Radiance

Self-Portrait with Saturn

(Tranquillity Studios, 1936, dir. Severin Unck)

(ACCOMPANYING MATERIAL: RECORD 1, SIDE 1, COMMENCE 0:37)

SC1 INT. LOCATION #3 NAVIGATIONAL CABIN—DAY 483 AFTERNOON [3 SEPTEMBER, 1935]

[FADE IN: Pilot’s nave of the good ship Stone in Swaddling Clothes, 1600 hours. Six hanging lanterns are tuned to low afternoon. Portholes show the glittering ice flow of the Orient Express speeding before and behind: Earth’s affectionate nickname for the steady, stalwart currents and eddies of ether and frozen debris cradling the Swaddling Clothes in advantageous gravitational tracks and the kind of acceleration no engine could muster. Jupiter shines ahead: Grand Central Station. There the long silver craft will loop around and lurch forward with renewed, breakneck momentum, the final leg to Saturn little more than a controlled fall from Jupiter’s great height. But the giant planet is still small, no bigger than a lonely cellar light bulb in the distance. Readouts display all well. Lights pulse on and off, slow and steady, the heartbeat of the ship.

SEVERIN UNCK curls up in the plush astronomer’s chair with a globe of cider to suck and a knob of af-yun palmed in her large hand. A casual habit now, but one she will never quite kick. She chews tiny peels of it as she talks, carving them free with a dark fingernail. Most prefer to smoke it, but the fumes would interfere with the instruments. She wears a pearl-grey sari; her eyes sport heavy black shadow and liner thick as a zebra stripe. Her short hair has gone frizzy from the static charge in her cabin and she looks tired. Tired but excited. Scrupulously maintained shipboard muscles show in her arms, her stomach, and the stony calves she dangles over the arm of the chair. Exercise on Earth and exercise in transit do not make the same bodies. SEVERIN has spent half her life in the sky. There is a longness to her, a hyper-Vitruvian extension anyone would recognize. Her skin is the odd blue of all natives of Earth’s Moon, the natural result of long-term exposure to the colloidal silver present in the entire lunar water supply. It appears on black and white film as the distinct soft charcoal grey sported by every star and starlet since the first ingénue took a bow with the Earth rising behind her.

Nine months on the ice road this time. Only another fortnight to go. Nine months with the same twenty-seven souls: her seven-member skeleton film crew and the twenty-strong mummers’ troupe SEVERIN hoofed to Saturn as a show of goodwill to the locals. Entertainment is as dear as bread on the outer planets.

Her delivery is natural and thoughtful, as though she has just pulled up that velvet chair to have a chat with us. Almost out of frame, a multicoloured script rests on the floor of the nave. The original draft pages are white; new scenes and major edits are a range of colours: blue, red, green, gold, pink, lavender. On film, they all flatten to silver and black. She turns the pages with a casual, dangling toe. It’s a subtle movement, but it’s there. It has a rhythm. A little dance between her body and the script. Whatever we are about to hear, however casual it sounds, none of it is unplanned, unedited, or unrewritten from the first earnest pause to the last well of tears.

SEVERIN adjusts George’s aperture. Her face comes very close to the camera—we can see the bags under her eyes and the first lines starting at the corners of her lids. For a moment, it is possible to imagine what she will look like as an old woman. Satisfied, she slots a sound cylinder into place and rests her feet against the long-distance radio. The film fuzzes and judders with the motion of the ship as Severin records the opening monologue of her first and perhaps most personal film.

SEVERIN smiles.]

SEVERIN

I used to look up at night and dream of the solar system. I know, I know—who didn’t? But your own dreams always seem so special, so terribly yours, until you grow up and figure out they’re just like everyone else’s. How perfect and beautiful and silent and dead each planet hung in my heart! All nine names, written in squiggly, shaky handwriting, glowing inside me.

[FADE to a series of drawings. They are the works of a child, but an exceptional child, who might make something of herself someday. The beginnings of an understanding of chiaroscuro, a hard handle on perspective. A male hand turns each drawing aside. It wears a wedding ring, but on the wrong hand. The child’s planets go by in schoolhouse order: Mercury, Venus, Earth, the Moon, Mars and the asteroids, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto. Forests stick out from the surface of the Moon like sunbeams; flowers ring Pluto like a doll’s curls. Susanoo-no-Mikoto, the eternal hurricane, glowers red on the face of Jupiter. The crayon strokes slash so deep they almost rip through the paper. Venus is pink and green and ringed with a hoop of whales joined tail to tail, a kindergartner’s idea of whales: big tails shaped like wide lowercase m’s, flumes spouting merrily from blowholes, jolly grins with disconcertingly human teeth.]

SEVERIN (V.O.)

I imagined them all empty and waiting for me, gorgeous, radiant playground worlds: the red plains of Mars, Neptune’s engorged oceans, still pools in the jungles of Venus, Pluto’s lilies shining violet and white. They turned in the dark without sound, like a movie. No one lived there; no one could. When I stepped on them I would be the first, a pioneer-girl with a whip and a gun, like Vespertine Hyperia in the old radio dramas.

