Radiance

The Deep Blue Devil

The Man in the Malachite Mask

Doctor Callow’s Dream

And If She’s Not Gone, She Lives There Still:

The Case of the Disappearing Documentarian

Begin with the widest shot possible and tighten it in: infinite lights in the infinite dark. Ten lights—shades of gold, blue, green, violet, red. One, one pink-orange lantern hanging in a wide, endless nothing without ceiling or floor. Every time it turns around, a year flies by. Closer. A city in the lantern, cordoned off by canals like velvet ropes. A single building in the city, almost a castle but not quite, thin and tall and ornamented with tangerine agate pillars, with gargoyles holding hearts in their hands and peonies in their mouths, with windows that face the sea. The doors close and lock discreetly; everyone necessary is already inside.

Begin with the most impersonal perspective, then tighten the aperture: What do the gargoyles see when they look through the windows?

Just before suppertime, in every room of the White Peony Waldorf, the telephones begin to ring. As the primrose and cornflower shadows of Venus whirl like leaves into gold, in every room of the White Peony Waldorf, hands pick up the polished brass receivers on the second ring. Lights come on like an advancing army of fireflies all over the Station, and in every room of the White Peony Waldorf, a lovely, lilting lady’s voice pours out of the telephone:

“If you would be so good as to assemble in the Myrtle Lounge in a quarter of an hour, Mr St. John will present the evening’s entertainment. Refreshments will be provided.”

Adjust the lens: What do the windows see when they look into the rooms?

Dresses come out of closets; steam unwrinkles dinner jackets; shoes and hats are hurriedly located. Just as the supper bell rings, out of every room in the White Peony Waldorf, people emerge—hesitant, pensive, nerves and necklines sparkling. One by one they take their seats on the couches, armchairs, chaises, and barstools of the Myrtle Lounge, velvet on velvet on velvet; gowns and trousers crushing that ash-pale, fruiting moss into the thick upholstery. A gramophone plays some dainty old tune. Murmured conversations dapple the room, introductions are made—many of the guests have not met each other before tonight. Hands fiddle with cigars and cigarettes and atomizers—many of the guests have vices that prefer not to wait on the host. There is perfume, there is sweat, there is talc, there is fear—many of the guests wear all four.

Adjust the lens again. Abandon the impersonal perspective and smash it underfoot like a wedding glass. What do the players see?

Anchises St. John and Cythera Brass sweep into the lounge. The air bursts with a flurry of snapping photographs. She wears a sleek strapless number that rustles silver in the popping lights. Flashes of the palest pink feathers flutter in the hem; a slim triangle of dyed crocodile scales soars up to a daring rosette of amethyst and alarming croc teeth at the point of the gown’s plunging, bare back. He wears a raisin-dark smoking jacket over dove-grey trousers and a shirtfront so white you’d think angels ran textile mills. A deep rose cravat blossoms at his throat, with a tiny tiger’s eye pin to hold it in place, and his buttery-yellow leather gloves shine in the low light. Cythera beams, her posture soft as a shimmy in the dark. Anchises is a picture of health, ruddy, his dark hair glossed and thick, a beard coming in nicely, his eyes bright as the sun glinting on a magnifying glass.

Anchises and Cythera hoist up platters of cocktails from the bar and serve them with smiles.

“Good evening!” Anchises cries, his rich, full voice, a leading man’s voice, bouncing off the moss-drenched walls. “Good evening, and welcome to my little party. I’m so pleased you all could make it! I know some of you have had a long journey, but you have, at long last, come to the end! Welcome to the end! Make yourself at home! Relax, put up your feet, and have a well-deserved drink!”

Zoom in again. Adjust the lens. Tighter. Tighter.

What does Anchises St. John see?

“A pink lady for you, Dad,” the great detective says, and, with a flourish, presents a flute to Erasmo St. John, the man who raised him, still strong and broad as a painting of Hercules, his bright black skin free of wrinkles, of the papery thinness of his last days on Mars; as he was on the seventeenth of November, 1944: twenty-eight years old, in love, well laid, and well paid. “Real gin, all the way from London. And a gimlet with muddled mint and French lavender for you, Mum—now, now, I insist. It’s my party, I get to spoil you.” He places a crystal glass in the slim hand of Severin Unck, sitting cross-legged in a black silk evening gown, trimmed in raven feathers and slit up to her hip. Her aviator jacket drapes over her shoulders; she smokes a cigar. One dark, pencilled eyebrow arches up in amusement.

