Radiance

PART FOUR

THE GOLD PAGES

Goddess, as soon as I saw you with my own eyes

I knew your divinity—but you gave me no truth.

Yet by aegis-wielding Zeus I beg thee—

do not make me live on, impotent, among men.

Have mercy on me, for well I know

the man who lies with immortal goddesses

is never left unharmed.

—Homer, “Hymn to Aphrodite”

A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you, the less you know.

—Diane Arbus

There lived an old woman

Under a hill

And if she’s not gone

She lives there still

—Mother Goose

The Radiant Car Thy Sparrows Drew

(Oxblood Films, dir. Severin Unck)

SC4 EXT. ADONIS, VILLAGE GREEN—DAY 16 TWILIGHT POST PLANETFALL 08:49 [3 DECEMBER, 1944]

[EXT. SEVERIN UNCK swims through the murky water, holding one of ERASMO ST. JOHN’S callow-lanterns out before her. ERASMO follows behind with her secondary camera, encased in a crystal canister. The film is badly stained and burned through several frames. She swims upward, dropping lead weights from her shimmering counter-pressure mesh as she rises. The grille of her diving bell gleams faintly in the shadows. Above her, slowly, the belly of a callowhale comes into view. It is impossibly massive, the size of a sky. SEVERIN strains towards it, extending her fingers to touch it, just once, as if to verify it for herself, that such a thing could be real.

The audience will always and forever see it before SEVERIN does. A slit in the side of the great whale, like a door opening. As the documentarian stretches towards it, with an instinctual blocking that is nothing short of spectacular—the suddenly tiny figure of a young woman frozen forever in this pose of surprise, of yearning, in the centre of the shot—the eye of the callowhale, so huge as to encompass the whole screen, opens around her.]

Production Meeting

The Deep Blue Devil

The Man in the Malachite Mask

Doctor Callow’s Dream

And If She’s Not Gone, She Lives There Still

(Tranquillity Studios, 1961, dir. Percival Unck)

Audio Recorded for Reference by Vincenza Mako

PERCIVAL UNCK: I don’t know how to end it. All this time and I still don’t know. I can’t change Rin’s story. But I thought…I thought I could give him a better story. One where he had the means to search and find his fate, the way heroes do. One where he got saved. But answers are all that saves anyone, and I don’t have any. I set the place for the ending, turned down the bed, lit the candles, and the bitch stayed out in the cold to spite me.

MAKO: But it wasn’t ever going to be a real ending. Remember? It was going to be better than the real world. That was the whole point. That was the gift we wanted to make for her. It was going to have weight. It was going to rhyme with the beginning in some ineffable way that real endings never do. We never set out to tell a true story, only a mostly true one. The ending we planned is elegant, if you follow the logic, and “elegant” is more important than “real.” That’s always been our motto, really.

UNCK: The fairy tale thing was never going to work. It’s beautiful, but it can only come at the story obliquely. It can only tell how it felt. It can’t say anything like: “Severin Unck died by electrocution.” It can’t say she didn’t. The language is all wrong. We have all the ambiguity we can eat already; we don’t need more. And anyway, it’s not a child’s story. Or an adult’s. It’s not Anchises or Severin or anyone else, but all of them together, stuck in a room with no idea how to get out.

MAKO: There’s a thought. A locked-room mystery?

UNCK: Huh. Maybe. We started him off as a detective. Maybe we can end it that way, too. Let him detect a little. But what room? We’d need a cell, a vault, perhaps a ship? We tried the grand estate already.

MAKO: Don’t be so literal. Venus is the locked room.

UNCK: Things do tend to come out when there’s nowhere to go.

MAKO: Let the mystery stay, but take the angry noir brooder out. Give it a bit of the old Victorian dash. A lashing of lace and leather. A room full of suspects, a brilliant genius with a flair for the dramatic. And why stick to people who really lived? Give it the shine of magic, a surreal spit-and-polish. Not too much—everyone hates the avant-garde, deep down. But enough to go out with a bang.

UNCK: But, Vince…I’ve got experience with this one. I know the song too well. It’s been sung at me at top volume. I don’t know if I can go through it again, even at the typewriter. That ghastly, desperate night, Mary staring at me like I’d become a hellhound before her eyes…

MAKO: Let’s not talk about that right now. It’s long over.

UNCK: I should have told Severin. Secrets seem so important until there’s no one left to spill them to. I would have told her eventually. I would have found the right time. I remember she asked me once about endings. I told her you could have a story that was nothing but beginnings, but I didn’t know if you could have one that was only endings. If she loved me, she’d have given me an ending I could use. If she’d loved me at all. [long pause] I was a terrible father.

MAKO: You weren’t. Eccentric. Not terrible.

UNCK: I abandoned her. It’s the one capital crime of fatherhood. Mothers can fail a thousand ways. A father’s only job is: do not abandon this child. And what did I do? I let her run wild and never called her back in for supper when the sun got low.

MAKO: Percy…you don’t have to finish this. You can just stop. Severin wouldn’t be disappointed if you didn’t finish. She’d understand. She left her movie unfinished, too.

UNCK: Oh, Vince, no. If I leave it like this…if I leave it, it looks just like her. A poor abandoned creature without an end. If I do that…she’ll think I didn’t love her. I can’t let her think that. I let her think many wicked things about me, but not that. This is how I loved her. She knows it, recognizes it. And I promise you, if she’s anywhere, she hates herself for leaving Radiant Car undone.

MAKO: Mystery on the Pink Planet, then?

UNCK: If you have a “Mystery” title, you’re promising answers. If you’re going to put your cards on the table, there’d better be something on them. Besides, that’s just dreadful on the face of it. “Pink Planet.” You’re fired, Vince. I mean it this time.

MAKO: We have some answers. The rest…we guess. We lay down our best hand. Maybe it’s not a royal flush, but it’s enough to beat the house. And you never know. We could get it right. Stranger things have happened.

UNCK: [whispers] If I say she’s dead, she will be.

MAKO: Then don’t.

UNCK: I want to go back and start it all over again. From the first shot. In the thunderstorm. With the silver basket. I’ll get it right this time. I can do it better. Just one more take.

The Deep Blue Devil

The Man in the Malachite Mask

Doctor Callow’s Dream

And If She’s Not Gone, She Lives There Still:

The Case of the Disappearing Documentarian

Begin with the widest shot possible and tighten it in: infinite lights in the infinite dark. Ten lights—shades of gold, blue, green, violet, red. One, one pink-orange lantern hanging in a wide, endless nothing without ceiling or floor. Every time it turns around, a year flies by. Closer. A city in the lantern, cordoned off by canals like velvet ropes. A single building in the city, almost a castle but not quite, thin and tall and ornamented with tangerine agate pillars, with gargoyles holding hearts in their hands and peonies in their mouths, with windows that face the sea. The doors close and lock discreetly; everyone necessary is already inside.

Begin with the most impersonal perspective, then tighten the aperture: What do the gargoyles see when they look through the windows?

Just before suppertime, in every room of the White Peony Waldorf, the telephones begin to ring. As the primrose and cornflower shadows of Venus whirl like leaves into gold, in every room of the White Peony Waldorf, hands pick up the polished brass receivers on the second ring. Lights come on like an advancing army of fireflies all over the Station, and in every room of the White Peony Waldorf, a lovely, lilting lady’s voice pours out of the telephone:

“If you would be so good as to assemble in the Myrtle Lounge in a quarter of an hour, Mr St. John will present the evening’s entertainment. Refreshments will be provided.”

Adjust the lens: What do the windows see when they look into the rooms?

Dresses come out of closets; steam unwrinkles dinner jackets; shoes and hats are hurriedly located. Just as the supper bell rings, out of every room in the White Peony Waldorf, people emerge—hesitant, pensive, nerves and necklines sparkling. One by one they take their seats on the couches, armchairs, chaises, and barstools of the Myrtle Lounge, velvet on velvet on velvet; gowns and trousers crushing that ash-pale, fruiting moss into the thick upholstery. A gramophone plays some dainty old tune. Murmured conversations dapple the room, introductions are made—many of the guests have not met each other before tonight. Hands fiddle with cigars and cigarettes and atomizers—many of the guests have vices that prefer not to wait on the host. There is perfume, there is sweat, there is talc, there is fear—many of the guests wear all four.

Adjust the lens again. Abandon the impersonal perspective and smash it underfoot like a wedding glass. What do the players see?

Anchises St. John and Cythera Brass sweep into the lounge. The air bursts with a flurry of snapping photographs. She wears a sleek strapless number that rustles silver in the popping lights. Flashes of the palest pink feathers flutter in the hem; a slim triangle of dyed crocodile scales soars up to a daring rosette of amethyst and alarming croc teeth at the point of the gown’s plunging, bare back. He wears a raisin-dark smoking jacket over dove-grey trousers and a shirtfront so white you’d think angels ran textile mills. A deep rose cravat blossoms at his throat, with a tiny tiger’s eye pin to hold it in place, and his buttery-yellow leather gloves shine in the low light. Cythera beams, her posture soft as a shimmy in the dark. Anchises is a picture of health, ruddy, his dark hair glossed and thick, a beard coming in nicely, his eyes bright as the sun glinting on a magnifying glass.

