Radiance (47 page)

Tracking shot over the labyrinthine rose-and-cobalt pattern of the rich carpet, past the gleaming grand piano, the vases full of varuna flowers and gardenias-which-are-not-really-gardenias. A rowdy group of out-of-towners are making quite the rumpus in the Myrtle Lounge. Such manners! Passersby can hear the uproar all the way out on the twilight-washed street.

“
Ate
us?” shouts Arlo Covington, C.P.A. He thumps his fist on the helmet of his diving suit. Peitho and Erzulie Kephus cringe away from him; they remember the sudden thump of their own deaths, and they still cannot bear loud noises. “
Ate
us?”

Calliope the Carefree Callowhale keeps her cool. Her animated lines crackle turquoise to black to ultramarine with suppressed indignation and embarrassment. “I beg your pardon. But what would you do if a roast chicken flew through your kitchen window, landed on your plate, and carved itself with your knife and fork? I daresay you'd fall to, sir.” She blushes her cartoon blush, two magenta circles on her cetacean cheeks. “You walked right
into
me, Mr Covington. What would you have me do?”

Percival Unck strokes his daughter's black hair. Her movie-tone skin flickers and skips. They have not stood together thus for so long. Severin presses her lips together. She can hardly look at the crew she lost. She knows the score, but has not yet been asked to put it on the board.

“And what about me?” Horace St. John draws himself up, with great difficulty, on a jewelled cane. His broken, bow-tied legs wobble. “I couldn't sleep. I committed the great sin of insomnia. The unforgivable transgression of taking a walk instead of having a piss inside my own tent.”

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 practised 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.