Radiance

  ERASMO: Oh, fuck off. You know all this. Eight attached to Radiant Car, ten support staff.

  CYTHERA: And upon return?

  ERASMO: I don’t know, what does your expense report say?

  CYTHERA: Please, Mr St. John.

  ERASMO: Well, I think that depends how you count. How is Santiago doing these days?

  CYTHERA: [clears throat] I have been instructed not to discuss that with you, Mr St. John.

  ERASMO: Of course. Fine. We got back on the Clamshell in White Peony Station light one director, one sound engineer, one idiot, one cameraman, and heavy one kid. Happy?

  CYTHERA: And for the record, how do you account for the discrepancy?

  ERASMO: Are you joking?

  CYTHERA: I am not. Let’s take them one by one. Mariana Alfric, your sound engineer?

  ERASMO: [shakes his head] Dead. We buried her in the village cemetery.

  CYTHERA: Arlo Covington, the Oxblood representative?

  ERASMO: Emphatically dead. Most likely, almost certainly, probably dead.

  CYTHERA: Horace St. John, your cameraman? You knew him well, is that right?

  ERASMO: He’s my cousin, yes. Dead…ish. I don’t know. We had to leave him.

  CYTHERA: And Severin Unck, the director?

  ERASMO: [unresponsive]

  CYTHERA: Well, we’ll get to that. Can you take me through the landing and establishment of base camp? In your own words.

  ERASMO: [long pause] [When he speaks again, it is in a whisper.] When I shut my eyes I see the film we meant to make. It was something elegant. Something accessible but still stylized, beautiful, satisfying. We saw a mystery in Adonis—the village that vanished. The movie would be like one of those wonderful scenes at the end of a Madame Mortimer flick, where she tells a room full of suspicious types how it all went down and you feel…you feel like you were groping around in the dark and your hand finally found a light switch. And the light comes on and it’s such a relief to see that those awful, frightening shapes in the shadows were just boxes of old clothes and a chest of drawers and a staircase. Our movie was meant to be a light switched on. It was our baby. We’d flip the switch and show how two hundred people could up and disappear in a night and leave nothing but wreckage. There was a solution, obviously. We just had to find it.

  CYTHERA: The lighting master, Mr Varela, has indicated that a rough edit was completed at some point? Is this true?

  ERASMO: Don’t. Don’t talk to me about Max. I don’t want to hear his name. Yes. We had enough footage for a feature. (Well, I say enough. You never have enough.) Not enough to make Radiant Car the way we’d broken it coming home from Enki. But enough for something. Cristabel and I worked on it in the Clamshell darkroom, cutting like Fates. Putting her together again. It was good in there, in the darkroom. Cristabel and I didn’t have to look at each other. Didn’t have to look at anyone else. Shadows and red light and little Anchises sitting in the corner not making a peep. Just looking at us and listening to us playing back the sound of screaming in the wind. If we stopped working, we’d have to look at everyone else. At Maximo and Santiago staring at nothing and Aylin and the Sallandars, at the crew who’d been gambling and drinking and swimming their brunches off in White Peony and were too polite to ask what happened. Their politeness just wrecked me. The only one of the lot who even seemed to care where the hell Severin went was the ship’s cat. Mr Tobias kept yowling and clawing up her berth. Just kept looking for her.

  If not for Maximo, I’d have come home with a movie and you wouldn’t give two dry shits who died. Because the story’s better if people died for it. Disaster sends ticket sales through the roof. It’s a better mystery, a better story, if it hurt to make it. If not for Max, I’d just load up a reel and I wouldn’t have to try to say all this with words like a caveman poking at a rock wall with a damned stick.

  I wonder…I wonder if I’d have been able to forget if it had happened somewhere else. If Horace had gotten torn up by a slickboar on Ganymede. If Arlo had drowned on a Nereid hunt off Enki. If an Edison man had shot Mari in a Tithonus back alley. If I didn’t have to drink Severin’s death every day, if I didn’t need that whale slime just to keep puttering along. I imagine other deaths for her quite a bit, you know. Uranian influenza. Trampled in the Phobos food riots. Strangled by a mad Belt miner. It’s a morbid hobby. It keeps me going. But a death is a death. It’s a thing you can’t get around. It just sits there like a fat arsehole in black pyjamas, eats all your food, drinks all your wine, and demands you call it mister for the privilege. I could handle a death. I could live with a death. Cook for both of us. Clean up after it. Pay its way. But I don’t get that luxury.

