Radiance

The Deep Blue Devil

The Man in the Malachite Mask:

The Murder of Gonzago

25 February, 1962. Half four in the morning, Setebos Hall

My hand shakes as I attempt to record the activities of the night. My lantern gutters, casting shadows like ink drops over my knuckles, my pen, my pages. There are sounds in this house … sounds I can scarcely begin to describe. I might call them howlings, and yet there is nothing in that lonely word bloody and primeval enough to encompass what my ears have been made to endure. Perhaps if I knew the Sanskrit for it, that ancient tongue of tongues, that would suffice.

I understand now that what happened in my presence in the throne room of the King of Pluto happens every night—it is a performance that repeats like a skipping phonograph, like a church bell. It was not done for my benefit; I am incidental. It does not alter; The King keeps a wooden hammer ribboned like a maypole at his side, and with this wicked gavel he punishes any improvisation or deviation with swift brutality. I saw with my own eyes a maid who mistakenly sang the word agony beset by hammer blows until she corrected herself, weeping: Ago, ago, I mean ago!

Enough, enough. Anchises, enough. There must be some comfort in relating of events, or else why has any tale been told? To salve, to soothe, that is the only purpose of language.

Cythera and I were guests of honour at supper tonight. We suspected nothing particularly untoward—at least, no more untoward than the average Tuesday on this accursed planet. We dressed accordingly, in black suits that invited no frivolous business. Even I managed to project a professional, detached air of importance, perhaps even a slight edge of intimidation. I flatter myself that I can pull off such a combination on some rare occasions. Cythera took my arm without even her usual sigh of distaste, ever-present yet almost imperceptible to anyone who had not shared quarters with her for three months, a sigh with deniability, as soft as loathing. But tonight she held it in abeyance, so I must have been in fine fettle. I closed my hand over hers and whispered:

“Cythera, you must not let your guard down around Varela. Whatever he has made of himself here, he is … a bad man.” I sounded, even to my own ears, like a frightened child. I had been just that when I last found myself trapped in a room with Severin Unck’s lighting master. Frightened of everything, but of him most particularly, of his stare, of his terrible lights in their black cases, gathered round him like the wall of a gaol.

“You’ve said nothing about him in your notes,” answered she, pausing at the door of our conjoined quarters. “Is there something you’ve neglected to tell me?”

I shut my eyes. From beneath years of drink and worse, images swam upward, breaking the surface: the cantina of the Clamshell, people weeping, men and women yelling, a doctor with yellow hands, a pistol belonging to no one … smoke—Stygian, unnatural, smoke with a vicious taste—but it was a smoke without fire … so much light, so much light. And then a man’s fists—Maximo’s—striking me over and over, his boot crunching down onto my deformed hand …

I swayed on my feet. Cythera steadied me, real concern in the eyes beneath her golden mask. What a wonder. She did worry for me, after all.

“On Venus I remember nothing of him except his smell—he took more care than the others for his personal cleanliness. Even Severin smelled sour in the morning, but Varela … there was always a breath of soap on him. But … on the ship, on the ship home. He beat me; he told me to keep silent. To never speak if I could help it. And he showed me the airlock. He asked if I liked it. Every day he asked. I ran from him…” But there was something on Venus as well. In the photographs, in the files, in my own memory, dancing just over the precipice where my brain dared not delve.

My companion gave me a glass of her own brandy, a Callisto vintage she must have hidden away from me aboard ship; I felt my strength returning. Perhaps all the strength I’ve ever owned has come from a bottle, from an atomizer, from a syringe. Without them I am friendless.

“You are not a child now, Anchises. He cannot hurt you. He certainly can’t hurt me. I’ve stared down men with more mettle than some pisspot theatre-rat, I assure you.”

How kind she was to me then. I’ve no idea what came over her. Perhaps she was ill. If only we had known.

Boatswain and Mariner appeared, once more maddeningly silent, maddeningly masked, and led us into the dining hall. A long black table lay prepared, groaning with wonderful foods, Earth foods: glistening roast turkeys and geese, bowls of green vegetables garnished with sweet nuts and butter, steaming bread, champagne, cold cherry soup, pumpkin tarts, everything as perfect as if it were made by some St. Louis matriarch in one humble kitchen. Merrymakers already sat at table, talking, laughing, even singing, as though nothing could be the matter. We took our places at the far end of the banquet table. At the other end sat Maximo Varela, the great lighting master, the Mad King of Pluto. He wore a suit not much different from ours—yet still, too, that unsettling, uncanny Severin mask.

