“Mrs. Mourning? Are you still there?”
“I’m here.”
“You cannot let your daughter die just because you want her to look beautiful. I know the pressure society puts on women to be thin and beautiful. Hell, I make my living off it, but there’s no way she’s going to gain any weight right now, no matter how much she eats. What she will do is die if she doesn’t eat. What do you want, Mrs. Mourning? A live daughter or a thin corpse?”
Another pause. “Okay. I’ll feed her.”
“Oh, and Mrs. Mourning?”
“Yes?”
“Be very careful. The treatment might make her a bit … unpredictable. Don’t let her bite you again.”
“Why would she bite me again?”
“Because she’s hungry.”
9
The flight was maddening. Trevor’s mind was filled with images of carnage. He imagined the legendary actress Alexis Mourning devoured by her only child. He wished he could make the plane go faster. He kept casting glances over at Dr. Ebersol and could see the same stress and impatience etched into his colleagues features, but there was something there besides the worry-seething rage. He was clearly incensed by the situation Trevor had put him-the entire clinic-in. Trevor accepted his role in the debacle, but he wasn’t the only person culpable in this. As far as he was concerned, they had all asked for it: the clinic, Alexis Mourning and her daughter, even Lelani Sims.
They had come to him looking for a miracle, unhappy with what nature had given them. They wanted to be skinny at any cost. He had warned them the treatment had only undergone animal testing, that it was an unapproved treatment. He had warned them all there might be unknown side effects. They didn’t care. Anything to be skinny. So he had provided them with the miracle they were seeking.
Trevor grew up in Northwest Philadelphia, Germantown, the only child of a single mom, a scared white kid in a predominantly Black neighborhood. Every day of his young life had been affected by the lack of money. Years later he still carried the painful memory of hearing his mother weep in the late hours when she thought he was asleep as she tried to figure out how she was going to pay bills more numerous than her twenty thousand-dollar-a-year paycheck could cover. He remembered her working two jobs, coming home exhausted, sometimes too tired to eat by the time she’d finished cooking dinner for Trevor. Even now, he remembered how he felt going to the store to buy groceries with food stamps after his mother lost one of her jobs, enduring the judgmental stares and words of ridicule from the other kids.
One of Trevor’s earliest memories was of walking home from school down Germantown Avenue, passing shops full of food, clothes, records, and toys he could not afford, watching his schoolmates ride by on the bus he could not afford to ride and wave at him or make faces. It was a four-mile walk from Henry H. Houston School in Mount Airy to his little home in Germantown. For Trevor, his choice was to ride the bus or eat lunch. His mother could not afford to buy him a bus pass and buy him lunch. So he walked.
He would leave Germantown Avenue and take the side streets, staring in awe at the beautiful roads lined with sugar maples, fifty-foot white pines, lush willow oaks, and hundred-foot sycamores, huge Colonial mini-mansions creeping with ivy, overlooking sprawling green lawns. Brand-new Lincolns, Cadillacs, Mercedes-Benzes, and Volvos sat in the driveways. Inside, warm and cozy with full bellies, were happy kids with moms who didn’t cry at night.
When Trevor arrived home each afternoon to the dilapidated three-story row home he shared with his mother, he would make himself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and sit down to do his homework while he waited for her to come home and cook dinner. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, when his mother worked her second job, Trevor would make his own dinner and put himself to sleep. He was ten years old when his mother first began working two jobs. Sometimes his mother would wake him up when she got home and would hug him and they would dream together. They would talk about him going off to college one day, getting a doctorate degree and becoming a famous scientist and living in a big house with lots of food and toys like the kids in Mount Airy and Chestnut Hill. Trevor would promise his mother that he would buy her a big shiny new car and take her traveling all over the world. She told him she was working so hard to make sure he could go to college one day and have everything he dreamed of. Trevor never got to buy his mother that new car. She died of obesity-related diabetes just before he graduated high school. Her only wish had been that he make a success of himself, and Trevor was not going to let her down.