Anchises and Cythera hoist up platters of cocktails from the bar and serve them with smiles.

“Good evening!” Anchises cries, his rich, full voice, a leading man’s voice, bouncing off the moss-drenched walls. “Good evening, and welcome to my little party. I’m so pleased you all could make it! I know some of you have had a long journey, but you have, at long last, come to the end! Welcome to the end! Make yourself at home! Relax, put up your feet, and have a well-deserved drink!”

Zoom in again. Adjust the lens. Tighter. Tighter.

What does Anchises St. John see?

“A pink lady for you, Dad,” the great detective says, and, with a flourish, presents a flute to Erasmo St. John, the man who raised him, still strong and broad as a painting of Hercules, his bright black skin free of wrinkles, of the papery thinness of his last days on Mars; as he was on the seventeenth of November, 1944: twenty-eight years old, in love, well laid, and well paid. “Real gin, all the way from London. And a gimlet with muddled mint and French lavender for you, Mum—now, now, I insist. It’s my party, I get to spoil you.” He places a crystal glass in the slim hand of Severin Unck, sitting cross-legged in a black silk evening gown, trimmed in raven feathers and slit up to her hip. Her aviator jacket drapes over her shoulders; she smokes a cigar. One dark, pencilled eyebrow arches up in amusement.

Erasmo leans over to kiss her. She touches the tip of his nose with her finger. Her skin flickers, crackles where it touches his; she is black and white, a film in flesh. “Thanks, sweetheart,” she says. “You shouldn’t have.”

Cythera plops down in a dashing fellow’s lap. He kisses her cheek. Thirty-seven and in his prime, with blistering black eyes and El Greco cheekbones, he looks just as he did the night before a certain silver basket landed on his doorstep. Two women share his couch. Cythera hands out the goods. “That’s an aviator for Unck Senior, a Bellini for the lovely Mary P, and an old-fashioned for Madame? You’ve got honest-to-Betsy Madrid lemons there, Percy; real Creek Nation peaches in your bubbly, Miss P; Hawaiian sugar and California orange peel in your extremely stiff drink, Maxine.”

Mary Pellam laughs like a toffee fountain and nuzzles the ear of Madame Mortimer. They have the same short blond hair, fine as fairy floss, but Mortimer has come to do business in her best black travelling suit, while Mary, seventeen and sweet as a clementine, wears a gold scrap of flapper froth, lavender lipstick, and no shoes.

Anchises does a quick shuffle over to a long couch mottled like a dairy cow with snowy moss. The tips of the moss have sprouted mauve spores. They smell of warm nutcake. “A piña colada with a juicy wedge of Queensland pineapple for my esteemed Mr Bergamot! A snakebite for Marvin the Mongoose—thank you so much for coming on such short notice—and a Brandy Alexander—served in a punchbowl, naturally—for Calliope the Carefree Callowhale!” A cartoon octopus in spats and a monocle wraps one hand-painted, bright green tentacle around the stem of his cocktail. A cheerful animated mongoose grabs his pint glass with both peppy, overcranked paws. Anchises sets the crystal punchbowl down on a side table so that a caricatured whale can dip her turquoise head into the booze. She sits like a lady: friendly, enormous, bright-eyed head up; long, non-threatening dolphin tail down. A steady spray of healthy milk gurgles up from her spout like flowers in a hat.

“Hey,” says Marvin the Mongoose, “didn’t you used to be a puppet? Or am I thinking of some other cat?”

“I transitioned to animation after my fourth film,” allows Mr Bergamot. “Though what I really want to do is direct.”

“No shop talk,” admonishes Calliope, fluttering her long eyelashes at the boys.

“And we have not forgotten the honoured, beloved, and marvellously morbid among us,” Cythera announces.

“Dead to the world, but still the life of the party—we appreciate how far you’ve come to be with us tonight! Don’t worry, cake will be served after the festivities!” Anchises drops to one silk knee before a man and woman with dark hair very like his own, dressed in a matching summer suit and clean white linen tea dress. She sits at an angle, askew; her spine is broken. He’s donned a smart bowler hat to hide his shattered skull. The couple beam with joy, blush with the embarrassment of sitting at the centre of attention.

“First,” Anchises says, his voice swelling with feeling, “a bottle of 1944 Bordeaux for my mother and father. I hope you don’t mind me calling those two Mum and Dad. Mixed families can get so confusing. But I know where I came from. Mostly. And the wine came from the Loire Valley.” He holds a hand up to his cheek and whispers loudly, “That’s in France.”

Peitho and Erzulie Kephus kiss their son, stroke his face, drink in his height, his confidence, his fine clothes. “How well you look! My baby boy, all grown up,” Erzulie says, and wipes her eyes.

“We’re proud of you, son,” says Peitho, with the special brand of gruffness that hides manful tears.

Cythera Brass selects a slim green libation from her lacquered tray. “A grasshopper for my dear, sweet Arlo,” she croons.

A man in a diving costume, his jaw square, his shoulders broad, and his glasses broken, smiles like a million dollars prudently invested. Brackish water full of stones and slime pours out of the sides of his smile. He can’t help it. He is so happy to see her. One of his feet is missing, the ankle chewed ragged, bloody. “Cyth! What brings a nice girl like you to a place like this?” Arlo Covington, C.P.A., kisses his old boss’s cheek.

Anchises moves down the line. “Max! You old so-and-so! You had me going there on Pluto for a while, but I’ve got your number now. And that number is…a banana margarita! Am I right? Old Horace, I don’t even have to ask, do I? Pisco sour, my good man. Peru or bust.”

Horace St. John, his legs tied up with silk bows to keep the shattered bones at something like human angles, shakes Anchises’s hand. One of his ribs protrudes from his Sunday suit like a white corsage. “You’re a prince.” He winks.

“Iggy, you look gorgeous! How about a stiff Sazerac?”

Santiago Zhang blushes. His mouth bleeds freely; shards of metal spike through his lips, his severed tongue. He squeezes Anchises’s hand joyfully. “It’s my lifelong ambition to try every cocktail known to man—this’ll be number eighty-two!” His lips leave a smear of blood on the glass like lipstick.

“And last but not least: Mari, Mariana, an apricot zombie for mi corazon, my darling, my sugar, apple of my eye and bird in my hand—is it too soon for hand jokes? Well, you know I never had a proper upbringing, I can’t be expected to know these things.” The sound engineer scowls, but she can’t keep it up for long. She grins girlishly and waggles her fingers. Mould covers her hand, her arm, bores into her cheeks. Fleshy fiddleheads yo-yo out of her palm. Maximo gives a mock bow and pulls a tuppence out of Anchises’s ear to show there’s no hard feelings. His eyes hang hollow in his face, his skin ashen, sallow, slick with Plutonian influenza, which is nothing to sneeze at.

“We’ll top that off with a Death in the Afternoon for you, Anki, and a bourbon neat for me,” Cythera finishes with a twirl, her feathers and scales catching the chandelier light and tossing it back up to the painted ceiling.

“You’re incorrigible!” Erasmo hollers. Severin glimmers with silver-screen delight. “Let the nice man make it a Daisy, at least!”

“Never!” cries Cythera Brass.

The company roars laughter.

“Oy, Mr Grumpy Bear, you forgot somebody!” comes a voice like chocolate-covered starlight, sailing over the assembled host.

“Don’t you believe it for a second, missy.” Anchises snatches a final snifter from the bar and fairly hops over to the late arrival. She has always known how to make an entrance. She’s buffalo fur and dragon leather from head to toe, young as the day is short, a plunging neckline and a soaring sweep of hair, her Moroccan features severe and welcoming all at once, her smile brand new, All-American. “A sweet moonlight for my sweet moonbeam, crème de violette for my dreamy Violet, queen of the airwaves.”

Violet El-Hashem takes her due praise and her seat, scootching in between the octopus and the mongoose. She waves shyly at Calliope. Marvin curls up in her lap and begs for belly scratches.

A hush falls. Expectant, nervous silence moves like a hot potato from hand to hand. Maxine Mortimer whispers in Mary’s ear. Percy makes a face at his daughter; she giggles behind her nickelodeon hand.

Anchises quaffs his absinthe and champagne in one gulp and opens his arms extravagantly, taking everyone in: everyone, everything, his life, his past, and his future.

“Mesdames et messieurs, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, octopi and mongooses, whales and wendigos, slatterns and stick-in-the-muds! We are here to investigate the early retirement of one Severin Lamartine Unck. I won’t bore you with the facts of a case you know all too well. Every one of you has a piece of the puzzle, and tonight is the night we put it all together and—if we’re lucky and everyone plays fair—point a finger at the baddie, have a spot of cake, dance it off, and call it a night. Are you ready? Has everyone visited the necessaries? Shall we begin?”

Mary Pellam whistles through two fingers. “Go get ’em, St. John!”

