Radiance, Page 27

  We all yelled at him not to disconnect, but he couldn’t hear us, I’m sure he couldn’t. We could barely hear ourselves. We heard him drop, grunt, and brush himself off. He said, “It’s pretty dry down here. I thought this was a well? There’re puddles, but nothing else. Maybe there’s a sluice gate somewhere? But, Raz…I don’t see Horace. I’ll keep looking! It’s huge down here. There’re drawings on the walls. Like feathers and tic-tac-toe hash marks and, I don’t know, maybe horses. Or snail shells. It looks like those caves in France. I can barely see the ceiling. Did Adonis have a cistern? If not, they were done for anyhow. It’s dry as a bone down here. Not a drop to drink. Christ, it just goes on and on, like Kansas…”

  “What’s Kansas?” Severin yelled over the unbearable noise. The miserable static picked up that word from the radio and flung it out over the Qadesh, up into the dim gold clouds. It detonated softly, like fireworks going off in the next town over.

  Kansas, Kansas, Kansas.

  From the Personal Reels of

  Percival Alfred Unck

  [A black cloth lies over the lens. A demand to shut the damn thing off has been made and ignored, but the cloth makes Clara look benign. Shapes move indistinctly across the room. SEVERIN UNCK, sixteen years old, sits in silhouette, her hair longer than it will ever be again.]

  PERCIVAL UNCK

  It’s for your own good, my little hippopotamus.

  SEVERIN

  Don’t call me that. There are more lies in this house than wallpaper. Don’t pile on any new ones. The roof won’t stand the weight.

  PERCIVAL

  Ada said you can stay with her until this has all blown over. We’ll go after the New Year’s parade. If you’d rather a flat in the city, perhaps we can come to some arrangement…

  SEVERIN

  What about Mary?

  PERCIVAL

  Mary’s shooting on location this year.

  SEVERIN

  [begins to cry] Why? Papa, I want to stay here. This is my home. Don’t you love me?

  PERCIVAL

  I am disruptive to your life right now. And…you are disruptive to mine. I love you, but there’s a great deal of trouble at the moment.

  SEVERIN

  Oh, there’s always trouble. There’s always something. Some reason I’m inconvenient. Some excuse to stay away. What kind of trouble now?

  PERCIVAL

  People…people are saying I shot someone.

  SEVERIN

  [SEVERIN pulls away.] Uncle Thad? [Percival does not answer.] Did you?

  PERCIVAL

  Rinny, it’s very complicated…

  SEVERIN

  Oh my god.

  PERCIVAL

  {He reaches out for her, his shadow for her shadow.] Darling, listen.

  SEVERIN

  No, don’t touch me. Call Ada. I won’t stay in this house another second.

  The Deep Blue Devil

  The Man in the Malachite Mask

  Doctor Callow’s Dream:

  The House, the Eye, and the Whale

  Once upon a time, in the Land of Milk and Desire, there lived a boy who had outsmarted his birthright. Whether he knew it or not, this is a very dangerous thing to do. A birthright can’t be cut off like a bit of fingernail—it hangs about, sullen, limping through the years with two wooden legs and a clay hand, waiting, slinking, sniffing for a chance to get in the game again.

  Only once did Anchises, whom everyone called Doctor Callow, tell a grown person about the workings of his heart. When he was eight and believed that his biggest wishes-which-were-not-really-wishes were behind him, little Doctor Callow went to see a witch (who was not really a witch, but an ornery old woman who had once made her living as an ostentatious fortune teller in Judgment-of-Paris, one of the great cities of the southern part of the Land of Milk and Desire, very far from Adonis, a city where the laws against conflict are so strict that the slightest bickering over a supper bill is cause for expulsion). The witch’s name was Hesiod—though it wasn’t, really. She had been born Basak Uzun, but began trying to escape her name as soon as her mouth got big enough to say it. She tried on many new names before she saw “Hesiod” in a beautiful book about the ancient days of Home, a place she had never seen and would never see. The name sounded to her like yellow sunlight on brown, dry earth, and she took it the way some young persons take trinkets when a shopkeeper’s back is turned, even though it was a boy’s name. She didn’t find that out until much later, and by then, she didn’t care. Hesiod fell in love with a dashing diver and came away from Judgment-of-Paris to homestead in Adonis, a place so new at the time that it didn’t have a name. When her beloved died at sea—brushed ever so lightly, as lightly as a lover, by the frond of a callowhale—Hesiod returned to her old ways, for telling fortunes is a hard habit to break.