We ate; yet it did not satisfy. The turkey, the goose gravy, the broccoli and Brussels sprouts all tasted the same, their flavour no stronger than that of the infanta flowers: sweet, complex, but hardly a patch on a leg of lamb as I remembered it. No one spoke to us; they behaved as though we were quite invisible, reaching across us for second helpings, kicking our shins beneath the table. I searched Varela’s eyes for the man in my memory, the man who had pinned my arm with one boot while he ground his other heel into my hand. But all I could see was the plastic face of Severin Unck, expressionless, unnerving.

Afterward, the company processed into a dark chamber adjoining the dining hall. Real fear moved in their eyes. The nakedness of it all unsettled our bones—naked walls, without sound, without light, yet nothing guarded. The hyena of the human heart had been loosed in the rooms of this place. I offered my hand to Cythera, but she refused it.

“It’s not your comforting I was concerned with,” I mumbled, and she gave me that old shipboard glare I knew so well.

Very well. Comfortless, we faced that lightless room, wide and long enough for draughts and echoes to play awful, invisible hosts. I could feel the movement of bodies, hear the rustle of fabrics, the soft thump of objects, but nothing had a name or a shape; nothing was yet itself. Light, finally, began as dawn begins: barely perceptible, except as an ease in the air, a redness. I could hear, suddenly, overwhelmingly, the crash and boom of ocean waves. Shadows leapt into stark existence—cretaceous shadows, of vast ferns and trunks, of tangled bush, of thorns and brambles. I felt a raindrop land on my head. I smelled ozone, moss, a storm just wandered off. Green lights like lost emeralds spattered down from the black depths of the ceiling. The silhouettes of broken ships, of broken palaces, of broken bodies came into relief. Lights the colour of drowned flesh crept in, slithering forward to meet the King as he stepped into the world of his making.

He stepped. And stepped. And turned. In a small, tight circle, round and round. He no longer wore the mask of Severin’s face. Now a grotesque Green Man rode his skull, a tangle of kelp, wild orange blossoms, and cacao-bark; hanging vines and fish bones. The King turned round and round, his head down, clutching his hand to his naked chest. No, no, no, I whispered, shaking my head from side to side, trying to retreat, to back out of that place before the place could see me, but a wall of bodies caught me, kept me. The King spun. The heavy leaves of his mask quivered in a real wind that picked up from nowhere, swirling, clawing at my gloves as if it knew, it knew what it would find there.

I began to weep. I am not ashamed. Any man would.

The King stopped as suddenly as if he had been stabbed through the eye. He turned his head toward me, his body motionless. The eyes of his mask were holes gouged in the green. Two long tendrils hung down nearly to his waist. They ended in coppery globes sloshing with some terrible pale wine—and didn’t I know that wine? How could I not? I clutched at Cythera Brass.

“Get me out of here,” I hissed. “I cannot be here. This is cruel. Protect me. Do your job.”

“Get yourself under control,” she hissed back.

The King spoke: “No tale can truly begin until its author is shriven. Thus, I offer up my confession on the altar of the telling. Will you hear me? Will you do as I ask?”

I did not, could not, answer him.

“Do it!” the King of Pluto roared. He ran at me suddenly, as a lion after wounded prey, his limbs painted, streaked, splashed with black and white, stark, terrible. Pigment dripped from his biceps, his hipbones; viscous, greasy tears.

“Do it,” he cried again, and sank to his ruined knees. His fern-tangled mask implored me with its empty sockets. What did his face look like? I should remember it; should remember him, Max, the man with the lanterns; should recall him as vividly as any child recalls a favourite character from some charming tale told in the wee hours of their youth. But there was nothing. My mind refused. I shook my head, held up my hands, choked back the bile churning through my body. I was all bile; I was nothing else. I did not know what he wanted from me!

“Do it,” he whispered. “Forgive me. Forgive me. I killed her. Forgive me.”

I stared down at the pitiful wreckage before me. Could it be this easy? As simple, as quotidian, as quaint as murder? He loved her, and she didn’t love him; or she fired him, and he could not bear the shame; or they quarrelled, and he did not know his strength? I tried to imagine it, his choking the life from Severin, dashing her brains out on the flat rocks where my parents had laid out laundry to dry before they were clawed from the surface of the world. Perhaps … perhaps I saw it happen, and that is why my mind refuses to grasp those unspeakable days on the shores of the Qadesh.

“Never,” I hissed. “I will never forgive you.”

But he only laughed: high, screeching, shrill, boiling laughter that steamed away into the nothingness of that horrid vault.