That notion lasted longer than it should have. When my father took me to Mercury for principal photography on The Hermit of Trismegistus, I reasoned that Mars still held herself pure for me. When he bundled Maud Locksley to Mars for Atom Riders of Ma’adim, I knew that Saturn, at least, would cast her rings around me and hold me close. When I got to the outer planets for the first time, well, no one even looked out the windows to see ringrise anymore. Someone snapped off a picture of me standing in the observation car and crying like an idiot. I’ve still got it pasted on the inside of George’s case. I look at it sometimes, try to really look. To remember everything I hoped the solar system would be. Self-portrait with Saturn. The photographer sold a copy of that miserable snapshot to Limelight and I hated myself for forgetting that I have never been unwatched, unwitnessed, unrecorded in my whole life.

[CUT BACK to SEVERIN, sipping from a cider globe. She looks out the porthole and speaks in profile. Dollops of ice cascade past. They look like stars, more like stars than the stars themselves. The camera can barely pick up those dim stellar pinpricks washed out by the greater light of the ship and a million glassy cold shards.]

SEVERIN

This is how you learn to see: You put together a crew. No one can see a damn thing clearly with only two eyes. Pilot, lighting designer, director of photography, production assistant, sound engineer, astronomer, local guide. You pay Mr Edison through gritted teeth and try to recover your finances by launch. You choose good kids, strong and a little gullible and intrepid as Argonauts. You check their references and they’re just as bright and perfect as stained glass. You get them all in a tin can together, set the clock for nine months transit on a favourable orbital window, and pour out the last real bourbon you’ll see for a year. Settle in for a long sail in the dark. And the first thing your kids do when the cameras are off and our big dumb blue mama is drifting away in the portholes is lean in close with eager puppy eyes and say: Come on, Severin, you can tell us now—who’s your mother, really?

But it doesn’t matter, that’s what the rags don’t get. And my crew does read the rags, sucks them down like sweets.

Let me tell you something terrifying, instead.

When I was seven, I saw Mary Pellam in The Seduction of Madame Mortimer—do you remember that series? Madame Mortimer, lady detective, having lost an eye on Uranus in The Saturnine Solution, finally meets her match in the dashing person of the master criminal Kilkenny, known to me as Igor Lasky, actor, Lothario at large, and frequent occupant of our liquor cabinet and back bedroom. Oh, how I loved those murder flicks! And Madame Mortimer best of all, with her bouncing blond curls and cruel laugh and hidden pistols and leaps of pristine logic. Madame always got her man. This was after Clotilde Charbonneau left us quite bereft and ran off with Clarence Feng, darling of the Red Westerns. Papa and I were both disconsolate. And I looked at my father and I pointed at the screen and I said: I want her for my new mother.

And he got her for me.

It took almost a year of gentle, insistent courting to seduce Madame Mortimer for my personal use. But Mary Pellam moved in by Christmas and had taught me to shoot like a bandit queen by Easter. The night after my father put a ring on her finger I sat up quite late, thinking very seriously about what had just occurred. I could ask for anything and receive it. Even people. Even a mother. I had a terrible power. I could easily become a monster like Kilkenny. Monstrous in my appetites, and each of them satisfied without end. I was reasonably certain I didn’t have a choice in the matter. I’d never seen a movie about someone with power who turned out nicely. If you have something, well, you’ve got to use it. I cried myself to sleep that night. I had been given a destiny, and that destiny was to be a villain, when all I wanted was to be Madame Mortimer.

Mary Pellam was a good mum. She taught me the Four Laws of Acting, which she had made up over gimlets at the Tithonus Savoy one afternoon so she could make a little scratch teaching between MM features.

[SEVERIN breaks into a glossy imitation of Mary Pellam’s crisp Oxford accent.]

No one will listen to a word you say if you don’t gin up a System of some sort. Everyone loves a System. Laws, Rules, Keys. You can sell Laws. You can’t sell, “Just be good at this for God’s sake; I’ll need a drink if you’re going to keep on like that.” If there’s a System to follow, that means it’s easy—why, patting up a good strawberry tart is a harder job than acting! If only we had known all along! Jolly good we’ve got you to set us straight, Mary. Offer up a System and everyone relaxes.

Mother Mary’s been retired for a while now, so I won’t be stepping on her side gig if I reveal her secrets. Miss Pellam’s Four Immutable, Immaculate, Ingenious, Imitable Laws of Acting:

1. Show up on time.

2. Bring your own makeup.

3. If you’re going to sleep with someone on set, make sure it’s the director.

4. Remember that the expressions and vocal patterns you are committing to film will become synecdoches. That’s a big word for a little mouth like yours, Rinny. It means something little that stands in for something big. Your smile will stand in for all human happiness. Your tears will be a model for everyone else’s sadness. Wives will copy your red nose, your shaking voice, the shape of your aghast mouth when they beg their husbands not to abandon them. Rakes will arch their eyebrows the way you do, grin just like you, tip their hat at your hat’s angle, and, with the weapons you give them, they will seduce the folk of their choice with ease. The more successful your film, the wider these synecdoches will spread. You have a responsibility to the people who will repeat your lines, wink your winks, imitate your laughter without knowing they are imitating anything. This is the secret power that actors hold. It is almost like being a god. We create what it is to be human when we stand fifty feet tall on a silk screen.

So you’d better be good at it, for God’s sake.

