Erasmo St. John puts his broad hand on his cousin’s back. It is cold; Erasmo doesn’t mind.
Calliope hangs her head. “You were an accident. We offer an apology—only the seventh we have ever made.”
“Oh, apologize to Horace but hang the rest of us, is that it?” cries Mariana Alfric, mould flaking off of her skin and floating into the air.
“But what happened to me?” Horace begs. His voice drops to a whisper. “I don’t remember dying.”
“What do you remember?” Anchises asks.
“Leaving my tent. I walked through the village; I smelled the sea air. I thought about my equipment for the next day. I kept walking—I figured Raz would show up at some point, so I went slowly. I walked past the memorial and saw something out there beyond the houses. Beyond the old carousel. A patch of green. Not that much is green on Venus, you know. A green patch, and yellow sunlight as bright as noon, and blue water. It was a pond surrounded by long grass and bluebells and squishy mushrooms. I dipped my hand in and tasted it—the water was fresh. I thought a swim in anything other than saltwater would feel wonderful. I popped in, just for a moment.”
Mr Bergamot does a sad little soft-shoe. “Remember the pin,” he says mournfully.
Calliope speaks up. “We hold countless worlds together. When one of us dies, edges begin to fray and come apart. Worlds shear off, bleed into each other, fly away into nothing, burn out. We leave a hole when we go. Through such holes, other places seep and stain. Shards of those places stick in the wreckage of us. Songs you have never heard, movies you’ve never seen, words as unfamiliar as new planets. Other voices may cry through, orphan voices, unstuck from the mouths that made them. Voices that began in other versions of yourselves and became lost inside us, now seeking a way home. You saw another of our places. If you want to know, it’s a tiny lake outside Tonganoxie, Kansas. It’s not an important place. In your world, it does not even exist—not Tonganoxie, not Kansas, not the lake. You walked toward it. But your body didn’t walk into the bluebells; it broke in ten places on the walls of a well on Venus. You did land in the sun, though, for by the time you landed, the frayed edge had stitched itself up again with you inside it. You were not on Venus anymore. You drowned in Kansas. We do not exist everywhere at once. We are always moving. Pieces of us linger when we leave like a trail of breadcrumbs. Like a staircase. Some parts of us stayed in Adonis after we tore it apart looking for our young. Arlo walked into one. You fell through the edge of another.”
“If I may,” interrupts Madame Maxine Mortimer, removing her sleek black blazer and folding it over the arm of an apricot-coloured fainting couch. “These little get-togethers go much more smoothly when we allow logic to lead the way. We simply cannot have the recriminations before the crime—and the criminal—has been fully examined. We must lay the events out upon our operating table, pour ourselves another schnapps, and dissect them properly.”
Anchises St. John runs his gloved hand through his hair. “I quite agree, Madame. I did say there were two possible solutions, if you recall. Another round, everyone?”
“Mind if I run the bar, Anchises?” Percy Unck asks. “I made my first pennies as a barman in Truro before I managed to stow away on the Jumping Cow and get my arse to the Moon.”
“Anything for my granddad.” Anchises yields magnanimously. Cythera Brass hops up on the bar and perches there, swinging her legs like a kid. Amid much grumbling, the company gathers at the bar.
Severin laughs and holds out her glass to be filled. “You never told me we were Cornish! Or stowaways.”
“Isn’t that the point of leaving Earth?” Percy purrs in his own hidden Cornish accent. He spent so long hiding it away—it feels good to let the old boy run. “Leaving yourself, if you didn’t like yourself—and I didn’t. Making a new person when the old one’s gotten worn at the knees. I met Freddy on that boat. He was running away, too. I suppose I got further than he did.” Percy can’t help but give the bottle of gin a jazzy little flip, catching it behind his back.
“Do it again!” cries Marvin the Mongoose.
