Radiance

“Oh, especially me. Good Lord, I work in the movie industry. Given that you’ll never hear the truth out of anyone’s mouth, you must listen to the lies—the specific lies they choose to tell. Prospero—Maximo—could have ginned up his little pantomime around any story he liked. The Judgment of Paris, that has a good Venus bit. Pentheus and the Bacchae, Inanna and Ereshkigal, anything. But he chose one where the girl only looks dead. Where there’s a trick. Just when it looks like she’ll be sawn in half and there’s no helping her, the false bottom gives way on the black box and she goes somewhere else, somewhere safe.”

“You’re better at this than I am.” I squeezed my eyes against a splitting headache. I hadn’t had a drink since planetfall, nor anything to eat but infanta.

“Very true.”

“Why didn’t they just hire you?”

Cythera Brass pulled back my linens with one vicious stroke. “Because I wasn’t there, you blubbering idiot. Now be a goddamned detective and earn your keep for once.”

But for all the hardness and contempt collecting like spittle in the corners of her mouth, Cythera helped me up and bathed me in cold Plutonian water. She had already laid out a suit—and the right suit, at that. I would have worn something too formal. I would have looked like I was waiting for him. I have never been a master of the secret code of men’s suits; only adept enough to know that the jacket is always saying something, the shoes and trousers always whispering, but not enough to know exactly what they’re on about. Cythera had chosen a soft dawn-grey number with a plum-coloured tie—which she tied loosely, messily, an artlessness full of art. She put pomade in my hair and shaved my chin—my hands shook too much to manage it myself. Not too close a shave, but not too bad, either. She was brusque in her ministrations, but I could see her relax—this was something she knew how to do, and there is relief in doing what you’re good at. Had she been married once? I suddenly wondered. I watched the business work on her like laudanum. Her face gentled when she smoothed out my suit lapels; her shoulders straightened when she touched the long razor. Perhaps she’d done this sort of thing for her boss back on Uranus, picking out shoes that communicated Melancholia’s stake in the fixed game of cards that people like her are always playing. When Cythera finished, I looked like a man with better things to do than whatever he was doing at the moment; a man who’d made just a little time for you, sir, but don’t push it.

And she timed it beautifully, fastening my mask in place and excusing herself to rinse the shaving cup just as Prospero, King of Pluto—or Maximo Varela, lighting master for Severin Unck—came into my ochre bedchamber and sank down beside me with the familiarity of a brother. He wore a simple moretta mask, black and dappled with silver stars. My Totentanz mask smelled of sandalwood, of the creams and oils of Cythera Brass.

Though she had left the room, there can be no question that she heard everything—of course she did.

“Anchises, my boy, how are you; are you well? Can I have anything brought up? You are fed, you are watered? You fainted dead away—I should have known it would be too much for you. Insensitive, insensitive, crass!” He struck himself in the temple with a fist and his mask skewed, showing a sliver of his real face, a face I still could not begin to reconstruct in my mind.

“I am fine. Yes, fine, really—please don’t trouble yourself. Only—what was that all about?” Be a detective, I thought. Questions. It’s always about the questions. Seeking the right one like an optometrist’s lenses. Can you see clearly now? And now? And now? “What I mean is, no one really turned into a tiger and ate Severin Unck, did they? Art has its limits.”

“You are the only one who can understand me, Anchises,” came his reply. He scratched his cheek beneath his starry mask. “You were there—you saw everything. You know my heart. Her heart. I used to take you walking along the beach in the mornings, do you remember? Every morning from the first day we met you. I recited everything I could think of, just so you could hear language again and remember how to make it yourself. Homer, Marlowe, Coleridge, Chaucer, a little Poe, a little Grimm. I managed most of The Tempest the day before she…the day before. I was proud of that. I gave you a little chocolate from craft services after every walk, so you’d associate words and sweetness. Didn’t work, but it seemed important. Tell me you remember. Tell me it mattered.”

I considered it. I considered telling him, Of course. Of course I remember: “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan his stately pleasure dome decree.” Yes, of course. Your voice brought me back to the country of human speech on a chariot drawn by Chaucer and Shakespeare. You saved me. Quoth Kubla Khan: Nevermore. It would have been kind, and he looked more strung out than me on my worst day. And in camaraderie he might have told me more than he would otherwise.