Anchises’s parents clap enthusiastically. Their dead hands make no sound. “We love you, honey!” they cheer.

Marvin the Mongoose hops up from Violet’s lap, spins around three times, bites his own tail, and yelps in his trademark lisp, “I am SO EXCITED. I don’t know what’s happening, but IT IS AMAZING. I want another snakebite! Two ’nother snakebites! HOW MANY YA GOT?”

“Why, hullo!” laughs Violet, scratching him behind one animated ear. “You’re voiced by Alain Mbengue, aren’t you?”

“Sure am!” Marvin puffs out his fluffy chest.

Violet shakes his paw. “My goodness, we’re practically related!”

Cythera produces a brass gong from behind the Myrtle Lounge bar and wallops it with a hammer. “I’ve always wanted to do that,” she confesses. “Enough with the patty-cake and the chit-a-chat! Eyes forward, mouths shut!”

Anchises begins. “Very well! As I see it, there are two possible solutions to this mystery. I shall lay them both out and we shall have a vote. Acceptable? Excellent. Now, the first solution is the easiest one, Occam’s old standby: I propose that Severin is dead.”

“Well, that’s not very nice,” Calliope the Carefree Callowhale harrumphs. She speaks with the voice of the actress who played her—an unsettling experience for the lady herself, Violet El-Hashem, seated one mongoose away. The whale’s long-lashed eyes narrow. “And I resent the implication. I mind my own business; you lot ought to mind yours!”

“That is the trouble, isn’t it, Miss Calliope? We haven’t been minding our own business. In fact, we—human beings, I mean—have rather taken hold of your business and called it our own without so much as a by-your-leave, isn’t that right?”

“Damned right,” huffs the cartoon whale. “How would you like it if I came and yanked on your personal bits while you tried to have a nap and made ice cream out of whatever oozed out?”

“How dreadful!” gasped Mr Bergamot, hiding his face with his tentacles. “I do hope none of these bandits have my address!”

“I’m sure we’re all very sorry,” snaps Mariana Alfric. Flakes of jade-coloured mould fly from her lips. “But we didn’t know. None of us were even alive when the Yue Lao landed on Venus. It doesn’t give you the right to go around smashing up villages and sticking your personal bits in my personal bits!” Mariana waves her tentacled hand by way of illustration. A chorus of approval echoes through the dead.

Calliope the Callowhale sniffs indignantly. “I feel we made it perfectly obvious we didn’t want to be interfered with. Would you trouble a tree for apples if the branches vaporised you instantly? I should think you’d leave it well enough alone! We ought not to be castigated for defending ourselves! Ask her!” Calliope points her animated fin at Violet El-Hashem.

“I don’t know what you think I had to do with any of it,” the radio star opines.

“You were one of the first of the robbers to come knocking at our door.”

“I beg your pardon! I was eight years old!”

“Oh, come off it. We know your voice. We’ve heard it over and over in our heads, sizzling back and forth like incandescent grease in an infinite pan. ‘When I looked upon that new world, splendid in every way and in every way terrible, I looked upon a tiger with stars falling from his striped tongue. I looked and saw my true bridegroom!’ I am not your bridegroom, sweetheart, but I shall be your tiger if I have to.”

Violet El-Hashem laughs long and hard. “Fishie, my love, it was only radio! The first time I set foot on Venus my publicist handed me a script, a contract, a cocktail, and slapped my bottom twice.”

“May I ask a question?” Arlo Covington raises his hand, still in its thick diving glove. Muck dribbles from the corner of his mouth and into his cool green drink.

“Hold your question for one moment, Arlo?” Anchises begs. “I fear some of our friends are getting rather upset. Let’s remember we’re all stuck in this together, shall we? We can play happy families for one evening, can’t we? Mariana? Violet?”

“Fine,” the girls grumble.

“Calliope? Let’s see some of that carefree callowhale we all know and love?”

“Fine,” spits the whale.

Anchises claps his hands together. “Now, Mum, you old scamp, get up here.”

Severin Unck disentangles herself from Erasmo and skips up to the bar, where she fixes herself another gimlet.

“Come on, Mumsy. You can tell us.”

“ARE WE POISONOUS?” holler Erasmo, Maximo, Mariana, Santiago, and Arlo, collapsing into helpless giggles.

But that’s not Anchises’s question. “Are you dead?”

Severin’s celluloid eyes twinkle. She taps her nose with a silvery finger. “I don’t want to spoil it.” She smirks. “Never go swimming for at least an hour after lunch, kids!”

Madame Mortimer stands up, stroking her eye patch as she thinks. “The only reason anyone thought twice about the whole business was on account of the footage of your bloody great eyeball, Calliope. Normally, death requires a body; but there are many exceptions, and this easily qualified. Callowdiving is a dangerous profession at the best of times. The careless are atomized like a ball of af-yun. It’s tragic, but it’s happened a thousand times without all this Sturm und Drang and beating of breasts. Without that little filmstrip, it’s an open and shut case.”

Mary Pellam pipes up. “That, and the fact that Maxie-boy over there has blubbered all over the known universe that he killed her.”

Anchises nods. “Yes, I do think it’s time we had a whack at that, don’t you, Prospero, old friend?”

Maximo Varela does not stand. He salutes with his margarita. “Ah, but I did kill her, my boy.”

“Liar,” purrs Severin from behind the bar. She saunters back to Erasmo, bearing a fresh pink lady. She perches on the seat of his armchair. “Oh, what a big fat liar you are.”

“Are we playing the lying game?” yips Marvin the Mongoose. His whiskers sproing merrily. “I love that game! I’m aces at it! Pick me! Pick me! I killed Severin, too!”

“Who are you?” sighs Peitho Kephus in exasperation. “What do you have to do with any of this? What are you doing here?”

Marvin the Mongoose puts both paws over his mouth. He hiccups. “I don’t know!” he yips. “I hitched a ride with the octopus!”

Max’s plague-slicked face droops. “I’m telling the truth. I’m so sorry, Rin.”

Severin rolls her eyes. “Good grief, Max, whatever for?”

“I hit you.”

“I hit you, too. I’m comfortable with our score.”

Maximo’s sunken eyes fill with rheumy tears. “I shoved you. You fell onto the rocks.”

“I had a bruised arse. Big deal.”

“You fell onto George and smashed it.”

“You’ve got me there. Your honour, Maximo Varela murdered George the kinesigraph camera in cold blood. I saw it with my own eyes. Take him away!”

“Baby, you should listen,” says Erasmo softly.

“I did kill you,” the Mad King of Pluto whispers. “But I did it after you died. On the Clamshell. Erasmo and Cristabel cut Radiant Car for you. As a way to say goodbye or a way to keep you alive, I don’t know. It took them weeks. Konrad and Franco brought food to the darkroom and left it outside the door. We didn’t see them or the boy for weeks. It was like they’d vanished, too. And all the while, I still had that static in my head. That horrible static filled with voices, our voices, sawing on my skull every minute. I can still hear it.”

“You never told me that,” says Erasmo.

“I don’t tell you much, Raz. But it’s true. And then, a month out of lunar orbit, the three of them emerged from their exile. They asked us all to come to the cantina for a screening. They even made popcorn. Trying to make some little happiness. And we watched The Radiant Car Thy Sparrows Drew. It was a hundred and twenty-seven minutes long. When the lights came up, everyone wept. They hugged each other, kissed foreheads and cheeks. In movies and books they always say: A spell had been lifted. But it had. They were in grief. But they would live.”

Severin Unck leans toward her lighting master. Her breathing quickens. “Was it good? Was it good, Max? Did I do okay? Did I make something…right? Tell me it was wonderful. I have to know it came out all right.”

And Percival Unck rises from his seat to take his daughter into his arms.

“That’s my girl,” he says. He kisses the top of her head. It’s nice to have made a person to commiserate with, he thinks, and Severin knows his thought without hearing it.

“I always thought you were going to be taller.” Percy laughs. His voice goes softer. “I always thought we’d patch it up someday.”

“We did,” Severin says. “Just you wait.”

“It was beautiful,” Max admits. “Sad, and terrible, and monstrous. But beautiful. People would have kept watching it as long as they knew how to work a projector. And that’s when I killed you.”

“Oh, Max,” sighs Mariana.

“The static crawled in my head, and my dead, obliterated Mariana crawled in my heart, and I couldn’t get a second’s peace, not a moment’s quiet. The static sent hideous knives of lightning though me, and the lightning spoke with your voice. It said, over and over: They have killed a Nereid. And she was full of roe. Full of roe. Full of roe. Like a nursery rhyme. Once Radiant Car started playing, Mariana began to sing along with the killing of the Nereid in my bones. Twinkle, twinkle, little dragon, won’t you come and pull my wagon. The two of you did not sing in harmony. Utterly atonal. I wanted to die. And when it ended, and you disappeared out of the frame like a cheap jump-cut trick, I heard you say a new thing: A mother is a person who leaves. I knew then how to stop the white noise from burning me out from the inside. The way princesses know things in fairy tales. The way you know things in dreams.”