“We are indeed Cornish, my little hippopotamus,” says Percy while he pours for Mary Pellam and Madame Mortimer. “Though my mother was half French, and my father half an idiot. Your mother, of course,” he clears his throat, “was Basque. Half, anyway. I believe her mother was Lebanese. There you have it: a map of your blood.” He hurries on, shaking up cocktails for Violet, Mariana, Arlo, Mr Bergamot, and Erasmo with the practiced hand of a juggler. He flips back easily into the voice Severin has known all her life. “Oh, I know I don’t sound Cornish—funny how I thought my voice was so bloody important back then. Then I went and got a job keeping quiet. Oh, but what a glorious quiet it was! Do you know, now that Freddy’s gone, they’re starting up talkies again? It’ll never last. You probably don’t know, Rinny, but Uncle Freddy went and shot himself two years ago. They found him on the beach. Dreadful business, but I think I’m the only one who’s sorry. Take that over to Max in his corner, will you, Mary? Thanks, love.”
Calliope gets her punch bowl last.
Anchises presses on. “Now that we’ve had our intermission, if we can all remember to keep our heads? I know we all have great personal stakes here, but do let us try not to all talk at once.”
Mary Pellam tosses off her third Bellini. “I do believe I’ve spotted a hole in your theory, kid,” she says.
“Oooh, I’ve got one, too!” squeals Marvin the Mongoose. He scampers over to Mary and climbs her like a tree, roosting on the crown of her golden head with his ruddy animated tail round her neck. “You first, you first!”
“Let’s have it, Mary,” says Anchises with a smile. He claps his hands and rubs them together.
Mary pushes Marvin’s fur out of her face and points a long finger at the boy from Venus. “You are not a callowhale.”
“Oh, well done, darling!” cries Madame Mortimer.
“Should I be?” Anchises quirks his eyebrow knowingly.
“Well, it stands to reason, doesn’t it? If that little hickey on your hand is a baby callowhale, and all this happened because they came looking for their wee one, shouldn’t you look a smidge more like Mrs Cousteau over there and a skosh less like Percy’s next leading man? No offense, Calliope.”
“None taken, I’m sure.” The Carefree Callowhale glowers.
“What’s your objection, Marvin?” Anchises inquires.
“Oh, I didn’t have one.” The mongoose giggles. “I just wanted to be one of the gang!”
“You are quite right, Mary. I am not a callowhale.” Anchises begins to walk around the Myrtle Lounge. He thinks better on the move. “Indeed, that pesky detail first alerted me to the presence of a second solution to our communal puzzle. I am either thirty or forty years old, depending on whether one counts the time I spent in limbo in Adonis, and I can assure you I have suffered no ill health, no unusual physiological developments—beyond the obvious, which I will come to in a moment—and only the expected mental disturbances of any traumatized child who has lost his parents, excepting those I inflicted upon myself with a bottle or an atomizer or a film projector. There were times when I wished for all those things. I think I would have known some peace if my fingers had become gas bladders filled with milk, if my mouth had closed over with clammy flesh and I’d grown a blowhole. My life would have begun to make sense. But the truth is quite the opposite. In fact, in recent years—” Here Anchises removes his buttery leather glove and reveals his open palm like a rabbit pulled from a hat. A great gasp goes up from the crowd. The hand is healed. A rough, hardscrabble scar runs across the skin, puckered like a bullet wound. But that is all. Mariana looks down at her own hands, crawling with feathery fronds, their fiddleheads curling and uncurling. “Even this last reminder of that morning so long ago when I found that dying callowhale limb lying, so forlorn, on the beach and…” He trails off, his voice thick. “Forgive me. Even that reminder has gone. So, as they say, what gives? Thus I come to my second
solution: I am not a callowhale—but someone else in this room is!”
“Don’t look at me!” cries Mr Bergamot, retracting his tentacles into his body in terror.
“I just played one on the radio!” Violet El-Hashem holds up her hands.
“Oh, all right, it’s me.” Severin Unck grins sidelong, putting one hand on her hip.
“Hi, baby,” says Calliope, waving her blue fin.
“Hi, Mama.” Severin wiggles her fingers.
“What happened to you down there?” Percival Unck pleads. “I have to know.”
“Please, Rinny.” Erasmo looks up at her, hurt and lost and full of an ache like a bullet lodged in a bone.
