Radiance

PART FIVE

THE RED PAGES

The radiant car your sparrows drew

You gave the word and swift they flew,

Through liquid air they wing’d their way,

I saw their quivering pinions play;

To my plain roof they bore their queen,

Of aspect mild, and look serene.

—Sappho, “Hymn to Aphrodite”

In the end, everything is a gag.

—Charlie Chaplin

The Man of the Hours

13 June, 1971

The afternoon sun knocks politely at the doors of Mount Penglai. It wears a soft orange dress with red buttons and a gold sash.

Mount Penglai meant to be a metropolis, but it got a little lost along the way. You can still see evidence of its grander destiny: a pronged glass hotel rising like a trident from the central business district: the mammoth bronze qilin statues outside Anqi Sheng Theatre whose marquee, on this particular day, reads: Mr Bergamot Goes to France. The city lies in the Chinese hemisphere, fed by the happy canals of the Mangala Valles, not so far from the enormous orange cone of Nix Olympia, a kindly volcano the size of Bulgaria that never makes any trouble. Prosperous kangaroo ranches dot the outskirts, and that’s about the size of the wealth around here—the fancier folk just didn’t want to live so far from Guan Yu.

Or too close to Enyo, after everything. It’s only five kilometres down the road.

Vincenza Mako knocks politely at the door of a large and handsome house. She is, by coincidence, wearing the same outfit as the sun. Orange, red buttons, gold sash. A man built this house because he wanted a place to try for happiness. Behind Vincenza, mango sellers and ice hawkers make the first market-cries of the day. She is nervous, a little. She has come bearing a gift: a box containing several reels of film.

Anchises St. John answers the door. The real Anchises St. John. Vince only met him once, when he was small and unable to speak. He turned out very tall, with shaggy dark hair, striped now with grey, soft lines around his eyes, a prominent nose. Not handsome, really—though Vincenza’s standards are skewed by the bounty of available beauty on the Moon—but at least interesting looking.

“Vincenza?” he asks, smiling uncertainly. He is a man unused to company, to appointments, to strangers.

“You can call me Vince. Everybody does.”

Anchises makes lunch for the two of them: ’roo steak, fried dumplings, and red beer. They watch the reels together out in the garden on a huge white bed sheet. Anchises grows sunflowers and moonflowers side by side. They race each other, up the fence, toward the sky.

The title card reads: Radiance.

Anchises doesn’t talk while the movie plays. The images reflect in his eyes, moving in his iris, shadows and light. He chuckles a few times.

“What do you think?” Vince says when it’s done. Anchises brings out goji-chocolate cake and coffee on plates with tropical fish painted on them. Crickets (which are not really crickets) hum and chirp.

“I’m not a critic,” Anchises says with a shrug of his shoulders.

“Come on. It’s you up there. You must have an opinion.”

“Well…it’s not really a movie, is it? Just pieces of one.”

Vince sighs. She wraps her hair around her hand, tying it into a knotted bun in one quick, assured movement. “Percy couldn’t figure out how to tell it. He never finished—the studio killed his funding and he just…stopped. Of course, you never really finish any movie, you just turn the camera off. But it was time to go, for him. The Moon wears on you after a while. I wonder if you can guess where he retired?”

“White Peony Station,” Anchises says, without missing a beat. “With Penelope Edison.”

“Bravo. They’re living at the Waldorf. When we filmed the song and dance numbers there, he said it felt like home. And after Freddy died, she just sort of melted back into everything. Into Percy’s life, into her work, into herself.”

“You’re not going to release this, are you? It’s a bear.”

“No studio; no distribution. But he wanted you to see it. Without an audience, it doesn’t exist. If a movie shows in a theatre and there’s no one to see it, does it make a sound?”

Anchises watches his moonflowers opening one by one, the night wind picking them up and blowing their petals open, perfect, white as screens.

“I was actually a detective for a while,” he gets up to fetch himself a cigar, cuts it, lights up, settles down again. “On Callisto. Though I guess you know that. I was a little of everything. I think I always knew I’d end up back here. I was happy here, with Erasmo. Safe. I don’t think I showed it much, but I was happy. I made sure I saw a hell of a lot before I came home. I was drunk most of the time and I did my best to get punched on every planet I could, but I’ll be damned if I didn’t see a hell of a lot. I even went to Pluto, just like you said. You did your research.”

Vince smiles, shrugging slightly, as if to say: Thanks, but you have no idea.