Mary Pellam was pretty as a playbill and hard as a hammer, but she was a philosopher, too. I used to stand next to her in the upstairs bath and we’d practice our faces in the mirror.

Determined. Betrayed. In Love. Awed by the Numinous.

She had 769 faces in the bank, she said, and was working on Number 770. She kept a little notebook with a green velvet cover that had all her Systems inside. But she wouldn’t write in a face until she had it deep down, locked up and loaded into the bones of her face. As I was only little, I couldn’t be expected to have so many, but no time like the present! If I applied myself, I might have as many as twenty under my belt by the time school started in the fall. Try Number 123, Attentive Reporter. Or Number 419, I Know Whodunit but I Won’t Say Yet, No Sir. And Number 42, Is That for Me?, useful for class birthday parties and being asked to jump rope with the bigger girls. Don’t think school isn’t a movie set, kid. It’s the most cutthroat location you’ll find ’til you work for your father. You’ll be competing for roles and you won’t even know what they are, or when auditions are over and you’re stuck with what you’ve got. I’d shoot for Professional Understudy. That way you can move from clique to clique undetected. Play chess until you can beat the club champion—but don’t move in for the kill. Let her have her pride. Move on and learn how to outqueen the queen bee.

Pretend you’re Madame Mortimer, she told me. Perfect your disguise case and you can go anywhere.

I remember touching her green velvet notebook. It had a brass lock on the side. I thought it must contain everything you could ever need to know about being alive. I was sure Mary had a System for anybody I wanted to be somewhere in that book.

She and my father weren’t well matched, though. That’s what happens when you let your kid pick your wife. He’s lucky I didn’t pick the dinosaur from Attack of the Cryptolizards, a B-flick my Uncle Gaspard made on the cheap and I loved like most children love their blankets.

Obviously, Gaspard Almstedt wasn’t really my uncle. He was Ada Lop’s agent’s lover, which made him family. Eventually, Madame Mortimer packed up her things and moved on to her next case, citing a need to hunt down Number 771 on Neptune, where the gravity changed the whole muscle sequence of smiling. In her wake, my father fell hard for Ms Lop.

Ada Lop, born Adelaida Loparyova, got her start in the business as a ballerina, although she was never one of the pink and rose-scented set. [Footage of Ada Lop’s performance with the Bolshoi plays beneath SEVERIN’S words.] Instead she tore her tulle to pieces at the culmination of Giselle and streaked her body with ugly black paint like blood. She kept the paint in little packets sewn into her leotard until the moment at hand. The first time, this was rebellion on her part—a statement about the stagnation of the ballet world, performing the same handful of very pretty but stultifying shows on a long loop—but it caused such a storm that she was compelled by her directors to repeat it night after night, to increasing and passionate crowds. She repeated it until she hated it. Until the tears were real. Until her body revolted and developed an allergy to the pigment in her leotard, and she retired up to the Moon and onto the screen, as so many dancers did in those early days. It is now simply part of the ballet. You’d be hard pressed to find a Giselle mounted anywhere outside of Nekyia that does not conclude with a young woman doing serious damage to her costume. The Plutonians are all decadents, anyway: the planet of the lotus-eaters.

On the first morning of her new life as my third mother, still in her bridal nightgown, with her long hair falling down her back like black paint, Ada made me breakfast. Hard-boiled egg, bitter greens, Saturnine corncakes, and a thin, almost translucent slice of pink pork from the rooftop farms in Tithonus. She even let me have coffee. She poured it into a cup meant for one of my old dolls, then poured herself a much bigger cup. We both got cream, I got sugar, and Ada Lop looked at me with those famous gigantic dark eyes and asked me what kind of mother I wanted her to be. She was very frank that way. She just asked things and expected straight answers, even when they were inhuman, unrealistic, performative questions. She performed even her most intimate conversations. As if we were recording all the time. I suppose we were, which is probably why Ada lasted so long in our house. No one in the world talked out loud like Ada talked. Not even people in plays. It’s too hard to write. Embarrassing to everyone else, but nothing embarrassed Ada.

[SEVERIN’S voice deepens, a cigarette-voice, feathery and Slavic.]

What does love look like to you? What do you think a mother is?

I was ten and a half. I was ten and a half and she was asking me for stage directions. I said, rather churlishly: A mother is whatever a father isn’t. She’s a detective. She’s a bandit. She knows 770 faces. A mother is a person who leaves.

Honestly, Ada Lop was the best interviewer I ever met. She got you off your guard. She asked things nobody asked. You never got to know her, but she’d get every last drop out of you and in her cup. I always wear her wedding ring when I interview somebody. It has a black amber stone in it with a golden flaw, like an eye. And she did exactly as I asked. Whatever my father failed to do, she picked up; taught me how to fix a cannon and do my own taxes and do a perfect plié and that to perform, to really perform, you have to make yourself ugly at some point. Nothing real is pretty, she said. Only a doll is pretty. And a pretty doll drinks out of a tiny cup forever. A woman wants a big cup.

There’s a fairy tale where all the good fairies come to bless a princess and give her something she needs. Beauty, a good singing voice, manners, skill at maths. But they forget to invite one fairy and so she curses the girl to die young and a whole heap of nonsense follows on—I don’t really care about the rest of it, it’s a just lot of overwrought handwringing about who marries who.

