Radiance

All-Clear

The morning’s Uranus is chosen by lot. He wears a funhouse-mirror version of the Imperial Crown, but where the Black Prince’s Ruby and Lizzie One’s best pearls ring the original, his glows with brazen electric bulbs: stars, winking on and off. He dons a coat of furpack and rain slicker blackfalse which reeks of the sweat of other Uranuses and their blood. Faces have been drawn onto the ’false in chalk and oil: Titans and gods in stick figures. Anonymous hands clamp a white collar round his throat: rings.

Uranus is joyful. His congregation throws blue paint onto his face. It drips down onto his cheeks, beads on his eyelashes. He puts his arms out, beckoning magnanimously—it is always smooth and sure, this motion. Uranus, every Uranus, has seen it done many times before it falls to him to perform.

Women and men come to him. Twenty-seven. Titania and Oberon and Puck wear shimmery greenfalse and brambles in their hair. Ariel and Umbriel, long silver veils and wild red leotards beneath. The maidens, then: great Miranda clothed in sails, Juliet strapped with golden daggers, Cordelia and Ophelia, Cressida and Portia, Desdemona and Bianca all dance painfully en pointe, their mad hair loose and long. Prospero strides with staff and book. Little children play the small moons: Belinda, Sycorax, Ferdinand, Setebos, Stephano, Mab, Trinculo, Francisco, Margaret, Rosalind, Caliban, Perdita, gamboling behind him like medieval dancers after Death. A toddling Cupid fires an empty amber bow over and over at everyone he sees. Uranus, ringed by his moons, his harem, his family.

The satellites throw garlands of rainpearls, dried crocus shrimp, morels, and the wild rubicund varuna flower that grows on the snowdunes of King George’s Sea, Oceana Telchine, the Fury’s Pond, and Herschellina, the vast dark waters of this world.

Titania steps out of the dance, though her stepping out is part of the dance and not separate from it. Her fairy crown flickers with shards of glowglass. Her green gown, cut like clinging leaves, shows the same crude sketching as Uranus’s raincoat: the great canyons of the moon Titania; the thriving farms and mining cities spreading over her hip, her breast, her back. She offers her hand to Uranus; he presses it to his cheek. She is lush and fertile; he is the god of air and cold. She bows to him, he to her. They dance, not in the cavorting, half-extemporized orgy of the other moons, but formally, as folk danced back home before these two—whoever they may be tonight or on other nights—shut their eyes and fired themselves at the reaches of the heavens. They are careful; they hold each other stiff and far apart, their feet precise. He leads, she follows. Uranus speaks in a slurry, the local mine-and-dice argot: a sing-song stew fashioned out of the Queen’s English, Manchurian, Russian, Punjabi, French, and anything else, picked up like toys, gnawed, shaken, held to the ear.

URANUS TO TITANIA: Aye-o, me larkhee, difujin moya, me mademoibelle, je lay on me side for thee, tbye, sur-la-vous. Scamp me round, q’est que yes?

TITANIA TO URANUS: Oye sohneya, me bolshy hazy ta. Je spin thee round-rosie, je never fall down.

URANUS: Gander all these melly platypups we made with us! Ain’t us proud. Ain’t us trop-gros Grand Papa.

TITANIA: Akara-thee lie on me full, heavy nicht on heavy vert. Thee dole me stars, je dole thee ’ren.

URANUS: ’Fess now, quoi ren do Moonmama and Grand Papa love plus-most?

ALL: Uranian ’ren! ’Ren quoi turn aback on dodder-Ertha. Aye-o me babba! We are no earthserfs. Titans we are, nowforever.

URANUS: Est thee lonely, difujin moya? Est thee lonely, me ren? Out in the noir and the shiver?

TITANIA: Longside all these coeurs a-beat? Never.

ALL: Never again.