“The lights went out,” whispers Severin. “The dark tasted like milk. My heart turned into a photograph of a heart.”
“I don’t understand you, darling,” Erasmo says.
Anchises sits down at the gleaming grand piano in the corner of the Myrtle Lounge. He plays a flourish on the keys. Severin walks across the room. She shrugs off her aviator jacket, musses her hair. She slides up to the top of the black grand and lies across it. As she does so, her flickering black-and-white skin flushes into colour, her dress turns a throbbing shade of deep green, her shoes bright gold, her lips redder than Mars.
“How’s your night going, Miss S?” Anchises asks, sliding into the old, comforting patter of a lounge act, his fingers coaxing the keys.
“Oh, not too bad, Mr A,” Severin croons. “I was dead for a little while, but I got over it.”
“Glad to hear it. You got a song for all these lonelyhearts?”
“I just might. It’s called ‘The Quantum Stability Axis Blues.’ You wanna hear it?”
“I’m dying to hear it.”
And so Severin Unck begins to sing, in a thick, low voice like bourbon pouring into a wooden cup.
I met my honey way down under the sea
Where the sun never goes so nobody can see
What my honey,
Oh, what my honey
does to me
Severin rolls onto her back, green sequins pulsing with light.
My honey put the moon on my finger
My honey put the stars on my plate
My papa told me good girls don’t linger
When a honey comes
Oh, when a honey comes
a-rattlin’ her gate
“I never said such a thing,” Percy grumbles.
“I know, Daddy, it’s a song,” whispers Severin, putting her finger over her red lips. Shhh.
My honey he was dyin’ without me
His heart was all locked up but I was the key
I said I should go,
but my honey said no,
Oh, no, no, no,
Let me show you what a good girl can be
Severin slides gracefully off the piano and walks through the lounge. Her green dress fades back to black, her skin to silver. She sits down on Erasmo’s lap; she runs her fingers through his hair. The key changes, and Calliope begins to hum a plaintive counterpoint. Mr Bergamot joins in.
My honey and me floated out on the foam
Still I sighed: I miss my baby back home
How can I leave him so lonesome and blue?
Don’t seem the kind of thing a good girl should do.
Severin snaps her fingers. She presses her knuckle under Erasmo’s chin.
But with honey, ain’t no such thing as leavin’
Anyone I want I can find just like that
So baby, don’t you get lost in grievin’
Wherever you go, that’s where I’m at.
“Because I am a nexus point connecting all possible realities and unrealities,” Severin purrs seductively. “I exist in innumerable forms throughout the liquid structure of space/time, and neither self nor causality have any meaning for me.” She kisses Erasmo as the song ends. Tears slide off his cheeks, onto his chin, and onto her film-shivering fingers, where they burn. “I love you right in the face.”
Severin stands and bows. Marvin the Mongoose throws gardenias at her feet. She holds her hand out to her father, who takes it, and holds it to his breast. He’s sobbing, a big ugly cry, but there’s no shame. In point of fact, there’s not a dry eye in the house.
“I’m okay, Daddy. It’s okay now.”
PART FIVE
THE RED PAGES
The radiant car your sparrows drew
You gave the word and swift they flew,
Through liquid air they wing’d their way,
I saw their quivering pinions play;
To my plain roof they bore their queen,
Of aspect mild, and look serene.
—Sappho, “Hymn to Aphrodite”
In the end, everything is a gag.
—Charlie Chaplin
The Man of the Hours
13 June, 1971
The afternoon sun knocks politely at the doors of Mount Penglai. It wears a soft orange dress with red buttons and a gold sash.
Mount Penglai meant to be a metropolis, but it got a little lost along the way. You can still see evidence of its grander destiny: a pronged glass hotel rising like a trident from the central business district: the mammoth bronze qilin statues outside Anqi Sheng Theatre whose marquee, on this particular day, reads: Mr Bergamot Goes to France. The city lies in the Chinese hemisphere, fed by the happy canals of the Mangala Valles, not so far from the enormous orange cone of Nix Olympia, a kindly volcano the size of Bulgaria that never makes any trouble. Prosperous kangaroo ranches dot the outskirts, and that’s about the size of the wealth around here—the fancier folk just didn’t want to live so far from Guan Yu.
