Radiance

The Deep Blue Devil

The Man in the Malachite Mask: My Sin

20 February, 1962. Early morning. Obolus cantina.

During the whole of that frozen, dark transit through the glittering, howling autumnal moorlands of the trans-Neptunian wastes, as the ice road hung thin and ragged as funereal curtains beyond the portholes, I had been keeping studiously to myself within the confines of our slim vessel as it passed through that singularly lonesome expanse of darkness and, whilst the blue and ghostly shades of morning at the edge of civilization roused the passengers, drew within sight of the melancholy face of Pluto.

Breakfast brought an oppressive gloom down upon my spirit. Soft-boiled eggs oozed a golden ichor of loneliness onto my spoon; the buttered rolls spoke only of the further torment of my being. Failure swirled in the milky depths of my tea and the bacon I devoured was the bacon of grief.

“There is naught on Pluto but magicians, Americans, and the mad,” rasped the old woman who had settled in beside me in the Obolus cantina, a lavishly appointed, elegant space filled topful with the intolerably irritating chime of cutlery and soft whisperings. She needn’t have troubled me; there was room enough for her to encamp at a table of her own and gum at her crumpets whilst leaving me in peace. I despised her for failing to do so and turned up the corner of my greatcoat against any further conversation. It is always damnably cold on these ships. At the evening receptions, the décolletages of all the earnest and well-meaning ladies prickle with gooseflesh and the throats of the paler girls sheen a trembling, vampiric blue. The crone with whom I unwillingly shared my morning meal, however, did not worry herself with the chill. She wore red and violet, and she had pinned in her white hair black silk calla lilies with long, viridescent stamens thrusting suggestively upward, as though her head were a radio array tuned every direction at once. She smelled sour—but then, so did I. So did the blue-necked ladies dancing in their rosettes and pink damask. Everyone reeks after six months on the Orient Express. There is no hiding our animal nature out here on the ice road. Crone, maiden, paladin, my own unhappy self: not a one of us smells better than a week-dead lion on the veldt.

“Is that so?” I groused at her, nose plunged deep into my tea, praying for her to return to the counter for more of today’s pastry (sugared gardenias in a glazed puff globe), more of today’s jam (fig-candleberry), more of anything but my attention. My own flaky globe and pot of jam sat unmolested before me—how quickly I had forgotten my previous starvations, privations, depredations, and come to that unimaginable point wherein I refused the obscenely precious food supplied by our invisible, unmentionable hosts at Oxblood Films. The price of my breakfast, which only increased with every day further distant from any place where a gardenia or a candleberry could grow, could purchase a small estate in the less fashionable bands of the Kuiper Belt, yet I could hardly taste it. The past coated my tongue and robbed the present from me—and yet I own no nobility on that account. Give me a little bacon and milk and I become, inevitably, a decadent like all the rest of them.

I wondered what use our hosts could have for this doddering old woman, what favour she had done or would do them, to earn passage. I had grudgingly reached first-name terms with most of the other passengers, but for six months, this baggage of a woman had declined to share her name with anyone at all. Perhaps she had once been a starlet. Perhaps I would recognize her younger self, if presented with evidence of those lilies in red hair thick as blood and life. Her voice had that old-fashioned, hard-edged showman’s twang, that affected, too-bright accent of the Nation of Theatre, as though all plays came from a single strange planet where you could pick up, without meaning to, the local dialect. That voice had no relation to her broken body, to the lump in her back or the long, sad draperies of her skin. Her voice was a wholly separate being, one flush and good and bright and subtle. She was all voice. In the dark, I might have worshipped her.

“Oh yes,” she said, crunching a sugared gardenia between her shockingly white teeth. An addict, then. Af-yun turns the teeth a lambent, unsettling, inhuman white, so white it edges into lavender, into a colour as clean as death. That’s what comes of eating the muck scraped off of Venus’s underside, of breathing the stars’ putrescence.

I will not say my teeth are brown.

