Radiance

What are you talking about?

She gestured to the callowhales overhead, as massive as suns, and circling, circling forever. Mr Bergamot loves teatime. At teatime he eats worlds. And egg salad.

I’m lonely, whispered Doctor Callow.

Don’t be. There’s a million million worlds to play with.

I’m lonely, he whispered again, because he didn’t know what else to say.

That’s okay, Severin Unck answered. She put her small hand on his. The colours of the Sea-which-wasn’t-really-a-Sea got so bright Severin and Doctor Callow had to shut their eyes, which were not really their eyes. Doctor Callow looked up through the waves-which-were-not-really-waves and saw a callowhale—thousands of callowhales—soaring through the surf. They looked back at him as one creature, their infinite faces-which-were-not-really-faces as radiant as the spasms of stars, as the first frame of a film that is perfect, that is impossible, that is complete.

That’s okay, Severin said. I’m here. There’s no place like Home.

PART FOUR

THE GOLD PAGES

Goddess, as soon as I saw you with my own eyes

I knew your divinity—but you gave me no truth.

Yet by aegis-wielding Zeus I beg thee—

do not make me live on, impotent, among men.

Have mercy on me, for well I know

the man who lies with immortal goddesses

is never left unharmed.

—Homer, “Hymn to Aphrodite”

A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you, the less you know.

—Diane Arbus

There lived an old woman

Under a hill

And if she’s not gone

She lives there still

—Mother Goose

The Radiant Car Thy Sparrows Drew

(Oxblood Films, dir. Severin Unck)

SC4 EXT. ADONIS, VILLAGE GREEN—DAY 16 TWILIGHT POST PLANETFALL 08:49 [3 DECEMBER, 1944]

[EXT. SEVERIN UNCK swims through the murky water, holding one of ERASMO ST. JOHN’S callow-lanterns out before her. ERASMO follows behind with her secondary camera, encased in a crystal canister. The film is badly stained and burned through several frames. She swims upward, dropping lead weights from her shimmering counter-pressure mesh as she rises. The grille of her diving bell gleams faintly in the shadows. Above her, slowly, the belly of a callowhale comes into view. It is impossibly massive, the size of a sky. SEVERIN strains towards it, extending her fingers to touch it, just once, as if to verify it for herself, that such a thing could be real.

The audience will always and forever see it before SEVERIN does. A slit in the side of the great whale, like a door opening. As the documentarian stretches towards it, with an instinctual blocking that is nothing short of spectacular—the suddenly tiny figure of a young woman frozen forever in this pose of surprise, of yearning, in the centre of the shot—the eye of the callowhale, so huge as to encompass the whole screen, opens around her.]

Production Meeting