Or too close to Enyo, after everything. It’s only five kilometres down the road.
Vincenza Mako knocks politely at the door of a large and handsome house. She is, by coincidence, wearing the same outfit as the sun. Orange, red buttons, gold sash. A man built this house because he wanted a place to try for happiness. Behind Vincenza, mango sellers and ice hawkers make the first market-cries of the day. She is nervous, a little. She has come bearing a gift: a box containing several reels of film.
Anchises St. John answers the door. The real Anchises St. John. Vince only met him once, when he was small and unable to speak. He turned out very tall, with shaggy dark hair, striped now with grey, soft lines around his eyes, a prominent nose. Not handsome, really—though Vincenza’s standards are skewed by the bounty of available beauty on the Moon—but at least interesting looking.
“Vincenza?” he asks, smiling uncertainly. He is a man unused to company, to appointments, to strangers.
“You can call me Vince. Everybody does.”
Anchises makes lunch for the two of them: ’roo steak, fried dumplings, and red beer. They watch the reels together out in the garden on a huge white bed sheet. Anchises grows sunflowers and moonflowers side by side. They race each other, up the fence, toward the sky.
The title card reads: Radiance.
Anchises doesn’t talk while the movie plays. The images reflect in his eyes, moving in his iris, shadows and light. He chuckles a few times.
“What do you think?” Vince says when it’s done. Anchises brings out goji-chocolate cake and coffee on plates with tropical fish painted on them. Crickets (which are not really crickets) hum and chirp.
“I’m not a critic,” Anchises says with a shrug of his shoulders.
“Come on. It’s you up there. You must have an opinion.”
“Well…it’s not really a movie, is it? Just pieces of one.”
Vince sighs. She wraps her hair around her hand, tying it into a knotted bun in one quick, assured movement. “Percy couldn’t figure out how to tell it. He never finished—the studio killed his funding and he just…stopped. Of course, you never really finish any movie, you just turn the camera off. But it was time to go, for him. The Moon wears on you after a while. I wonder if you can guess where he retired?”
“White Peony Station,” Anchises says, without missing a beat. “Wi
th Penelope Edison.”
“Bravo. They’re living at the Waldorf. When we filmed the song and dance numbers there, he said it felt like home. And after Freddy died, she just sort of melted back into everything. Into Percy’s life, into her work, into herself.”
“You’re not going to release this, are you? It’s a bear.”
“No studio; no distribution. But he wanted you to see it. Without an audience, it doesn’t exist. If a movie shows in a theatre and there’s no one to see it, does it make a sound?”
Anchises watches his moonflowers opening one by one, the night wind picking them up and blowing their petals open, perfect, white as screens.
“I was actually a detective for a while,” he gets up to fetch himself a cigar, cuts it, lights up, settles down again. “On Callisto. Though I guess you know that. I was a little of everything. I think I always knew I’d end up back here. I was happy here, with Erasmo. Safe. I don’t think I showed it much, but I was happy. I made sure I saw a hell of a lot before I came home. I was drunk most of the time and I did my best to get punched on every planet I could, but I’ll be damned if I didn’t see a hell of a lot. I even went to Pluto, just like you said. You did your research.”
Vince smiles, shrugging slightly, as if to say: Thanks, but you have no idea.
“Max wasn’t quite that well organized when I got there, though.” Anchises St. John turns to look Vince in the eye. His gaze is still sharp. “How did you know kids used to call me Doctor Callow? And about the frond on the beach?”
“Do you remember a little girl named Lada? She was the same age as you.”
Anchises rubs his forehead. Tears form at the corners of his eyes. “I’m sorry. I do try, it’s just…”
“Don’t worry. God, it was thirty years ago now, anyway. Longer, um, for you, I suppose. Lada Zhao’s family moved to the Japanese sector about six months before the last Nutcake Festival. She remembers you very fondly. She has a photograph of you, standing next to the frond. She says she told you not to touch it.”
Radiance Page 33