When Trevor was in college, he watched a documentary about the two doctors who invented breast implants. They made millions and became celebrities in the medical world. That was the type of success Trevor wanted. But he knew plastic surgery was a dying science. The future was in genetic engineering. What the public called “gene doping” was poised to make plastic surgery-as well as the entire diet and fitness industry-obsolete. The fact that gene doping was illegal was ridiculous in his mind. He had never met a professional or Olympic-level athlete who wasn’t on some form of performance-enhancing drugs. Yet the public celebrated the ones who didn’t get caught and ostracized the athletes who tested dirty. How can there be cheaters when everyone is doing it?
Like “natural” professional bodybuilders, the “natural athlete” has long been a myth. In every sport, from baseball to basketball, football, boxing, tennis, cycling, track, swimming, mixed martial arts, and even volleyball, performance-enhancing drugs are the norm, not the exception. There has been an arms race going on in sports since the sixties, with every athlete struggling for an edge, and in that arms race, genetic engineering stood poised to become a nuclear bomb.
Sports fans want to see records broken year after year, in every sports season, in every Olympics. How do they think that can happen without some kind of pharmaceutical assistance? But the sports industry has to keep up the illusion. Fuck the illusion! Why not make athletes as fast and powerful as they can be? Why not make women as beautiful as they can be? If science can do it, and the public obviously wants it, why not?
Trevor was building up his own head of indignant, unrepentant anger. He knew he would be made out to be the bad guy, crucified by the media, perhaps even incarcerated and/or sued for millions when this was exposed. Despite their efforts to contain it, this desperate flight back to the states to try to avert what seemed an inevitable fate, the media would catch wind of it. It would be the top story of the year if Alexis Mourning got eaten by her daughter because of a genetic weight-loss treatment.
Trevor thought about the others he’d given the treatment to, those he hadn’t contacted yet: the host of a top-rated televised singing contest in LA; an executive chef in Austin; a famous young country singer; a former Republican speaker of the house; an African American talk-show host; a rotund hip-hop artist; two pop-singers who combined were one of the most famous couples on the planet; and at least six others. It was only a matter of time before Dr. Ebersol started asking him about his other patients, and Trevor still had no idea what he was going to do.
“What are we supposed to do when we get there?”
Dr. Ebersol roused from his own deep thoughts. His face seemed to have aged a decade since they boarded the plane. His eyes were vacant, looking through Trevor at some horror from his darkest imagination. Trevor knew exactly what the man had been so intensely contemplating. He was trying to imagine how profound someone’s hunger would have to be to make them eat another human being in the middle of a city with supermarkets and restaurants fifteen or twenty minutes away.
“What?”
Dr. Ebersol’s eyes focused on Trevor as if he was just now aware of the man’s presence beside him. He regarded Trevor with obvious disdain. A sneer of disgust twisted his features.
“I was just wondering what exactly we’re going to do when we get back to the states. I don’t exactly have an antidote. What are we supposed to do here? How are we going to help them?”
That faraway look returned t
o Ebersol’s eyes. He looked like he was going into shock.
“David?”
His eyes focused again. This time he looked less angry. He just looked defeated. “We need to get them back to the clinic or to a hospital, and then you need to figure out how to extract that DNA from their cells.”
Trevor shook his head. “That’s not possible. Once something is part of your genetic makeup, it can’t just be taken out.”
Dr. Ebersol jabbed him in the chest with his finger. “If you put it in there, you can take it out, or put something else in to counteract it. Make another retrovirus, one that will curb their appetite and help them gain weight.”
He punctuated each word with another jab. Trevor rubbed his chest and pouted.
“You want me to just pull that out of my ass? It’s not that simple. You know how long something like that would take? Isolating and extracting the right DNA strand, synthesizing the virus, the clinical trials? Look, I’ve been thinking. Maybe we’re going about this the wrong way. Maybe we should just let this thing run its course.”