Maximo Varela snapped his fingers. A campfire appeared in the centre of the room, its embers seething. Drums began, and pipes as well—hooting, owlish horns. Eight figures danced around it, naked, painted, masked: a silver man in a beaked mask with deep camera lenses over its eyes like a raccoon’s bandit face; a man and a woman painted like flame and forest, her mask a clock face, his the burnt ruin of a diving bell; two men, their clothes all woven of priceless grain, a woman cyclops, her single eye a pit of blackness; an indigo man with the face of a bull and a scar like a star on his cheek; and a chalk-marked child, clutching one of his hands with the other, his mask a simple, harlequin white with two black hearts where the dimples ought to be, his mouth a heart-shaped hole. I clutched my own hand reflexively, instinctively. Beneath my glove I felt the topography of my scars; the ropy flesh; the hidden, seeping wound; the soft, sinuous writhing of it … Saints in heaven, why now? It had not stirred in years.

The child spun among the dancing adults, reaching up to them, to be touched by them, to be held by them, comforted. They ignored him. The women embraced; the camera-eyed man lifted a bowl of milk and poured it over himself, over the others—they lapped it from one another’s skin, swallowed it, danced in its fall like pale rain. The cream beaded on their collarbones, their chests, their flat stomachs. The child sucked his fingers sullenly, crouching by the fire. Then, the woman painted like the forest cried out and vanished into the shadows.

No, no, no.

The man with the face of a bull began to choke. He clawed at his throat. His face began to swell; vomit flew from his lips and the vomit was not liquid but a torrent of light, bubbling, foaming, scarlet light. Long nails pricked at the rags of my memory. Hooks, shards. Ah, but there is nothing there for you, Prospero. My memory is a land where everything dies. The cyclops lurched unnaturally, his limbs jerking at hideous angles, and a blade appeared, stuck through the centre of his monstrous eye.

The King of Pluto entered the scene. He came leading a woman painted red. No—not painted red, but soaked in blood. She wore the Severin mask, but now that porcelain face was ravaged by arterial spray. Scarlet and black blood splattered over naked breasts, clotting in the hollow at the small of her back, pooled and half-dried in the valleys of her clavicle, turning her belly into a country of crimson. She was not Severin. She was not. That body, so blatant and unguarded, was not the body I dreamt of. Still, I looked away as though it were, as though it could be. The King passed her from dancer to dancer; she was tender with each of them, even—finally, finally—with the pale child. She hoisted him up, spun him in the air. He laughed, and she threw him to the ground. I lurched forward despite myself, stupidly. He is safe, of course he is safe. It is only an act, a little mummers’ nonsense to pass the time on this godforsaken world; only you needn’t be so rough with him—he’s only small; he is a good boy. The boy’s laughter opened a door into weeping.

The drums and pipes quickened, and so, too, the sounding sea: harder, urgent, arrhythmic. The silver man, erect as a knife, lifted bloody Severin into his arms and penetrated her, the blood running liquid down her limbs and mixing with the milk—how could there be so much blood? Where was it coming from? I thought my heart would stop. Cythera watched calmly, interested, never turning away for a moment. The music groaned, creaked, sped along its jerking, spasming path toward I knew not what; the silver man fixed his lenses on the wet, red body of his lover as though he could drink her in through those black mouths. She bounced in his arms, screaming now. The others bent in their dancing, hunched over, their arms brushing the ground, fingers contorted into hooks, claws, talons.

The Mad King of Pluto did not dance. He tore a green frond from his mask and cast it into the fire, where it became a great book, spitted on spikes, the flames licking at its spine like a beast roasting. He read from its flaming pages, and his voice echoed against the crash of invisible waves:

“Take her and spare us, take her and spare us, You who moved upon the face of the deep before the dark had any need of God. Take her and spare us. As long ago the daughter of Agamemnon was called upon to present herself to the ships moored at Aulis when the winds would not blow, so the daughter of Percival gave herself so that we might live. Agamemnon’s child came in beauty like the star of the morning. Take her and spare us. The lords of men told her she was to be wed to the greatest of them, and readily she prepared herself for a soft bed garlanded with flowers, to be thus brided. Take her and spare us. But the bed was not a bed, nor were the garlands flowers. Take her and spare us. The daughter of Agamemnon lay down upon a stone altar, bound with rough ropes, and there the priest slit her throat to appease the angry moon. Take her and spare us. And from her bleeding body the winds began to sing and fly so that every man’s ship found its destiny. Take her and spare us, take her and spare us. Send us home, and send her to hell.”