  CYTHERA: The landing, Mr St. John.

  ERASMO: I know. I know you want a simple accounting. Put it to bed, Raz. But the thing is, you already have the simple accounting. You know what happened. I know it. That’s not the mystery. You ask me to take you through it as though you don’t already have fourteen versions typed up neatly on your desk. As if it’s not public record. The facts are easy. See? I’ll do them standing on my head. I can recite them like a poem. Anything is a poem if you say it often enough. My poem goes: I loved a girl and she left me. You know that one?

  CYTHERA: [sounds of china clinking, spoons knocking against cups, knives scraping against bread] Shut the door when you leave, Jane. We’ll take lunch at one o’clock. Now, back to the landing…?

  ERASMO: [long pause] We landed in White Peony Station on the seventeenth of November, 1944.

  CYTHERA: Earth time.

  ERASMO: Yes. We kept to the home clock throughout. I won’t be giving you any headaches with a November sixteenth that lasts a year. We weren’t staying; no need to synchronize our watches with the local time in Wonderland. November sixteenth means autumn, and on Venus autumn means permanent dusk. No dawn ’til spring. Our rendezvous with our liaison, Aylin Novalis, at the Waldorf on Idun Avenue, went off fine.

  Principal photography commenced on the seventeenth—interviews, man-on-the-street stuff with every crazy person who thought that Adonis had been taken by aliens, or God, or Hathor Callowmilk Corporation, or that the villagers had succumbed to religious mania and killed themselves at the climax of some orgiastic cannibalistic ritual coinciding with the Venus-Mercury alignment. The utter bullshit we heard, Miss Brass, I cannot begin to tell you. Every shade and flavour.

  We spent three nights in the hotel—the ship’s crew, too. Everything was beautiful, though mostly broken and very damp. Some of the ceiling tiles had fallen down into the lobby. I remember the pink stone columns out front were all sort of pockmarked from the salt air. They looked like an old man’s skin. Even inside, there was pale white moss everywhere like velvet, on the chairs, on the bar, on the walls, on the beds. I think we checked in on a Tuesday. Like today. I suppose that makes it an anniversary. I’ll expect cake with lunch, Miss Brass. And a candle.

  Anyway, on our last night in White Peony Station, everyone got out one last pretty thing to wear before we all had to start living in our hiking kit and waterproof socks. We all drank a great deal and gorged on ice cream like a gang of kids after school. Even Arlo seemed to have a good time. He kept trying to remember these dumb jokes, but he couldn’t get them right. So there’s this mummy snake and this baby snake and the mummy snake says, “Honey, I just bit myself!” No, wait, the baby snake says, “Mumsy, are we poisonous?” Wait, shit…

  The ceiling dripped onto the plastic tubs we’d hauled over a hundred thousand kilometres, and before I finished my Quandong Ripple my spoon had grown a little fur of moss on it as well. Mariana and Cristabel sang “I Left My Sugar Standing in the Rain” up at a big mouldy baby grand while Aylin played, and pretty well, too. Crissy wore silver sequins. Mariana had a lavender flower in her hair. Maximo fired back with “It Never Rains on Venus” in his old rye-whiskey baritone, and you’d have thought no one in that shabby hotel bar had ever realised the irony of that tune before, the way we laughed while the chandeliers leaked onto
our heads. They all tried to get Rinny to sing, but they took the wrong tack. I know my girl. She’ll sing you the moon—no kid raised in a theatre can turn down applause any more than they can turn down a meal. But Van Rooyen—that was our navigator—wanted to hear “Callisto Lullaby.” Too bad, Roo! That’s from Thief of Light and Severin would rather take an ice pick to the eye than do anything even the littlest bit Percy-adjacent, so she demurred. I don’t think I ever saw her demur before. It was interesting. Didn’t look quite right on her.

  That was the worst Waldorf from Mercury to Pluto, but it felt like the most exciting place we could possibly be. Just us, the old crew. Except Cristabel, who we nabbed right out of film school, before anyone else could snap her up, and Franco, who was barely in long pants, we’d all been together since Saturn. We’d all fucked one another and cried over one another and gotten right with one another again. Maximo taught me how to juggle. I taught Santiago how to play the squeezebox and order a cocktail in eleven languages. Mariana and Severin swam together every morning at dawn in any town with so much as a puddle. Just the two of them, their arms flashing up in the mist, two dark heads like seals heading out to sea.