“Max wasn’t quite that well organized when I got there, though.” Anchises St. John turns to look Vince in the eye. His gaze is still sharp. “How did you know kids used to call me Doctor Callow? And about the frond on the beach?”

“Do you remember a little girl named Lada? She was the same age as you.”

Anchises rubs his forehead. Tears form at the corners of his eyes. “I’m sorry. I do try, it’s just…”

“Don’t worry. God, it was thirty years ago now, anyway. Longer, um, for you, I suppose. Lada Zhao’s family moved to the Japanese sector about six months before the last Nutcake Festival. She remembers you very fondly. She has a photograph of you, standing next to the frond. She says she told you not to touch it.”

“You didn’t put her in your movie.”

“It seemed a little on the nose, to have an actual Greek chorus there to warn you.”

Anchises swirls ice cream around the top of his cake with his spoon. It melts slowly. He doesn’t wear gloves anymore. His scarred hand has a tan. He doesn’t speak for a long time. A few coyotes—which are not really coyotes, but have two brains, and plates on their backs like furry stegosauruses—howl out on the plains.

“Can I keep the prints?”

“Of course you can.”

“I…I like the Anchises you made. He’s better than me. He has a lantern jaw and a mission. And he gets to stand next to Severin. To play a song for her. The way he talked to everyone at the end…I could never talk like that. I’m no good with big groups of people. They frighten me. Everything frightens me. But some things I can frighten back. Mostly kangaroos.” He looks up at the evening coming on, very blue and clotted with stars. “I wish it had never happened, Vince. I wish I’d been a diver. I wish I could have taken care of my parents in their old age. Sometimes I even wish I’d moved Earthside, so I wouldn’t have to eat this shit every day.” He gestures at his ice cream, made from Prithvi Brand Premium Callowmilk. “But if it had to happen, I like what you made better than what I made out of it. I’d like to keep him. I can wear him on Sundays. He got his answer, in the end. I’ll take his, since I never could find mine.”

“He had two. We never filmed the vote. Which one would you choose?”

Anchises St. John finishes his cake. Voices are coming up the walkway toward the house, musical, lilting voices.

“Not much of a choice, is it?” he says. “Erasmo and Cristabel will be here in a moment. They always bring gin. Would you like to stay to dinner?”

Vince takes his scarred hand in hers. She squeezes it. “Very much.”

Goodbye

Look at your hands. The light on them. The light that is a small boy, head bent, turning in circles around your palm. Your fate line. Your heart line. Him.

One of the crewmen shaves in a mirror nailed to a cacao-tree. He catches a glimpse of Severin in his mirror and whirls to catch her up, kissing her and smearing shaving cream on her face. She laughs and punches his arm—he recoils in mock agony. It is a pleasant scene. You have seen it before. You will see it again. It is the best of her you hold in your hands.

There is no such thing as an ending. There are no answers. We collect the pieces where we can, obsessively assemble and reassemble them, searching for a picture that can only ever come in parts. And we cling to those parts. The parts that have been her. The parts that have been you. Your chest, your ribs, your knees. The place where her last image entered and stayed. We have tried to finish Percival’s work—to find the Grail, to ask the correct question. But in some version of the tale, Percival, too, must fail, and so must we, because the story of the Grail is one of failure and always has been. He did not finish his film. We could not finish it for him. There is no elegy for Severin Unck showing in a theatre near you.

But there is a reliquary.

What you have seen in this shadowed room, this quiet corner of a Worlds’ Fair where every tiny rock has sent its best representatives to fly banners and wave, is the body of Severin Unck. All her pieces, laid out for viewing. It does not live—we are not Victor Frankenstein, nor do we wish to be—but it looks like a woman we once knew. Look at her.

Now, look at my hand. I will hold it up. And look at yours. How many of you wear gloves? One glove? Two? More and more, every year. For the space is not smooth that darkly floats between our earth and its morning star—Lucifer’s star, in eternal revolt against the order of heaven. It is thick, it is swollen, its disrupted proteins skittering across the black like foam—like milk spilled across the stars. And in this quantum milk, how many bubbles may form and break; how many abortive universes gestated by the eternal sleeping mothers may burgeon and burst? Perhaps Venus is an anchor, where all waveforms meet in a radiant scarlet sea, where the milk of creation is whipped to a froth, and we have pillaged it, gorged upon it, all unknowing. Perhaps in each bubble of milk is a world suckled at the breast of a pearlescent cetacean. Perhaps there is one where Venus is no watery Eden as close as a sister, but a distant inferno of steam and stone, lifeless, blistered. Perhaps you have drunk the milk of this world—or perhaps I have, and destroyed it with my digestion. Perhaps a skin of probabilistic milk, dribbling from the mouths of babes, is all that separates our world from the others. Perhaps the villagers of Adonis drank so deeply of the primordial milk that they became as the great mothers.