Erasmo leans over to kiss her. She touches the tip of his nose with her finger. Her skin flickers, crackles where it touches his; she is black and white, a film in flesh. “Thanks, sweetheart,” she says. “You shouldn’t have.”

Cythera plops down in a dashing fellow’s lap. He kisses her cheek. Thirty-seven and in his prime, with blistering black eyes and El Greco cheekbones, he looks just as he did the night before a certain silver basket landed on his doorstep. Two women share his couch. Cythera hands out the goods. “That’s an aviator for Unck Senior, a Bellini for the lovely Mary P, and an old-fashioned for Madame? You’ve got honest-to-Betsy Madrid lemons there, Percy; real Creek Nation peaches in your bubbly, Miss P; Hawaiian sugar and California orange peel in your extremely stiff drink, Maxine.”

Mary Pellam laughs like a toffee fountain and nuzzles the ear of Madame Mortimer. They have the same short blond hair, fine as fairy floss, but Mortimer has come to do business in her best black travelling suit, while Mary, seventeen and sweet as a clementine, wears a gold scrap of flapper froth, lavender lipstick, and no shoes.

Anchises does a quick shuffle over to a long couch mottled like a dairy cow with snowy moss. The tips of the moss have sprouted mauve spores. They smell of warm nutcake. “A piña colada with a juicy wedge of Queensland pineapple for my esteemed Mr Bergamot! A snakebite for Marvin the Mongoose—thank you so much for coming on such short notice—and a Brandy Alexander—served in a punchbowl, naturally—for Calliope the Carefree Callowhale!” A cartoon octopus in spats and a monocle wraps one hand-painted, bright green tentacle around the stem of his cocktail. A cheerful animated mongoose grabs his pint glass with both peppy, overcranked paws. Anchises sets the crystal punchbowl down on a side table so that a caricatured whale can dip her turquoise head into the booze. She sits like a lady: friendly, enormous, bright-eyed head up; long, non-threatening dolphin tail down. A steady spray of healthy milk gurgles up from her spout like flowers in a hat.

“Hey,” says Marvin the Mongoose, “didn’t you used to be a puppet? Or am I thinking of some other cat?”

“I transitioned to animation after my fourth film,” allows Mr Bergamot. “Though what I really want to do is direct.”

“No shop talk,” admonishes Calliope, fluttering her long eyelashes at the boys.

“And we have not forgotten the honoured, beloved, and marvellously morbid among us,” Cythera announces.

“Dead to the world, but still the life of the party—we appreciate how far you’ve come to be with us tonight! Don’t worry, cake will be served after the festivities!” Anchises drops to one silk knee before a man and woman with dark hair very like his own, dressed in a matching summer suit and clean white linen tea dress. She sits at an angle, askew; her spine is broken. He’s donned a smart bowler hat to hide his shattered skull. The couple beam with joy, blush with the embarrassment of sitting at the centre of attention.

“First,” Anchises says, his voice swelling with feeling, “a bottle of 1944 Bordeaux for my mother and father. I hope you don’t mind me calling those two Mum and Dad. Mixed families can get so confusing. But I know where I came from. Mostly. And the wine came from the Loire Valley.” He holds a hand up to his cheek and whispers loudly, “That’s in France.”

Peitho and Erzulie Kephus kiss their son, stroke his face, drink in his height, his confidence, his fine clothes. “How well you look! My baby boy, all grown up,” Erzulie says, and wipes her eyes.

“We’re proud of you, son,” says Peitho, with the special brand of gruffness that hides manful tears.

Cythera Brass selects a slim green libation from her lacquered tray. “A grasshopper for my dear, sweet Arlo,” she croons.

A man in a diving costume, his jaw square, his shoulders broad, and his glasses broken, smiles like a million dollars prudently invested. Brackish water full of stones and slime pours out of the sides of his smile. He can’t help it. He is so happy to see her. One of his feet is missing, the ankle chewed ragged, bloody. “Cyth! What brings a nice girl like you to a place like this?” Arlo Covington, C.P.A., kisses his old boss’s cheek.

Anchises moves down the line. “Max! You old so-and-so! You had me going there on Pluto for a while, but I’ve got your number now. And that number is … a banana margarita! Am I right? Old Horace, I don’t even have to ask, do I? Pisco sour, my good man. Peru or bust.”