Maximo Varela cannot go on. He sobs, guilt and lymphatic fluid seeping out of his grey skin. Erasmo finishes his confession for him.

“While we slept, he stole everything. All the reels, the scraps, the outtakes, everything. Even the unusable stuff. He dragged it all up to the observation deck and laid it out in the sun to overexpose. You tried to stop him, Anchises. Maybe you remember. Hopefully not. I don’t know how you could even have understood what would happen to film left in the light, but you tried to grab it all up in your little arms like so much black spaghetti. You held it tight to your little chest and hissed at him. And Max…well, he hit you until you let go. Hit a kid with his fists. Stomped on your hand. I never forgave him. Never will. Radiant Car fried all night. Chemical fumes everywhere. Smoke but no fire. By the time we figured out what he’d done, those four miserable pieces were all we could salvage.”

“I killed you,” Maximo insists. “It was all that we had of you, and I burned it. I turned the big spotlight on it and it burned and I made that child bleed and I didn’t care. I killed the heart of you. But the static burned out, too. No more roe. No more twinkling dragons. No more mothers leaving.

“We have all come here to mend. But there’s no forgiveness in the Wizard’s bag for me.” Varela blinks and shakes his head, as though he doesn’t quite know why he’d said that last bit.

Severin stubs out her cigar on her filmstrip-hand. A glowing hole pops into life in her palm, like an open mouth. “You’re right,” she says. “There isn’t. No heart, no courage, no brains for you, Max. And no supper, either.” She considers carefully, a rakish Rhadamanthus, before delivering her judgment. “Go sit in the corner. That’s your punishment.”

And so he does. The King of Pluto faces the wall.

“I never seriously considered Varela a suspect,” Anchises informs the room.

“That’s not what you said at Setebos Hall.” Cythera snorts.

“I am wiser by far now. No, the evidence leads us to one conclusion: Calliope is the villain in our midst. I accuse you, callowhale! What say you?”

The callowhale tries to snarl, but she had only ever been drawn smiling, so that children would love her. She smiles and smiles, and in her singsong advertising jingle voice she trills, “She stank of death and life and a million never-sleeping eyes! Don’t give me your smug primate smirks, Anchises St. John! You touched our dying limb and took our spores into your tiny, insufficient flesh. A new star guttered in the dream-net of the callowhales. It wanted to live, but it had no vigour. We felt you in us; we thought you were part of us, lost, dying. We came for you, and destroyed the cage you languished in. Only afterward did we understand our mistake. We are very embarrassed about it. But your parents should have taught you to keep your hands to yourself! You touched Severin’s face in gratitude; Mariana struck you in fear—new stars guttering into very little of note on the edges of our dreams. We would not be fooled twice. We ignored them. Told them we were on to their tricks. But Severin came so close, right into my parlour, and her stink woke me like burnt bacon. I told her to go away, and she did. I am not sorry! She is small and I am big. She drank my milk without asking. I will not be made to apologize!”

“What about me?” asks Mariana Alfric. “I didn’t come close. I didn’t get a chance.”

Calliope shrugs her cheerfully drawn shoulders. “You let that doctor cut us out of you. You could no longer live separately. When our child died, you died. It had already converted much of your fluid and tissue. Children are so hungry in their first hours.”

“Your child?” gasps the sound engineer.

“What did you think it was? A disease? A wound? You guzzle our milk and think we never bear young?”

“Ooh!” exclaims Mr Bergamot. The animated octopus slides off his mossy sofa and draws himself up onto his tip-tentacles. “May I have the seafloor? I’m quite keen on marine biology, you know.”

“By all means.” Anchises gracefully relinquishes the Myrtle Lounge bar.

“Lemme help!” squeals Marvin the Mongoose, and scampers away from Violet’s lap.

The mongoose and the octopus clear their throats. They run through a quick warm-up: Do re mi fa so la ti do! Do ti la so fa mi re do! Mr Bergamot produces a harmonica from goodness-knows-where, lays down an establishing A note, and snaps his suckers to a quickstep beat.

“The Lifecycle of the Callowhale!” the mongoose and the octopus sing in unison. And they begin to soft-shoe up and down the bar.

“A callowhale isn’t much of a whale,” sings Mr Bergamot in the key of G.

“Not a bug!” belts out Marvin.

“Not a cat!”

“Not a fungus or a snail!”

The octopus knots four tentacles together into a square while turning cartwheels with the rest. A light clicks on inside the square of suckers, though the Waldorf owns no projector. The film merrily commences, and all watch in wonder as an on-screen Calliope dances on her tail. Mr Bergamot sings his verse:

The great callowhale’s got no stop and no start

Just a hundred million brains and a million hundred hearts

Hundreds of tiny callowhale shapes appear with cheerful popping sound effects, all squeezed into Calliope’s big body. Marvin the Mongoose sings his turn:

They’re all dressed up with everywhere to go

They might look funny but boy, how they grow!

In the film, Calliope sprouts a red bow on the side of her ever-smiling head and a string of pearls round her neck. A knock sounds—is it a date? No! It’s a little boy! It is, in fact, Anchises, drawn like a lovable scamp in a Sunday comic strip. He holds up a squirming mass of fiddleheads and fronds like flowers. Calliope blushes: For me? And then Mr Bergamot and his mongoose assistant burst into a flurry of tap dancing, four tappity-spats and two sets of clackety-claws going a mile a minute.

If you’re having trouble with the maths

Come consult our helpful graphs!

The graph’s bars spring up, fountains erupting from the blowholes of two miniature Calliopes. The tallest bears the title, “How Important a Callowhale Is to the Continued Function of the Multiverse.” A very short, squat one, little bigger than an exclamation point, reads: “How Important You Are to the Continued Functioning of the Multiverse.” A pitiful slide whistle sounds its note, and then they’re off again. Marvin turns a somersault and warbles:

Just think of a long shiny pin!

The music scratches to a halt. Mr Bergamot protests, “A pin! Now that’s just silly!”

“Not as silly as an octopus playing the harmonica,” the mongoose rejoins. A rimshot echoes down the Waldorf staircase from nowhere. The octopus and mongoose join arms and serenade the lounge together:

Now think of a long shiny pin!

Stuck down through batting and muslin!

Cotton and linen, silk, lace, and wool, too!

There’s so much that fantastic pin can punch through!

One of the Calliopes leaps off the graph. Her nose sharpens to a wicked silver point. She dives down from the x-axis and the image shifts: a whale shearing through quilts and blankets and veils, sending up splashes of thread behind her.

The pin holds it together, so nice and so neat

That is a pin everyone wants to meet!

The spaces between Mr Bergamot’s tentacles fill with stars, with worlds none of the living or the dead have seen before, shuffling together like cards, like the squares of a quilt, lying one atop the other. All the while the bouncing cartoon callowhale dives through them.

Well, that silk is a universe and so are the laces

The cotton and linen are vast starry spaces

Where nothing goes quite as it goes where you go

And no one you’ll meet will be someone you know

And the fantastic pin that we mentioned before?

Is a callowhale swimming through infinite doors

The stars coalesce into a cheerleader with GO WHALES! stamped on her megaphone. She throws nebulae into the air like pom-poms.

So cheer on the whales and treat them with care

Don’t tease and don’t poke, don’t startle or stare

Without them, the silk would slide right off the linen

And who knows what trouble we all would be stuck in!

The cheerleader frowns and explodes into a puff of animated smoke. The slide whistle slides again. Mr Bergamot takes over once more, and the image he holds changes to Calliope with an enormous thermometer in her mouth and a cold compress on her head.

Now sometimes a whale can get hurt or get sick

Though their hearts are so strong and their skin is so thick.

But we can’t go without, not for one single day

So they make a new whale to play callowcroquet!

A baby whale appears in a shower of glittery fireworks. It wears a lacy bonnet and shakes a rattle with its fin. Calliope and her baby wind up a pair of croquet mallets and whack Jupiter and Saturn through identical hoops.

Marvin the Mongoose, darling of Capricorn Studios, brings it home, while Bergamot’s tentacles fill with smiling faces:

Oh, the life of a great callowhale is amazing!

We hope you’ll forgive us our upside-down phrasing

And the next time your loved one gets vaporised flat

Just remember the pin, and that will be that.

A smattering of awkward applause picks up. The octopus relaxes his arms, the filmstrip clicks off, and our performers bow. But Marvin can’t resist starting up again, high-kicking into a reprise:

If our song has got you spinning

Just go back to the beginning!

OH! A callowhale isn’t much of a whale!

Not a bug! Not a cat! Not a fungus or a snail!

“May I ask a question?” Arlo interrupts the mongoose’s encore.

“Yes, of course. I’m so sorry,” Cythera says, and she means it.

“I understand the girls. But what did you do to me and Horace? We never touched the kid. We drank bottled water. We never did anything.”

Calliope the Carefree Callowhale blushes, two perfect magenta circles blazing on her turquoise face.

“We ate you,” she says sheepishly.