Prospero yanked Severin down from her silver mount by her hair. For a moment, a silken, elastic moment, he danced with her. A formal dance, a waltz, her face tipped up, straining to reach his. He touched her cheek, the cheek of her mask, the cheek beneath. And then he threw her savagely against the green-lit rocks, splashing through the blood and milk and mire. Before my eyes, the remaining dancers shuddered, howled, and transformed into four red tigers and a cub, maskless and striped: real tigers, starving tigers.

In the pit of drums and milk they bent their heads and ate her. I saw her bones snap, I saw the marrow within, I saw her rictus of anguish, I saw the King of Pluto drink her blood, and I saw that woman die with the face of Severin fixed to her skull.

But past the moment of her red death I remember nothing, for it was then that I lost consciousness.

25 February, 1962. I know not what hour.

I have seen her. I have seen her here on Pluto, in this damned city of Prospero’s, of Varela’s, alive, whole, laughing.

She came to me in the ochre bedchamber—how I got there and who brought me, I cannot say. I woke in the night, flushed, trembling, the memory of that poor girl’s clavicle snapping under a tiger’s mouth washing my brain in blood. I clamped my hand over my mouth to keep either shouts or sickness inside, and I still could not say which would have won out. But at that instant, the pale door of my room opened and someone stole in, sneaking—though not very well—through the shadows. Her smell filled the room, her sweat, her hair oil, her breath. Severin, Severin, all the pieces of her that my mendicant memory could scrape together. She crawled in beside me, her skin cold, beyond cold, glowing blue and bloodless. She wore no mask in the dark. Her black hair, a little mussed and frizzy, framed her heart-shaped face, that face bending down over me as it did on the first moment of the miserable life I now lead.

“Move over, silly,” she whispered. “I’m freezing.”

And then I was holding her in my arms. She was naked. Her long, space-stretched bones, her smallish breasts pressed against my chest, her breath light against my throat. A dream, yes; it must be a dream. Impossible to conceive of anything but dreaming. But she had such weight. Such aliveness.

“Didya miss me?”

Her voice was the voice from the cinema, from the phonograph—crackling, even, as a phonograph crackles. Static poured out of her mouth.

“All I’ve done my whole life is miss you,” I answered. I am what I am, and what I am is an answer. I must tell the truth. I can commit every sin but false witness.

“Well, isn’t that nice?” She laughed, and her laugh skipped like a needle over a scratch. I stroked her hair—I could feel it, each strand, beneath my fingers.

“What happened to you? Just tell me, tell me so I can stop wondering.”

“I’m right here, sweetheart. That’s all that matters. I’m here.”

“It’s not all that matters. Everything matters. You disappeared right in front of me…”

Severin raised her perfect black eyebrow. “Did I? What a funny thing for a girl to do.” She punched my arm playfully. “And you said you didn’t remember anything.”

I didn’t remember. I didn’t—until that moment, with her frozen lips nearly touching mine—remember the morning light of Venus and the jungle and the molten, brilliant water shining around her, and then through her, and then through nothing but an empty strand following down to the surf.

She took my face in her hands. “Hey now. Rest easy. It’s okay now. It’s fine now. I’m okay. You don’t have to be so sore about it. You’re a good boy. You always were a good boy. Everybody just loved you, right from the start. Like a little puppy.” She looked so serious and sad, her great deep eyes full of shadows. “Just close your eyes, Anchises. Close your eyes and listen to what I say. Everybody’s alive. Everybody’s alive and happy and I got the shot I wanted. Just the perfect shot. It’ll be shown in film school for a million years, it’s that good. I’m that good, and so are you. So are all of us. There is such a thing as grace. I’m supposed to tell you that. There is such a thing as grace. Everybody’s alive. Mariana and Horace and Arlo and Erasmo and Max and Aylin and you and me. What I say three times is true.”

Severin moved her cold hands over my body, in the secret world of the ochre bed sheets and the unutterably Plutonian night. She stroked me, clutched me, her gestures needful and knowing. Her breath quickened. It smelled of the cacao-ferns of my village. Of Adonis.

“It’s not so bad, where I am,” she whispered, guiding me into her, into the ice palace of her body. “You can see so far from here. So far. I love you, Anchises. I love you. You found me, and I love you. I couldn’t stay dead with an audience like you waiting for me. Clap for me, darling; clap like the curtain’s coming down. Harder, harder, harder.”

As I broke inside her, Severin threw back her head, laughed, and came down on my throat like a guillotine. Her small teeth pierced my skin and she drank as deeply of my body as I ever did of her image.

I woke alone. But I can still smell her on my hands.

