“Everyone thinks they’re on this big journey now,” Debbie said, refilling her glass. “I’ve had it with the journey. I’ve had it with you people.”

“I don’t think I’m on a journey,” Burt said.

“Self-discovery,” Debbie added. “What a joke. Life’s too short to find out who we really are.”

It was the first time the six of them had got together for dinner in more than a year (since Maria’s diagnosis), and after such a long time (and in celebration of Maria’s remission) they’d expected to have more interesting things to tell one another, deeper things, but they were entering dessert territory now, a cake was on the table, and only superficial topics had been broached: Ervin’s promotion, Jane and Burt’s move to the suburbs, Katherine’s recent purchase of a metabolism-tracking device—a pen-shaped item and the cause of Debbie’s rant.

“How much can you know about yourself, exactly?” she said. “The therapy, the vision quests, the birth charts—do we really need the data on metabolic flexibility, too?”

Jane, in Katherine’s defense, said that, the more you knew about yourself, the more useful you could be to society.

“Bullshit,” Debbie said. “I call bullshit. Knowing whether Kat is in fat- or carb-burning mode doesn’t help anyone.”

As a result of Katherine declining cake five minutes earlier, no one had touched it. No one, Debbie included, really wanted to. They’d all overeaten already, drunk too much, made private plans to atone for it the next day. The cake presented a challenge, it sat there taunting them, and Debbie knew this, that you couldn’t serve cake to a group of fortysomethings without causing ripples, but what else could she have done? Not offered dessert? She got it, no one wanted to put on weight, but this was a gorgeous princess cake, just gorgeous, she’d had to drive all the way to Andersonville to get it from that Swedish bakery everyone talked about. Staring at it now, though, she wondered if the cake didn’t look a little bit like a tit, the smooth half sphere, the small pink marzipan flower nippling the top of it—and, oh, God, did Maria think it looked like a tit? Did Maria still have nipples? Debbie had been meaning to look it up, what exactly it was they took in a mastectomy, but she hadn’t had the nerve.

“I’m not on a journey,” Katherine said. “I just want to lose a few pounds.”

Back in the summer, she’d met a pretty famous actor at a friend’s gallery in L.A., and they’d been dating long-distance ever since. The actor was a little younger than her. She didn’t want people to think they looked wrong together. He was about to come to Chicago for a six-week shoot. It would be the first time they were in the same city for more than a few days.

Katherine changed the subject to the documentary she’d just seen, about flat-earthers, but this topic, too, made Debbie angry. Debbie’s anger at flat-earthers turned out to run deeper, in fact, than her anger at metabolism-tracking devices. It was one thing to feel the earth was flat, she said, but that anyone could believe that a secret of this magnitude could’ve been kept from the public by scientists and governments for centuries, for millennia, even—no one could keep a secret for that long. Didn’t people understand this?

“Why would Pythagoras have lied about the earth being round?” she said. “And Aristotle? And Eratosthenes? Why go to the trouble of pretending to measure the planet’s diameter, going out, planting sticks, tracking shadows?”

“Maybe they just wanted to impress their wives,” Burt said.

“Were those guys even married?” Katherine said. “Weren’t they all gay?”

Debbie rolled her eyes. She happened to know a lot about the Greek wives: Pythias had been a scientist (on her honeymoon with Aristotle, she gathered materials for an encyclopedia they were working on together); Theano (Pythagoras’ wife) had been a mathematician in her own right.

Maria hadn’t said anything in a while. It hadn’t occurred to her that the cake looked like a tit. She didn’t care how accomplished certain wives had been thirty centuries ago, and she hadn’t seen the flat-earth documentary. She couldn’t understand why such a documentary existed in the first place, why someone would bother filming idiots displaying their idiocy. There was something repulsive about it, wasn’t there? About ridiculing people, amplifying their dumb beliefs, so that upper-middle-class Chicagoans like her and her friends could feel alarmed and superior. Most things were aesthetically repulsive to her, if Maria was honest. Her aging friends certainly were. Not so much their appearance (they used the retinol creams and popped the antioxidants, they dyed their hair, they exercised) but their thoughts—had they always been so small? Maria was getting bored of them. She was getting bored of herself, too, but what could you do. You could do one thing, Maria knew, but she didn’t have the guts. And, for all that she’d thought of suicide as a teen, it had surprised her how determined she’d been to survive cancer, to see the world through. (Those were the words that had appeared in her head when she’d been diagnosed.)