Horace St. John, his legs tied up with silk bows to keep the shattered bones at something like human angles, shakes Anchises’s hand. One of his ribs protrudes from his Sunday suit like a white corsage. “You’re a prince.” He winks.

“Iggy, you look gorgeous! How about a stiff Sazerac?”

Santiago Zhang blushes. His mouth bleeds freely; shards of metal spike through his lips, his severed tongue. He squeezes Anchises’s hand joyfully. “It’s my lifelong ambition to try every cocktail known to man—this’ll be number eighty-two!” His lips leave a smear of blood on the glass like lipstick.

“And last but not least: Mari, Mariana, an apricot zombie for mi corazon, my darling, my sugar, apple of my eye and bird in my hand—is it too soon for hand jokes? Well, you know I never had a proper upbringing, I can’t be expected to know these things.” The sound engineer scowls, but she can’t keep it up for long. She grins girlishly and waggles her fingers. Mould covers her hand, her arm, bores into her cheeks. Fleshy fiddleheads yo-yo out of her palm. Maximo gives a mock bow and pulls a tuppence out of Anchises’s ear to show there’s no hard feelings. His eyes hang hollow in his face, his skin ashen, sallow, slick with Plutonian influenza, which is nothing to sneeze at.

“We’ll top that off with a Death in the Afternoon for you, Anki, and a bourbon neat for me,” Cythera finishes with a twirl, her feathers and scales catching the chandelier light and tossing it back up to the painted ceiling.

“You’re incorrigible!” Erasmo hollers. Severin glimmers with silver-screen delight. “Let the nice man make it a Daisy, at least!”

“Never!” cries Cythera Brass.

The company roars laughter.

“Oy, Mr Grumpy Bear, you forgot somebody!” comes a voice like chocolate-covered starlight, sailing over the assembled host.

“Don’t you believe it for a second, missy.” Anchises snatches a final snifter from the bar and fairly hops over to the late arrival. She has always known how to make an entrance. She’s buffalo fur and dragon leather from head to toe, young as the day is short, a plunging neckline and a soaring sweep of hair, her Moroccan features severe and welcoming all at once, her smile brand new, All-American. “A sweet moonlight for my sweet moonbeam, crème de violette for my dreamy Violet, queen of the airwaves.”

Violet El-Hashem takes her due praise and her seat, scootching in between the octopus and the mongoose. She waves shyly at Calliope. Marvin curls up in her lap and begs for belly scratches.

A hush falls. Expectant, nervous silence moves like a hot potato from hand to hand. Maxine Mortimer whispers in Mary’s ear. Percy makes a face at his daughter; she giggles behind her nickelodeon hand.

Anchises quaffs his absinthe and champagne in one gulp and opens his arms extravagantly, taking everyone in: everyone, everything, his life, his past, and his future.

“Mesdames et messieurs, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, octopi and mongooses, whales and wendigos, slatterns and stick-in-the-muds! We are here to investigate the early retirement of one Severin Lamartine Unck. I won’t bore you with the facts of a case you know all too well. Every one of you has a piece of the puzzle, and tonight is the night we put it all together and—if we’re lucky and everyone plays fair—point a finger at the baddie, have a spot of cake, dance it off, and call it a night. Are you ready? Has everyone visited the necessaries? Shall we begin?”

Mary Pellam whistles through two fingers. “Go get ’em, St. John!”

Anchises’s parents clap enthusiastically. Their dead hands make no sound. “We love you, honey!” they cheer.

Marvin the Mongoose hops up from Violet’s lap, spins around three times, bites his own tail, and yelps in his trademark lisp, “I am SO EXCITED. I don’t know what’s happening, but IT IS AMAZING. I want another snakebite! Two ’nother snakebites! HOW MANY YA GOT?”

“Why, hullo!” laughs Violet, scratching him behind one animated ear. “You’re voiced by Alain Mbengue, aren’t you?”

“Sure am!” Marvin puffs out his fluffy chest.

Violet shakes his paw. “My goodness, we’re practically related!”

Cythera produces a brass gong from behind the Myrtle Lounge bar and wallops it with a hammer. “I’ve always wanted to do that,” she confesses. “Enough with the patty-cake and the chit-a-chat! Eyes forward, mouths shut!”