From the Personal Reels of

Percival Alfred Unck

[MARY PELLAM, dressed in a black leotard and stockings, her clavicle and shoulder blades moving as delicately as swan bones beneath her skin, applies makeup in her gilded mirror. SEVERIN UNCK watches her, recording every stroke of the liner crayon with her dark pupils.]

SEVERIN

I don’t want you to go.

[PERCIVAL UNCK balances his camera, Clara, on a dressing table with small blue horses painted all over it. He steps into frame and kisses Severin on the forehead before bending to hoist her up onto his hip.]

PERCIVAL

Mummy and Papa have to go to rehearsal. She’s going to be Isis in The Golden Ass, which is a bit naughty for your age, I think, but you can watch it when you’re…let’s say eight. There’s a donkey in; he’ll make you laugh. Mummy is going to come in at the end and save the day. Won’t that be wonderful? She’ll wear a lovely big crown with an asp on it and carry heaps of roses in her arms. [pause] An asp is a poisonous snake. But very holy.

SEVERIN

I don’t want you to go.

MARY

You can come along if you like, darling. You had loads of fun when we were rehearsing The Great Train Robbery.

SEVERIN

I ate candy and rode the train. But it was dark in there. In the…

PERCIVAL

In the soundstage, Rinny. [His eyes sparkle. He presses his daughter’s small chin with his thumb.] Rehearsal is just practicing, my precious little hobgoblin. Mummy must practice being both Egyptian and a goddess, which is very hard to do at the same time! Why, it’s like rubbing the top of your head and patting your belly at once. A soundstage is nothing to be afraid of, moppet. Just imagine Rehearsal has a capital R. Rehearsal is like a planet Mummy and I go to, like Earth or Mars. It’s a dark cool planet with a lot of lights and people and toys and trains and candy, and when you go there you get to be somebody else and talk funny and dance a bit and say and do everything three times, because that’s the law. Planets always have their own funny laws, don’t they?

SEVERIN

Yes. I hate it.

PERCIVAL

Well, on Rehearsal, it’s the law that you can only cry if Papa tells you to, or sing a song if Papa tells you to, and you can only fall down and hurt yourself if Papa tells you to do it very tragically, like Eurydice when the serpent bit her. Remember Eurydice?

SEVERIN

She let me wear her hat.

MARY

And Eurydice got right up and had a coffee when Papa said, “Cut!” didn’t she? [SEVERIN nods reluctantly.] She was perfectly all right! My, my, we are just all over serpents today, aren’t we? Come on, kitten! You and me are Egypt-bound!

The Graeae

Transcript from 1946 debriefing interview with Erasmo St. John, property of Oxblood Films, all rights reserved.

Security clearance required.

CYTHERA BRASS: Session four, day three. This will be our last session, I think. How do you feel about that, Mr St. John?

ERASMO: Dandy.

CYTHERA: I’ve enjoyed talking to you.

ERASMO: Then you are out of your mind. There is nothing enjoyable in this. It’s just eating ashes.

CYTHERA: Who checked on Mariana, after you lost contact with Arlo?

ERASMO: Severin and I. Rinny took care of everyone who would let her.

CYTHERA: And what was Miss Alfric’s condition?

ERASMO: She was gone. Dissolved into long, stringy fern blades and spores and mud and withered leafy things. She hadn’t run off. The pin in her knee from when she tried to ride Sancho Panza one last time was lying in the muck. No blood. Just…muck.

CYTHERA: Do you have any thoughts on the infection vector? Severin and Mariana both touched Anchises, but neither the child nor Unck had that kind of catastrophic reaction. In fact, Severin had much more contact than Alfric.

ERASMO: How should I know? Talk to Retta.

CYTHERA: Dr Nantakarn. [sounds of papers shuffling, file folders moving against each other.] It is the opinion of this doctor that, once transmitted, the infection entered a state of dormancy in the Adonis subject. Neither Alfric nor Unck seemed to be contagious—it is possible that they would have become so given enough time. I can offer no firm reasoning as to why Unck showed no ill effects without the ability to take post-contact blood samples. Perhaps she had an immunity. Perhaps symptoms develop at different rates depending on any number of metabolic, environmental, or genetic factors. Perhaps it just liked her better.

ERASMO: I don’t know. Mari was fine until we cut it out of her. Well, not fine, but other than the fronds, she had no pain, no fever. But I think…sometimes I think it killed her because she hit Anchises. It defended itself. Reacted in fear. Severin just held him while he slept. It didn’t have to be afraid of her. I don’t know. I didn’t have any time to think about the science of it.

CYTHERA: You had decided to break camp.

ERASMO: Yes. Three people were dead. We panicked. And we were still out of sync with our own soundtrack. We heard Max reciting Shakespeare to the boy hours after he stopped. Forward and backward. I was securing the gondola in the wind and I could hear Cristabel singing I left my sugar standing in the rain and she melted away…all couched in the static, sunk deep in it, the song a pin down at the bottom of the ocean. Crissy started clawing up her arms with her fingernails. Santiago…well, you must know. The night Severin disappeared, he took one of the machetes and hacked that Type I Ekho Ultra Mic into a hundred vicious pieces and started swallowing them one by one. Konrad stopped him before he finished his bowlful of knives, but Retta had to open up his gut as soon as we got back to White Peony. He was going into shock, bleeding into his stomach, his teeth ground half off, his tongue sliced almost in half. I never heard him speak again. Never saw him blink. He just turned off all over.

We were finished. We could take the kid back to White Peony and get a few more interviews with people who had a cousin’s cousin’s dog in Adonis and we’d have a movie in six months. We could heal. Everything else could be edited in, fixed in post. We had enough film shot on site to make it look like we’d been there for ages. Like we’d been thorough.

CYTHERA: Why do you think Severin went out on that dive? After everything that had happened, everyone she’d lost, why would she go out alone?

ERASMO: She didn’t go out alone. I went with her. I know the cameraman is invisible, but come on. Give me a little credit for existing. Rin decided to go out to the callowhales because we were leaving.

[clears throat]

I’ve had a lot of time. Just…time. Life is long. You come to theories over time, and over time theories become convictions. And it’s my conviction that Severin only went to Venus at all to make that dive. She wanted to see the callowhales. That’s it. The kid, the village, sure. But the callowhales…they’re the only unexplainable thing we found on seventy worlds. She wanted them. Maybe they wanted her. No one wanted her to go, and they all tried—she came out in her mesh suit sporting a shiner that said just how hard Maximo had tried. But I think she made up her mind that night on Neptune when the lights went out. She was going to touch one. She was going to fly through the night and the heavens to the one magical thing in creation and grab onto it for dear life.

You’ve seen the shot. There’s nothing more to a dive than that. You take the boat out and go down. Aylin manned the hoses up top. What I remember isn’t that moment in the red dark, that moment when she was there and then she wasn’t. I’ve seen that happen so many times on film it’s like I don’t even remember it myself anymore. What I remember is the night before.

We were lying on our cot with Anchises between us, for all the world like a family. We were gonna take him home and raise him—we hadn’t talked about it yet, but we were going to. Just like Rin was going to go see the callowhales. She stroked his hair while he slept against her breast and she said, “There used to be a story. A Greek story, so you know it’s good. About three sisters. They were actually the sisters of the Gorgons, too. You know, Medusa. They were called the Graeae. Sometimes they’re painted as beautiful, sometimes as horrible and hideous. They have long white hair and they’re never apart. They have one eye and one tooth between them. They share it. Pop it out of one sister’s socket and into the other. I think about them a lot. I used to dream about them when I was little, when I first read about them. Oh, didn’t I say? Perseus comes along and kills them on his way to killing the Gorgons. That’s how it goes—as soon as there’s anything interesting in Ancient Greece, some arsehole with a magic hat comes along to murder it. I used to dream about it. About the eye. In my dream I was waiting for my father to give it to me. I was blind and cold and I wanted so badly to play with it. And now…and now when I think about it, I think we’re all Graeae. We live in a universe of lenses. We watch and watch. We all share one eye between us, the big black camera iris. We wait for our turn to see what someone else saw on a screen. And then we pass it on. All I’ve ever wanted was just to play with it. I still feel like I’m in that dream, jumping up and trying to grab onto the eye, and I can’t reach it.”

She fell asleep almost before she finished saying I can’t reach it. I watched her. And I could see…little bronze threads on her cheek, tiny fronds, by her hairline, growing like gold veins across her face.

And months later when I touched Anchises’s poor hand, I heard her say it again. One eye. And then giggle like she was three and say oh wow, oh wow oh—and then nothing.

And that’s the end of it—nothing. I didn’t hit her over the head with a tripod and dump her body, though I heard that said plenty once we got back. Always suspect the boyfriend. Maximo didn’t bury her in the delta. I loved a girl and she left me. I don’t know where she is. I want to know. I want to know. But I was there and I still don’t.

Maybe I don’t get to see the end of this show. Maybe I just live out the rest of my days between reels. Maybe Anchises will figure it out. Maybe not. Who knows, maybe death is the darkroom where you get to see it all like it was supposed to come out. Bright and crisp and clean. No shadows unless you want them. But it ended like it started, which I guess is how you know it’s an Unck story. Suckers for symmetry, those two. I left my sugar standing in the rain and she melted away.