“The question is,” the crone chortled in that surprisingly rich, full, clotted-cream voice, spilling bits of flower and pastry down the front of her red gown, “which one are you? I’m American, which doesn’t bode well for you, I’m afraid. Well, I’m American now, in any event. Morocco never treated me as well as I deserved, so I saw no reason to stand by my man. Pluto is the end of everything. Last Chance Gulch. For me, that spells home.”

I made a noise in my throat that could be interpreted as agreement, rebuttal, amusement, disgust, or commiseration—I have perfected this noise. I consider it vital, for rarely do I wish to say anything to another person which a well-timed grunt cannot replace.

My tormentor, however, wheedled on as though I had clasped her to my chest and implored her to speak, speak now, speak forever, speak until the sun gutters and the snow road melts! “But you are a young man. Only the young are so rude and unpleasant. There’s no fortune to be made on Pluto, if that’s your mind. Someone ought to have told you.”

“I have business.”

“With whom? The buffalo?”

I sighed and fixed her with a black gaze. I have perfected that gaze also—it is necessary in Te Deum and elsewhere. If you cannot wither a man with your eyes you will be withered by his fists. Yet my best back-alley glare did not move that ridiculous soul whom I by now had to admit had become my breakfast companion. “With Maximo Varela, if you insist on prying into my affairs. Though it has been indicated to me that he is no longer going by that name.”

The woman snorted. Even her snort had melody. Incredulity shaped itself upon her face. “That … that he is not.”

“We are to be met at the Depot by his daughters and escorted safely to his house, though neither the house, nor the daughters, nor the Depot, nor the meeting are any concern of yours.”

Her rheumy eyes swam with dark mirth. “Poor lamb,” she crooned, and patted my hand in a grandmotherly fashion. “What a pity we wasted this voyage in not knowing one another. I might have told you tales. I might have told your fortune. I might have told you to yourself. People used to listen to me, oh how they used to listen! Hung on every word. I made gold out of horseshit in my day, my boy. Imagine what I could have done with you.”

I, naturally, did not share her sentiment. We would disembark at midnight tomorrow and already my feet itched for earth, my heart for silence, for the surcease of the endless thrum of engines in the walls, the constant hum and rumble that maddened me, made my blood ricochet up and down my spine, no less than the equally endless need for the smallest of talk shared between the few rarefied passengers, all of us avoiding the plain fact of the ghastly waste of this ship, its food and fuel and polish spent on sixteen nervous, uncertain souls.

“If you have information on Varela, I will certainly hear it,” I allowed, knowing I might as well accept my defeat. I would be her creature until lunch service, and probably dinner, too. She would never let me be.

The crone with the bronzed voice looked out the bolted porthole at the growing spheres of Pluto and Charon, opals hanging in the stony blackness, clouds like hands clutching their few, scattered continents, clutching warmth, clutching life. When she spoke, the pitch of her voice plucked at my sinews. It was as familiar as my own shadow, yet I could not, could not recall where I had heard it before. Its rhythms changed, peaked, rolled—and I felt as though my mother were telling me a tale before bedtime, though I have no memory of my mother and would not know her if she called my name from the depths of hell.

“Once upon a time, a man, weary of both body and soul, shipwrecked upon a faraway isle. This isle dwelt in the midst of an endless, wine-dark sea whose depths were strewn with stars and horned leviathans and secrets kept by unguessable fathoms—and upon this isle it was always night. This man possessed in his heart and his hands the power to command light and force it to follow his will, but this power no longer comforted him, for he had once been charged with the protection of a maid both good and beautiful, and had lost her. But the whispers of the world said that he had done more than lose her, that he had killed her with his own hand. In shame, this man threw his name, the name of a man who could cast an innocent girl into darkness, underfoot and trampled upon it. From the moment his foot touched the sweet-smelling shores of that faraway isle, he called himself Prospero, a name so famous he could bury himself within it. He put upon his head a jester’s crown and on his feet the belled dancing shoes of a fool, and spoke only madness to any who came before him, begging him to perform his old feats of light and shadow. Yet even this did not bring him the oblivion he craved, the anonymity of the guilty or the rest of the defeated. The more absurd his speech, the more frenzied his dance, the more he behaved like a jungle creature in a man’s skin, the more he found himself sought after by the folk of Pluto, for whom amusement is the only currency.

