Radiance

Hesiod burped. She liked to burp almost as much as she liked to swear, but her customers didn’t like the burping as much.

“Fucking hell, kidlet,” she sighed. Her breath smelled sour. “Just because things don’t go your way doesn’t mean you’re cursed. You think I didn’t wish to get old with my Iskender and have a bunch of babies and enough milk money for a house with central heating? You think I didn’t wish to be happy? You think any of the countries that landed here didn’t wish they could have it all to themselves and kick everyone else out? The world is made of wishing, Anki; just every bastard wishing all the time, and it’s a dog’s work to tell who gets their wishes and who doesn’t, because everyone’s wishes bash into each other a thousand times a minute, and it’ll get sorted out in hell if it ever does. If you wished the sun would come up tomorrow, it’d knock into a million other sad sacks wishing it wouldn’t, and no matter what happened come dawn, you couldn’t say who got their way. But mostly nobody gets their way. They wish for good and they get a handful of shit, and I know you’re young, but you’re old enough to get right with that. If you got that curse, baby boy, we all got it. I don’t want to hear you bitch before you get your beard. You got no idea how hard you can lose your wishes. You’re young enough to think there’s logic to time and events and desire. It’s cute, but I don’t go in for cute at my age.”

Anchises didn’t blink. “What do the cards say?” he said, stonily, his cheeks burning.

Hesiod burped again. “They say you’re never gonna get what you want, and you’ll just have to live with it like everyone else.”

Outside, beyond the glowing crimson breakers, the seals-which-were-not-really-seals barked out their rough songs like dinner bells, and never again did Doctor Callow tell a grown-up person what he knew.

As the years of July passed by, Anchises grew older—and more and more possessed by the desire to see the face of a callowhale. It was not only that no one had, but that little Doctor Callow was convinced that anything with a face had to be alive, alive the way he was, the way his parents and the foreman at the Prithvi factory and the cacao-dancers at the Nutcake Festival and the slick-suited politicians in White Peony Station were; the way the girl with the black ponytail no longer was. A face was where you kept your aliveness. It was the part of you that showed sorrow and laughing and anger and embarrassment and surprise. Other parts felt those things, but your face announced them. What did a surprised callowhale look like? How about sad? How about if you told one a joke, a really good joke, the best joke in the world, and it laughed? He had to know. At ten years old, Anchises felt that if he died without knowing, the bones of his face would be knotted up with grief. Anyone who dug him up a hundred years later would look at his skull and say: This man died missing the better part of his soul.

But he was only ten, and he did not yet have his own diving bell.

As Adonis began to look forward to the Nutcake Festival of the crisp, cold, lean year of July thirteenth, three things happened, one after the other. Like dreams following sleep, each one ended in wishes our Doctor Callow did not mean to make, and like morning following dreams, each wish drew borders round the territories of the rest of his life.

The village elders of Adonis put their shaggy heads and tight-stitched wallets together to plan something special for the Nutcake Festival that year, as it was the tenth Nutcake, and also because that year had not been so kind as July third: the amphorae were only three-quarters full, the cows-which-were-not-really-cows were surly and recalcitrant, and every other cacao-husk had no nut in it. Everyone needed cheering up. The elders sent away to Parvati, another village in the Land of Milk and Desire, deep in the lushest and loveliest jungles of the interior, for seven barrels of cider (which was not really cider, but heady, hearty, heavenly stuff the colour of a flamingo’s feathers for which Parvati was already becoming famous, as it was brewed from apples which are not really apples, but crisp, colossal, crystallized berries that grow only in the most protected and shadowy forests of the Land of Milk and Desire). They sent to the village of Dahomey on the slopes of Mount Neith where wild frangipani grows (which are not really frangipani, but fragrant, feral, fecund flowers the colour of sunset that smell like bread baking and are only the female of the species) for twelve mature Samedi moths, which are the males of the same species of the frangipani-which-is-not-really-frangipani. Every summer the frangipani-that-are-not-really-frangipani blossoms open up on the mountainside and th

ousands of great glossy black-green moths-that-are-not-really-moths fly out of their mothers and into the world. A single wing of the Samedi moth, properly roasted over a low, grass-fed fire, can feed twenty, with scraps left for the hounds. And, finally, the elders of Adonis sent to White Peony Station for three precious treasures, so dear they could not be purchased, only lent at robber’s prices, with thrice-signed bonds assuring their return in pristine condition. One treasure was white, the second silver, the third black. One enormous, the second awfully loud, the third nothing much to look at, but more dear than the other two combined.

The first treasure, white and enormous, was a projection screen.

The second, silver and awfully loud, was a film projector.

The third, black and not much to look at, was a movie, its spools of film closed tightly into canisters like holy jars of spices buried within the pyramids back Home.

The elders kept the name of the film secret, so that everyone who was not an elder could have the pleasure of finding out what it was just as the cider was going to their heads and the world seemed very fine indeed. They had debated long and hard over which movie to request from White Peony Station—a movie the children would like, but that would not bore the adults too much, that would neither be too sad nor too cloying, too pretentious nor too stupid. Only five people in Adonis had ever seen a movie before, and all in their youths, when they had first arrived in White Peony Station, or Aizen-Myo Sector, or Judgment-of-Paris, or even back Home. Adonis was normally too small and busy for such diversions. Finally, they settled upon a film by Percival Unck, whose name the old timers remembered blazing from the marquees of those White Peony and Aizen-Myo movie halls. This film was called The Girl Who Made Fate Laugh, and it had an octopus in it.

Little Doctor Callow, along with his mother, who was pregnant again, and his father, and his baby sister, and the twins, thrilled with anticipation. Anchises ranged far and wide into the hills to find cacao-husks that rattled with seeds inside. He put his pole into the water off of the swimming dock, caught four lovely fish, and smoked the wine-dark trout himself. He chased cassowaries off of their nests, ignoring their squawks and caterwauling, bolting from a hen hollering Cao ni nainai de, ni ge wangbadan gouzazhong! Sizei, ni geiwo gun huilai, wo nie si nige guisunzi!, and carried home as many eggs as he could in an apron made from the bottom of his school shirt. All the other children did their share, wandering the jungle paths in the autumn dusk, giggling in the gloaming, chasing after wild piglets (which are not really piglets, but skinny, six-legged, spicy-tasting black miniature deer, with long searching snouts and longer teeth). Anchises tried to outdo them all, combing the beach for live scallops (which are not really scallops, and taste like slightly bitter mangoes), and clams (which are not really clams, but squirting, sallow, shell-dwelling molluscs whose meat is poisonous except in autumn).

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.