Radiance, Page 28

  After a long day of digging up clams-which-were-not-really-clams and prying whelks-which-were-not-really-whelks free of rocks, Anchises saw something on the magenta-mauve sand. It stopped him in his steps. It stopped his breath in his chest. He knew what it was faster than he would have known his own face in a mirror. He had drawn a picture of one a long time ago, had seen it so clearly in his head it had been like a photograph.

  It was a callowhale frond.

  The thing was the colour of copper and as long as three fishing boats. It lay on the beach like a dead serpent out of the corner of some old map. Fine, long hairs and thick viney stalks draped off of it, and each hair and stalk forked off into fringes like coral or ferns. Flaps of skin like flowers and leaves, silvery and mossy like verdigris, flopped helplessly in the foamy, calm water. A huge gas bladder, drained and wrinkled and empty, was sinking slowly into the wet sand. Anchises thought he could see dim lights flickering inside it, lights like eyes opening deep beneath the skin of the balloon, if it was really skin. None of the seabirds (which are not really seabirds) or scuttling crabs (which are not really crabs) would come near it.

  Anchises stared at the frond for a long time. The lights burst weakly inside it, hot green and searing blue. It was still warm. It was still wet. It smelled like a thousand things at once, so many that he could not sort the stink into its parts in order to say later what it had been like. Its shadow stretched deep and wide.

  “Hello,” said Doctor Callow, and in that moment he truly could not recall any other name anyone might have called him in the history of the world. “Hi.”

  The frond did not reply. The lights, if there were lights, did not grow brighter or dimmer. The sea-stench of the thing did not grow less or more powerful. Was its callowhale still alive? Was it sick? Was it in pain? The boy had never heard of a beached frond. Fronds did not come off like hair in a brush. Divers who accidentally touched one came home bruised, as though they had boxed a train. Or with missing hands. Or missing eyes. Or crisscrossed with scars from wounds they had never suffered. Or not at all.

  Doctor Callow put out his hand hesitantly. His bare hand—he did not have divers’ gloves or a mesh suit, only his pink, fleshy fingers. He held them above the skin of the great frond. He felt nothing but the warmth rising from it like tea-steam. He took his hand away and smelled it; it smelled like him, nothing more. He tried again, going a bit closer to that copper-coloured callowflesh. Nothing—and so he drew closer still, inching forward, the rest of his body eager, impatient. When he finally allowed his fingers to fall just above the body of the frond-flesh, Doctor Callow gasped. A sort of rusty, electric, half-sour crackling blossomed between him and it. It pushed up weakly against him, invisibly. It made colours in his mind, colours without names. His whole body felt it, firing off whatever involuntary reactions it could think of: goose bumps, shivers, sweat, stomach fluttering, heart racing, pupils dilating to great black holes in his face, hair standing erect, and other parts of him erect, too. But it didn’t hurt. He still had both hands, both eyes. No bruises or scars. It felt good, even, though it felt like something that shouldn’t, like putting his fingertips in the wax of his father’s candles. Maybe because it was dying. Maybe because it didn’t have its whale anymore.

  Doctor Callow closed his eyes. He was not quite brave enough to actually touch it. So he just let his arm go slack.

  It fell onto the flesh of the callowhale frond with a soft wet smack.

  Doctor Callow felt as though he were swimming in the rusty-sour electric crackle, in the nameless colours. He felt as though he had never really been warm in his whole life, even though the Land of Milk and Desire is a hot and wet and heavy place. He laughed and he cried a little. He petted it like a dog. He was so shivery and prickly and hard and short of breath his everything ached. But he would have traded every ease he’d known for that ache and called it a bargain. The boy who loved callowhales stroked the severed arm of his beloved. He whispered to it. And, after a long while, little Doctor Callow curled up in a coppery curve of the frond; pulled the fine, soft hairs over him; and fell asleep in its dying embrace. The last of the ghostlights flashed on his dreaming skin.

  “I wish,” he whispered as he drifted toward the cliff edge of sleep, “I wish that I’ll never see your face, that I’ll never look you in the eye, that I’ll never know you at all.”

  Every night after that, while the callowhale frond rotted, he slept in its great sagging coils and told no one. The rot, as it relaxed and bloomed, smelled to him like his mother’s callowmilk bisque; and Hesiod’s cigarettes; and the tops of the twins’ heads when they were first born; and thick, good paper that had been drawn on over and over and over so that it was all black from corner to corner.

  When a notice went up in the town square calling Adonites of all ages to audition for a secret Festival scheme specially prepared by the elders, Anchises scrupulously avoided wanting it too much. He told everyone it was silly and he didn’t want a part even a little bit. He reported at the correct hour with a mask of uncaring plastered to his face; and thus, when the schoolteacher in charge of the whole mysterious business chose him, along with three other children, a nice lady diver with extremely straight hair, and a tall, rangy-looking milkman, he could not suppress his shock. Doctor Callow ran around in a circle, his little heart unable to stand in one place when so much was happening.

