like.

  The implant is a tiny silver node on her brow, hidden just above her hairline. Sometimes Cara thinks this is why the movie star likes her so close. Whenever she is with Cara, the movie star is being watched too.

  * * *

  The phone rings at 4:00 a.m., breaking her brittle sleep. “Axel?” Cara says.

  “It’s happening again.” The movie star is crying. “Now, Cara.”

  “Don’t move,” Cara says. “I’m coming.”

  She pulls on clothes, fear coming in cold rushes.

  * * *

  The night lighting in the lobby is velvet, dusk-like. Early stars are scattered across the distant ceiling. Greta’s face is serious, eerily lit by the glowing keyboard. Her fingers move like spiders. Tap, tap, tap. Greta looks up as Cara approaches. Then she turns and vanishes through a black door behind her, leaving the desk glowing and pulsing like an undersea creature.

  Cara presses the glowing blue button labelled ‘Assistance’. The alarm or bell or whatever it is rings in some distant place, out of sight. Cara presses the button again. The lobby is still. The black door does not open.

  “Hello,” Cara calls. “She needs a kit,” she calls. “Now.”

  Nothing happens for a minute or so. The door opens slowly. Greta emerges smooth as a wave. “Of course,” she says. “Please excuse the brief wait. We’re short staffed.” She puts the kit on the desk for Cara. It looks like a small black briefcase.

  “This is a level ten,” Cara says, looking at the label on the leather handle. “I don’t want it that strong.”

  “This is all we have. I can send out. It will take a few hours.” Cara sees in Greta’s porcelain eyes that she knows what using the kit means for Cara. Cara can almost feel it already, the sick seismic movement of pain.

  Cara says, “I’ll take it.”

  “Corpse,” Greta says softly, holding Cara’s gaze.

  “What?” asks Cara, even though she heard.

  “I said, of course.”

  As Cara goes Greta says something else under her breath in German. It means, roughly, knife-face. Cara knows all those words. She has heard them many times.

  Cara understands, now. Greta hates the movie star, but she hates Cara for different reasons.

  * * *

  The movie star is curled up in a corner of the bed, making herself as small as possible in the smooth expanse of white sheet. The TV and radio are silent. She grunts in time with her pulsing pain. When the cancer comes back it moves fast, blazes with unnatural speed through cartilage and bone. Tonight it is in her spine.

  Cara does not waste time on words or comfort. She breaks the seal on the kit, takes the green and white pill from its plastic cartridge and swallows it.

  She trembles as her body begins to purge itself. Oily, rose-scented sweat oozes from her pores. She grabs a tissue from the silver box beside the bed and coughs up grey, glistening lumps. Cara feels her insides twisting, molten. She runs for the bathroom.

  “Don’t go,” the movie star pleads. “Don’t leave m—” Cara slams the door behind her. She reaches the toilet just in time. Red and pink liquid roars out of her throat, hot, both acid and sweet. It seems to go on forever. Then everything goes quiet. Cara lifts her head. Her eyes stop watering. Her stomach settles.

  It begins to happen; comes like a beam of sunlight through a deep ocean. The night takes on a velvet touch. Cara hears the fish speaking in the night river, the silent language of fin and tail. The implant is forced out of its lodging in her brow, lands with a tinkle on the marble floor. Cara’s body has rejected it. The world becomes a dark flower opening, with Cara at its centre. Everything is alive – she gasps at how alive.

  She is almost as she once was, now. Memory and pain wash through her. Also love. There was that, too. She feels the shape of her mouth change as the nubs grow into elegant scythes. Her tongue licks the ivory smoothness of them. She misses these, perhaps most of all.

  She opens the bathroom door. She sees each mote of dust spiralling on the cold hotel air. The movie star is still curled up in the corner of the bed. She does not move as Cara approaches. She has passed out. Cara hears the dry sound of the cancer growing in her spine.