But I could not do it. He killed her. This is her killer. I felt his guilt sliding off of him like oil.

I felt that old compulsion to speak the truth surge up within me—so inconvenient, so detrimental to my vocation. “I don’t remember any of it, Maximo.” He flinched at the sound of his real name. “I have no memory before she grabbed me in Adonis, and after that…just pieces. Moments. Nothing more. My ‘memory’—in the sense of a series of events that occur in order, in which there is some respect paid to cause and effect, proceeding more or less in real time—that doesn’t start ’til Mars. Erasmo’s house on Mount Penglai. Everything before that, the hospital on Luna, the hacienda on Mercury is…blurred. Scene Missing. I remember Severin’s face. Her voice. I remember her laughing. I remember Mariana screaming. I remember the smell of the cacao and the red sea. Why don’t you tell me what happened? That’s what I’m here for.”

Varela studied my face in disbelief. Our masks faced each other, revealing nothing. Clever, that. Perhaps Pluto had hit upon something essential, necessary. Now that I had one, I certainly did not want to take it off, here or anywhere.

Finally, he sighed. “I don’t deal in unvarnished truths. It’s the varnish that counts. That makes it true. Give me enough light and I can do anything. Make you believe anything. Ghosts, fairies, vampires: Just tell me what you want and I can make it real. Just tell me what you want and I’ll make it so it happened.”

He gripped my hand horribly. His nails were long. “You have no idea what I can do. I made you believe in this place. In death and tigers. I have made a planet believe I am their King. Look around: This is the island of the lotus-eaters, and I am the hungriest of all.”

“What about the dead girl? Was there a real girl dying under all those tigers?”

The tiniest sliver of mirth crept into Varela’s voice. “A magician cannot share all his tricks.”

He leapt up, swung round one of the thick pillars of the bed, and slapped the wall. The room seemed to quiver with the force of his mood.

“Something has to be real, you know. Something real has to anchor the magic. Death is the realest thing there is. Death holds the rest together. You’ll believe everything else if you believe in the death. Once someone exsanguinates in front of you, well, anything can happen. You’re on the edge of your seat. The tension, the tension just rears up. I’m aces at deaths. Always have been.” Varela struck the door with the flat of his palm and it cracked, sending up puffs of dust. “Do you know how I met Severin? I was part of her mother’s circus. Lumen Molnar, I mean, the last mother. I was the magician. Prestidigitation. Knife acts, girls cut in half, disappearances. I loved my work. I went to Saturn with Lumen, me and the whole troupe—even the monkeys. And, Christ, they loved us on Saturn. We lit up every halfpenny theatre in Enuma Elish—they didn’t even care what the act was, they were just so hungry for a show; so hungry. You know, a person will give up food for a good show. Push comes to shove, they’ll give up their last food. They’ll do it and they’ll think they got a good bargain. That hunger goes deeper and bitterer than the need for bread. And we came sailing in just dripping with gravy. They slurped us up. Licked their fingers dry and banged the table for more.” He dragged down one of the orange tapestries that covered the walls. It ripped easily, like crepe paper, and floated down to the floor. “Half the time you could see the rabbit in my trousers, but it never mattered. I’ve had more Saturnine girls than you’ve had cups of tea, boy, with more lined up round the block that I was too tired to see to. Elish would have given Severin the key to the city if they’d had one. Anything she wanted—any access, any transport, anything. Because she brought the circus, and it was better than gold. Boredom will murder you dead on the outer worlds.