  Anchises strung six trout-which-were-not-really-trout on a heavy rope and brought them along to pay for his fortune. Hesiod’s hut, its veranda washed by salt wind, its windows pink sea glass, sat, quite satisfied with itself, by the shore of the Qadesh. Anchises knocked three times, which is traditional. Hesiod answered him, her long grey hair plaited with cacao-husks and ocean daisies (which are not really daisies, but livid, lilac, languorous anemones that can survive for six days without water). Doctor Callow presented his gift of fish.

  Hesiod plucked out one of the fish’s eyes and ate it without a word. It must have tasted good, as eyes go, for she shrugged and let him into her house, sat him on a driftwood-which-was-not-really-driftwood chair, and pulled out her cards. She spread them on the table in a graceful fan, like a casino girl (which Hesiod had also been when she was young). The witch-who-was-not-really-a-witch had a crystal ball, too, but she never used it and it wore a perfect coat of dust. It was just for show, but people like a fortune-teller with a crystal ball.

  “What’s your name?” said Hesiod gruffly. She wasn’t really gruff, but people like a grouchy witch. A friendly one couldn’t possibly know anything about the world.

  “Doctor Callow,” answered the boy proudly.

  “No it isn’t,” snorted the old woman.

  His little shoulders fell. “It’s Anchises Kephus, ma’am,” he mumbled.

  “That’s fine, boy. I can always spot another scrap who’s shucked their name. If a name doesn’t fit you, best leave it on the road for someone else who’ll like it better.”

  The witch-who-wasn’t-really-a-witch and the boy-who-was-really-a-boy sat without talking or moving for quite a while. Anchises didn’t know how to explain his life to her. It sounded silly when he tried to make words out of it. He had become very good at figuring things out without asking adults about anything, and he found it hard—painful, even—to change his ways now. He was eight years old, and that, he thought, was a long time to get used to living a certain way.

  Hesiod coughed and pulled a cigarette (which was not really a cigarette, but a shag made of black, bilious, brackish callowkelp, more expensive than beer from Home, wrapped up in newsprint) out of her deep bosom. She lit it, and the room filled with a scent like sumac and ozone and coffee and possibilities. “You have to ask a question, you know.” She chuckled. “It costs a lot more than fish for the kind of fortune where you don’t say anything.”

  Anchises took a breath as big as his eight years. “I think that I have a curse, Miss Hesiod. Maybe it’s not a curse—maybe it’s no different than being born with yellow hair, or something. But I don’t have yellow hair; I have this. I think I’ve had it since I was little—littler than I am now, I mean. This is what I think the curse is, ma’am: Anything I wish for doesn’t come true.”

  Before Doctor Callow’s words came out of his mouth, they felt as heavy and swirling and important and salty as the Qadesh. But with every word he said to Hesiod, he hated the sound of his voice in the smoky hut and the words it was making even more. These words were small and they only meant what they said, not how they felt before he said them. He nearly wept with the frustration of it.

  “Oh,
you silly little turtle. All children think that. Hell, I think that, sometimes.” Witches, even those who aren’t really witches, like to swear, and their customers like it, too. As a rule, Hesiod tried to keep to no fewer than four profanities per visit.

  The boy gritted his teeth. “No, that’s not what I mean. I’ve had a long time to go over it—and I did go over it, carefully, like the men from Prithvi testing callowmilk for alkalinity. I do have a curse! Listen to me, I brought you fish!” Anchises calmed himself down, which was not easy for him, then or later. “These are things I know about it so far: It doesn’t matter if I want it very much or not much at all. It doesn’t matter if it’s a big thing or a little thing. I have to say the wish out loud or it doesn’t count—if I just think about it, nothing happens—but I don’t have to say any particular magic words. It’s enough to say I’d like rice-suckers for supper tonight, or I really want…” But he couldn’t say anything he really wanted, because he was so afraid the curse wouldn’t know the difference between wishing and an example of a wish he might make, and already he wouldn’t be getting rice-suckers for dinner, which he loved. He said the next part as quickly as he could, in case saying it at a normal speed would make it all come undone. “And if I am very careful and wish for the exact opposite of the thing I want, I get what I wanted in the first place, which I guess is called a loophole.”