  I can’t imagine many of us slept much that night. I heard Maximo and Mariana going at it already when Rinny and me stumbled by their door on the way to ours. I found out later that Crissy had a thing going with the signalman, Ghanim. That fellow was handsome as a statue and talked like a book, which made him candy for our little AD.

  She told me about it in the darkroom while we watched some handheld stuff from that first night. We saw Carolyne (she was our wire walker) and Horace snuggling by the fountain—big brass Aphrodite, who else. We hadn’t even known they were an item till that moment. We watched ourselves jumping around drunk and grinning for the camera. And we smiled at ourselves smiling, Crissy and me. Our first smiles since it happened. A camera collects secrets. It collects people and holds them prisoner forever. And that’s when Cristabel told me about Ghanim and how he quoted Chaucer to her—in Middle English, no less—while they made love, all glottal stops and breathy German consonants, and how she couldn’t look at him now because if she looked he’d come to her quarters, and if he came, he’d ask, and if he asked, she couldn’t answer, so that was that over, she guessed.

  Severin and I had Room 35. I remember it had this huge fuck-off mirror, half-frosted over with moss and dried rain, and I watched Severin in it while she straddled me on our sticky, lichen-y bed in a black kimono; drank the most bog-awful grappa that has ever touched my lips; and sang “Callisto Lullaby” for me. Just for me. This is what you want to hear, right? Details? We kissed half the night—we could have kissed for England, her and me. We could kiss so long we’d forget to fuck. We didn’t forget that night, and I’m glad. We listened to Idun Avenue and the drunks singing “Flower of Scotland” and “La Marseillaise” and some Chinese one we didn’t know, listened to the shops closing up, to the rattling percussion of pachinko parlour doors opening and shutting, to trucks peeling down the road too fast, to little curls and wisps and crumbs of music floating out of dance halls, to the constant trickle of rain into the gutters and grates and sloughs and potholes, to last call. We talked about the things you talk about when it’s two a.m. and you’re naked and you’ve known the person you’re naked with so long you could draw their face blind in the dark. About Clotilde, which other people always found strange, but never troubled us. We weren’t related. Aren’t. Her father married half the Moon and fucked the other half senseless. She’d have to go pretty far to find someone whose mum had never stopped round for supper. Clotilde connected us, from the beginning, like a story with foreshadowing. We talked about being children on the Moon, about the hole-in-the-wall curry place with the turquoise tureens in the Plantagenet Quarter back home, about the night on Phobos when we finally got together and how good it was. We both wore black and red, because we couldn’t live without dressing the set first. I tasted funny to her at first, and she thought maybe it wouldn’t last. A person has to taste right if you’re gonna stick around. I joked that she just didn’t like the taste of an honest man. I’d made that joke many times. It wasn’t even a joke anymore so much as a refrain. And then she said: You’re not that honest, because that’s the next line.

  You know the first time we said I love you it got all banged up? She took a beating in that warehouse in Kallisti Square. I was patching her up in an emergency medical bay. Blood everywhere, both of us faint from hunger and adrenaline. One of her teeth didn’t look like it was going to make it. I tied my shirt around her head to soak up the worst of it. She said: “He kicked me right in the face,” at just the same second as I said, “I love you.” She laughed and she kissed me. The Kallisti water tower exploded. And after that, we always said “I love you right in the face.” And bit by bit, that’s how a couple gets pounded together out of two busted people.

  Christ, there are things I miss and there are things I miss, but I can hear her voice now just as clearly as when the rain fell through our talking and the moss closed in as quiet and soft as falling asleep.

  Am I making you uncomfortable?

  CYTHERA: You’re certainly a very…frank man.

  ERASMO: Good. Good. That makes me happy. I want to keep going, if I can make you squirm. If I can make you embarrassed to listen to me, because you should be.