“I wasn’t anything until Saturn. A purveyor of cheap tricks. But I learned. I learned the lantern trade. A trick of the light, boy, just a trick of the light. Everything in creation is just a trick of the light—the only difference between heaven and hell is who’s running those lights, who’s got the switch, who knows the cues.” Varela turned and stomped on the hearth, the night table, the lovely little secretary on which I’d written my previous entries. They crumpled like drywall and ash, no more mahogany and metal and lacquer than my own flesh. “A couple of times Severin got up there with me, played my girl in the box. She looked up at me with trust as complete as a promise. You can’t even imagine. You think she’s yours because she let you play the urchin in some miserable B-plot scene, but she isn’t yours—you never even knew her; she’s just a face to you. I saw that face under my hands in a box like a coffin; I saw her understand totally that I would never hurt her, that I would always protect her. And I saw that face go under a diving bell with that same expression, not a twitch of the mouth or slant of the eye different. But what she trusted wasn’t me, wasn’t Erasmo, wasn’t Amandine or Mariana or any of us who had kept her whole on every planet we visited. No, she trusted…Venus. The Qadesh. Her own fucking specialness. And look what happened.”

I had drawn myself up into a corner of the room near the curtained bathroom door that concealed Cythera. I could not see how to get out, past his rampage, to anywhere safer. I summoned up a whisper: “What happened? What did happen?”

“Nothing! Nothing! She was nothing, and nothing happened. Nothing is happening. Nothing is all that ever happens. You look at this place and see a palace: elephants; griffins; a Ferris wheel; lights, lights, everywhere. You look at a masked girl screaming and think she’s dead. I tell you this is the island of the lotus-eaters, and it never occurs to you to stop eating the lotus.” Varela overturned a plate of infanta flowers, their petals already curling brown. “You see everything in such plain terms. You and her and nothing else. I’m an extra in your story. Well, you’re an extra in mine, boy. A punter picking cards out of the rigged deck I offer. The thing about a magic trick is that you have to play fair. You show the audience everything you’re going to do before you do it. You tell them to their faces that you’re going to lie to them. You show them the tools—see how they shine! You show them the girl—see how innocent and lovely she looks in her spangled costume! You show them the knives. You say: I am going to cut her in half and you are going to applaud. And then you keep your promise. If you’re any good, the shock is worse because they knew it was coming, but no one ever believes a man on a stage.”

Varela turned and punched through the polished ebony wall—it crackled away beneath his fist like the sugared crust on a French custard.

“Yet you believe her. Her! You look at her pretty little face on the screen emoting and stuttering and blushing and contemplating her rich girl’s life, and you think there wasn’t a script out of frame at her feet, rewritten to an inch of its life, every rewrite thatched in on coloured papers to keep it straight. Oh, are we on the red pages today, where Severin is a rebel and a champion of truth? Or blue, where she cries about her mothers for thirty minutes? Or green, where the lady who’s never wanted for a thing in her life whines about how much someone else has to pay for her to speak on camera? It was a rainbow by the end, every movie she ever made. And you think it’s real, that Venus was any different. That the heart of that girl wasn’t always an empty goddamned soundstage, and her soul wasn’t a hack-job screenplay with half the pages torn out and floating down the length of the solar system. What happened to her? The same thing that happens to any bad script: Too many people get their hands on it, trying to fix it, ’til it turns into nothing—nothing; not a trick, not a twist ending, just a girl bleeding out in a box. There’s no artistry to that. You can’t cram artistry into it, no matter how hard you try. She’s just a dead girl.”

“That’s not an answer. Did you kill her? Tell me!”

He calmed himself, assessing the wreckage of the room, the torn cardboard and shattered coloured lights and crepe tapestries. I knew he was right, that he was showing me his trick, but the infanta had so addled my senses that even amid the trash heap of the ochre bedroom, everything I saw was still limned with light, with richness, an afterimage of opulence, ghosts in the architecture.

“Listen, boy—and look! Behold my beautiful assistant strapped to the wheel! Vulnerable, tender, entirely within my power! See how the light catches her jewelled bodice like a burst of starlight. We landed on Venus with no complications. Transport from the International Station to Adonis took two weeks. Before your very eyes, I shall drive five knives into her unblemished body! You see the knives are sharp; I do not deceive you—I’ve cut my own finger with their points: one, two, three, four, five!

“We arrived on site and set up camp. We found you on the first day of scouting. I had my light meters and she had George, but she hadn’t intended to shoot anything that day. You were extremely anaemic and dehydrated. We fed you and washed you and Severin took charge of you like a pet. Now the wheel starts to spin! Her sequins dazzle! Her cries arouse! The first knife—ah, direct hit in the left shoulder! See how she bleeds!