  Hesiod smoked her cigarette-that-wasn’t-really-a-cigarette thoughtfully. “How big can you do? If you wished for the sun to come up tomorrow, would the world end?”

  “I don’t know, I’d never dare!”

  “You never know unless you try.” The crone shrugged.

  “I think…I think it’s just things to do with me. Or, at least, people I know,” he added hastily, thinking of the girl with the black ponytail. “It’s localized phenomena,” he whispered, lifting a phrase from one of his textbooks.

  “Big words from a little man. If you’ve got this all figured out, what do you need me for? Have you got a question, or haven’t you?”

  “Yes! Hold on! Jeez!” It was all getting away from him, skidding out from under his feet like red sand. Anchises shoved his hand in his shirt pocket and pulled out a piece of paper, on which he had written his question in neat, round letters, in case he got confused or upset. “What Is Going to Happen to Me?” he read slowly, evenly. “Is This Going to Happen Forever? Is It a Real Loophole? What Can I Do So It Goes Away?” He looked up at the fleshy lilac flowers in Hesiod’s hair and her big cataracted eyes. “Am I gonna be okay?”

  Hesiod thought of fortune cards no differently than she thought of casino cards: each had a value, which changed according to its position on the table, and when it was laid down near other cards, their combined values made a winning or a losing hand. She dealt three cards from her deck as quick as breathing.

  The House. The Eye. The Whale.

  The House had a hut on it that looked a lot like Hesiod’s hut, only made up all of locks: locks for doors, locks for windows, a lock-thatched roof. The house stood, all locked up, under a sky full of stars, and in some of the stars, faces with suspicious eyes glared down. The Eye had three old ladies on it. They all had white hair that hung down like pillars to the ground. They wore silver, and they wore blindfolds. The middle one had an eyeball in her outstretched hand, from a green eye. The Whale had a callowhale on it, but it was not like Anchises’s drawing of a callowhale. It looked like a stone wrapped up in grass, only the leaves of the grass were shaped like peacock feathers, and they had eyes in them, too.

  Hesiod burped. She liked to burp almost as much as she liked to swear, but her customers didn’t like the burping as much.

  “Fucking hell, kidlet,” she sighed. Her breath smelled sour. “Just because things don’t go your way doesn’t mean you’re cursed. You think I didn’t wish to get old with my Iskender and have a bunch of babies and enough milk money for a house with central heating? You think I didn’t wish to be happy? You think any of the countries that landed here didn’t wish they could have it all to themselves and kick everyone else out? The world is made of wishing, Anki; just every bastard wishing all the time, and it’s a dog’s work to tell who gets their wishes and who doesn’t, because everyone’s wishes bash into each other a thousand times a minute, and it’ll get sorted out in hell if it ever does. If you wished the sun would come up tomorrow, it’d knock into a million other sad sacks wishing it wouldn’t, and no matter what happened come dawn, you couldn’t say who got their way. But mostly nobody gets their way. They wish for good and they get a handful of shit, and I know you’re young, but you’re old enough to get right with that. If you got that curse, baby boy, we all got it. I don’t want to hear you bitch before you get your beard. You got no idea how hard you can lose your wishes. You’re young enough to think there’s logic to time and events and desire. It’s cute, but I don’t go in for cute at my age.”

  Anchises didn’t blink. “What do the cards say?” he said, stonily, his cheeks burning.

  Hesiod burped again. “They say you’re never gonna get what you want, and you’ll just have to live with it like everyone else.”

  Outside, beyond the glowing crimson breakers, the seals-which-were-not-really-seals barked out their rough songs like dinner bells, and never again did Doctor Callow tell a grown-up person what he knew.

  As the years of July passed by, Anchises grew older—and more and more possessed by the desire to see the face of a callowhale. It was not only that no one had, but that little Doctor Callow was convinced that anything with a face had to be alive, alive the way he was, the way his parents and the foreman at the Prithvi factory and the cacao-dancers at the Nutcake Festival and the slick-suited politicians in White Peony Station were; the way the girl with the black ponytail no longer was. A face was where you kept your aliveness. It was the part of you that showed sorrow and laughing and anger and embarrassment and surprise. Other parts felt those things, but your face announced them. What did a surprised callowhale look like? How about sad? How about if you told one a joke, a really good joke, the best joke in the world, and it laughed? He had to know. At ten years old, Anchises felt that if he died without knowing, the bones of his face would be knotted up with grief. Anyone who dug him up a hundred years later would look at his skull and say: This man died missing the better part of his soul.

