Radiance

“By all means.” Anchises gracefully relinquishes the Myrtle Lounge bar.

“Lemme help!” squeals Marvin the Mongoose, and scampers away from Violet’s lap.

The mongoose and the octopus clear their throats. They run through a quick warm-up: Do re mi fa so la ti do! Do ti la so fa mi re do! Mr Bergamot produces a harmonica from goodness-knows-where, lays down an establishing A note, and snaps his suckers to a quickstep beat.

“The Lifecycle of the Callowhale!” the mongoose and the octopus sing in unison. And they begin to soft-shoe up and down the bar.

“A callowhale isn’t much of a whale,” sings Mr Bergamot in the key of G.

“Not a bug!” belts out Marvin.

“Not a cat!”

“Not a fungus or a snail!”

The octopus knots four tentacles together into a square while turning cartwheels with the rest. A light clicks on inside the square of suckers, though the Waldorf owns no projector. The film merrily commences, and all watch in wonder as an on-screen Calliope dances on her tail. Mr Bergamot sings his verse:

The great callowhale’s got no stop and no start

Just a hundred million brains and a million hundred hearts

Hundreds of tiny callowhale shapes appear with cheerful popping sound effects, all squeezed into Calliope’s big body. Marvin the Mongoose sings his turn:

They’re all dressed up with everywhere to go

They might look funny but boy, how they grow!

In the film, Calliope sprouts a red bow on the side of her ever-smiling head and a string of pearls round her neck. A knock sounds—is it a date? No! It’s a little boy! It is, in fact, Anchises, drawn like a lovable scamp in a Sunday comic strip. He holds up a squirming mass of fiddleheads and fronds like flowers. Calliope blushes: For me? And then Mr Bergamot and his mongoose assistant burst into a flurry of tap dancing, four tappity-spats and two sets of clackety-claws going a mile a minute.

If you’re having trouble with the maths

Come consult our helpful graphs!

The graph’s bars spring up, fountains erupting from the blowholes of two miniature Calliopes. The tallest bears the title, “How Important a Callowhale Is to the Continued Function of the Multiverse.” A very short, squat one, little bigger than an exclamation point, reads: “How Important You Are to the Continued Functioning of the Multiverse.” A pitiful slide whistle sounds its note, and then they’re off again. Marvin turns a somersault and warbles:

Just think of a long shiny pin!

The music scratches to a halt. Mr Bergamot protests, “A pin! Now that’s just silly!”

“Not as silly as an octopus playing the harmonica,” the mongoose rejoins. A rimshot echoes down the Waldorf staircase from nowhere. The octopus and mongoose join arms and serenade the lounge together:

Now think of a long shiny pin!

Stuck down through batting and muslin!

Cotton and linen, silk, lace, and wool, too!

There’s so much that fantastic pin can punch through!

One of the Calliopes leaps off the graph. Her nose sharpens to a wicked silver point. She dives down from the x-axis and the image shifts: a whale shearing through quilts and blankets and veils, sending up splashes of thread behind her.

The pin holds it together, so nice and so neat

That is a pin everyone wants to meet!

The spaces between Mr Bergamot’s tentacles fill with stars, with worlds none of the living or the dead have seen before, shuffling together like cards, like the squares of a quilt, lying one atop the other. All the while the bouncing cartoon callowhale dives through them.

Well, that silk is a universe and so are the laces