26 February, 1962. Seven in the evening. Setebos Hall.

“Is that your answer, then?” Cythera sighed beside me, holding a cup of beef broth with more irritation than I have seen from women holding wet laundry. “Murder? Varela was what … a madman? Well, he’s clearly that. But was he always? After all, no one accused him back then, and why wouldn’t they have pinned it to his chest? How much easier for everyone if it was a massacre. Disappearances invite a lot more questions than massacres.”

“He confessed it!” I coughed and sank further into my sickbed, into my dank cavern of sweat-stiff blankets. I could hardly lift my head. I put a hand to my throat: bandaged neatly. But there had been a wound. Who had nursed me? My head pounded meatily. I could taste nothing but stale infanta and bile in my mouth.

“Come now,” she said, and I do believe there was a softening in her voice, a coaxing. I had studied the haruspicy of her tones for so long I could scry the tiniest alteration. “Be the detective we went all the way to Uranus for. With enough of those damned flowers in my system, I’d confess to assassinating Thomas À Becket with a ray gun. He’ll come and see you soon. Maybe he’ll gloat over getting you to faint like a maiden on her wedding night, maybe he’ll blubber all over you again; but either way, you need to pull yourself together and act like you’ve got a job to do.”

“So do you,” I spat. “You’re meant to protect me from assaults like that, from … from depredations. And that girl! God, the dancing girl! He killed her, no matter what he did or didn’t do on Venus…”

“Did he, though? I was there. I saw what you saw. I saw more, since I didn’t shriek and collapse like a startled grandmother. And I listened, it would seem, somewhat better. He told us the story of Iphigenia. But Iphigenia doesn’t die in the end, you know. She’s replaced with a deer at the last moment and spirited away to a temple on the other side of the world. She finds steady work and lives quietly until the day her brother and his comrade turn up, trussed and shaved for sacrifice, on the steps of the house of those distant, foreign gods—and there she is, like nothing ever happened, gathering bowls to catch their blood. You really ought to read more. People always lie, Anchises. They lie like they eat, without manners, without restraint. They love lying.”

“Even you?”

“Oh, especially me. Good Lord, I work in the movie industry. Given that you’ll never hear the truth out of anyone’s mouth, you must listen to the lies—the specific lies they choose to tell. Prospero—Maximo—could have ginned up his little pantomime around any story he liked. The Judgment of Paris, that has a good Venus bit. Pentheus and the Bacchae, Inanna and Ereshkigal, anything. But he chose one where the girl only looks dead. Where there’s a trick. Just when it looks like she’ll be sawn in half and there’s no helping her, the false bottom gives way on the black box and she goes somewhere else, somewhere safe.”

“You’re better at this than I am.” I squeezed my eyes against a splitting headache. I hadn’t had a drink since planetfall, nor anything to eat but infanta.

“Very true.”

“Why didn’t they just hire you?”

Cythera Brass pulled back my linens with one vicious stroke. “Because I wasn’t there, you blubbering idiot. Now be a goddamned detective and earn your keep for once.”

But for all the hardness and contempt collecting like spittle in the corners of her mouth, Cythera helped me up and bathed me in cold Plutonian water. She had already laid out a suit—and the right suit, at that. I would have worn something too formal. I would have looked like I was waiting for him. I have never been a master of the secret code of men’s suits; only adept enough to know that the jacket is always saying something, the shoes and trousers always whispering, but not enough to know exactly what they’re on about. Cythera had chosen a soft dawn-grey number with a plum-coloured tie—which she tied loosely, messily, an artlessness full of art. She put pomade in my hair and shaved my chin—my hands shook too much to manage it myself. Not too close a shave, but not too bad, either. She was brusque in her ministrations, but I could see her relax—this was something she knew how to do, and there is relief in doing what you’re good at. Had she been married once? I suddenly wondered. I watched the business work on her like laudanum. Her face gentled when she smoothed out my suit lapels; her shoulders straightened when she touched the long razor. Perhaps she’d done this sort of thing for her boss back on Uranus, picking out shoes that communicated Melancholia’s stake in the fixed game of cards that people like her are always playing. When Cythera finished, I looked like a man with better things to do than whatever he was doing at the moment; a man who’d made just a little time for you, sir, but don’t push it.

And she timed it beautifully, fastening my mask in place and excusing herself to rinse the shaving cup just as Prospero, King of Pluto—or Maximo Varela, lighting master for Severin Unck—came into my ochre bedchamber and sank down beside me with the familiarity of a brother. He wore a simple moretta mask, black and dappled with silver stars. My Totentanz mask smelled of sandalwood, of the creams and oils of Cythera Brass.

Though she had left the room, there can be no question that she heard everything—of course she did.