CYTHERA: Is that all?

ERASMO: Probably not. I’ll ring if I think of anything new.

CYTHERA: Oxblood will pay for resettlement anywhere you like, Erasmo. And you’ll always have a job with us if you decide to come home.

ERASMO: I’m thinking Mars. Mount Penglai. I was born near there, you know. Didn’t mean to come into this life anywhere but the Moon. Still seems strange that I didn’t pull it off. Mum and Dad were working on Kangaroo Khan, and whoops—congratulations on your bouncing baby Martian.

CYTHERA: Mount Penglai is lovely. The mangoes are amazing.

ERASMO: You’ll let me take him, won’t you? [Cythera says nothing.] He’s worth nothing to you. He’s just a kid. He’s going to be bent into all kinds of unpleasant shapes by this. He needs a father. Or at least someone who can un-pretzel him from time to time. Trust me, you don’t want him. I do. Let me give him a childhood.

CYTHERA: We’ll consider it. May I…may I ask? You wear a wedding ring, but on the wrong hand. Indulge my curiosity?

ERASMO: She didn’t want to get married. Doesn’t mean I wasn’t her husband.

CYTHERA: [pause] Can I get you a last coffee before you go?

Christmas Card,

mailed to C. Brass c/o Oxblood Films,

Yemaya, December 1952

To be included in the manuscript of Erasmo St. John’s memoir, The Sound of a Voice That Is Still, scheduled for publication Spring 1959 (Random House)

Front:

SNOW HO HO!

HAPPY CHRISTMAS

FROM MERRY MARS!

Inside:

Hiya, Cyth,

Well, he’s gone to seek his fortune, and I’m drinking alone at Yuletide with no one else to write to.

I don’t know if he ever loved me, and I don’t know what the thing in his hand means. It never gave him any pain that I could tell. I don’t know if it ever changed much; he started wearing gloves when we were living in New York (what a cock-up that was! Six months of yelling at each other in brownstones neither of us will be able to fish out of the back drawer again) and never took them off. Wouldn’t show me the hand any more than a boy shows himself naked to his father past a certain age.

Not that I was his father. I wanted to be. I did. It would have been…well, there’s no point in dressing it up. It would have been like Rin and me had a kid together. That’s not fair, it’s not a fair thing to put on a traumatized little boy, but we all put something too heavy on our babies.

It moved in his sleep. I remember that, in the days before the gloves. It moved in his sleep like it was underwater. Like it was drifting in a current, a tide that you couldn’t see. I touched it once. He was sick, really sick—he was sick a lot back then. Nowhere sat right with him ’til Mars. He reached out to me in his fever, and he did that seldom enough. I held him tight and took his hands and I could feel it, moving against my palm, like it was looking for something. Maybe purchase, maybe a way out, maybe it couldn’t breathe with my palm against it. But its little tendrils touched my skin and that is the only time I have heard Severin Unck’s voice since the Clamshell made moonfall. I never told him. How do you tell a kid that?

Cristabel got her Russian citizenship six or seven years ago and came out to our little red planet. I bet you saw that coming, didn’t you? She can play the bassoon. I didn’t really think anyone played the bassoon anymore. It’s an instrument out of books and poems and grandads manning the watch on the prow of lonely, starlit ships. It sounds plaintive and kind in the desert dark.

The plain fact is, after everything that happened in Adonis, I could never love anyone who wasn’t there.

I might try to write a book. We’ll see. I’m not much of a writer. Anything more than a title card seems wasteful to me. I spent the best years of my life under the law of silent flicks: Show everything, because you can’t say much. But I think I might give it a go.

It’s almost dark in Mount Penglai. The way my house sits, I can watch the kangaroos out on the red plains. Who knew those funny creatures would take to Mars so well?

The Ingénue’s Handbook

12 October 1947, Eleven in the Evening

Pellam’s Parlour, Grasshopper City

My darling Severin,

You must know I always meant to tell you everything. You deserved to know. It was only that I couldn’t be certain, not absolutely certain, and without certainty, why rock the boat?

Oh, what a dreadful thing to say! I sound like my grandmother, and she had a full set of dentures by forty-five. And it’s execrable wordplay as well. You always gave me a slap on the wrist for punning in your presence. But I know you liked it, you dissembler, you.

I’ve settled on Miranda, of all places. It’s beautiful here, really. Nothing like my old movie. Thaddeus shot Europa-for-Miranda for the tax shelter and it still looks spectacular, but it’s nothing like the gentle blue hills and snowy roofs and bright red flowers no bigger than a prick of blood all over the place.

I have a horse now! She’s not really a horse. Horses on Miranda are the exact colour of absinthe with white hair and rather lion-like paws. Mine’s called Clementine. I thought about naming her Severin, I really did, but it’s an even more unwieldy name for a horse than it was for a little girl, even if the horse does have green lion feet. I bought her from a Mirandese lady I wish you could meet. She comes round quite a bit to help me look after Clementine, and lately she’s been staying longer and longer. My Miranda affair. It’s funny, but she looks just like Larissa Clough in The Man Who Toppled Triton. Do you remember that one? Mortimer gets called to the back of beyond to investigate an assassination, or what have you. They’re all starting to run together.

I miss you terribly. I’ve missed you on and off for half my life. A stepmother’s burden, I suppose. I do hope I wasn’t too wicked. Oh, Sevvy, my lass, there are nights out here when the sky is so full of moons you think they’ll come tumbling down over the grass and roll right through your door, and all I want in the world is to show you around my little house, make you a cup of tea, and ask you, My dearest of hearts, how have you been, really? And you would tell me about your next movie, and Erasmo, and how old-fashioned my silly watercolours are, and who paints their parlour chartreuse, anyway? I’d make you sandwiches just like the Savoy’s. You could toss Clementine a raw rump roast; she likes them especially.

And then I remember, and it’s too dreadful for words.

I always meant to tell you. I’m still not certain, but I’m…certain enough.

Sevvy, your father didn’t shoot anyone. I thought he did; everyone thought he did, though no one would say it. Batty, horrid, bear-brained Freddy Edison shot my Thaddeus, and Percy kept him from spilling it all like a bucket of paint and ruining himself because…well, God knows why Percy ever loved Freddy the way he did. A more undeserving shit of a man was never born. Freddy did it because he thought his wife, Penny, was sleeping with Thad. It wasn’t even in the neighbourhood of true, of course. I knew that, but I couldn’t say how I knew, and I couldn’t understand why Percy was spitting lies whenever he spoke, so I…I ran away. I know I ought to have been braver. But I’ve come to think you only get so much bravery in one lifetime, and if you spend it too soon, you’re all out of fuck it all to hell by the time you really need it.

I knew Thad never touched Penny. Thad never touched anyone of the lady persuasion. When I was twenty or twenty-one, I came to his house to get a few scripts. I came a little early or a little late, I can’t remember which, though I do remember how bright Thaddy’s forsythia bloomed that year. It framed his door in pure gold. I walked right in because I am a rude and graceless creature and saw him kissing Laszlo Barque goodbye. They looked so lovely together, like summer in two people. We all froze like antelope who’ve smelled a hyena. I saw them decide to trust me, and they saw me promise to keep their secret, all without saying a word. We had a splendid afternoon playing gin rummy and complaining, my favourite hobbies.

I never told a soul. Thaddeus knew about me, too, of course. One good confidence deserves another. But I was always a spritely little Naiad; I could flow from men to women and back and forth and it never seemed the least bit strange to me, just lucky. I can hide better than some. Even if I have to come all the way out to a cold black moon to do it. If you’ve married men twice, nobody asks what you think about when the night breeze comes sidling in. And none of us ever forgot how Algernon B-for-Bastard ruined Wadsy Shevchenko just for the fun of it. To sell his wretched little magazine. He’d have been thrilled to shit on Thaddeus’s grave so that no one ever spoke of his movies again without adding: Oh, didn’t you know? Irigaray was nothing but a nasty little fairy! And did you hear how he died? I say good riddance to his sort. They always come to a bad end. No. Not for my forsythia friend.

Oh, I hate everything and everybody. Bother.

But what troubles me is the why. Why did Percy lie?

I think I have it figured out now. Maxine would be ashamed of me. She’d roll her one good eye and scold me. How could anything possibly take a soul this long to think through? So here it is, no more dawdling!

Percy lied because he had a bigger lie in his back pocket. Darling, I believe with all my beat-up little heart that Penelope Edison is your mother.

I found a photograph in Thaddeus’s hand, a photograph of a baby that looked terribly like you. I did know you quite well when you were small. So the question becomes: why would he have it?