“And Eratosthenes was killed by the man whose wife he was sleeping with,” Debbie said. “So maybe bisexual, all those guys, but definitely not straight-up gay.”

Who cared who’d been what and slept with whom? Maria wondered, but she knew that everyone did—everyone but her cared about those two things. She was the outlier. She was so bored that she started wondering what she would take in a fire. She knew what she would take in a fire at Katherine’s place, but what would she save from Deb and Ervin’s apartment if it went up in flames right at this moment? There wasn’t much to get excited about. Everything matched, nothing begged to be noticed. Kat’s apartment was much nicer, Maria thought. She wished they were having dinner at Kat’s. There was art on the walls there, real art, by real painters. Not painters whose names anyone recognized yet, but soon.

Kat was the best of the lot, really. After Maria’s diagnosis, Kat had offered everything she could—a shoulder to cry on, chemo drives, pharmacy runs, ice-cream deliveries. Maria said no to all, but still. She appreciated the effort. She appreciated that Kat had kept trying, too, offering stranger and stranger services as the weeks went on—she could do Maria’s nails, if she wanted, she could read to her, she could teach her piano. The idea of piano lessons offended Maria at first—that she could be expected to learn a new skill while dealing with cancer. Wasn’t cancer itself enough to learn from? she thought. What else would be asked of her? Was she supposed to master Mandarin as well? Meet new people? Yet, mere hours after the piano suggestion, Maria was in the shower, once again fighting the urge to feel the lump (Had it grown? Was it shrinking?), and when she extended her arms as far away from her body as possible, pleading with the fingers at the end of them to stay still and not touch, to refrain from palpating, from inquiring, she realized 1) how thin her fingers had become and 2) that giving them something to do might not be such a bad idea. She started going to Kat’s on Mondays and Thursdays for piano lessons, skipping only one week, when she went in for her mastectomy. Now that she was in remission, she wondered if Kat would want to keep teaching her. Already Kat was less available, but that had to do with the new boyfriend, Maria wanted to believe, not with her newly recovered health. Kat was spending more and more time with Adrian, in L.A. or on set, but she told Maria that she was free to come practice at her apartment when she was out of town—she’d given her a set of keys. Maria took advantage of Kat’s empty apartment every chance she got. Sometimes she even spent the night there, though she never told Kat when she did. She didn’t necessarily practice much piano; mostly she lay on Kat’s tufted daybed, read from Kat’s library, made tea in Kat’s enamelled-steel kettle. Every little thing Kat owned was beautiful. In a fire, Maria would’ve taken the small painting of a woman in a bathtub, which hung in the guest room.

Debbie choked on a sip of wine, and, in the few seconds it took her to catch her breath, Ervin saw an opportunity to open up the conversation. His wife could be hard to stop when she’d had a few, and she always started early when they hosted. (A first glass of wine while she gathered ingredients on the counter, a second while dinner simmered—by the time the guests arrived, she was usually four drinks ahead.) Ervin asked everyone what their favorite conspiracy theory was.

Jane said global warming. Oceans rising.

“You don’t believe in global warming?”

“I thought we were naming things other people don’t believe in,” Jane said.

“Every time I hear about oceans rising, I think about the Steven Wright joke,” Burt said. “ ‘Sponges live in the ocean. I wonder how much deeper it would be if that weren’t the case.’ ”

“Maybe the world would be saved if we grew more sponges,” Jane said.

“Or just one very big sponge,” Katherine said.

She said her favorite conspiracy theory was that Elvis was alive. Ervin said Roswell, and Burt said God, which made Maria uneasy. Not that she believed in God, but her parents had, and she’d tried it herself, a handful of times.

It was going to be her turn to share. She didn’t have a favorite conspiracy theory. What did that even mean? She thought her friends might not insist that she come up with an answer, though. One good thing about her illness was that people had mostly stopped trying to change her mind once she’d said no. Whenever she said no now, everyone assumed the no came from a place of knowledge they couldn’t access, that it was the no of someone who’d seen not exactly the future but something akin to the future, a shortcut to the end, and who knew what was worth her time and what wasn’t.