“Anchises, my boy, how are you; are you well? Can I have anything brought up? You are fed, you are watered? You fainted dead away—I should have known it would be too much for you. Insensitive, insensitive, crass!” He struck himself in the temple with a fist and his mask skewed, showing a sliver of his real face, a face I still could not begin to reconstruct in my mind.

“I am fine. Yes, fine, really—please don’t trouble yourself. Only—what was that all about?” Be a detective, I thought. Questions. It’s always about the questions. Seeking the right one like an optometrist’s lenses. Can you see clearly now? And now? And now? “What I mean is, no one really turned into a tiger and ate Severin Unck, did they? Art has its limits.”

“You are the only one who can understand me, Anchises,” came his reply. He scratched his cheek beneath his starry mask. “You were there—you saw everything. You know my heart. Her heart. I used to take you walking along the beach in the mornings, do you remember? Every morning from the first day we met you. I recited everything I could think of, just so you could hear language again and remember how to make it yourself. Homer, Marlowe, Coleridge, Chaucer, a little Poe, a little Grimm. I managed most of The Tempest the day before she … the day before. I was proud of that. I gave you a little chocolate from craft services after every walk, so you’d associate words and sweetness. Didn’t work, but it seemed important. Tell me you remember. Tell me it mattered.”

I considered it. I considered telling him, Of course. Of course I remember: “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan his stately pleasure dome decree.” Yes, of course. Your voice brought me back to the country of human speech on a chariot drawn by Chaucer and Shakespeare. You saved me. Quoth Kubla Khan: Nevermore. It would have been kind, and he looked more strung out than me on my worst day. And in camaraderie he might have told me more than he would otherwise. But I could not do it. He killed her. This is her killer. I felt his guilt sliding off of him like oil.

I felt that old compulsion to speak the truth surge up within me—so inconvenient, so detrimental to my vocation. “I don’t remember any of it, Maximo.” He flinched at the sound of his real name. “I have no memory before she grabbed me in Adonis, and after that … just pieces. Moments. Nothing more. My ‘memory’—in the sense of a series of events that occur in order, in which there is some respect paid to cause and effect, proceeding more or less in real time—that doesn’t start ’til Mars. Erasmo’s house on Mount Penglai. Everything before that, the hospital on Luna, the hacienda on Mercury is … blurred. Scene Missing. I remember Severin’s face. Her voice. I remember her laughing. I remember Mariana screaming. I remember the smell of the cacao and the red sea. Why don’t you tell me what happened? That’s what I’m here for.”

Varela studied my face in disbelief. Our masks faced each other, revealing nothing. Clever, that. Perhaps Pluto had hit upon something essential, necessary. Now that I had one, I certainly did not want to take it off, here or anywhere.

Finally, he sighed. “I don’t deal in unvarnished truths. It’s the varnish that counts. That makes it true. Give me enough light and I can do anything. Make you believe anything. Ghosts, fairies, vampires: Just tell me what you want and I can make it real. Just tell me what you want and I’ll make it so it happened.”

He gripped my hand horribly. His nails were long. “You have no idea what I can do. I made you believe in this place. In death and tigers. I have made a planet believe I am their King. Look around: This is the island of the lotus-eaters, and I am the hungriest of all.”

“What about the dead girl? Was there a real girl dying under all those tigers?”

The tiniest sliver of mirth crept into Varela’s voice. “A magician cannot share all his tricks.”

He leapt up, swung round one of the thick pillars of the bed, and slapped the wall. The room seemed to quiver with the force of his mood.

“Something has to be real, you know. Something real has to anchor the magic. Death is the realest thing there is. Death holds the rest together. You’ll believe everything else if you believe in the death. Once someone exsanguinates in front of you, well, anything can happen. You’re on the edge of your seat. The tension, the tension just rears up. I’m aces at deaths. Always have been.” Varela struck the door with the flat of his palm and it cracked, sending up puffs of dust. “Do you know how I met Severin? I was part of her mother’s circus. Lumen Molnar, I mean, the last mother. I was the magician. Prestidigitation. Knife acts, girls cut in half, disappearances. I loved my work. I went to Saturn with Lumen, me and the whole troupe—even the monkeys. And, Christ, they loved us on Saturn. We lit up every halfpenny theatre in Enuma Elish—they didn’t even care what the act was, they were just so hungry for a show; so hungry. You know, a person will give up food for a good show. Push comes to shove, they’ll give up their last food. They’ll do it and they’ll think they got a good bargain. That hunger goes deeper and bitterer than the need for bread. And we came sailing in just dripping with gravy. They slurped us up. Licked their fingers dry and banged the table for more.” He dragged down one of the orange tapestries that covered the walls. It ripped easily, like crepe paper, and floated down to the floor. “Half the time you could see the rabbit in my trousers, but it never mattered. I’ve had more Saturnine girls than you’ve had cups of tea, boy, with more lined up round the block that I was too tired to see to. Elish would have given Severin the key to the city if they’d had one. Anything she wanted—any access, any transport, anything. Because she brought the circus, and it was better than gold. Boredom will murder you dead on the outer worlds.

