Radiance

by Catherynne M. Valente

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

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

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

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

  No.

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

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

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

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

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

  SEVERIN (V.O.)

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

  But it’s mine.

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

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

  But what baby ever got left alone?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  [SEVERIN’S voice goes soft and tired, vanishing down into Clotilde’s Marseilles accent.] Buck up, baby blowfish. Just puff up bigger than your sadness and scare it right off. That’s the only way to live in the awful old ocean.