Point is, I didn’t have twelve fairies, but I guess I had seven.

[SEVERIN leans into the lens conspiratorially, inviting anyone and everyone into her confidence. Smoke curls around her face.]

I’m thinking of actually putting this stuff in the final cut. Everyone wants to know about my mothers, so why not lay it all out? But then I’d have to start over. From the beginning, because the beginning is where the end gets born. I suppose I could edit it back together so it looks like I started with Clotilde, which means starting with myself, with that morning and that doorstep and that ridiculous blanket. But that wouldn’t be honest. That wouldn’t be real. That would give you the idea that a life is a simple thing to tell, that it’s obvious where to start—BIRTH—and even more obvious where to stop—DEATH. Fade from black to black. I won’t have it. I won’t be one of the hundreds telling you that being alive flows like a story you write consciously, deliberately, full of linear narrative, foreshadowing, repetition, motifs. The emotional beats come down where they should, last as long as they should, end when they should, and that should come from somewhere real and natural, not from the tyranny of the theatre, the utter hegemony of fiction. Why, isn’t living easy? Isn’t it grand? As easy as reading out loud.

No.

If I slice it all up and stitch it back together, you might not understand what I’ve been trying to say all my life: that any story is a lie cunningly told to hide the real world from the poor bastards who live in it. I can’t. I can’t tell you that lie. That’s Dad’s game, and I’ve been sick of playing it since I was four.

If I fixed it so time goes the way you expect, you might come away thinking I know what the hell I’m doing.

So. Act One, Scene One. Arriving shortly after Scene Two but well before the swelling Overture. We’ll get to the trumpets and the timpani when this big bullet fires into Jupiter orbit.

[SEVERIN rolls her eyes in disgust and runs her hand through bobbed hair full of split ends and static, scratching the back of her head, bashful. She pulls her knees up under her chin and watches the camera watching her. She peels a slice of af-yun from her ball and places it on her tongue like a Eucharist. A shower of ice shimmers outside the porthole ringing her head: a saint’s corona. The rest of her words play over exterior shots of the ice road intercut with old footage in which she is just leaving the frame: ice crystals; a girl running out the door of a soundstage; snowy seeds and pebbles; the back of her head as she burrows into a heap of costumes; frozen boulders, colliding and breaking apart, fracturing, bursting, tumbling through the dark. The Swaddling Clothes had to be kitted out prelaunch: fore, aft, two starboard and two portside cameras, each globed in a protective plasto-crystal lantern. The lantern warps the image slightly, fisheyes it so that we seem to see as we do when just waking: blurry at the edges, soft with frost and dust, only the centre of vision perfectly, painfully clear.

The flotsam dissolves to show their passage through the asteroid belt, never an easy slalom. Other ships pass by in the Orient Express, the ice road, the traffic jam of heaven, nearly clipping the corners of the swift, silent reef around them, sometimes just barrelling through and hoping for the best, streaming on undaunted, with dents buckling their hulls.]

SEVERIN (V.O.)

God, when I record sound, I feel so alive. I feel excited about my work. I feel like Ada Lop when she first crushed a hundred little capsules of black paint against her breast. I feel ugly. I feel real. My voice is raspy and kicks around a low tenor from the af-yun. The dryness of our recycled air kicks it down a note or two from true and makes it squeak when it should flow on. It’s not a leading lady’s voice.

But it’s mine.

And fuck Uncle Freddy if he thinks he can keep me quiet.

Well, once upon a time I was a baby. Everybody was, but no one remembers themselves as babies. There is some line in the sand, some pole vault of sentience over which we suddenly begin to learn the trick of memory. It’s not innate—I don’t think so, at least. I think if you left a baby alone it would grow up on the crest of now, experiencing time like a lion: only this instant, only the hunt and the blood and the cubs and the mating and the long savannah full of prey. Nothing comes before you sink your teeth into skin and meat and marrow. Nothing will come after. Everything is always happening for the first time.

But what baby ever got left alone?

Not me, if that’s what you’re thinking.

I hate talking about how I was born. Obviously I don’t remember it. It’s a story that’s been told to me. We all start out with this lie. Our parents tell us the story of our beginning and they have total control of it. Over the years they change it—they know they’ve changed it, and we know they’ve changed it, but we just let them. They massage the details to reflect who we are now, so that there will be a sense to it: You are this because that. We gave you a blanket with birdies on it and now you’re a pilot, how lovely! All so that we think of ourselves as being in … not just a story, but a good story. One written by someone in full command of their craft. Someone who abides by the contract with the audience, even if the audience is us. Everyone loves a System. Everyone relaxes.

In my case, this is the literal truth. I have been an audience to my own life. I can verify most of the events because I have watched them happen on film. I am told that the first time I saw my father without a camera held up to his eye I shrieked with terror and confusion and would not be consoled. His camera was his household god: Clara, an Edison Model B II handheld 35 mm, painted pearl-white with silver inlay and a walnut tripod. Even when more elegant, lighter, less cumbersome cameras flooded the market, old Percy just took Clara’s guts and transplanted them into a new, sleeker casing, or vice versa. These days there’s probably nothing left of the original girl but a bit of glass and polish, but it’s still Clara to him. The only woman he was ever faithful to.