“What about you, Maria?” Ervin asked. “What’s your favorite conspiracy theory?”

She thought of her parents, who hadn’t believed in evolution, who’d tried to tell her, when she’d expressed a desire to become a paleontologist after seeing “Jurassic Park,” that fossils had been placed on earth by God in order to test people’s faith. Would her parents have called the existence of dinosaurs a conspiracy theory? Would saying “dinosaurs” be an insult to her parents’ memory?

The cake was still untouched at the center of the table.

“Why is it called a princess cake?” Maria asked, but Katherine’s phone rang before Debbie could look for an answer on the internet, and, because it was Adrian calling, everyone went quiet, trying to hear the famous actor’s voice.

“Adrian’s in town!” Katherine said.

“I thought he wasn’t coming till Sunday!” Burt said.

Adrian had taken an earlier flight to surprise Katherine, but had found no one at her place.

“Can he come over?” she asked Debbie. “Maybe he’ll eat the whole cake. Adrian can eat anything.”

The mood shifted in an instant. They were going to meet a movie star! Jane and Debbie both pretended they had to pee, and took turns in the bathroom to reapply their makeup.

When Adrian arrived, Debbie brought him a small plate and a spoon from the kitchen, even though he could’ve used any clean plate or spoon already on the table.

“This looks amazing,” Adrian said. “Did you make it yourself?”

Debbie blushed and said, “Don’t be silly.” She cut him too big a slice, and, as she did that, she thought the cake now looked worse than a tit, looked like a mangled tit. Adrian made appreciative sounds the moment the cake entered his mouth, and Maria assumed that he was acting. Not enough time had passed for flavor to register in his brain.

Jane brought him into the fold by asking what his favorite conspiracy theory was, and Adrian didn’t take a beat to think about it or pretend that the question surprised him: his favorite conspiracy theory was that he had a secret twin. With every new film he made, he explained, speculation erupted online as to which twin had done the work.

“That’s creepy,” Burt said. “I don’t think I’ve heard that theory.”

“The worst part is, I think my therapist believes it,” Adrian said. “I feel like she’s always trying to trick me, always quizzing me to see if I remember this or that from a previous session.”

“Why don’t you fire her?”

“Because she’s really good. She helps me keep the right boundaries between my characters and my true self.”

Maria and Debbie met eyes over the cake. Neither of them found the concept of therapy interesting—they knew this about each other. Debbie, besides despising the idea of self-knowledge, believed that she was too complicated for therapy; Maria felt the opposite, that one needed an interesting personality to take to a shrink and that she didn’t have one. Her dreams didn’t contain sophisticated layers of meaning, for example. Before a trip, she dreamed that she was packing a suitcase. Every time she quit smoking, she had pleasant dreams in which she smoked.

“I think that’s more of a rumor than a conspiracy theory,” Katherine said, about Adrian’s secret twin.

“What’s the difference?”

“I’ve always wondered how rumors start,” Jane said.

They thought about it as a group. Did a rumor start the moment someone came up with a story? The powerful men in an office, the bored children behind a tree? Or did it start only once a certain number of strangers had heard it? What was that number? It had to be tricky, launching a rumor into the world which you knew would get warped and amended, something whose nature it was to be distorted. The main beats of the story had to be foolproof. The first people you told it to had to be picked with utmost care. Burt wondered how many rumors got nipped in the bud—for every successful one, how many failed to take off?

“And why did the rumor that I have a twin make it?” Adrian asked. “What’s so fascinating about that?”

Maria figured that he wasn’t comfortable when a conversation strayed from him for too long.

“Are you kidding?” Ervin said. “Two Adrian Kerrys! That’s the definition of hope for the ladies.”

“And the gentlemen,” Katherine added. “Adrian is quite popular among the L.G.B.T.Q. community.”

They agreed that rumors, like conspiracy theories, played on hope. Hope that there was always more to uncover, more to life than they’d been told, more meaning. More life. Everything had to be more than it was, to have a secret layer that only truly enlightened people could see. Even the darkest of conspiracy theories held a promise.

“I guess I can see the hope in the twin theory,” Debbie admitted. “Or even in Roswell. But where’s the promise in flat earth?”

“Oh, Lord. Not this again.”