  I woke up like a shot at four in the morning. Severin was snoring away next to me. Only she didn’t quite snore. She made a sound with her jaw like a click, and then a sigh, and then a little soft choke. The first time I heard it I thought she was dying. Anyway. You know how sometimes you wake up and you’re certain as the grave that’s it for you and sleep? That’s how it was. So I got up and went down to the lounge. A proper hotel lounge never shuts, and I made sure the Waldorf was a proper hotel when Logistics was booking everything. I went down to the lounge. I wanted a pink lady. They’re my favourite. Do you have a favourite?

  CYTHERA: Bourbon neat.

  ERASMO: [laughs] That’s because you’re a terrible person. It’s my opinion that you should never order anything “neat” at a bar. Pour yourself a couple of shots at home for free—there’s no skill in it. Let the nice bartender-man strut his stuff a little! Me, I love pink ladies. I order them on every planet, on every tiny bootheel of a moon. A pink lady is never the same twice. Did you know, on Neptune they make them with saltwater? Disgusting, but wonderful. It’s all wonderful. I mean that. Everything, every place. Even salty grenadine. So I got down to the lounge and my cousin Horace was sitting up at the bar with my drink already ordered for me. We’ve always been like that. When we had sleepovers as children, we always had nightmares at the same time, or had to get up to pee at the same time.

  The lounge had a wizened little gramophone wheezing its way through something called “Over the Rainbow.” I’d never heard it before. Horace pushed my drink over my way and said, “It would appear the Venusian recipe is a vague stab at gin, which they make out of all this white moss; grenadine which comes from xochipilli fruit and has nothing whatever to do with pomegranates besides being red; frothed callowcream; and a spritz of grapefruit, which is, shockingly, actual grapefruit.” Horace favoured pisco sours. Rinny was just starting to see my ineffable wisdom. She’d taken to chasing down gimlet variations.

  It wasn’t half bad. Spicy. A little musty. We drank for a while and watched the twilight outside. The autumn light on Venus is a big gift wrapped up in a bow for a DP. A year of magic hours. No waiting for that perfect four-thirty p.m. sunlight. Venus is forgiving. The shoot can run as late or early as it wants, and you’ll still have the light.

  I asked Horace, “Have any theories? Before we get started. My money’s on psycho axe-murdering diver. Chops everybody up and feeds them to the eels.”

  Horace smiled. Two things about Horace smiling: It’s the only time you can really see the little scar on his cheek where I pranged him with a pub dart when he was eight, and when he’s smiling, he looks more like my dad th
an I do.

  “Aliens,” he said. “Stands to reason we’d find some, sooner or later. I mean, other than the whales. They don’t count. They don’t do anything. I mean proper aliens that walk and talk and complain about the weather. Aliens, or Canada. That whole sector is contested. Could have been a tactical thing ordered by Ottawa. Peasants won’t move? Easier to wipe them out than try to have a civilized talk about it.”

  And then we got this idea into our heads that we’d go for a run before everyone else got up. We didn’t have the right shoes for it but we jogged the whole length of Idun Avenue, down to the estuaries. We stuck our feet in the red water. His feet smelled horrible. Always did.

  CYTHERA: I think we’re getting a bit far afield.

  ERASMO: So what? You said, “in my own words.” These are them. You take what I give you or you get nothing.

  Fine. I’ll speed up the reel. No fraternal waterfront breakfast for you.

  Aylin Novalis met us at the Pothos docks at 0900 with four gondolas. She had to have been as hungover as the rest of us, but she never looked it. Even at the end, Aylin never looked tired or shaken. She was a better actress than anybody I ever met. Scrubbed and shined and ready to go, that was Aylin. Born and raised on Venus, Aizen-Myo Sector. She’d been a guide for ten years. The best. If you woke her up in the dead of night I bet she’d have her work shoes on under the covers. Her hair was up in a pretty little knotted ponytail that looked complicated to fix but really wasn’t. I saw her do it at camp later on. She looked for all the world like a schoolteacher ready to take us all on a field trip to the aquarium. Look at all the lovely fish! Let’s see how many different kinds we can count! One, two, three—don’t touch the glass, George…

  We loaded up the gondolas. Land travel is useless on Venus—it’s all mud and silt. It took them forever to get the few cities there are to stand up straight enough to take a road. But the water goes everywhere. The gondolas weren’t anything of the sort—I assume they’re named after some hoary old Venusian/Venetian pun, but they’re just industrial swamp boats with pontoons and outboard engines and absurd little flourished prows like someone’s gonna pop out from under the tarp and start singing “O Sole Mio.”