  And so Doctor Callow got to see the movie early. They all walked down the beach for several miles until they could be sure that no one back home could see the lights. Then, huddled together, they watched The Girl Who Made Fate Laugh so that they could play parts from it at the Festival. It was the third movie in the Mr Bergamot franchise, and suddenly the children in the cast became consumed with speculation as to what might have happened in the other films. But Doctor Callow didn’t care about that. He watched in a rictus of wonder as people who were not actually there at all moved and danced silently in silver. He shushed the seals when they barked so as to hear the silence better—and to better see the face of the girl who made Fate laugh.

  The girl was called Chamomile, and though she was played by two different actresses, the boy whose wishes could not come true only saw one. When Chamomile was little, the actress who played her was a small, dark, sullen child with raggedy hair and a sour expression on her face. She looked unhappy all the time, but when she danced or walked, her body seemed to have all the joy her face forgot. She wasn’t in the movie very long—Chamomile grew up some and an older, brighter, sprightlier girl took over. In her big scene, little Chamomile made a dress out of poppies and ran around a field of wheat (Anchises had no idea what wheat was—it looked like hairy, overgrown rice, he supposed) with patchwork wolf ears stuck to her head, until she ran smack into a tall, severe, beautiful lady with a crown on her head and a long black dress that showed enough of the curves of her breasts that Doctor Callow blushed all the way down to his toes. A title card showed: Better run, Your Majesty, or I’ll eat you all up! Chamomile growled like a wolf, showing her small, even teeth, and the lady laughed.

  The rest was all about older Chamomile, and how Fate helped her do fantastic things because Chamomile had made her laugh, which is a hard thing to do, Anchises agreed. Chamomile escaped a wicked prince who wanted to marry her, and went down to the Chalet Under the Sea where she made friends with a gentleman octopus named Mr Bergamot and a seahorse named Mrs Oolong, and together they had terrific adventures battling submarines and manta rays, and in the end Chamomile turned into a mermaid and didn’t marry anyone but became the Queen of the Ocean anyway.

  Afterward, Anchises could talk of nothing but the little girl who put on wolf’s ears and the poppy dress. The others teased him about it and said he should take his pretty face and go find her back Home. Wouldn’t he like to meet her and see if she had worked out how to smile yet? Maybe if he threw a coin in the well and made a wish…

  “No!” Anchises cried on the dark beach, quite terrified. “No, I never, ever want to meet
her, not ever! I hope I’ll never see her in real life, not even once, not even for a minute!”

  And he ran back toward Adonis with his heart screaming inside him.

  On the night of the Nutcake Festival, Adonis ate itself silly, cider and moth-steaks and fried nutcake and callowmilk meringue and piglet pies and cassowary custard. By the time the projector had been set up and the screen stretched flat without a wrinkle and benches arranged in rows in front of the tower of diving bells that marked the centre of Adonis, the whole of the village was groaning, patting their bellies, and telling old Home jokes about chickens and roads and horses with long faces walking into bars, even though no one could quite agree on what a chicken was, or a horse, for that matter. A road is like a river, right? Like a canal. There is more water than earth in the Land of Milk and Desire, where a current is ever so much better than a wheel. Hesiod herself was as happy as a taxman, burping and yelling and singing in Turkish in a voice so deep and sweet even the English speakers cried a little.

  Finally, a hush fell. Sometimes, without anyone saying so, folk know it’s time for the show. A fiddle picked up—and then a viola, and a big warbly bass, followed by a zither, a balalaika, and a koto. A clarinet and an oboe joined in. Above them floated a single lonely trumpet. Below them moaned the big belly of a tuba. It was a motley orchestra, all the instruments Adonis had. They began to play a lively march, which the men in White Peony Station had assured the elders was the very one played by the big-city orchestras when The Girl Who Made Fate Laugh premiered in the theatres there. (It wasn’t, really. It was, in fact, the opening march from another movie entirely, The Miranda Affair, but only one person in Adonis would ever come to know that.)

  And when the title cards came up, with their lovely white writing on black backgrounds, Anchises and the others would say the lines aloud, so that the movie was not silent at all.

  Better run, Your Majesty, or I’ll eat you all up!

  I’d rather marry a mushroom!

  Oh, how I should like to see how the fish live under the sea!

  Anchises said Mr Bergamot’s lines. He put on a deep voice like he thought an octopus—a hideous creature he could not imagine being real—might have. Once, he said his line through a bowl of water, which made everyone laugh. He felt wriggly all over when they laughed, like bathing in the Qadesh. When Mr Bergamot danced on-screen in his eight shining spats, Anchises danced a little, too, and that made them laugh again. It was wonderful.

  You’re a funny-looking fish.

  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.

  I love you bigger than the ocean.

  But when it came to the climactic scene, the one where Mr Bergamot and Mrs Oolong and Chamomile are swimming through a shipwreck on the run from the vicious manta ray Dr Darjeeling and all hope is nearly lost, the girl in pigtails who was supposed to say Chamomile’s lines had fallen asleep at the tuba player’s feet.

  The schoolteacher shoved Anchises forward to say her line, even though that was a bit confusing, as he was a boy, and he had the next line, too. He tried to make his voice high and soft like a girl’s, like he imagined Chamomile’s would sound.