Anchises begins. “Very well! As I see it, there are two possible solutions to this mystery. I shall lay them both out and we shall have a vote. Acceptable? Excellent. Now, the first solution is the easiest one, Occam’s old standby: I propose that Severin is dead.”

“Well, that’s not very nice,” Calliope the Carefree Callowhale harrumphs. She speaks with the voice of the actress who played her—an unsettling experience for the lady herself, Violet El-Hashem, seated one mongoose away. The whale’s long-lashed eyes narrow. “And I resent the implication. I mind my own business; you lot ought to mind yours!”

“That is the trouble, isn’t it, Miss Calliope? We haven’t been minding our own business. In fact, we—human beings, I mean—have rather taken hold of your business and called it our own without so much as a by-your-leave, isn’t that right?”

“Damned right,” huffs the cartoon whale. “How would you like it if I came and yanked on your personal bits while you tried to have a nap and made ice cream out of whatever oozed out?”

“How dreadful!” gasped Mr Bergamot, hiding his face with his tentacles. “I do hope none of these bandits have my address!”

“I’m sure we’re all very sorry,” snaps Mariana Alfric. Flakes of jade-coloured mould fly from her lips. “But we didn’t know. None of us were even alive when the Yue Lao landed on Venus. It doesn’t give you the right to go around smashing up villages and sticking your personal bits in my personal bits!” Mariana waves her tentacled hand by way of illustration. A chorus of approval echoes through the dead.

Calliope the Callowhale sniffs indignantly. “I feel we made it perfectly obvious we didn’t want to be interfered with. Would you trouble a tree for apples if the branches vaporised you instantly? I should think you’d leave it well enough alone! We ought not to be castigated for defending ourselves! Ask her!” Calliope points her animated fin at Violet El-Hashem.

“I don’t know what you think I had to do with any of it,” the radio star opines.

“You were one of the first of the robbers to come knocking at our door.”

“I beg your pardon! I was eight years old!”

“Oh, come off it. We know your voice. We’ve heard it over and over in our heads, sizzling back and forth like incandescent grease in an infinite pan. ‘When I looked upon that new world, splendid in every way and in every way terrible, I looked upon a tiger with stars falling from his striped tongue. I looked and saw my true bridegroom!’ I am not your bridegroom, sweetheart, but I shall be your tiger if I have to.”

Violet El-Hashem laughs long and hard. “Fishie, my love, it was only radio! The first time I set foot on Venus my publicist handed me a script, a contract, a cocktail, and slapped my bottom twice.”

“May I ask a question?” Arlo Covington raises his hand, still in its thick diving glove. Muck dribbles from the corner of his mouth and into his cool green drink.

“Hold your question for one moment, Arlo?” Anchises begs. “I fear some of our friends are getting rather upset. Let’s remember we’re all stuck in this together, shall we? We can play happy families for one evening, can’t we? Mariana? Violet?”

“Fine,” the girls grumble.

“Calliope? Let’s see some of that carefree callowhale we all know and love?”

“Fine,” spits the whale.

Anchises claps his hands together. “Now, Mum, you old scamp, get up here.”

Severin Unck disentangles herself from Erasmo and skips up to the bar, where she fixes herself another gimlet.

“Come on, Mumsy. You can tell us.”

“ARE WE POISONOUS?” holler Erasmo, Maximo, Mariana, Santiago, and Arlo, collapsing into helpless giggles.

But that’s not Anchises’s question. “Are you dead?”

Severin’s celluloid eyes twinkle. She taps her nose with a silvery finger. “I don’t want to spoil it.” She smirks. “Never go swimming for at least an hour after lunch, kids!”

Madame Mortimer stands up, stroking her eye patch as she thinks. “The only reason anyone thought twice about the whole business was on account of the footage of your bloody great eyeball, Calliope. Normally, death requires a body; but there are many exceptions, and this easily qualified. Callowdiving is a dangerous profession at the best of times. The careless are atomized like a ball of af-yun. It’s tragic, but it’s happened a thousand times without all this Sturm und Drang and beating of breasts. Without that little filmstrip, it’s an open and shut case.”

Mary Pellam pipes up. “That, and the fact that Maxie-boy over there has blubbered all over the known universe that he killed her.”

Anchises nods. “Yes, I do think it’s time we had a whack at that, don’t you, Prospero, old friend?”

