Some Solace For Thy Woes

After his death came the shooting stars, singly at first, silver needle-scratches against the dark sky, and then in their dozens and hundreds. As we watched, everyone joked that a small one must have knocked him in the head; nothing would satisfy his vanity, we agreed, but that he must be killed by a spectacle.

“That’s funny,” said his widow, and we winced, turned to look at the damage we’d inflicted. Dry-eyed, she maneuvered her bulk past the crowd, the hissing train of her black gown silencing her footsteps. A little flock of relatives—nieces, in-laws, maiden aunts—fluttered after her, leaving the church like moths. They probably intended to explain that no disrespect had been meant to the dead man: a lie, I thought, that she would see through even before they caught up to her. We had all meant to disrespect him.

“Pender,” my wife whispered. “Are we going to the wake?”

“Oh, I don’t know…that’s inner-circle stuff, just his friends.”

“He didn’t have any friends.”

“Mera.”

“You know what I mean. I mean, what are we doing at this thing? Were you guys friends? You met him at conferences, you emailed him, you had lunch with him a few times—”

“My publisher had lunch with his publisher. There were a hundred people at one of those lunches. That’s not friendship.”

Outside in the cool darkness at the cab stand, surrounded by the susurrus of his false friends, which I suppose technically included us, I saw the widow again—alone, cradling her pregnant belly, a living shadow against the pale golden stone of the church—and felt a stab of pity. “Tsk. Where are her people? We should go give our condolences.”

“You’re better at that kind of thing, Pen; you go. I’ll see if Massey wants to split a cab home.”

I took off my hat as I approached; what was the protocol here? Did she know me from a hole in the ground? Had Cassian ever said anything to her about me, or was I just another name among a hundred hangers-on, someone he knew just well enough to open a message from?

Her shadowed face was lit for a moment in the flare of a departing cab’s thrusters, revealing it to be composed, her cheeks still dry. She held her hand out—feverishly hot, like many past pregnant friends, as if their bodies had been converted into both incubator and furnace.

“Thank you for coming. I know it would have meant so much to him.”

“My sympathy, Mrs. Boniface.” I hesitated, feeling as if I had stumbled over a low but immovable obstacle, like a root. “God, that was horrible of me. I’m sorry.”

“No no. I’m keeping the last name.”

“Oh! Well, that’s…uh…”

She smiled, surprising me. “Your cab’s waiting.”

I relayed the story to Mera and our friend Massey as we lifted off, finishing with a flourish: “And that’s how I know she definitely murdered him.”

“You should do an essay on him,” Mera said, bouncing in her seat. “You said you wanted to do more nonfiction this year. And he was such a character. Everyone knew him, and no one knew him.”

“And don’t just call,” Massey added. “Get into the house.”

“Oh, for God’s sake. I can do this all over the phone, Mass. Maybe even with email.”

“But you don’t really know someone till you see how they live. Do you want to half-ass this essay?”

“What,” I said, irritated now, “instead of barging into the exact center of someone’s grief? Yes.”

“At least do video calls,” Mera said. “I’ve heard so many rumours about their house.”

“You two are the worst,” I said as they nodded enthusiastically. “You’re vultures.”

#

It wasn’t that they were wrong, the two vultures; it was that both propriety and pity forbade digging up dirt on a man who’d died so recently. But after a few days I found myself consumed by a kind of frantic curiosity, chewed up and spat out by it. Cassian Boniface had been a personality, if not a true celebrity; and it was just as Mera had said: everyone knew him, no one knew him.

He had been an astrophysicist at the Chambers Institute for Space Science, and no one at CISS wasn’t known, in some general way, to the public. They were the thoroughbreds of science—pampered in their cosy stables with catered snacks and unlimited processing time, not like poor Mera in her workaday university lab, everything held together with tape and spare tubing. As married couples, we would have gotten the same Basic every month as the Bonifaces, the exact same numbers ringing up in our bank accounts like clockwork, but Cassian’s job would surely have made ten times that. And he’d given most of it away, everyone said, in exaggerated, spy-movie secrecy. Someone had tried to trace it once, and the effort had petered out from frustration. And of course, the hair, the clothes, the house, the car, protracted jokes of bad taste. Everything but his wife—the startling deposit of real gold in amongst all that pyrite, the beautiful stranger who had showed up one day with no past, no family, and the sapphire on her finger like a frozen blue tear.

Finally, Mera handed me my tablet and booted me out the door, with strict instructions to stay out until I’d stopped moping about my essay and started writing it. Grumbling, I caught a cab to the Boniface mansion, and rode a jerky brass-and-gears cherub-bedecked marble lift up the hill to the front door, clutching a wing and a head to stay on as it twitched and hissed.

As I waited at the door, the security camera craning slightly to frame my face, a faint whistle came from the sky—imagined, surely. No—there. More shooting stars, the tiniest erasures of darkness—skritch!—vanishing in a sudden flood of light as the door opened. I didn’t have time to make a wish.

PREMEE MOHAMED is an Indo-Caribbean scientist and spec fic writer based in Canada. Her work has been published by Analog, Automata Review, Mythic Delirium, Pseudopod, Nightmare Magazine, and others. She can be found on Twitter at @premeesaurus and her website is www.premeemohamed.com.