Radiance

Let me show you what a good girl can be

Severin slides gracefully off the piano and walks through the lounge. Her green dress fades back to black, her skin to silver. She sits down on Erasmo’s lap; she runs her fingers through his hair. The key changes, and Calliope begins to hum a plaintive counterpoint. Mr Bergamot joins in.

My honey and me floated out on the foam

Still I sighed: I miss my baby back home

How can I leave him so lonesome and blue?

Don’t seem the kind of thing a good girl should do.

Severin snaps her fingers. She presses her knuckle under Erasmo’s chin.

But with honey, ain’t no such thing as leavin’

Anyone I want I can find just like that

So baby, don’t you get lost in grievin’

Wherever you go, that’s where I’m at.

“Because I am a nexus point connecting all possible realities and unrealities,” Severin purrs seductively. “I exist in innumerable forms throughout the liquid structure of space/time, and neither self nor causality have any meaning for me.” She kisses Erasmo as the song ends. Tears slide off his cheeks, onto his chin, and onto her film-shivering fingers, where they burn. “I love you right in the face.”

Severin stands and bows. Marvin the Mongoose throws gardenias at her feet. She holds her hand out to her father, who takes it, and holds it to his breast. He’s sobbing, a big ugly cry, but there’s no shame. In point of fact, there’s not a dry eye in the house.

“I’m okay, Daddy. It’s okay now.”

PART FIVE

THE RED PAGES

The radiant car your sparrows drew

You gave the word and swift they flew,

Through liquid air they wing’d their way,

I saw their quivering pinions play;

To my plain roof they bore their queen,

Of aspect mild, and look serene.

—Sappho, “Hymn to Aphrodite”

In the end, everything is a gag.

—Charlie Chaplin

The Man of the Hours

13 June, 1971

The afternoon sun knocks politely at the doors of Mount Penglai. It wears a soft orange dress with red buttons and a gold sash.

Mount Penglai meant to be a metropolis, but it got a little lost along the way. You can still see evidence of its grander destiny: a pronged glass hotel rising like a trident from the central business district: the mammoth bronze qilin statues outside Anqi Sheng Theatre whose marquee, on this particular day, reads: Mr Bergamot Goes to France. The city lies in the Chinese hemisphere, fed by the happy canals of the Mangala Valles, not so far from the enormous orange cone of Nix Olympia, a kindly volcano the size of Bulgaria that never makes any trouble. Prosperous kangaroo ranches dot the outskirts, and that’s about the size of the wealth around here—the fancier folk just didn’t want to live so far from Guan Yu.

Or too close to Enyo, after everything. It’s only five kilometres down the road.