I dream of the sea. Always the sea.

Perhaps we are all only pieces. But we are stitching ourselves together, into something resembling a prologue.

Go out into the Fair. Into the light. Breathe the lunar air. Eat, drink, and be happy, for you have reached the end—which is not really the end.

The Howler and the Lord of the World

FILM REEL FROM THE ENYO SITE ON MARS

[INT. A cinema. The seats glow a deep, heart-like red. Cherubs with the heads of fish frame the screen. SEVERIN UNCK sits in one of the seats, soaking wet. She looks confused, upset. She shivers; her teeth chatter. She turns to see if anyone else is in the theatre, but she is alone. When she turns back, MR BERGAMOT is seated next to her, a green cartoon octopus wearing spats and a monocle.]

SEVERIN

Uncle Talmadge?

MR BERGAMOT

I’m afraid not. But this was my favourite of all the bodies you remember. I like his appendages. [MR BERGAMOT flourishes his tentacles.] Can I get you some popcorn?

SEVERIN

Who are you?

BERGAMOT

Who you came for. You stuck a bloody great camera in my face, remember?

SEVERIN

Sorry.

BERGAMOT

No, you’re not.

SEVERIN

I’m sorry it hurt you.

BERGAMOT

We were already hurt. Would you like to watch a movie?

SEVERIN

Always.

[A film begins on the huge screen. The camera swoops down out of the starry sky to the surface of Pluto. It is not our Pluto. There are no flowers, no cities, no glowing carousel bridge to Charon. This Pluto is tiny, without an atmosphere, a mass of blasted craters. A YOUNG GIRL walks through the barren rocks. Her hair is white, with bronze kelp growing out of her scalp alongside it. Her skin is made of scratched ice. She is crying. Blood drips from the hem of her dress.]

SEVERIN

Who is she?

BERGAMOT

That’s me. My big-screen debut. Callowhales exist throughout everything that has ever existed or will exist. We look different in each place where existence occurs. Think of them as sets, if it helps. Vast, infinite, enclosed realities where anything may occur, yet actions taken in one—say, The Atom Riders of Mars or Universe 473a—do not affect any other—say, Universe 322c or The Girl Who Made Fate Laugh. A hundred million sets together make a grand studio. The whole of existence.

On your set, we look like callowhales. That has proven somewhat unfortunate. Our milk was not meant to be ice cream. In another six or seven generations, humans are going to look very interesting. But we do not interfere. We do not resist the progression of events on any single set.

On another set, we look like mountains. That is safer. In another, we look like several hammers in one particular woodworker’s shed. The woodworker likes sandalwood best. He doesn’t know why he never chooses to use those particular hammers. On the set you are seeing now, we look like her.

SEVERIN

What happened to you?

BERGAMOT

What happened to me happened on another lot entirely. There, we look like the colour red. I became very sick. It wasn’t anyone’s fault. No one did anything to make it happen, at least not on purpose. For us, causality is meaningless. A cow kicked over a pot of glue—perhaps that killed a callowhale. Perhaps it did not, but will 1.5 million years from now. I began to cough. My coughs have echoes upon echoes. You get sick, too—think of me as having the measles. I am young; the stronger among us would not even notice the measles. I ran away from being sick. This is where I stopped running. I was so tired.

[The YOUNG GIRL falls to the stony ground of that Plutonian wasteland. The scene changes. The YOUNG GIRL falls to the ground on Mars. This Mars is not our Mars, either. There are no kangaroos sunning themselves on Mount Penglai, no mango sellers, no moonflowers. Nothing but dust and red sky. The air is poisonous. The YOUNG GIRL crawls, dragging her fingernails on the rocks. She dies slowly. She dies crying and shrieking. By the end, her mouth is full of red dust.]

BERGAMOT

That is where I died.

SEVERIN

[squinting] Is that Mangala Valles?

BERGAMOT

Yes. But a different Mangala Valles. In the place I am showing you, no one can live anywhere but Earth.