I think Penelope couldn’t hold it in any longer. She’d had about a hundred thousand gimlets that night, and she had to tell somebody. Thaddeus listened to all the girls he worked with. He could listen like a funny-nosed, redheaded god of making it all okay. Laszlo Barque loved that about him—I don’t think anyone listened to Laszlo much before Thaddeus. He was too pretty for people to pay attention to what he was saying. So I think Penny must have been showing him a picture, unburdening her soul, and Freddy saw them talking, pasted Thad and Penny together with a few other facts he’d collected over the years, lost his pencil-eraser of a mind, and bang. Those facts being: Freddy went to Saturn for the Worlds’ Fair in Enuma Elish. He didn’t come home for ten months or so. Time enough. Maybe she looked different when he came back. Maybe she felt different. Maybe she stopped wanting babies with him. I don’t know. But he must have suspected her long before that night on the Achelois.

The thing is, Enuma Elish hosted the fair in 1914. And you were born in October that year.

That’s all the evidence I have. I know it’s not much. Percy and Freddy grew up together. Not in the sense of whacking each other with toy fire trucks and eating sand side by side, but in the sense of two young men on the same rocket to the Moon, both of them viciously ambitious and twenty and starving for the world. Even when Freddy turned out rotten as an old banana, Percy still loved him. Whatever part of a person can turn love off is broken in Percy. Oh, I know you don’t think so. Seven wives, after all. But we all left him, not the other way round. Even you. And he still loves everyone he ever loved, I’m as sure of that as I am of the colour of my eyes. It’s only that a real live person can never shine like a movie you haven’t made yet. He must have loved Penelope like a bruise in the soul to betray his friend. And it would have killed him if Freddy ever found out. Possibly literally, considering.

Before you ask, I’m certain Penny loved you. She just got stuck, baby girl, like a needle on a record, and she couldn’t get out of a story with no good end.

For a long time I thought it showed an ugliness in Percy that he never told you. Of all people! But secrets hold a sway stronger than any scruples. You were so bound and determined to put every detail of your life into a microphone and through a camera lens. You insisted on talking when the rest of us were happy with the quiet. Truth, reality, bald honesty—that was you in a tall glass with ice.

He would have told you someday. I’m sure he meant to. Just like I did. Maybe we all just should have used our grown-up voices a little more.

That’s all I’ve got, Sevvy. I hope this letter finds you, somehow.

Clementine wants her evening ride. The moons are all coming up like big pale party balloons. Don’t tell anyone I said so, but I love you and I will miss you till I die. Even if you weren’t my child, you are my daughter, and that’s worth a drink if it’s worth two.

Come home, if you can.

Mary

—

From a Letter Recovered from the

Grave of Severin Unck

How Many Miles to Babylon?:

Episode 974

Airdate: 2 September, 1952

Announcer: Henry R. Choudhary

Vespertine Hyperia: Violet El-Hashem (final episode)

Tybault Gayan: Alain Mbengue

The Invisible Hussar: Zachariah von Leipold

Doctor Gruel: Benedict Sol

Guest Star: Maud Locksley as Gloriana, the Panther Queen

ANNOUNCER: Good Evening, Listeners, if it is indeed Evening where you are. Gather in, pour yourself a cup of something nice, and sit back for another instalment of the solar system’s favourite tale of adventure, romance, and intrigue on How Many Miles to Babylon? Celebrating our thirty-eighth year on the waves and in your hearts, Babylon is a joint production of the United/Universal All-Worlds Wireless Broadcom Network (New York, Shanghai, Tithonus) and BBC Radio, recorded at Atlas Studios, London.

This evening’s programme is brought to you, as always, by Castalia Water Filtration, Wherever You Go, Have a Glass of Home Sweet Home. Additional promotional consideration provided by the Audumbla Company, Bringing Our Family of Quality Callowproducts to Your Table and Your Family to the Stars; Your Friends at Coca-Cola; the East Indian Trading Company; and Edison Teleradio Corp.

Previously on How Many Miles to Babylon?: Our heroine, Vespertine Hyperia, finally wed her beloved Tybault in the Halls of Hyperion, formerly Doctor Gruel’s Sinister Seraglio. Her bridesmaids: two gentle callowhales. Her bouquet: the stars.

VESPERTINE: Oh, Tybault, my long dreamed-of destiny, will I ever feel more joy than I do now in your arms, with all of Venus safe and at peace and our child sleeping soundly in my belly?

TYBAULT: I know I shall not, faun of my fate.

VESPERTINE: But our adventure is not over, is it? There is so much more to do and to dare! The Mountain of Memory, the Fortress of Forty Thousand Wishes, the Dragoon Lagoon! Together we will bring each of them to the welcoming arms of the Crown!

TYBAULT: We will never cease, not even in death. This is our home for all time!

VESPERTINE: Tonight, I shall fall asleep in your arms as I have longed to do for so many years. The night wind will come through our windows and whisper sweet promises of tomorrow. I shall sleep and I shall dream of the world we made when first our eyes met and our hands touched. Farewell, Sorrow! Vespertine is your maid no longer!

The Deep Blue Devil

The Man in the Malachite Mask

Doctor Callow’s Dream

And If She’s Not Gone, She Lives There Still:

The Case of the Reappearing Raconteur

Wide angle. Establishing shot. Slow zoom.

The White Peony Waldorf glows like a candlelit cake. Supper waits under silver domes, ready, but not yet served. A basket of mints sits in the dumbwaiter, its contents all set to kiss every pillow with their neat green foils. The painted ceiling, like a strange chapel, depicts Venus interceding with the Trojans and the Greeks. Armies surround a patch of swamp. The goddess cradles Paris’s bruised body in one perfect arm and pleads for peace with the other. She bleeds from a wound over her heart; her hair is soaked in blood. It is a famous painting, though no one presently enjoying the pleasures of the lobby looks up.

Tracking shot over the labyrinthine rose-and-cobalt pattern of the rich carpet, past the gleaming grand piano, the vases full of varuna flowers and gardenias-which-are-not-really-gardenias. A rowdy group of out-of-towners are making quite the rumpus in the Myrtle Lounge. Such manners! Passersby can hear the uproar all the way out on the twilight-washed street.

“Ate us?” shouts Arlo Covington, C.P.A. He thumps his fist on the helmet of his diving suit. Peitho and Erzulie Kephus cringe away from him; they remember the sudden thump of their own deaths, and they still cannot bear loud noises. “Ate us?”

Calliope the Carefree Callowhale keeps her cool. Her animated lines crackle turquoise to black to ultramarine with suppressed indignation and embarrassment. “I beg your pardon. But what would you do if a roast chicken flew through your kitchen window, landed on your plate, and carved itself with your knife and fork? I daresay you’d fall to, sir.” She blushes her cartoon blush, two magenta circles on her cetacean cheeks. “You walked right into me, Mr Covington. What would you have me do?”

Percival Unck strokes his daughter’s black hair. Her movie-tone skin flickers and skips. They have not stood together thus for so long. Severin presses her lips together. She can hardly look at the crew she lost. She knows the score, but has not yet been asked to put it on the board.

“And what about me?” Horace St. John draws himself up, with great difficulty, on a jewelled cane. His broken, bow-tied legs wobble. “I couldn’t sleep. I committed the great sin of insomnia. The unforgivable transgression of taking a walk instead of having a piss inside my own tent.”

Erasmo St. John puts his broad hand on his cousin’s back. It is cold; Erasmo doesn’t mind.

Calliope hangs her head. “You were an accident. We offer an apology—only the seventh we have ever made.”

“Oh, apologize to Horace but hang the rest of us, is that it?” cries Mariana Alfric, mould flaking off of her skin and floating into the air.

“But what happened to me?” Horace begs. His voice drops to a whisper. “I don’t remember dying.”

“What do you remember?” Anchises asks.

“Leaving my tent. I walked through the village; I smelled the sea air. I thought about my equipment for the next day. I kept walking—I figured Raz would show up at some point, so I went slowly. I walked past the memorial and saw something out there beyond the houses. Beyond the old carousel. A patch of green. Not that much is green on Venus, you know. A green patch, and yellow sunlight as bright as noon, and blue water. It was a pond surrounded by long grass and bluebells and squishy mushrooms. I dipped my hand in and tasted it—the water was fresh. I thought a swim in anything other than saltwater would feel wonderful. I popped in, just for a moment.”

Mr Bergamot does a sad little soft-shoe. “Remember the pin,” he says mournfully.

Calliope speaks up. “We hold countless worlds together. When one of us dies, edges begin to fray and come apart. Worlds shear off, bleed into each other, fly away into nothing, burn out. We leave a hole when we go. Through such holes, other places seep and stain. Shards of those places stick in the wreckage of us. Songs you have never heard, movies you’ve never seen, words as unfamiliar as new planets. Other voices may cry through, orphan voices, unstuck from the mouths that made them. Voices that began in other versions of yourselves and became lost inside us, now seeking a way home. You saw another of our places. If you want to know, it’s a tiny lake outside Tonganoxie, Kansas. It’s not an important place. In your world, it does not even exist—not Tonganoxie, not Kansas, not the lake. You walked toward it. But your body didn’t walk into the bluebells; it broke in ten places on the walls of a well on Venus. You did land in the sun, though, for by the time you landed, the frayed edge had stitched itself up again with you inside it. You were not on Venus anymore. You drowned in Kansas. We do not exist everywhere at once. We are always moving. Pieces of us linger when we leave like a trail of breadcrumbs. Like a staircase. Some parts of us stayed in Adonis after we tore it apart looking for our young. Arlo walked into one. You fell through the edge of another.”