Maximo Varela does not stand. He salutes with his margarita. “Ah, but I did kill her, my boy.”

“Liar,” purrs Severin from behind the bar. She saunters back to Erasmo, bearing a fresh pink lady. She perches on the seat of his armchair. “Oh, what a big fat liar you are.”

“Are we playing the lying game?” yips Marvin the Mongoose. His whiskers sproing merrily. “I love that game! I’m aces at it! Pick me! Pick me! I killed Severin, too!”

“Who are you?” sighs Peitho Kephus in exasperation. “What do you have to do with any of this? What are you doing here?”

Marvin the Mongoose puts both paws over his mouth. He hiccups. “I don’t know!” he yips. “I hitched a ride with the octopus!”

Max’s plague-slicked face droops. “I’m telling the truth. I’m so sorry, Rin.”

Severin rolls her eyes. “Good grief, Max, whatever for?”

“I hit you.”

“I hit you, too. I’m comfortable with our score.”

Maximo’s sunken eyes fill with rheumy tears. “I shoved you. You fell onto the rocks.”

“I had a bruised arse. Big deal.”

“You fell onto George and smashed it.”

“You’ve got me there. Your honour, Maximo Varela murdered George the kinesigraph camera in cold blood. I saw it with my own eyes. Take him away!”

“Baby, you should listen,” says Erasmo softly.

“I did kill you,” the Mad King of Pluto whispers. “But I did it after you died. On the Clamshell. Erasmo and Cristabel cut Radiant Car for you. As a way to say goodbye or a way to keep you alive, I don’t know. It took them weeks. Konrad and Franco brought food to the darkroom and left it outside the door. We didn’t see them or the boy for weeks. It was like they’d vanished, too. And all the while, I still had that static in my head. That horrible static filled with voices, our voices, sawing on my skull every minute. I can still hear it.”

“You never told me that,” says Erasmo.

“I don’t tell you much, Raz. But it’s true. And then, a month out of lunar orbit, the three of them emerged from their exile. They asked us all to come to the cantina for a screening. They even made popcorn. Trying to make some little happiness. And we watched The Radiant Car Thy Sparrows Drew. It was a hundred and twenty-seven minutes long. When the lights came up, everyone wept. They hugged each other, kissed foreheads and cheeks. In movies and books they always say: A spell had been lifted. But it had. They were in grief. But they would live.”

Severin Unck leans toward her lighting master. Her breathing quickens. “Was it good? Was it good, Max? Did I do okay? Did I make something … right? Tell me it was wonderful. I have to know it came out all right.”

And Percival Unck rises from his seat to take his daughter into his arms.

“That’s my girl,” he says. He kisses the top of her head. It’s nice to have made a person to commiserate with, he thinks, and Severin knows his thought without hearing it.

“I always thought you were going to be taller.” Percy laughs. His voice goes softer. “I always thought we’d patch it up someday.”

“We did,” Severin says. “Just you wait.”

“It was beautiful,” Max admits. “Sad, and terrible, and monstrous. But beautiful. People would have kept watching it as long as they knew how to work a projector. And that’s when I killed you.”

“Oh, Max,” sighs Mariana.

“The static crawled in my head, and my dead, obliterated Mariana crawled in my heart, and I couldn’t get a second’s peace, not a moment’s quiet. The static sent hideous knives of lightning though me, and the lightning spoke with your voice. It said, over and over: They have killed a Nereid. And she was full of roe. Full of roe. Full of roe. Like a nursery rhyme. Once Radiant Car started playing, Mariana began to sing along with the killing of the Nereid in my bones. Twinkle, twinkle, little dragon, won’t you come and pull my wagon. The two of you did not sing in harmony. Utterly atonal. I wanted to die. And when it ended, and you disappeared out of the frame like a cheap jump-cut trick, I heard you say a new thing: A mother is a person who leaves. I knew then how to stop the white noise from burning me out from the inside. The way princesses know things in fairy tales. The way you know things in dreams.”

Maximo Varela cannot go on. He sobs, guilt and lymphatic fluid seeping out of his grey skin. Erasmo finishes his confession for him.