I began my life as a character in my father’s films. It’s mortifying, really. I appeared one morning as if from nothing. A spontaneous child. A mystery afoot! The commencement of plot! I was, in point of fact, dropped in a literal basket on the actual doorstep of one Percival Unck. A note tied round my neck with a black velvet ribbon, wrapped in swaddling clothes of pewter-coloured satin. Even the wicker basket was silver. And I was, too—I had been prepared to meet my father. My dark hair and dark eyes needed no help, but the rest of me had been painted as well: my blue skin tinted as white as death, my lips stained black with greasepaint, even my tiny fingers daubed as pale as a mime. I entered real life as monochromatic as a movie. And as archly, humiliatingly Gothic. I have been assured that the doorbell rang at the stroke of midnight and that there was a thunderstorm.

This was, naturally, by design. I wonder: if my absconding mother had not framed the scene just so, might old Percy have stuck me in an orphanage and never given the little gurgling wastrel at his feet another thought? I wonder if I’d rather that.

My mother vanished, as the genre requires her to do. She also would have been painted and dressed in shades of black and white and grey. Otherwise she’d never have gotten past the gate. Those were the days of Virago Studios. The rules were strict. No exceptions.

[Archival footage of the construction of Virago Studios, the soundstages, the colourisation barns, the set builders setting up shops like medieval blacksmiths.]

It was more a city than a studio lot. Virago is one of Artemis’s names, because heaven forbid anything on the Moon not get named after Artemis. Or Chang-e or Hathor or Selene. It means a maiden who behaves like a man. [SEVERIN grins impishly.] Maybe I was too hasty about foreshadowing. He built it far enough away from the Big Four’s territory that it felt safe, a place of his own outside sparkling, noisy, filthy, gorgeous Tithonus—Grasshopper City, my home and yet never home for a moment. Far enough for peace but not so far that anything Papa did at Virago would not be breathlessly reported upon. Lord, it was so much easier then. All money was new money, land was cheaper than beer, and you could build Versailles for a tenner. So he did. A city of sets and scenes and great glass greenhouses dressed to stand in for Mars in winter, Ganymede during Carnivale, Venus before we landed there. Our own house was formerly the mansion set for The Gods Alone Delight in Thunder. If you turned the wrong way, you’d run smack into a false wall, a staircase that went to nowhere, a painted window instead of a real one.

Back then it seemed so important to cover up the fact that living on the Moon turned us all blue as gumdrops. Who wants to watch a movie where no one looks like them? So in the early days they caked on the greasepaint like clowns so that everyone on Earth could rest easy knowing life offworld was just like life at home. Nothing weird out there, lovies, finish your tea! But Percy took it a step further. That’s all he ever does: go a step further, more ridiculous, more difficult, more absurd. So the Law of Virago was simple: No Colour.

Colours show up strangely on black-and-white film. You can’t be sure what that magenta bustle will look like on the final print. So Virago lived in black and white. And grey and silver and jet and charcoal. The makeup never came off. I was four before the sight of scarlet ceased to utterly paralyze me. I’d go stock-still with horror. The red could see me. It could get me. Of course I saw myself without makeup in the morning and the evening, but it didn’t help. I thought I was the only blue girl in the world and had to be covered up for the shame of it. If I opened my mouth, everyone would know that the red was already inside me. I was the very carefullest girl in Virago. No one would guess my secret.

I’ve never seen the note. That does seem odd to me. Of all the artefacts of my life, that one is surely the most important. I assume it shared the rather tawdry information that my father had gotten some hopeful little fool of an actress in trouble and wouldn’t he kindly do something about it; thank you, regards, sincerely. Perhaps some appropriate evidence of my provenance, as if my face—even then nearly identical to Percy’s sloping, lupine, dissolute mug—was not as good as a birth certificate. Perhaps some little pillow-joke they shared. Perhaps a name for my father to ignore.

I should like to see my mother’s handwriting. I should like that.

Vince found me. Vince brought me in out of the dark and the wet. Vincenza Mako, who never slept with my father but outpaced all the women who did by miles: She wrote his movies, every one. What’s the point of screwing somebody once you’ve gotten that close? It’s … redundant. Vince brought me in, kissed my forehead, read the note, and made the decision before Percy got downstairs. She opened her dress to hold me against her hot, greasepainted skin, out of the cold. I couldn’t stop shivering, but I didn’t cry.

[The footage of SEVERIN’S discovery in Virago plays under her narration.]

And Percival Unck, unable to stop being Percival Unck for even a single moment, made her do it all over again. Get the shot. It didn’t happen if it didn’t happen on film. No matter what else happens—hell and the resurrection and dinosaurs and comets—get the shot. He made poor Vince take me back out into the screeching storm and the rolling clouds and never you mind the rain and the lightning, just leave her there until I can get Clara and at least one good overhead light going. Yes, fine. Shut the door. We’ll add in the doorbell cue later.