“I wasn’t anything until Saturn. A purveyor of cheap tricks. But I learned. I learned the lantern trade. A trick of the light, boy, just a trick of the light. Everything in creation is just a trick of the light—the only difference between heaven and hell is who’s running those lights, who’s got the switch, who knows the cues.” Varela turned and stomped on the hearth, the night table, the lovely little secretary on which I’d written my previous entries. They crumpled like drywall and ash, no more mahogany and metal and lacquer than my own flesh. “A couple of times Severin got up there with me, played my girl in the box. She looked up at me with trust as complete as a promise. You can’t even imagine. You think she’s yours because she let you play the urchin in some miserable B-plot scene, but she isn’t yours—you never even knew her; she’s just a face to you. I saw that face under my hands in a box like a coffin; I saw her understand totally that I would never hurt her, that I would always protect her. And I saw that face go under a diving bell with that same expression, not a twitch of the mouth or slant of the eye different. But what she trusted wasn’t me, wasn’t Erasmo, wasn’t Amandine or Mariana or any of us who had kept her whole on every planet we visited. No, she trusted … Venus. The Qadesh. Her own fucking specialness. And look what happened.”

I had drawn myself up into a corner of the room near the curtained bathroom door that concealed Cythera. I could not see how to get out, past his rampage, to anywhere safer. I summoned up a whisper: “What happened? What did happen?”

“Nothing! Nothing! She was nothing, and nothing happened. Nothing is happening. Nothing is all that ever happens. You look at this place and see a palace: elephants; griffins; a Ferris wheel; lights, lights, everywhere. You look at a masked girl screaming and think she’s dead. I tell you this is the island of the lotus-eaters, and it never occurs to you to stop eating the lotus.” Varela overturned a plate of infanta flowers, their petals already curling brown. “You see everything in such plain terms. You and her and nothing else. I’m an extra in your story. Well, you’re an extra in mine, boy. A punter picking cards out of the rigged deck I offer. The thing about a magic trick is that you have to play fair. You show the audience everything you’re going to do before you do it. You tell them to their faces that you’re going to lie to them. You show them the tools—see how they shine! You show them the girl—see how innocent and lovely she looks in her spangled costume! You show them the knives. You say: I am going to cut her in half and you are going to applaud. And then you keep your promise. If you’re any good, the shock is worse because they knew it was coming, but no one ever believes a man on a stage.”

Varela turned and punched through the polished ebony wall—it crackled away beneath his fist like the sugared crust on a French custard.

“Yet you believe her. Her! You look at her pretty little face on the screen emoting and stuttering and blushing and contemplating her rich girl’s life, and you think there wasn’t a script out of frame at her feet, rewritten to an inch of its life, every rewrite thatched in on coloured papers to keep it straight. Oh, are we on the red pages today, where Severin is a rebel and a champion of truth? Or blue, where she cries about her mothers for thirty minutes? Or green, where the lady who’s never wanted for a thing in her life whines about how much someone else has to pay for her to speak on camera? It was a rainbow by the end, every movie she ever made. And you think it’s real, that Venus was any different. That the heart of that girl wasn’t always an empty goddamned soundstage, and her soul wasn’t a hack-job screenplay with half the pages torn out and floating down the length of the solar system. What happened to her? The same thing that happens to any bad script: Too many people get their hands on it, trying to fix it, ’til it turns into nothing—nothing; not a trick, not a twist ending, just a girl bleeding out in a box. There’s no artistry to that. You can’t cram artistry into it, no matter how hard you try. She’s just a dead girl.”

“That’s not an answer. Did you kill her? Tell me!”

He calmed himself, assessing the wreckage of the room, the torn cardboard and shattered coloured lights and crepe tapestries. I knew he was right, that he was showing me his trick, but the infanta had so addled my senses that even amid the trash heap of the ochre bedroom, everything I saw was still limned with light, with richness, an afterimage of opulence, ghosts in the architecture.

“Listen, boy—and look! Behold my beautiful assistant strapped to the wheel! Vulnerable, tender, entirely within my power! See how the light catches her jewelled bodice like a burst of starlight. We landed on Venus with no complications. Transport from the International Station to Adonis took two weeks. Before your very eyes, I shall drive five knives into her unblemished body! You see the knives are sharp; I do not deceive you—I’ve cut my own finger with their points: one, two, three, four, five!