  It is difficult not to drift, not to lose herself in the music of everything. But she must be fast, before her skin becomes too tough. When Cara takes her arm the movie star comes to, screaming – not with pain but with fear. Her body knows what Cara is. She hits Cara’s face weakly with her fist. Cara catches the movie star’s wrist with ease and inserts the IV line into her vein. She slides the cannula into the vein in her own neck. She has to stab repeatedly, and hard. In a moment, it would have been too late. Cara releases the valve and the thin plastic tube turns black. Her blood flows into the movie star.

  After a few seconds the plastic tube begins to melt. They are designed to be perishable, so that no more than the legal amount of blood can be transferred. The tube disintegrates in saggy drips. It falls in smoking remains on the white sheets. Cara smells the singed sweetness, mingling with the deep earthy scent of her blood. Cara pulls the cannula from her neck. The wound closes faster than even her senses can catch.

  The movie star gives a shuddering sigh. Her eyes are filled with black light. “You took so long, Cara,” she whispers. “I was afraid you had left me.”

  Cara takes her in her arms, just as she did when the movie star was a little girl; as she did the movie star’s mother, once upon a time. “I am always here,” she says. “Rest, now.”

  The movie star’s head nods wearily. “I love you,” she says. “You know that, don’t you, Cara?”

  “I know,” Cara says.

  “And you love me too.”

  “Always,” Cara says, holding her tightly. But they need each other so much that it’s hard to tell.

  Cara makes tea and puts it by the bed. The steam spirals, makes silk ribbons on the air. Cara gazes, then shakes herself. She could watch it for hours. Once, she would have done. All she had was time.

  “They’ll pick you up in an hour for the night shoot,” she tells the movie star. “You should try and nap until then.” She strokes the movie star’s hair. The movie star grunts softly. She is lost in the dreams
carried by Cara’s blood.

  Cara knows she is delaying the moment. She takes the last items from the kit. The pills, the bottle. Too powerful. It is going to hurt. She looks around the room one last time. She has not been this strong for many years. She wants to commemorate it somehow, before she makes herself weak and grey again. But what would be the point?

  * * *

  Back in her room Cara lays them out on the nightstand. Blue pill, then white, then white and yellow. Green bottle. This will be bad; nearly as bad as the first time, many years ago. But the thought of pain is nothing compared to Cara’s sorrow at losing the world again, its myriad detail, the stark clarity of it, the thousands of warm lives she can feel for miles around, like burning stars in the night.

  She fingers the long graceful points in her mouth. She lets their razor edges slice her fingertips, leaving long black bloody lines which vanish instantly. She bids them farewell.

  She wonders what would happen if she didn’t take the pill. She can make it to the river, she is sure. Once she’s underwater the stuff they put in the air can’t affect her. I could live in the ocean, Cara thinks. Never surface. Or there must be remote islands, forgotten by people, where the air is clean. I could live there. She pictures pale sand littered with the white bones of shipwrecked men. The peace of it pulls at her. I’ll do it, Cara thinks, wild. What else is there for me? She had forgotten how deeply it is possible to feel. Maybe Axel found one of those islands. Maybe Rose— no. She cuts off the thought. She knows it leads nowhere.

  They were in the forest when the mist came. Axel fought. That is why he died. Cara lay still and watched. She was allowed to live because she was useful. The movie star’s grandmother, Cara’s great, great, great granddaughter, was permitted to keep Cara for medical purposes. Cancer runs in the family. Cara knows that as well as anyone. Rose.

  If the movie star has children Cara will help to raise them, as she raised the movie star, and the movie star’s mother before her. She will hold the children at night when they are scared and feed them balanced diets and help them with their homework. When the movie star dies Cara will belong to them. If the movie star does not have children maybe a distant relative will take her. The immunity will not be as perfect as with Cara’s descendants. It is most powerful in the direct line. But someone might still want her. Humans are all related to some degree. The blood always helps, even if only a little.