  I wish the night would end and I could see the sunlight again. I wish I could stay here forever with you under the sea.

  The blood drained from Doctor Callow’s face. He clapped his hand over his mouth.

  Far offshore, the red Qadesh trembled.

  The night ended in the Land of Milk and Desire. But it did not end in Adonis. It did not end for Anchises.

  From the Personal Reels of

  Percival Alfred Unck

  [The screen is dim. SEVERIN UNCK has awakened from dark dreams in the middle of the night. She is five years old. Her father sits on her bed, an enormous wrought-iron bower of briars piled high against the lunar autumn with embroidered quilts and an infinitude of pillows. SEVERIN drowns in it; she is a tiny ship adrift on the sea of linen. PERCIVAL UNCK wraps his long arms around his daughter.]

  PERCIVAL

  Don’t fear, my little hippopotamus. Dreams can be frightening, but they can’t hurt you.

  SEVERIN

  They can! Oh, they can, Papa. [She begins to weep quietly.]

  PERCIVAL

  Tell your papa what you dreamt that was so terrible. When something is very awful indeed, so awful you can’t bear it, there’s a magic trick you can do. Tell the something’s story from start to finish, and by the time you get to the end, you will often find you can bear it quite well, and perhaps it was never so bad in the first place.

  SEVERIN

  I dreamt I grew up and I was all alone. I was the loneliest girl in the whole world.

  PERCIVAL

  Is that all?

  SEVERIN

  It’s a lot! I was in a little black room and everywhere I went I took the black room with me, and no one could get in, and I couldn’t get out.

  PERCIVAL

  That’s a very short story. I don’t know if the magic works when the story’s so short. Do you feel better?

  SEVERIN

  No. I shall never feel better again.

  PERCIVAL

  But you will, my love. The sun will come up and shine his brightest at the scary old beasties that scamper round your poor head, and everything will be right as rainbows. That’s what the sun is for.

  The Deep Blue Devil

  The Man in the Malachite Mask

  Doctor Callow’s Dream:

  Teatime for Mr Bergamot

  There are stories so old and strong that they travelled from Home to the Country of Seeing and Being Seen, the Land of Wild Rancheros, the Land of Purple Corn, and the Land of Milk and Desire. The stories were stowaways: they hid in the ships with settlers, only coming out to breathe and stretch when absolutely necessary. And when the ships made landfall, the stories, having conserved their energy, burst free and ran wild, changing into local clothes and dancing up on stages and wearing flowers in their hair. Stories are like that. They love havoc, especially their own.

  Many of these stories involve sleep. That is because we are all afraid of sleeping. We know it deep in our blood and our marrow. A panther, a bear, a Cro-Magnon may find a child while she’s sleeping. And so we tell tales of a girl who pricked her finger on a navigational array and fell asleep for a hundred years. A girl who ate an apple that wasn’t really an apple and fell into a deep sleep until a handsome businessman with a Kleen-Krop patent came along and kissed her awake again. A wise scientist who gave away all his notes for free, so his assistant put him to sleep in a tree forever.

  It was like that for Anchises. For Doctor Callow.

  He didn’t prick his finger or eat an apple—a real apple or otherwise. He didn’t give away his magic books.

  It was only that he had a hundred fine, long, coppery-golden hairs tangled in among his own, stuck to his skin, snagged in his boots. It was only that he smelled like sumac and ozone and coffee and possibilities; and his mother’s callowmilk bisque; and Hesiod’s cigarettes; and the tops of the twins’ heads when they were first born; and thick, good paper that had been drawn on over and over and over so that it was all black from corner to corner. It was only that he hadn’t been hungry for moth-steaks or fried nutcake or piglet pies or cassowary custard and had stuffed himself with callowmilk meringue and sweet callowmilk cheese with apricot (which is not really apricot, but a charcoal-coloured, crunchy, caramelly fruit that shrinks away from any human hand that tries to grasp it) and callowmilk pandowdy and blancmange and callowpudding and zabaglione and callownog, everything with cream and milk and cheese in it, everything with callowmilk thick and spicy and pale folded in and poured over it. He had eaten like he had never really known how to eat before. He had eaten like his bones were hollow.

  In stowaway stories like these, the solution is often simple. Too simple for anyone to think of until later, when the kingdom is asleep and the spinning wheels are all burnt
up and there are dwarves building a coffin of glass and a wizard has been buried in the foundations of a castle. Oh. Oh. I should have known it. If only I had known.

  A mother knows the smell of her young. Even when she is sick, even when she is mad, even when she cannot see her own hand before her, she knows her child. Her poor, tiny child—what can have gone wrong with this one? He’s so little, impossibly little—no child so thin can be healthy. What can she do, what can she possibly do to make him grow? To make him strong, to make him right? Nothing could be more important than a child so ill he only has four pitiful, withered fronds and a tubule that looks like it couldn’t hold a mouthful of milk.

  Oh little calf, little bull, come to our breast. We did not see you there. It isn’t your fault, poor lamb. We have only ourselves to blame. Hold still. Don’t squirm. We will make it better. We will kiss it and kiss it and kiss it and kiss it until it doesn’t hurt anymore. Until nothing can hurt anymore.