On that lawless carnival isle, the castle of Prospero became a constant Saturnalia, a house on a high icy hill where unholy lights flashed and burst through the permanent night of that world of phantasms. Even to breathe the air of those halls was to become intoxicated. To light a single lantern was to invite ghosts and will-o’-the-wisps and sirens from every gable and eave. Into this miasma the man thought he could finally disappear. But word reached the great Emperor of the shadowy isle that wonders unheard-of were afoot in the house of Prospero, a house which was quickly becoming a kingdom unto itself. The Emperor donned a mask, the face of a black coatl whose tongue dripped with nightrubies, and went to the revels to see for himself. What he saw there no man can say, yet when he emerged, he had made Prospero his only heir, and placed the coatl crown on that poor magician’s grieving head.

“This is the isle toward which our pretty silver ship flies, for whose sake our golden sails catch the sun’s good wishes and bear us both across the starry, frozen wasteland between our former lives and the End of All. And the man I speak of is Maximo Varela: Prospero, the Mad King of Pluto. I wish you your fill of him—you will have it, I’m sure, and more.”

The old woman looked back to me and laughed like a young girl. A flush rode high on her cheeks. She clapped her hands, applauding herself. “I reckon I’m as good as I ever was, don’t you? Give me a script; I’ll eat you alive and you’ll love every moment. Now clear off and quit bothering an old woman at her breakfast.”

I returned to my quarters in a consternation of curiosity and black dread. I felt, far beneath the polished green floorboards, the fragrant Ganymedean banyan with its glinting golden grain, the pneumatic array gasping into life, the intimate suckle of gravity cupping the Obolus and drawing it down, down into its long well. Very soon my work would have to begin, truly begin, rather than remaining comfortably far off, like a suit in a closet with all its attendant discomfort, ready to be worn sometime soon, but not today.

The smell of our staterooms flowed over me: sweat, skin, stale breath, lavender, talc, shoe polish, typewriter ribbons, last week’s peach-xochipilli preserves left uncovered on a night table. Above and below it all, penetrating every surface, every linen and lantern glass, was that perfume I had grown to both loathe and long for, Madame Zed’s latest vicious, stinking, delicious golden bottle: My Sin. It smelled like a forest of fallen women.

I looked down at the shape of Cythera Brass, the source of My Sin, in the emerald sheets of her bunk. She wore that witch’s unguent so often I was convinced that even her marrow would stink of its musk and spice. From her alone I had never smelled—from Uranus past Neptune’s unhinged orbit—even the slightest noxious emanation. Any foulness of air in our quarters belonged to myself alone. I smelled only My Sin on her, only that alien wood where a creature like her might cut her teeth. My warden, my minder, my leash. Her long, lovely limbs lost in sleep—but not so lost that she did not wrap her arms around her shoulders, her head sunk in her chest, guarding and girding herself even in dreaming. I despised her: for her orderliness, her efficiency, her beauty, her imperturbable calm, her—quite correct—disdain of my person, her loyalties, and her constant reminder that I was being tolerated only for the work I could perform. All aboard presumed her my wife, for she kept closer to me than any lover, always at my elbow, my side, practically barracked in my waistcoat pocket. I had risen inhumanly early in order to escape her company at breakfast—but one can never escape the quiet, implacable hell of company.