[The camera shows a solar system without electric lights—save on one glowing world. Dark Mars, Neptune, Venus, the Moon, all many, many miles further apart than we know them to be. No Orient Express, no Grand Central Station, no bright cannons firing into the black. All those worlds, dead and empty, with no air, no oceans, no rivers, no trees. SEVERIN covers her mouth with her hands.]

SEVERIN

Oh…Oh, God. What an awful, lonely place. No buffalo, no Enki floating on the ocean, no circuses on Saturn, no movies on the Moon. How can a place like that be? How can they bear it?

BERGAMOT

Have you ever seen a movie?

SEVERIN

You’re joking.

BERGAMOT

Do you know what a movie is, though?

SEVERIN

Is this a riddle?

BERGAMOT

A movie is a ribbon. A long, long ribbon with thousands of pictures on it. Each one slightly different, so that when you run through the pictures very fast, they look like they’re moving. But when the movie is playing, the thousands of pictures are all still there on the ribbon. They just look like one picture. There are a million million frames, each one of them only a little different, and callowhales move through those frames like a cigarette burn in the corner of the image. Each frame is a world; a universe. Some of them are full of panthers. Some are full of dancing. Some are so sad I think you would never stop crying if you saw them, far sadder than this one, with its teeming Earth. You and Venus and your lover and your ship and the Moon and your father are only one frame, and there are ever so many more than twenty-four per second.

This frame has only one living world. It is where I died. Sometimes we are not very tidy when we die. Pieces of my body washed up in every possible reality. A scale here, a pneumatocyst there, a frond on a beach near a village called Adonis. I spasmed all the way through my death. When I got sick, I shook and shivered, and my shaking and shivering happened not to this Pluto, but to the one you know, to a town called Proserpine. When I died, I screamed in pain, and my screaming happened not to that cold Mars but to a town called Enyo. We have no manners when we are sick. I am ashamed.

SEVERIN

If you died, how are we speaking? Am I dead?

BERGAMOT

I would prefer you not to be dead.

SEVERIN

You and me both, buddy.

BERGAMOT

This octopus, sitting with you, is just a piece of my body washing up, like the others. It will dissolve, eventually, like the rest. I wish you could stay here forever with us under the sea.

SEVERIN

But I can’t. I have to go back. I have people to look after.

BERGAMOT

You were vaporised at the point of contact. You cannot go back, only forward. Back and forward are nonsense words, anyway. But you can still look after your people, if you want to.

You do not understand what a callowhale is. You have never seen like we see. In some places, we look like a camera. Like an eye shared between three women. Like a story about seeing and being seen.

[The screen shows a parade of images, of scenes, each lapping at the next like a wave. ERASMO in a small room with an espresso, agony and anger and exhaustion on his face. MARY PELLAM sleeping next to a green creature with lion paws. MARY as a child in Oxford. PENELOPE leaving a basket on the doorstep of a grand house. PERCY and VINCE, arguing over a script, swimming naked in a lake on the Moon. PERCY and FREDDY arguing; Freddy running off with PERCY’s gun, shooting THADDEUS IRIGARAY, weeping. MAUD LOCKSLEY and ALGERNON B washing blood off a floor. ERASMO and ANCHISES eating biscuits on Mars, laughing. ERASMO and CRISTABEL jogging together in the morning. MARIANA sleeping in a morphine haze. MARIANA singing to the dragon SANCHO PANZA in the broiling sun. SEVERIN, very little, trying to work out who is telling the story to whom. Many more flash by, millions more. Wars that come sooner in one universe come later in another, but come all the same. There are great rockets instead of airplanes; battles stretched by transit windows and orbits until they fray to pieces, leaving fleets abandoned in the night; more and more; human bodies sailing further out, past the solar system, filling with milk and starlight until fiddleheads open out of their navels, blossoming with flowers; great-grandchildren playing with CLARA without understanding what she could ever have been, more; until SEVERIN is crying; until she puts her hands over her face.]

BERGAMOT

Buck up, baby blowfish. Just puff up bigger than your sadness and scare it right off. That’s the only way to live in the awful old ocean.

[SEVERIN looks up. She laughs.]

BERGAMOT

Why are you laughing?

SEVERIN

I just…I really wish you could’ve met my dad. I wish I could tell him it really was an ice dragon, after all. [She wipes her eyes.]

All right, mister. Put me in the picture.