It all happened again. This time, Percy opened the door to find the abandoned orphan daughter he had never known existed. [PERCIVAL raises his hand to his mouth. His eyes fill with tears.] Percy looked into Clara’s big black eye with an exquisite expression of shock, wonder, fear, and cautious, not-quite-believing joy. Percy gathered the shivering black-and-white bundle into his arms with a father’s instinctual protective gesture. [PERCIVAL brushes a stray tuft of dark hair from his daughter’s brow.] Then Percy, his own Byronic, Stygian hair plastered across his forehead by the deluge, gave one last gaze out into the street and the wind as if to say, By golly, the world is so terribly full of unlikely magic, before closing the door to the great house and opening the door to a new life. [A slow, tender, terribly vulnerable smile blossoms on the face of Percival Unck. He shakes his head. The rain pours down. He shuts a heavy door on the storm, bringing an innocent within.]

This is the version I’ve seen. I have watched it over and over. It is beautiful. It is right. It is full of hope for the future. It is perfect. It is a whopper of a lie.

Percy had to find me a mother right quick. It was the casting decision of a lifetime, as all the papers speculated wildly. He couldn’t raise that wee poppet all by himself, the poor man! A child needs a woman’s tender hands! And he could have his choice. Who wouldn’t leap at the chance to slot herself into that family portrait, to cradle the beautiful baby, to rest her hand possessively upon the elbow of the great man? A role had been written, the costumes made, the sets impeccable … he only needed a leading lady. Oh, but isn’t that always the trouble, though? An actress who can be nymph enough to interest the patriarch; mother enough to comfort the child; genius enough to build a kid from scratch to be that most elusive of creatures, the useful and interesting adult; fairy godmother enough to make the thousand magical woods and towers and castles of childhood appear at a snap of her fingers? File your headshots with the secretary, please. Form a line to your left.

But Clotilde? Clotilde wasn’t an actress. His first choice, and she couldn’t have delivered a line with conviction if God in Heaven cried action. Clotilde was no topless tart of Ilium. But she made a fine Airy Spirit, to say aye and thank him for his commands.

Clotilde Charbonneau is a box of photographs in my mind. She was gone before I started school and I recall her in bursts, flashes, frames, stills. Moments exploding in the recesses of my brain like lightning effects. I remember Clotilde’s furs. I remember Clotilde’s fingers. I remember Clotilde’s soft, throaty French consonants. I remember Clotilde’s hair, falling around me like the trees of a dark and secret forest. Hair like mine. Excepting Mary Pellam, Percy was always careful to make certain my mothers looked like me, could plausibly be mistaken for sharing my blood. They all had black hair, big dark eyes, and cheekbones like statues. He made sure I was never an alien; always a native in a nation where all the women looked like sisters.

When I think of Clotilde Charbonneau I am surrounded by blackness, by softness. She loved furs, and my father was delighted with an obsession he could so easily satisfy. Otter, stoat, mink, fox, sable, rabbit. Wilder still–Martian beaver, Ganymedean woodmonk, Uranian glacierfox. All black, infinite and uncountable shades of black. I remember closing my fists in her furs as though she were an animal and I were her cub. I must have seen her without her furs at some point, some pale slip of a thing beneath her panther skin, but I cannot recollect it.

But her fingers—oh, yes, the fingers of Clotilde Charbonneau! In all the monochrome kingdom of Virago, Clotilde’s fingers were rainbows. She couldn’t help it; she wore the silver paint we all did, but by the end of the day it always rubbed away and her colours showed through: saffron and rose and moss and robin’s egg and lilac and lemon.

Miss Clotilde was a colourist, see. Percy had scads of them; a whole army, really. Squirreled away in a great grey barn hand-colouring every frame of whatever opus he could not bear to realize in black and white alone. They are strange beasts, those prints. Their colours lie on top of the image like fitful lovers, unable to quite sink into the impermeable silver world of my father’s heart. The vampires from The Abduction of Proserpine soaked in wriggling red. Peachy-golden quivering angels in Trismegistus, their vapour trails ghosting green. Clotilde’s fingers were saturated in those poisonous inks. All the water on Mars couldn’t out that damned spot. She began wearing gloves when she moved in (black, obviously), but I saw her secrets when she put me to bed, for a child needs human touch and not leather, no matter how fine.

So after all the Moon’s most eligible ingénues had eaten Percival Unck’s cake and sipped his tea and exclaimed over the very special beauty and intelligence and character of his daughter, he pulled a twenty-two-year-old colourgirl out of his barn, put ermine on her back, and sat her in a nursery that spangled and glittered like New Year’s Eve, every surface covered in silver and glass and white and shimmer. Because she was the best painter he’d ever met. Because she liked to drink and swear, even though she looked like the kind of girl who never would. And because she told him that she’d never see a single one of his movies in a theatre, for she’d seen them all already, flowing, frame by frame beneath her hands, and she liked the stories she made up in her head better than anything the dialogue cards could say. Fill her in like a new frame, Percy whispered to her. Make her red and green and peachy-golden. Trace the woman she’ll be around the child she is like indigo round grey. Make her leap off the screen in better colours than the real world has ever met.

Clotilde eventually tired of inking Uncks, both celluloid and flesh, in anonymity. I can’t blame her. She left us after The Majestic Mystery of Mr Bergamot premiered. I cannot imagine what an iron-sided soul she must have had to be the first to leave my father. To tell him no. The last words she said to me in that mirror-ball nursery weren’t even her own words, but they’re the only ones I remember her saying to me. It was a quote from Mr Bergamot.

[SEVERIN’S voice goes soft and tired, vanishing down into Clotilde’s Marseilles accent.] 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.