“I’m serious! Who would feel better if we suddenly were to find out that the earth is, indeed, flat?”

“The hope is to discover that everyone has been lying to you,” Katherine said. “Which then gives you an explanation as to why your life sucks. The hope is to put the blame on someone else.”

“It gives you a chance to give up, too,” Jane added. “If everything you were told is a lie, then you’re free to give up on the sheep life you’ve been living and start anew. It’s the ultimate fantasy.”

“I don’t have that fantasy,” Burt said. “Why does everyone always want to quit what they’re doing?”

“I don’t know, Einstein, why did you quit med school? Because it’s hard!”

“That’s not why I quit,” Burt said.

“Everything’s fun for a minute, then it gets hard,” Jane insisted.

Maria wanted to ask why Burt had quit med school, but Adrian jumped in before she could.

Cartoon by Carolita Johnson

“I just played a heart surgeon in an indie film,” he said. “I observed a couple surgeries back in May, to prepare for the role. That stuff is wild.”

Maria’s mastectomy had been in May, and though she knew it wasn’t her surgery that Adrian had attended, she became uncomfortable at the thought that it could have been.

“What type of surgery did you observe?” she asked.

Adrian was going for another slice of cake.

“Just a couple valve replacements,” he said.

“Did you have to ask for the patients’ consent?”

“They were so psyched to let me watch.”

Maria struggled to find a response to this. She glanced in Katherine’s direction for help (Was her boyfriend serious? Did he really think that his presence had made open-heart surgery better for the patients?), but Katherine was focussed on the new slice of cake on Adrian’s plate.

“I’m going out for a cigarette,” Maria ended up saying, and her friends looked at one another. Were they supposed to stop her? She’d never been a heavy smoker, but after her diagnosis they’d all been relieved to hear that she’d quit.

“You sure you want to do that?” Jane asked. “I didn’t know you’d taken it up again.”

“I’ll come out with you for one,” Adrian said.

From the balcony, which was right off the dining room, they could’ve kept participating in the conversation, but Maria slid the glass door shut behind them, which muted her friends. She needed to be away from everyone for a minute. That was, in fact, the main reason she’d started smoking again—a cigarette was an excuse to get out. People, even nonsmokers, understood that a smoker needed to take a cigarette break once in a while. What they seldom knew was that the break was also one that the smoker was taking from them. She resented Adrian for following her out.

“Can I ask you something?” he said, lighting Maria’s cigarette before his. She didn’t like it when people lit her cigarettes for her—lighting your own cigarette was half the fun.

“Ask away,” she said, then looked down at the street, three floors below.

“What do you think Kat sees in me?”

Maria wondered what it might feel like to be so self-involved. She doubted it could be all that pleasant.

“Katherine is pretty private,” she said, unsure why it felt important to use Kat’s whole name. “We don’t really talk about these things.”

“What do you talk about?”

Maria thought about it for a moment. The past few weeks, they’d mostly talked about Maria’s apartment. She wanted Kat to help her redesign it—she couldn’t stand the way it looked anymore, the sad eggshell-colored walls, the smooth kitchen cabinets.

“Neither of us talks very much,” she said.

The wind in the trees made a sound that reminded her of the hospital, the pillow they’d given her there. Whenever she’d turned her head, the pillow had made this unnerving sound, something between a ruffle and a squeak, like it was filled with Styrofoam bits.

“We did talk about you once,” she remembered. “I asked her about actors, if she thought it was easier for actors to accept the idea of death, because their youth had been recorded on film, their energy preserved forever.”

“Forever?” Adrian said. “Who believes in that?”

He said he didn’t think humans were going to last very much longer. His youth, as Maria had put it, would exist on film for a while, but soon no one would be left to watch it.

“All humans fantasize that their generation will be the last,” Maria said.

“Believe me, I’m aware. I work in Hollywood. Every other script I get is an end-of-the-world story. The movie I’m shooting right now is an end-of-the-world story.” Maria showed no curiosity about the plot, so Adrian went on: “I didn’t say we were going to be the last. Maybe humans will stick around for thousands and thousands of years, but it’s a known fact that we’ll disappear at some point. We don’t know how yet, that’s the whole thrill, but we know that we will. And then what difference will it make that I was once young and did my own stunts in ‘Last Pursuit’? Or that I was in the film adaptation of ‘Cat’s Cradle’?”

