Radiance, Page 22

  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.”