Funny thing about Clotilde. She remarried-didn’t even take long to manage it. To a Battersea backdrop artist indentured to Oxblood Films. Practically every forest and starscape and lonely moor you’ve ever seen were his, excepting the ones done by her after she signed on to his contract. His name was Felix St. John.

[SEVERIN extends her hand offscreen and pulls ERASMO ST. JOHN toward her. He perches delicately on the arm of the navigator’s chair, incongruously graceful for a man of his size. He kisses her; they grin at each other.]

ERASMO

Which mum are you on?

SEVERIN

I’d only just got through ours. But I already did Mary and Ada. It’s a little jumbled at this point.

ERASMO

Ah, then it’s Amal next, is it? Number Four.

SEVERIN

Queen of the Tigers. I’m impressed you remember.

ERASMO

[He reaches out, tucks her hair behind her ear.] I know your life story cold. It’s like the twelve days of Christmas. Five golden rings, four calling birds, three French hens, two turtledoves, and Amal Zahara the Tiger Queen.

SEVERIN

She was the animal wrangler on The Virgin of Venus. Almost as tall as you.

ERASMO

You first saw her leading six tigers to the set, dressed as a squid-princess so that she could direct the animals without seeming out of place in the shot. She had on a crown of tentacles and stars. The alpha tiger was called Gloucester.

SEVERIN

I was twelve. She let me ride him home. He had fur like a chimney brush and he licked my face all over.

ERASMO

Your father loved her selfishly for once—for himself, for herself—and they were happy. The tigers moved in. She refused to dye their fur. They were a constant, cheeky orange eyesore in Virago.

SEVERIN

Ravens, too. And parrots who could all say one line of Chekhov each, but nothing else. A brace of black bears; four peacocks; two pythons; an albino deer; a komodo dragon; several lynx; seven ponies; and a tame, elderly kangaroo.

ERASMO

They all had something wrong with them. The albino deer, the aged kangaroo, one of the bears was missing an eye … Which one?

SEVERIN

Gonzalo. Trinculo had had his hind foot mashed in a trap.

ERASMO

The peacocks were deaf. The pythons had eczema. Half the ravens had broken wings and the other half couldn’t stop imitating babies crying. Gloucester had a stomach condition and could only eat meat ground up to slurry and mixed with milk, which Amal fed him by hand three times a day.

SEVERIN

The komodo dragon—Andromache—seemed all right at first. The only one of the lot fitted out for life in this world. But she fixated on Percy. Wouldn’t leave him alone. Insisted on sleeping with the pair of them every night or else she’d put up this terrible hue and cry, keening like a broken trumpet till they relented.

ERASMO

You tried to learn that cry.

SEVERIN

But they wouldn’t let me sleep with them.

ERASMO

Amal collected broken beasts.

SEVERIN

So naturally she collected us. The tigers slept in my room when they weren’t working. When I had tea parties, only tigers were invited.

ERASMO

Amal was the first person in your life who didn’t slather you with attention.

SEVERIN

[laughing] Hey.

ERASMO

Hey yourself. Not even six tigers could give you enough attention to let you rest easy. Hey, let’s talk about you a little more, and then we can address the issue of whether or not the world revolves directly around Severin Unck. I like Amal. I’ve never met her, but I like her. She had her zoo and she was in love with Percy and she treated you a little better than the deaf peacocks but not quite as well as Gloucester the tiger. You didn’t need your meat slurried, after all. There’re whole weeks when you were that age where there’s no film of you at all.

SEVERIN

Don’t let Percy hear you say that.

ERASMO

I like thinking about a version of you that doesn’t look for a camera all the time.

SEVERIN

Amal said once that I needed her tigers more than I needed a mother. That I had all the wildness of a plate of cheese. And a little tiger shit was good for a girl who lived in a fairy tale.

ERASMO

[His smile is enormous, frank, warm.] I can be a tiger if you want. What big teeth I’ve got.

SEVERIN

[ignoring him] She left anyway. One of the younger tigers, Cortez, bit off most of her hand when they were doing The Jupiter Circus. She was putting the bellhop’s hat on him and he just took it off at the wrist. No matter how you think you know a beast, she said in hospital, no matter how much love you’ve spent on him … then she waggled her stump. But she had an extra-wide bed brought into her room so that Cortez could lie next to her while she recovered. He rested his big old head in her lap and never moved from her side. She slept with her good arm around his scruff. Percy didn’t come to visit once. I suppose a twelve-year-old can’t begin to guess what goes on inside a marriage, most especially a marriage primarily concerned with lenses and the half-tamed. But when Amal got her clean bill of health she went to her chalet on Mount Ampère and sent for the rest of her animals.

ERASMO

Except two.

SEVERIN

Except Gloucester. I found him sprawled on my bed with his belly ready for scratching and a note round his neck that had instructions for his slurry on one side and on the other: No matter how much love you’ve spent.

ERASMO

And?

SEVERIN

[laughs softly] And Andromache. I bet she was sprawled on Percy’s bed, too, cooing and flicking her tongue at the pillows. Sometimes I think Amal was having a last joke at his expense. Percy complained about Andromache noon and night, but he grudgingly gave her soft-boiled eggs at breakfast when she came nosing at his bathrobe and called her a hell-bitch just like he called me sweetheart. I caught him rubbing her nose just once, and he looked ashamed of himself. But really, I think Andromache would have lain down and died if she’d been parted from her Percival. I think Amal left a lizard in lieu of a wife.