Maria had never seen any of Adrian’s movies. She didn’t suspect they were very good.

“I think, after someone dies, there’s solace to be found in moving images,” she said. “For the family, at least.”

Adrian said that she might be right. His mother had died when he was young, and he found it sad sometimes that there was no footage of her, only a few photos, and photos didn’t help you remember someone as well as home videos did.

“What did your mother die of?” Maria asked.

“Cancer.”

“What kind?”

He hesitated to say it.

“The kind you had.”

So, Kat had told him a bit about her. Maria looked away from the street and at Adrian, but she couldn’t make out his expression. There were no lights on the balcony, and his face was turned toward the moon and a flock of birds heading for a warmer climate.

“I wonder if birds also have conspiracy theories,” Adrian said. He’d read somewhere that people who studied birdsong had noticed slight changes in a flock’s repertoire after certain migrations, as if bird stories and vocabulary were amended according to what they’d learned from a trip. “I wonder if they have gossip.”

“Do you like birds?”

“Not really,” he said. “They creep me out a bit.”

“Me, too,” Maria said.

Especially since dead birds had started showing up on the sidewalks again, she added, as they did at this time of year. She’d seen her first dead warbler of the season just the day before, and that always felt like a bad omen. She couldn’t understand why migratory birds insisted on flying through Chicago on their way south. Studies had shown that Chicago was the most dangerous place for them. Every fall, they got confused by the lights and reflections. Every fall, thousands of them hit windows and died. It seemed as if their birdsong should’ve included “Avoid Chicago” by now, she told Adrian. “Avoid Chicago at all cost.”

“But maybe Chicago is part of their mythology,” he objected. “Maybe their vocabulary does include something about the dangers of Chicago, and they know something bad might happen there, but it has to be part of the journey. Like, they know that it’s dangerous the way we know that smoking and drinking are dangerous. We still do it.”

The wind in the leaves made that Styrofoam sound again. Maria shivered. When she came home from the hospital, she threw away all her pillows; she’d ended up not using the noisy hospital one, and so she realized that pillows weren’t necessary for sleep, as she’d been led to believe they were since childhood. That the human need for pillows was just another lie.

“The real question, though,” Adrian said, “is, do birds know that they’re dinosaurs? That they’ve been around so much longer than us? Do they have any clue?”

Maria found it odd, this shift to dinosaurs. Adrian’s commitment, since he’d stepped out on the balcony, to talk about the nothingness of humanity, the specks of dust they all were, made her question if he treated every change of locale as a new scene. He’d seemed so interested in himself back at the table.

“I used to wonder about that, too,” she admitted. “I used to wonder if birds carried some kind of collective memory of the asteroid.”

“Right? We always talk about the species that were wiped out, we mourn the T. rexes and the brontosauruses, but when I was a kid I was obsessed with the ones that remained, the birds and the turtles. The fungi. I always wondered what it must’ve been like for them, to survive all those years alone in the dark. If they carried any sense of responsibility, or guilt. I think they did. I think they still might. Maybe that’s why I find it hard to look at them for too long. They embody a form of regret—what the world could’ve been.”

Maria thought his last line cheesy, and stilted—something he might have read in a bad script. But then maybe it was hard not to be cheesy when you talked about birds.

“My parents believed that the world was six thousand years old,” she said.

They might have also believed that birds merely sang, she realized now, were constantly cutely singing—not alerting one another to potential dangers, not retelling old stories and cautionary tales.

“Six thousand years is still a good chunk of time,” Adrian said. “It’s still a frightening amount to consider.”

Maria thought that was a nice thing to say. Or maybe it was condescending to her parents. She couldn’t tell. Her cigarette was almost finished, and she didn’t want to go back inside thinking about her parents, or about time, how much there had been and how much was left. She asked Adrian what it was that he saw in Katherine.

Adrian turned toward the window, as if he needed to look at his girlfriend to remember what he liked about her. She and Debbie were animated in conversation, Debbie making hand gestures like Let me stop you right there, Katherine leaning forward to say what she was going to say.

“Kat . . . she doesn’t think about this stuff,” Adrian said. “She doesn’t think about geological eras, what she’s bigger or smaller than. She’s content. It’s an amazing thing to see.”