“We arrived on site and set up camp. We found you on the first day of scouting. I had my light meters and she had George, but she hadn’t intended to shoot anything that day. You were extremely anaemic and dehydrated. We fed you and washed you and Severin took charge of you like a pet. Now the wheel starts to spin! Her sequins dazzle! Her cries arouse! The first knife—ah, direct hit in the left shoulder! See how she bleeds!

“The angels first appeared that night. Seraphim, you understand? Not frilly angels with blousy pink wings and haloes like wedding rings. These ones had wheels full of eyes and voices like the noise of the deep. We poor fools! We thought it was equipment, feedback. All that expensive sound shit nobody needs but Severin just insisted on. Mariana was the only one who could make those machines heel, but even she was new to it; she’d never gotten to work with anything that high-end before. We thought the whining, the thrumming, that horrible, horrible vibrating, was Mariana’s problem. Ignore it, ignore it, just go to sleep.” He covered his face with his hands for a moment, but snapped up again, his mask barely concealing the livid excitement in his quivering body. “Observe the flight path of the second knife: I’ve sunk it in the right shoulder, perfectly parallel to the first—what artistry! What skill!

“But the angels came again in the morning. It wasn’t feedback. The voices of seraphim are the colour of need. When their words entered me, I felt a cancer in my heart, and, at the same time, the blossoming of my body into beauty. Thrumming. Voices. Quiet at first, like when you’re in a room full of people and everyone is talking constantly but you can’t make out the words, just an ocean of sound. A tide, sometimes louder, sometimes softer. The third knife, ladies and gentleman, a blow to the left hip! Oh, that one hurt her, you can tell! Blood running down the inside of her beautiful thigh. See it drip onto the stage.

“On the fourth day, they woke us up in the middle of the night. 2:14 a.m., by my watch. Mariana singing. Singing, screaming. Screaming, singing. She was so beautiful; the look on her face when she heard the angels singing in her voice. How I loved her! It wouldn’t stop. No one could sleep. But I loved it. I ran through the ocean surf trying to get closer—if I could only get closer! If I could get closer, I could see their faces, their eyes and their wheels. You can hear it on some of the footage, whispering in the trees. That’s all an Edison mic can hear of God. They wanted us to leave, but Severin wouldn’t listen. I loved her, too, for that. Something she couldn’t explain was happening right in front of her. Something real. Something outside herself. I don’t have a drug in my cabinet to compete with that. But she and I were the only ones talking about it. And she was convinced, convinced it was all due to the callowhales somehow, because she couldn’t see the seraphim like I could. She couldn’t understand their songs, their songs like rainbows and arrows and dying. She would just stare out to sea at those fish, those big, stupid islands like desiccated brains floating in blood. She stared. Just stared. Like she had been paused. Ah-ha! The fourth knife, as true as the rest, into the right hip like butter, my friends! Go on, gasp! Clutch your pearls! See the rictus of pain on her face—as real as you and I! Doesn’t she wear her blood pretty—like jewellery, those trickles, like strands of rubies. Nothing finer!

“We fought, the night before she and Erasmo went out on their own. Mariana was hurt by then, and I wanted to call White Peony Station for transport. I wanted to take care of my Mari. But, even more, I wanted them all to go, just go, so I could have the voices to myself. So I could finally listen, really hear them, in the quiet. None of them could shut up. They couldn’t open up to the sound. The voices were deafening, by then—you just couldn’t think, couldn’t move. Their verbs tasted like life. The seraphim were touching us, touching me. They talked all the time, like carnival barkers advertising the known universe. Severin and I fought often—we’d been lovers, on Saturn, and you’ll treat someone you’ve fucked far worse than someone you haven’t. She screeched at me: I have to know, I have to know. Take Mari and go if you want; I don’t need you. I hit her—she hit me back. It went like that with us, sometimes. But I pushed her. I pushed her and she fell.

You could never understand. Leave me alone with the wheels and the eyes and the heavens and your pitiful questions. Just keep your eye on the fifth knife—piercing the heart, as true and sharp as love. Stop the wheel, if you please. Get her down, now—mind the sequins. A star of knives—perfect, if I do say so myself. Now, a wave of my hand, of my wand, of the curtain of light—and abracadabra! She’s perfectly well! Turn around and show the audience, honey; show them you don’t have a scratch. She’s fine. She’s fine. See? She’s fine.”

Then the Mad King of Pluto bent his face to the ruined floor of his broken house and wept as though he would never again see the sun.