“While we slept, he stole everything. All the reels, the scraps, the outtakes, everything. Even the unusable stuff. He dragged it all up to the observation deck and laid it out in the sun to overexpose. You tried to stop him, Anchises. Maybe you remember. Hopefully not. I don’t know how you could even have understood what would happen to film left in the light, but you tried to grab it all up in your little arms like so much black spaghetti. You held it tight to your little chest and hissed at him. And Max … well, he hit you until you let go. Hit a kid with his fists. Stomped on your hand. I never forgave him. Never will. Radiant Car fried all night. Chemical fumes everywhere. Smoke but no fire. By the time we figured out what he’d done, those four miserable pieces were all we could salvage.”

“I killed you,” Maximo insists. “It was all that we had of you, and I burned it. I turned the big spotlight on it and it burned and I made that child bleed and I didn’t care. I killed the heart of you. But the static burned out, too. No more roe. No more twinkling dragons. No more mothers leaving.

“We have all come here to mend. But there’s no forgiveness in the Wizard’s bag for me.” Varela blinks and shakes his head, as though he doesn’t quite know why he’d said that last bit.

Severin stubs out her cigar on her filmstrip-hand. A glowing hole pops into life in her palm, like an open mouth. “You’re right,” she says. “There isn’t. No heart, no courage, no brains for you, Max. And no supper, either.” She considers carefully, a rakish Rhadamanthus, before delivering her judgment. “Go sit in the corner. That’s your punishment.”

And so he does. The King of Pluto faces the wall.

“I never seriously considered Varela a suspect,” Anchises informs the room.

“That’s not what you said at Setebos Hall.” Cythera snorts.

“I am wiser by far now. No, the evidence leads us to one conclusion: Calliope is the villain in our midst. I accuse you, callowhale! What say you?”

The callowhale tries to snarl, but she had only ever been drawn smiling, so that children would love her. She smiles and smiles, and in her singsong advertising jingle voice she trills, “She stank of death and life and a million never-sleeping eyes! Don’t give me your smug primate smirks, Anchises St. John! You touched our dying limb and took our spores into your tiny, insufficient flesh. A new star guttered in the dream-net of the callowhales. It wanted to live, but it had no vigour. We felt you in us; we thought you were part of us, lost, dying. We came for you, and destroyed the cage you languished in. Only afterward did we understand our mistake. We are very embarrassed about it. But your parents should have taught you to keep your hands to yourself! You touched Severin’s face in gratitude; Mariana struck you in fear—new stars guttering into very little of note on the edges of our dreams. We would not be fooled twice. We ignored them. Told them we were on to their tricks. But Severin came so close, right into my parlour, and her stink woke me like burnt bacon. I told her to go away, and she did. I am not sorry! She is small and I am big. She drank my milk without asking. I will not be made to apologize!”

“What about me?” asks Mariana Alfric. “I didn’t come close. I didn’t get a chance.”

Calliope shrugs her cheerfully drawn shoulders. “You let that doctor cut us out of you. You could no longer live separately. When our child died, you died. It had already converted much of your fluid and tissue. Children are so hungry in their first hours.”

“Your child?” gasps the sound engineer.

“What did you think it was? A disease? A wound? You guzzle our milk and think we never bear young?”

“Ooh!” exclaims Mr Bergamot. The animated octopus slides off his mossy sofa and draws himself up onto his tip-tentacles. “May I have the seafloor? I’m quite keen on marine biology, you know.”

“By all means.” Anchises gracefully relinquishes the Myrtle Lounge bar.

“Lemme help!” squeals Marvin the Mongoose, and scampers away from Violet’s lap.

The mongoose and the octopus clear their throats. They run through a quick warm-up: Do re mi fa so la ti do! Do ti la so fa mi re do! Mr Bergamot produces a harmonica from goodness-knows-where, lays down an establishing A note, and snaps his suckers to a quickstep beat.

“The Lifecycle of the Callowhale!” the mongoose and the octopus sing in unison. And they begin to soft-shoe up and down the bar.

“A callowhale isn’t much of a whale,” sings Mr Bergamot in the key of G.

“Not a bug!” belts out Marvin.

“Not a cat!”

“Not a fungus or a snail!”

The octopus knots four tentacles together into a square while turning cartwheels with the rest. A light clicks on inside the square of suckers, though the Waldorf owns no projector. The film merrily commences, and all watch in wonder as an on-screen Calliope dances on her tail. Mr Bergamot sings his verse:

The great callowhale’s got no stop and no start

Just a hundred million brains and a million hundred hearts

Hundreds of tiny callowhale shapes appear with cheerful popping sound effects, all squeezed into Calliope’s big body. Marvin the Mongoose sings his turn:

They’re all dressed up with everywhere to go

They might look funny but boy, how they grow!

