Keri sold pots but lived off family money. She had a recurring dream in which she would see people she knew, often children, huddling together frightened while she heard a series of pops. One by one, their heads would explode, or, in a variation, little bloody holes would appear in their otherwise undisturbed bodies.
Tall, strong and often dressed in clothes that resembled combat fatigues, Keri looked like a futuristic woman soldier from a science fiction movie. Her hair was brush cut and dyed a pale blonde.
She hesitated between thinking that these dreams were manifestations of her rage and that she was the reincarnation of a Nazi member of the squads responsible for shooting Jews. She associated with members of a cult who encouraged her belief in reincarnation. She gave them money but could never decide to live with them in their brownstone on West 89th Street.
She knew that she was an angry and abrupt person with poor social skills. Her few friends were people more tenuous than herself who depended on her and could withstand her abuse and neglect.
She hated her father and never spoke to him but the funds transfers continued regularly whether she spoke to him or not.
Keri told people that her father molested her as a child, but they didn't believe her.
Keri was a talented potter and sold to galleries and private collectors. She was even more interested in the glaze than in the shape, and she made pots which remind you of an evening sky, the desert at morning, a mudbank glittering with fishscales just exposed by the sea, and a cloudy ocean seen from space.
Ken Copeland never knew Keri was ill, though he thought she was a bit strange, because they followed a very circumscribed routine. She would call him and if he was available, he would come over and have sex with her in her apartment. Afterwards, she would tell him to leave and would go back to work. He liked her wildness; though most of the women he was drawn to were smart and highly functional, there was room in his gallery for a woman who wouldn't speak.
Since Keri never told him anything personal, Ken never knew about the shooting fantasies or about Keri's conviction that her pots were becoming malevolent.
She broke off with Ken in a rage one day and stopped having sex with anyone.
Increasingly, she was making pots that struck her as being evil objects, but she could tell from the shape and would pull them apart before putting them in the kiln.
She received a letter from Samantha Lazare one day informing her about Ken, and she wondered if her malignance had killed him. The next day, she fired a pot which, when she saw it, scared the shit out of her.
Everything about it was slightly misshapen, but not enough to make it trivially ugly. Instead, it looked like an object which has been warped by its attraction to a powerful object in another dimension. The glaze was too deep and red. It looked completely different than what she intended. When she moved to destroy it, the thought occurred to her that she was that pot, and by smashing it she would kill herself.
It was Keri's last pot. A few months later, when she could no longer take care of herself, her father moved Keri to an expensive institution in northern California, where he visits her regularly.
In his house, in a room which no-one else is allowed to visit, is a private museum of his daughter's work. Ten pots are lined up in chronological order, from her optimistic college work to the last red one.
You can trace the progress of Keri's disease in the pots.