I did, in a moment of extreme and regrettable sobriety, try to kiss Cythera at the little Christmas ball held in the starboard conservatory. Shards of the ice road swirled and banged beyond panes of submarine glass overhead. Pine boughs hung festively all about—though of course not actual pine. Our yuletide green had been knitted out of jute and wire and shredded dresses by the Udolpho triplets, those wanton Martian contortionists and—as I had discovered—wanted counterfeiters, from Guan Yu. Each of the nine women aboard had donated a green gown to the effort. We whirled away under Cythera’s lime spangled flapper-fringes, Harper Ibbott’s hunting cloak, every girl’s bright emerald and olive hoopskirts cut and ruched into garlands. We were a strange lot, the Obolus cargo, some famous, most not, all vibrating with the things we did not tell each other. Cythera seemed happy for once, in a long, ghost-grey sigh of a dress, assaying a Charleston, singing carols. True to the word of our mutual masters, Miss Brass had brought along a steamer of intoxicants and exotics that would turn a pirate into a teetotaller, but in those early days I had hatched the comical notion that I would do my job well. I spent my nights reading and rereading the histories and reports provided by Oxblood, staring at photographs as though my gaze could set them ablaze; coming close, I thought, to connections that danced just beyond the reach of my deprived, shrivelled brain, which had thrived on liquor, opiates, and hallucinogens. I could see her, I could see Severin, big and dark as a heart, at the nexus of some glowing web whose edges I was so close to touching.

Alas, that is the danger of sobriety. Everything seems possible.

At midnight on Christmas, with the disc of distant, turquoise Uranus like a tiny crescent moon above us, I slung my arm around the waist of Cythera Brass and kissed her. It was a good kiss, one of my best. We are the same height, but our noses did not clash, nor our foreheads collide. The scent of My Sin drenched my fingers, my eyelids, my mouth. I thought perhaps I had impressed her with my dedication to the work, that though we had been forced into sharing a certain chain of events, we might find warmth—indeed, even strength—in each other.

Those long limbs went to stone in my arms. When I withdrew, her face crackled with contempt. “I am not a perk of your position, Mr St. John,” she said, with the finality of the grave. “Do not mistake me for an opium pipe.”

And that was the utter terminus of any camaraderie or goodwill between us.

Yes, I despised her. But I am a strange creature. I am strange even to myself. There is no specialness in my ashen feelings toward Miss Brass. I despise myself as well, and all my works. It does no good. No matter how I practice my despising, I remain Anchises, and my works keep working.

“Wake up,” I barked, and though I did not mean to bark, I was not sorry. “We make Charon orbit in ten hours.”

She stirred beneath those soft green linens. My Sin filled the air.

I spoke more softly, then. I doubt she heard me. “By the way, I think I just had breakfast with Violet El-Hashem.”

21 February, 1962. Noon (thereabouts). Pluto, High Orbit.

Shall we have trumpets? Shall we have banners? Shall we have garlands and chords and bursts of coloured flame to announce our presence, descending in a slow angelic spiral from high Plutonian orbit down, down, down into the fields of pale flowers that soften the face of that little lonely world and her twin?

Perhaps a little trumpeting. Perhaps a little flame.

Night is Pluto’s native crop. I thought myself darkness’s man, but I had never even kissed her cheek until the sun set on that flower-choked world. Night poured itself down my throat. Night was my wine and my meat. Night wed me and bedded me, widowed me and murdered me and resurrected me whole a thousand times over with each hour. I saw before me, in that selfsame hall that had boasted our Christmas ball, beyond the veins of frost forking through the glass panes, a carousel hanging in space. Severin never came here. The one world she missed in all her profligate travels. At last, I shall have something she did not.

I will warn you now, Reader: Pluto is a place too mad for metaphor. What is there can only be what it is: a world far gone, decayed from the moment of its birth, lost in the unfathomable tides of these black rivers, so far from the sun that is our heart that it is, quite plainly, a place of delirium and dissolution.

It is a bestiary of the grotesque.

It is a Jacobean horror-hall.

It is a brothel of the undead.

It is so beautiful.

Welcome to America, to the Grand Experiment’s last light bulb, left burning long after the household has locked up and fled.