In the film, Calliope sprouts a red bow on the side of her ever-smiling head and a string of pearls round her neck. A knock sounds—is it a date? No! It’s a little boy! It is, in fact, Anchises, drawn like a lovable scamp in a Sunday comic strip. He holds up a squirming mass of fiddleheads and fronds like flowers. Calliope blushes: For me? And then Mr Bergamot and his mongoose assistant burst into a flurry of tap dancing, four tappity-spats and two sets of clackety-claws going a mile a minute.

If you’re having trouble with the maths

Come consult our helpful graphs!

The graph’s bars spring up, fountains erupting from the blowholes of two miniature Calliopes. The tallest bears the title, “How Important a Callowhale Is to the Continued Function of the Multiverse.” A very short, squat one, little bigger than an exclamation point, reads: “How Important You Are to the Continued Functioning of the Multiverse.” A pitiful slide whistle sounds its note, and then they’re off again. Marvin turns a somersault and warbles:

Just think of a long shiny pin!

The music scratches to a halt. Mr Bergamot protests, “A pin! Now that’s just silly!”

“Not as silly as an octopus playing the harmonica,” the mongoose rejoins. A rimshot echoes down the Waldorf staircase from nowhere. The octopus and mongoose join arms and serenade the lounge together:

Now think of a long shiny pin!

Stuck down through batting and muslin!

Cotton and linen, silk, lace, and wool, too!

There’s so much that fantastic pin can punch through!

One of the Calliopes leaps off the graph. Her nose sharpens to a wicked silver point. She dives down from the x-axis and the image shifts: a whale shearing through quilts and blankets and veils, sending up splashes of thread behind her.

The pin holds it together, so nice and so neat

That is a pin everyone wants to meet!

The spaces between Mr Bergamot’s tentacles fill with stars, with worlds none of the living or the dead have seen before, shuffling together like cards, like the squares of a quilt, lying one atop the other. All the while the bouncing cartoon callowhale dives through them.

Well, that silk is a universe and so are the laces

The cotton and linen are vast starry spaces

Where nothing goes quite as it goes where you go

And no one you’ll meet will be someone you know

And the fantastic pin that we mentioned before?

Is a callowhale swimming through infinite doors

The stars coalesce into a cheerleader with GO WHALES! stamped on her megaphone. She throws nebulae into the air like pom-poms.

So cheer on the whales and treat them with care

Don’t tease and don’t poke, don’t startle or stare

Without them, the silk would slide right off the linen

And who knows what trouble we all would be stuck in!

The cheerleader frowns and explodes into a puff of animated smoke. The slide whistle slides again. Mr Bergamot takes over once more, and the image he holds changes to Calliope with an enormous thermometer in her mouth and a cold compress on her head.

Now sometimes a whale can get hurt or get sick

Though their hearts are so strong and their skin is so thick.

But we can’t go without, not for one single day

So they make a new whale to play callowcroquet!

A baby whale appears in a shower of glittery fireworks. It wears a lacy bonnet and shakes a rattle with its fin. Calliope and her baby wind up a pair of croquet mallets and whack Jupiter and Saturn through identical hoops.

Marvin the Mongoose, darling of Capricorn Studios, brings it home, while Bergamot’s tentacles fill with smiling faces:

Oh, the life of a great callowhale is amazing!

We hope you’ll forgive us our upside-down phrasing

And the next time your loved one gets vaporised flat

Just remember the pin, and that will be that.

A smattering of awkward applause picks up. The octopus relaxes his arms, the filmstrip clicks off, and our performers bow. But Marvin can’t resist starting up again, high-kicking into a reprise:

If our song has got you spinning

Just go back to the beginning!

OH! A callowhale isn’t much of a whale!

Not a bug! Not a cat! Not a fungus or a snail!

“May I ask a question?” Arlo interrupts the mongoose’s encore.

“Yes, of course. I’m so sorry,” Cythera says, and she means it.

“I understand the girls. But what did you do to me and Horace? We never touched the kid. We drank bottled water. We never did anything.”

Calliope the Carefree Callowhale blushes, two perfect magenta circles blazing on her turquoise face.

“We ate you,” she says sheepishly.