“What are you talking about? What do you mean, ‘Let it run its course’?”
Trevor lowered his voice to a whisper and cupped a hand over his mouth so the passengers around them wouldn’t overhear what he was saying. “Let’s say Alexis doesn’t feed her daughter, and the same thing happens to her that happened to Lelani Simms’s fiancé. It seems to me that wouldn’t be such a bad thing. It might just solve all of our problems. She kills her mother, that’s one witness gone, and then she starves to death herself, both witnesses gone. No one is going to trace this back to us.”
Dr. Ebersol was practically turning colors in his effort to restrain his rage and keep his voice at a whisper. “And what about Lelani?”
“If she’s starving like you say she is, she’ll probably be dead before we even get there.”
“And what happens, you fucking amoral imbecile, if they just keep feeding? What happens if Lelani starts making her way through the entire building? What happens if-after killing her mom-Star kills the maid, the gardener, the fucking pool boy? And what about all the others you’ve given this shit to? Have you contacted them yet?”
Trevor slowly shook his head.
“I didn’t think so. What if they start going on a rampage and eating everyone around them?”
“I think we can contain it. They’d probably just raid their own pantries first and then hit the nearest restaurant. I don’t know why Lelani didn’t just order takeout or drive herself to a buffet or something. I don’t think what she did can be considered a normal reaction to hunger, even intense hunger. There are people starving to death in Africa who aren’t eating each other. I say we just monitor them.”
Dr. Ebersol shook his head. “Monitor them? More than a dozen people? And how do you propose we do that?”
“We hire private detectives. We pay them to keep their mouths shut and report anything suspicious.”
“And what do we tell them to do when they see the person they’re supposed to be watching chowing down on their neighbor?” Ebersol asked.
Trevor shrugged. “I don’t know. Tranquilize them. Subdue them. Bring them back to the clinic. I really don’t think that’s going to happen though.”
“And what do we do with them when we get them back to the clinic?”
“I guess I’d try to cure them.”
“So why the fuck wouldn’t we start there? Why wait until they’ve lost their fucking minds and eaten half the neighborhood before we try to cure them?” Ebersol asked.
“Because I don’t know if I can, and if I can’t, what do we do with them? We can’t have a baker’s dozen of the world’s rich and famous drop dead at a medical resort in Cancun. You don’t think that’ll look suspicious? They’d be better off dying in their beds or getting shot by the police. It would be cleaner that way.”
“Getting shot by police trying to eat someone’s kid or something is cleaner?”
Trevor shrugged again. “At least we wouldn’t be involved.”
Ebersol grabbed Trevor by his lapels and shook him. “But we are involved, you fucking asshole! And you think it wouldn’t get traced back to us?”
Trevor jerked away from Ebersol and nervously looked around the cabin. “Shhh! Keep your voice down. We still don’t even know if everyone is going to react the way Lelani did. That was one isolated incident. All we know is that Star Mourning is really hungry. We don’t know for a fact that she’s going to start eating people. We could be blowing all of this out of proportion. Models are fucking crazy anyway. I’m sure Lelani had a lot of problems before I treated her. Maybe the cannibalism thing was an accident.”
“An accident? How do you figure that?”
“Maybe she was just being opportunistic. She got into a fight with her fiancé, things got physical, and Lelani killed him by accident. Then she ate him because he was there, and she was hungry, and he was already dead.”
Trevor could see Dr. Ebersol considering it. It was obvious this scenario hadn’t entered his mind before and he wanted to believe it. Trevor wanted to believe it too.
“Maybe all we have to do is meet with my other clients and tell them they are going to have to eat a lot more than normal, and that’s the end of it. Maybe prescribe some type of high-calorie protein shake or something to eat between meals?”
“I suppose. We’ll see soon if Lelani was just an isolated incident.”
Below them, water gave way to land. San Diego, California came into view, a vast expanse of lights. They would be landing in LA soon. Trevor would be taking a car to the home of Alexis Mourning, and Dr. Ebersol would be continuing on to Austin, Texas.