Maria wondered if he knew about the metabolism-tracking device. It didn’t seem to be on the table anymore. Perhaps Kat had hidden it before he arrived.

Katherine broke up with Adrian before the end of his first week in Chicago. Back at her place after filming a stunt in which his character was thrown through a bay window, he’d talked for too long about his nostalgia for sugar glass, a type of prop that had been replaced by something called breakaway glass. He just didn’t like the resin in the breakaway glass as much. The stunts weren’t as fun. Katherine couldn’t find it in her to pretend to care. The split was amicable. Adrian moved into Soho House that very night.

He was supposed to spend the next few days filming action scenes on Lower Wacker Drive, but heavy rain flooded it, and production adjusted the schedule: a monologue that Adrian had been dreading was moved up by three weeks. He was now expected to give it to the camera in about an hour.

“You’re right,” he said to the mirror in his dressing room. “I am a physicist.”

Would the audience believe this? Well, Adrian reasoned, they would already have been asked to buy the idea that, after Russia tested secret new weapons in Siberia, the earth had started spinning faster on its axis.

“I understand the science,” he went on. “I know what is happening. What I don’t know is how to explain it to my kid. I don’t know how to tell my kid that if the earth keeps spinning faster and faster, that if the numbers keep rising at the pace we’ve been seeing, it won’t just be satellites going off track, it won’t just be shorter days and constant jet lag, tsunamis and plants dying and horses going mad. If my projections are correct, we’ll reach terminal acceleration in a week. We’ll become weightless, which will be fun, sure, but only for a split second, before we start flying around like bloody—literally bloody—confetti. We’ll hit the walls in our houses and die, we’ll collide with buildings if we’re outside, or trees, or other bodies, already dead bodies, just floating in the air. Is that what I should tell my kid? How do I get him ready for this? I’m a physicist, yes, but I’m a father first. Now, tell me, what equations can I solve to prepare my boy for this kind of death?”

Later in the script, Adrian’s character did have a talk with his son, another twenty lines he wasn’t looking forward to learning, especially given how much he disliked the child actor they’d cast to play the son. The kid had been chosen for his resemblance to Adrian, supposedly, but Adrian couldn’t see it, was insulted that production hadn’t found a better match.

His assistant knocked on the door. They were waiting for him on set.

Walking to the soundstage, Adrian heard a flapping noise and looked up at the thirty-five-foot ceilings. He spotted two pigeons amid the rigging, looking down at the set. Their puffy chests brought to mind plump ladies at the opera, passing judgment from the comfort of a private box. He wasn’t fond of pigeons, but seeing birds where they shouldn’t be always cheered him for a moment. There was security to go through to get into Cinespace, but the pigeons hadn’t bothered with it. Maybe they’d take the El and go to an indoor mall later, or to the airport, or to the movies. He’d never seen a bird in a movie theatre, but it had to have happened.

The makeup artist did some touch-ups to his forehead, and Adrian tried to focus on his lines, to get in the zone. The only thing he liked about the script was a scene, much later on, in which his character prepares for the erosion of gravitational power by strapping pillows against his and his kid’s chests, arms, and legs. He looked forward to shooting that scene, and the ones that would follow, in which he’d hang from cables in front of a green screen, padded in pillows. He hadn’t known Maria when he first read the script (he hadn’t even known Katherine), and he would only ever think of her once more: when the time came to shoot that pillow scene. When they’d gone back inside after their cigarette, Maria had told the table about her newfound discovery that people didn’t need pillows to sleep. She presented her act of throwing away all her pillows as a grand cathartic gesture, a step toward freedom, but her friends looked troubled by it. She couldn’t go to bed without pillows, they said. They all seemed to believe it was unthinkable.

Adrian stood on his mark and waited for the director’s go. The pigeons were still up there, but they were restless now, they seemed to have sensed that something was about to happen. Perhaps they were debating flying down toward the set for front-row seats.

The set today was a physics lab. There were many fine details, but there was also a gigantic periodic table of the elements hanging on the wall. Adrian didn’t think that a real physicist would have a poster of the periodic table in his lab, but his doubts had been brushed away. “It communicates,” the director said. ♦

This is drawn from “One Sun Only: Stories.”