ERASMO

And then Faustine.

SEVERIN

[Her eyes take on a faraway, clouded expression. She chews on the inside of her cheek.] And then Faustine, my fifth mother. She only lasted a year. Opera singer. She started out a soprano, but she was an alto by the end. Chest like a barrel of bourbon. Everyone adored her. She was like laughter turned into a person.

ERASMO

And a baleen addict.

SEVERIN

Well, who isn’t? [SEVERIN peels a rind of af-yun with her fingernail and sucks on it ruefully.] But Faustine grew up on Venus. I’d never met anyone who’d been born on Venus. I thought she was magic. A real life Vespertine Hyperia come to live in my house and lie on my bed and tell me tales of pirates on the callowseas. Her parents were divers, then homesteaders. She floated in callowmilk in utero—literally. Her mother tapped a huge lode on one of the outer whales when she was six months along. We think it’s in everything here, but on Venus … on Venus it is everything.

ERASMO

Baleen, though …

SEVERIN

I know. A lady can smoke her af-yun on the steps of the Actaeon and still be called a swan in girl’s clothing, a gift to man and the stage. It’s delicate, pure callowmilk, nothing added but a little cacao-butter, a little ergot, a little cocaine. A drawing-room vice. Baleen is the whore’s luncheon. Have you ever seen a piece of baleen? When you’re married to my father you can afford the best. She had it brought in on a jade tray every morning. On a piece of black lace. It looks like a white piano key. About that long, about that thick. It snaps like cold chocolate. Smells like Monday laundry. Raw callowmilk protein cut with soya, industrial bleach, sugar cane, a dash of oleander, a whiff of boric acid, and a healthy lashing of heroin.

ERASMO

She gave it to you.

SEVERIN

Well, of course she did. I was fourteen. Do you have any idea what a fourteen-year-old girl will do to be loved? I wasn’t any kind of innocent at fourteen—she didn’t corrupt me. If you could pour it down your throat or stick it up your nose, I had managed to get my hands on it and give it a go. Percy didn’t care. Experience, he said. Experience is the only reason and the only master. I asked Faustine one afternoon what Venus was like. She put a stick of baleen in my hand and said it’s like this, baby girl. I ate it and curled up into my tiger and went to Venus with my mother.

ERASMO

And what was it like?

SEVERIN

It was like being inside a star. Like a star turning on inside of you. And then Faustine sang and that was like a star, too. A blue one sizzling down the dark alongside the red star of me. I remember she sang the opening aria from Her Last Nocturne and I saw the night sky pour out of her mouth. Every time I went to hear her sing afterward, even months afterward, I saw the same thing. Blackness and stars flooding her mouth and splashing onto the boards in great gouts. Galaxies and the void dripping off her chin. Her teeth burning. I told her about it on a night in December and she whispered: I know it, baby. I see it, too. That’s my insides coming out. Sometimes I see it so clear I pull back my feet to keep my shoes clean. But that’s what it looks like when you’re doin’ okay up there. Maybe you’ll do okay someday and I’ll get to see your guts blown out. That’d be nice. Wouldn’t that be nice? And then she put her head in my lap and died. Miss Faustine had so much baleen in her stomach that it backed up her works and she was poisoned to death by her own fluids.

[SEVERIN and ERASMO are quiet for several seconds. The displays tick on, lights faithfully flickering like candles.]

Araceli Garrastazu came after that. The femme fatale, Mary Pellam’s opposite—the perfect witch-seductress for my father’s every overwrought phantasmagoria. I barely knew her. I was running with whatever wolves would have me by then. The colours of Tithonus beat grey Virago every time. I didn’t want to act, but I slept with producers anyway; Gloucester and I danced on the carousel boats every weekend with my father’s rivals and I took girls and boys to my cabin on endless ugly promises of introducing them to Percy: Yes, of course, darling, he’s just dying to find the next big thing and you’re so lovely. You’re devastatingly talented. You’re perfect. You’re perfect. Until that horror show with Thaddeus Irigaray. That turned off my faucet, I can tell you. And by then Araceli was off to reinvent herself on the radio. [SEVERIN strokes her throat with her hand, a throttling, effacing gesture.] We’re almost done, aren’t we? Lumen’s left. Lumen’s my mother now, lucky number seven. She’s the reason I’ve got a boatload of circus with me. I love her. I love Lumen Molnar for everything she is not. I love her because she is nothing like me. I love her because she has never been to Venus. I love her because she has only one face. I love her because she is at this moment having supper in the cantina with Maximo and Mariana and Augustine and Gloucester. Because she came with me. Come with me, and I’ll love you until Jupiter burns out and the callowhales speak.

[SEVERIN clutches ERASMO’S arm. Her nails dig in. But she speaks to the camera.]

Do you want to know the truth about my mother? She was wonderful. She was kind. She never left me. She tucked me in at night and woke me in the morning. She played with me every day and she never missed a recital or a bedtime story.

Her name was Clara.

She could hold just under 150 meters of film at a time.