Neither had a clue how bad the day would end. They had no idea what they were getting into. Not the slightest idea.
10
“I brought you some food, dear. Oh my God!”
The tray of cold cuts, crackers, and pâté spilled from Alexis Mourning’s hands, and a scream tore from her throat. Her daughter was sitting on the edge of the bed, cannibalizing her own hand. Her three middle fingers had been completely removed. The naked phalanges stuck out of Star’s mouth as she gnawed at them, probing them for the last morsels of flesh before moving on to her thumb.
“Stop!” Alexis shouted.
Star let out a wounded cry and then scampered over to the pile of spilled food smeared onto the polished mahogany floor. Star scooped up the pâté and shoved the entire quarter-pound slice into her mouth, chewing quickly and swallowing. She grabbed a fistful of crackers in one hand, cold cuts in the hand she’d almost chewed off, sat on the floor-clearly oblivious to her mother’s presence-and devoured all of it. She continued to moan like a wounded dog while shoveling food into her mouth. A torrent of tears streamed from her crimson-rimmed eyes.
“What’s wrong, Star? You’re scaring me.”
“I’m so hungry. I feel like I’m dying. I need more food,” her daughter cried between bites.
Alexis remembered what the doctor told her about giving her daughter as much to eat as she wanted, but everything she’d ever learned about being a woman rebelled against the idea of letting her daughter glut herself.
“That-that’s not enough food? You don’t want to get fat again, do you?”
It was a ridiculous question. In the last four hours, Star Mourning had lost another twenty pounds. She now had the body her mother had always dreamt of. The jiggle was gone from her belly. It was now totally flat and even a bit concave. Her hips were almost completely gone; just enough remained now to give her a slight curve and emphasize the slenderness of her waist. The dimpled cellulose that had been clustered around her ass and thighs had melted away, leaving stretch-marked skin that hung loosely from her atrophied muscles. A few weeks in the gym was all her daughter would need to tighten up those muscles, and any of the skilled surgeons at the Aphrodite Clinic could easily correct the loose skin and stretch marks, Alexis thought. She smiled appreciatively at her daughter, admiring her increasingly emac
iated appearance, heedless of the gleam of insanity sparkling in the young girl’s eyes, and forgetting the fact that she’d walked in on the child feasting on her own fingers. All that mattered to Alexis was that her daughter was finally skinny.
“I’m starving!”
Star scrambled to her feet and rushed past her mother, heading for the kitchen and the locked refrigerator. She leapt up onto a chair in the parlor and snatched the heavy drapes down from the window. She pulled the curtain rod free from the thick satin drapes while still running toward the kitchen in full sprint. Gripping the thick, wrought-iron curtain rod in both hands, Star took a swing at the lock on the refrigerator, gouging the stainless steel. She swung several more times before the lock finally gave way.
Her mother entered the kitchen behind her just as Star opened the refrigerator and began pulling food off the shelves and scarfing it down. Alexis stood a safe distance away, terrified for the first time that her daughter might be losing her mind. She pulled out her cell phone and tried once more to phone the doctor.
Dr. Trevor Adams didn’t answer his phone. He must still be on the plane, she thought. In desperation, Alexis phoned her psychiatrist.
“Dr. Linder? This is Alexis. I need your help.” Her voice choked and she let out a strangled sob.
“What is it? What’s happened?”
Alexis cleared her throat and wiped away an unexpected sprinkle of tears.
“I think my daughter’s going crazy.”
“Star? What’s wrong with her? Is it her weight again?”
“Yes. I mean, no. Kind of. She keeps eating. She lost a bunch of weight since we came back from the clinic, but she’s eating everything in sight! She bit me and then she ate her own fingers when I wouldn’t give her any food.”
“She-did you say she ate her own fingers?”
Alexis sobbed again. She covered her mouth with her hand and wept.
“Oh, God. Oh, God!”
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