“If I may,” interrupts Madame Maxine Mortimer, removing her sleek black blazer and folding it over the arm of an apricot-coloured fainting couch. “These little get-togethers go much more smoothly when we allow logic to lead the way. We simply cannot have the recriminations before the crime—and the criminal—has been fully examined. We must lay the events out upon our operating table, pour ourselves another schnapps, and dissect them properly.”

Anchises St. John runs his gloved hand through his hair. “I quite agree, Madame. I did say there were two possible solutions, if you recall. Another round, everyone?”

“Mind if I run the bar, Anchises?” Percy Unck asks. “I made my first pennies as a barman in Truro before I managed to stow away on the Jumping Cow and get my arse to the Moon.”

“Anything for my granddad.” Anchises yields magnanimously. Cythera Brass hops up on the bar and perches there, swinging her legs like a kid. Amid much grumbling, the company gathers at the bar.

Severin laughs and holds out her glass to be filled. “You never told me we were Cornish! Or stowaways.”

“Isn’t that the point of leaving Earth?” Percy purrs in his own hidden Cornish accent. He spent so long hiding it away—it feels good to let the old boy run. “Leaving yourself, if you didn’t like yourself—and I didn’t. Making a new person when the old one’s gotten worn at the knees. I met Freddy on that boat. He was running away, too. I suppose I got further than he did.” Percy can’t help but give the bottle of gin a jazzy little flip, catching it behind his back.

“Do it again!” cries Marvin the Mongoose.

“We are indeed Cornish, my little hippopotamus,” says Percy while he pours for Mary Pellam and Madame Mortimer. “Though my mother was half French, and my father half an idiot. Your mother, of course,” he clears his throat, “was Basque. Half, anyway. I believe her mother was Lebanese. There you have it: a map of your blood.” He hurries on, shaking up cocktails for Violet, Mariana, Arlo, Mr Bergamot, and Erasmo with the practiced hand of a juggler. He flips back easily into the voice Severin has known all her life. “Oh, I know I don’t sound Cornish—funny how I thought my voice was so bloody important back then. Then I went and got a job keeping quiet. Oh, but what a glorious quiet it was! Do you know, now that Freddy’s gone, they’re starting up talkies again? It’ll never last. You probably don’t know, Rinny, but Uncle Freddy went and shot himself two years ago. They found him on the beach. Dreadful business, but I think I’m the only one who’s sorry. Take that over to Max in his corner, will you, Mary? Thanks, love.”

Calliope gets her punch bowl last.

Anchises presses on. “Now that we’ve had our intermission, if we can all remember to keep our heads? I know we all have great personal stakes here, but do let us try not to all talk at once.”

Mary Pellam tosses off her third Bellini. “I do believe I’ve spotted a hole in your theory, kid,” she says.

“Oooh, I’ve got one, too!” squeals Marvin the Mongoose. He scampers over to Mary and climbs her like a tree, roosting on the crown of her golden head with his ruddy animated tail round her neck. “You first, you first!”

“Let’s have it, Mary,” says Anchises with a smile. He claps his hands and rubs them together.

Mary pushes Marvin’s fur out of her face and points a long finger at the boy from Venus. “You are not a callowhale.”

“Oh, well done, darling!” cries Madame Mortimer.

“Should I be?” Anchises quirks his eyebrow knowingly.

“Well, it stands to reason, doesn’t it? If that little hickey on your hand is a baby callowhale, and all this happened because they came looking for their wee one, shouldn’t you look a smidge more like Mrs Cousteau over there and a skosh less like Percy’s next leading man? No offense, Calliope.”

“None taken, I’m sure.” The Carefree Callowhale glowers.

“What’s your objection, Marvin?” Anchises inquires.

“Oh, I didn’t have one.” The mongoose giggles. “I just wanted to be one of the gang!”

“You are quite right, Mary. I am not a callowhale.” Anchises begins to walk around the Myrtle Lounge. He thinks better on the move. “Indeed, that pesky detail first alerted me to the presence of a second solution to our communal puzzle. I am either thirty or forty years old, depending on whether one counts the time I spent in limbo in Adonis, and I can assure you I have suffered no ill health, no unusual physiological developments—beyond the obvious, which I will come to in a moment—and only the expected mental disturbances of any traumatized child who has lost his parents, excepting those I inflicted upon myself with a bottle or an atomizer or a film projector. There were times when I wished for all those things. I think I would have known some peace if my fingers had become gas bladders filled with milk, if my mouth had closed over with clammy flesh and I’d grown a blowhole. My life would have begun to make sense. But the truth is quite the opposite. In fact, in recent years—” Here Anchises removes his buttery leather glove and reveals his open palm like a rabbit pulled from a hat. A great gasp goes up from the crowd. The hand is healed. A rough, hardscrabble scar runs across the skin, puckered like a bullet wound. But that is all. Mariana looks down at her own hands, crawling with feathery fronds, their fiddleheads curling and uncurling. “Even this last reminder of that morning so long ago when I found that dying callowhale limb lying, so forlorn, on the beach and…” He trails off, his voice thick. “Forgive me. Even that reminder has gone. So, as they say, what gives? Thus I come to my second solution: I am not a callowhale—but someone else in this room is!”

“Don’t look at me!” cries Mr Bergamot, retracting his tentacles into his body in terror.

“I just played one on the radio!” Violet El-Hashem holds up her hands.

“Oh, all right, it’s me.” Severin Unck grins sidelong, putting one hand on her hip.

“Hi, baby,” says Calliope, waving her blue fin.

“Hi, Mama.” Severin wiggles her fingers.

“What happened to you down there?” Percival Unck pleads. “I have to know.”

“Please, Rinny.” Erasmo looks up at her, hurt and lost and full of an ache like a bullet lodged in a bone.

“The lights went out,” whispers Severin. “The dark tasted like milk. My heart turned into a photograph of a heart.”

“I don’t understand you, darling,” Erasmo says.

Anchises sits down at the gleaming grand piano in the corner of the Myrtle Lounge. He plays a flourish on the keys. Severin walks across the room. She shrugs off her aviator jacket, musses her hair. She slides up to the top of the black grand and lies across it. As she does so, her flickering black-and-white skin flushes into colour, her dress turns a throbbing shade of deep green, her shoes bright gold, her lips redder than Mars.

“How’s your night going, Miss S?” Anchises asks, sliding into the old, comforting patter of a lounge act, his fingers coaxing the keys.

“Oh, not too bad, Mr A,” Severin croons. “I was dead for a little while, but I got over it.”

“Glad to hear it. You got a song for all these lonelyhearts?”

“I just might. It’s called ‘The Quantum Stability Axis Blues.’ You wanna hear it?”

“I’m dying to hear it.”

And so Severin Unck begins to sing, in a thick, low voice like bourbon pouring into a wooden cup.

I met my honey way down under the sea

Where the sun never goes so nobody can see

What my honey,

Oh, what my honey

does to me

Severin rolls onto her back, green sequins pulsing with light.

My honey put the moon on my finger

My honey put the stars on my plate

My papa told me good girls don’t linger

When a honey comes

Oh, when a honey comes

a-rattlin’ her gate

“I never said such a thing,” Percy grumbles.

“I know, Daddy, it’s a song,” whispers Severin, putting her finger over her red lips. Shhh.

My honey he was dyin’ without me

His heart was all locked up but I was the key

I said I should go,

but my honey said no,

Oh, no, no, no,

Let me show you what a good girl can be

Severin slides gracefully off the piano and walks through the lounge. Her green dress fades back to black, her skin to silver. She sits down on Erasmo’s lap; she runs her fingers through his hair. The key changes, and Calliope begins to hum a plaintive counterpoint. Mr Bergamot joins in.

My honey and me floated out on the foam

Still I sighed: I miss my baby back home

How can I leave him so lonesome and blue?

Don’t seem the kind of thing a good girl should do.

Severin snaps her fingers. She presses her knuckle under Erasmo’s chin.

But with honey, ain’t no such thing as leavin’

Anyone I want I can find just like that

So baby, don’t you get lost in grievin’

Wherever you go, that’s where I’m at.

“Because I am a nexus point connecting all possible realities and unrealities,” Severin purrs seductively. “I exist in innumerable forms throughout the liquid structure of space/time, and neither self nor causality have any meaning for me.” She kisses Erasmo as the song ends. Tears slide off his cheeks, onto his chin, and onto her film-shivering fingers, where they burn. “I love you right in the face.”

Severin stands and bows. Marvin the Mongoose throws gardenias at her feet. She holds her hand out to her father, who takes it, and holds it to his breast. He’s sobbing, a big ugly cry, but there’s no shame. In point of fact, there’s not a dry eye in the house.

“I’m okay, Daddy. It’s okay now.”