CYTHERA: Tell me your first impressions of him.
ERASMO: I told you already—we spent most of the morning setting up cameras and lighting rigs. Horace and I set up coverage. Mari’s equipment didn’t seem to like the humidity—she was way behind schedule. We all kept busy…because if you looked at him once, you’d never stop.
CYTHERA: Walking in circles?
ERASMO: You’ve seen the film. But in real life it was…it was just awful. That poor boy. He’d been like that for years, but he still looked like a child. Like all the photos we’d collected of Adonis before the…event. The disaster. It was a genuinely unexplainable thing. Severin kept saying somebody must be feeding him. But I don’t know. Every once in a while he would kind of…wink out. Like a shutter clicking. And then he’d come back, so fast you told yourself it was nothing, it was just you blinking, moron. Until we watched the dailies.
It got to me. I felt sick. I felt like I’d run at full speed straight into a brick wall. We’d come all the way across space to see him, and he was exactly like the stories. Exactly like the photogr
aphs. There was no new information. Everybody exaggerates; everyone embellishes. But Anchises was just so bizarre that you couldn’t top him.
CYTHERA: What time did Severin make contact?
ERASMO: Around 1300, I think. The light was perfect; the light is always perfect on Venus. Max didn’t think she should touch him. He said, “Just try talking first. We have all the time in the world.” And Dr Nantakarn said something about trauma victims and how you couldn’t predict their reactions to human touch. I wasn’t really listening. Rinny was definitely gonna hug that kid, so I didn’t consider it an important debate. Rinny didn’t like being hugged all that much, but she was a great practitioner of hugging others. She liked to initiate the whole process. When she was younger, she said it could fix anything, if you timed a hug right and were really good at it. And she was. Really good at it.
Later, she revised that to “almost anything.”
But she did try talking to him first. I don’t remember what she said. Generically soothing stuff. She could be so comforting, if you really needed it. Needed her. Not if you’d just had a bad day or lost your watch or something. She didn’t have a lot of pity for the little tragedies. But if you got stuck in a big one, you’d want her there to kiss it better. [clears throat] Right. So she said a few sweet nothings and then she went in for the hug, and then all hell broke loose.
CYTHERA: What particular kind of hell?
ERASMO: The kid started screaming bloody murder. I thought for a moment he was going to blink out again, to get away from Severin, but she held him still. Held him while he shrieked and shook and clawed at her. Like that girl in the story. Who holds onto Tam Lin ’til the wicked fairies have all marched by. What’s her name?
CYTHERA: Janet.
ERASMO: [chair squeaks] That was quick. Under other circumstances, I think you might be an interesting person to know, Cyth. Janet. She held him like Janet, and at the same time the sound roared up again, nothing like the night before. Loud—and I mean marching band-loud. It was absolutely mechanical this time. Machine noise and voices. We didn’t recognize them at first. We couldn’t begin to understand words out of all that junked-up static—skipping, popping, screeching feedback, looped back on itself, the timbre fucked from top to bottom. But somewhere in there we could hear…voices. We were all pretty freaked out—but that kind of freaked out where you’re excited and alive and so fucking curious your curiosity could punch a hole in the ground.
CYTHERA: Can we discuss the boy’s hand for a moment?
ERASMO: [loud sigh] After all this time I still don’t know what to say about his hand. It was disgusting, I can say that. I couldn’t see it clearly, not right away. He was still hollering his head off. His eyes were absolutely wild. I saw a horse bolt during a fireworks show once. When the gauchos finally tracked her down, she was lying in a lake of her own sweat, panicked entirely out of her ability to stand on her own four legs. And her eyes, her poor eyes, looked like Anchises’s eyes. Irises spinning in their whites.
Anchises held up his hand—the hand—to Severin like he meant to strike her, but she didn’t recoil. I was so proud of her. I would have flinched. All I could think was: He has a mouth in his hand. But it wasn’t a mouth. Later he let us all examine it as much as we liked. With gloves and masks, mind you. We didn’t just shove our thumbs in. He had a gash in his palm that didn’t or couldn’t or wouldn’t heal, and the gash was full of horrid squirming bits of flesh, like tiny tentacles, but so fine. Silky. Wet. Greenish-bronze. And alive: they moved by themselves, stretching out of him. Severin just kept telling him how everything was fine as paint. Giving him her best Face Number 124: Adoring Mother. Instead of hitting her, he touched her cheek with that ruin of a hand. It was such a tender gesture, so…adult. And when he touched her it all shut off. He stopped screaming and the static stopped screeching and he let her scoop him up in her arms. She carried him away from the Memorial and then Margareta conducted her examination while Rinny cradled him in her lap.
Anchises slept in our tent for the next three days. We tried to get him to talk, but he wouldn’t. Just clung to Rin like she was something new to circle round. We sat by the fire singing all the songs we could think of to the kid. Maximo took him for walks and kept up this constant patter, hoping he’d do the primate thing and start trying to mimic the big monkeys.
CYTHERA: If we could step back for a moment: What steps did you take to investigate the source of the static? Did Dr Nantakarn suggest that you might have been hallucinating? It seems that all of you freely indulged in drugs and alcohol…
ERASMO: Oh, please. Don’t patronise us. Retta heard it, too. So did Aylin, and neither of them touched a drop of anything even the slightest bit altering. We did what you’d expect—strip that sound equipment, son! Get into those Edison innards. But it was all fine. Mariana kept saying, “It’s perfect, it’s perfect.”
CYTHERA: The rest of the night passed without incident?
ERASMO: Reasonably. We decided not to try to get anything out of Anchises yet. He slept like he’d died. At breakfast the next morning—
CYTHERA: This is December third?
ERASMO: Sure. Who cares? At breakfast I offered him some eggs—he wouldn’t eat solid food yet, but I made him a plate just in case. Max had taken him walking on the beach earlier in the morning and the boy seemed almost cheerful. I offered him eggs and he opened his mouth and static came pouring out of it—but inside the static we heard something else.
Mariana. Screaming.
It was only a coincidence; he wasn’t making the sound. It came from everywhere—from the sky, from the Qadesh—but he opened his mouth in time for it to look like a cue. Mariana’s scream was clear as bleeding daylight, and we all knew it was hers. Mari lost it. You have to understand, she wouldn’t have suffered the indignity of getting certified on Edison gear if she didn’t have a delicate ear and love that mixer on her hip like a child. She screamed in harmony with herself, holding her hands over her ears, yelling over the sound of this other staticky voice we didn’t recognize yet, garbled, warped, followed by a lot of audio vomit. From then on, it never stopped.
You understand, we didn’t know what it was saying then. Afterward, Cristabel and I played back Mariana’s tape in the studio on the Clamshell and cleaned it up. Only then could we get at the actual words.
CYTHERA: Which were?
ERASMO: “Now my charms are all o’erthrown, and what strength I have’s mine own, which is most faint.”
Billy Shakes, my dear. The Tempest. But it was just growling then. Growling, and that vicious, shrill screaming. It never stopped after that. None of us could sleep in that invisible static mess, listening to shredded voices coming from nowhere. It just swallowed Mari up. She spent the morning banging on her temples to make it stop. Moaning, rocking back and forth, clutching her mixer to her chest.