  But he was only ten, and he did not yet have his own diving bell.

  As Adonis began to look forward to the Nutcake Festival of the crisp, cold, lean year of July thirteenth, three things happened, one after the other. Like dreams following sleep, each one ended in wishes our Doctor Callow did not mean to make, and like morning following dreams, each wish drew borders round the territories of the rest of his life.

  The village elders of Adonis put their shaggy heads and tight-stitched wallets together to plan something special for the Nutcake Festival that year, as it was the tenth Nutcake, and also because that year had not been so kind as July third: the amphorae were only three-quarters full, the cows-which-were-not-really-cows were surly and recalcitrant, and every other cacao-husk had no nut in it. Everyone needed cheering up. The elders sent away to Parvati, another village in the Land of Milk and Desire, deep in the lushest and loveliest jungles of the interior, for seven barrels of cider (which was not really cider, but heady, hearty, heavenly stuff the colour of a flamingo’s feathers for which Parvati was already becoming famous, as it was brewed from apples which are not really apples, but crisp, colossal, crystallized berries that grow only in the most protected and shadowy forests of the Land of Milk and Desire). They sent to the village of Dahomey on the slopes of Mount Neith where wild frangipani grows (which are not really frangipani, but fragrant, feral, fecund flowers the colour of sunset that smell like bread baking and are only the female of the species) for twelve mature Samedi moths, which are the males of the same species of the frangipani-which-is-not-really-frangipani. Every summer the frangipani-that-are-not-really-frangipani blossoms open up on the mountainside and th
ousands of great glossy black-green moths-that-are-not-really-moths fly out of their mothers and into the world. A single wing of the Samedi moth, properly roasted over a low, grass-fed fire, can feed twenty, with scraps left for the hounds. And, finally, the elders of Adonis sent to White Peony Station for three precious treasures, so dear they could not be purchased, only lent at robber’s prices, with thrice-signed bonds assuring their return in pristine condition. One treasure was white, the second silver, the third black. One enormous, the second awfully loud, the third nothing much to look at, but more dear than the other two combined.

  The first treasure, white and enormous, was a projection screen.

  The second, silver and awfully loud, was a film projector.

  The third, black and not much to look at, was a movie, its spools of film closed tightly into canisters like holy jars of spices buried within the pyramids back Home.

  The elders kept the name of the film secret, so that everyone who was not an elder could have the pleasure of finding out what it was just as the cider was going to their heads and the world seemed very fine indeed. They had debated long and hard over which movie to request from White Peony Station—a movie the children would like, but that would not bore the adults too much, that would neither be too sad nor too cloying, too pretentious nor too stupid. Only five people in Adonis had ever seen a movie before, and all in their youths, when they had first arrived in White Peony Station, or Aizen-Myo Sector, or Judgment-of-Paris, or even back Home. Adonis was normally too small and busy for such diversions. Finally, they settled upon a film by Percival Unck, whose name the old timers remembered blazing from the marquees of those White Peony and Aizen-Myo movie halls. This film was called The Girl Who Made Fate Laugh, and it had an octopus in it.

  Little Doctor Callow, along with his mother, who was pregnant again, and his father, and his baby sister, and the twins, thrilled with anticipation. Anchises ranged far and wide into the hills to find cacao-husks that rattled with seeds inside. He put his pole into the water off of the swimming dock, caught four lovely fish, and smoked the wine-dark trout himself. He chased cassowaries off of their nests, ignoring their squawks and caterwauling, bolting from a hen hollering Cao ni nainai de, ni ge wangbadan gouzazhong! Sizei, ni geiwo gun huilai, wo nie si nige guisunzi!, and carried home as many eggs as he could in an apron made from the bottom of his school shirt. All the other children did their share, wandering the jungle paths in the autumn dusk, giggling in the gloaming, chasing after wild piglets (which are not really piglets, but skinny, six-legged, spicy-tasting black miniature deer, with long searching snouts and longer teeth). Anchises tried to outdo them all, combing the beach for live scallops (which are not really scallops, and taste like slightly bitter mangoes), and clams (which are not really clams, but squirting, sallow, shell-dwelling molluscs whose meat is poisonous except in autumn).