Radiance

“He had two. We never filmed the vote. Which one would you choose?”

Anchises St. John finishes his cake. Voices are coming up the walkway toward the house, musical, lilting voices.

“Not much of a choice, is it?” he says. “Erasmo and Cristabel will be here in a moment. They always bring gin. Would you like to stay to dinner?”

Vince takes his scarred hand in hers. She squeezes it. “Very much.”

Goodbye

Look at your hands. The light on them. The light that is a small boy, head bent, turning in circles around your palm. Your fate line. Your heart line. Him.

One of the crewmen shaves in a mirror nailed to a cacao-tree. He catches a glimpse of Severin in his mirror and whirls to catch her up, kissing her and smearing shaving cream on her face. She laughs and punches his arm—he recoils in mock agony. It is a pleasant scene. You have seen it before. You will see it again. It is the best of her you hold in your hands.

There is no such thing as an ending. There are no answers. We collect the pieces where we can, obsessively assemble and reassemble them, searching for a picture that can only ever come in parts. And we cling to those parts. The parts that have been her. The parts that have been you. Your chest, your ribs, your knees. The place where her last image entered and stayed. We have tried to finish Percival’s work—to find the Grail, to ask the correct question. But in some version of the tale, Percival, too, must fail, and so must we, because the story of the Grail is one of failure and always has been. He did not finish his film. We could not finish it for him. There is no elegy for Severin Unck showing in a theatre near you.

But there is a reliquary.

What you have seen in this shadowed room, this quiet corner of a Worlds’ Fair where every tiny rock has sent its best representatives to fly banners and wave, is the body of Severin Unck. All her pieces, laid out for viewing. It does not live—we are not Victor Frankenstein, nor do we wish to be—but it looks like a woman we once knew. Look at her.

Now, look at my hand. I will hold it up. And look at yours. How many of you wear gloves? One glove? Two? More and more, every year. For the space is not smooth that darkly floats between our earth and its morning star—Lucifer’s star, in eternal revolt against the order of heaven. It is thick, it is swollen, its disrupted proteins skittering across the black like foam—like milk spilled across the stars. And in this quantum milk, how many bubbles may form and break; how many abortive universes gestated by the eternal sleeping mothers may burgeon and burst? Perhaps Venus is an anchor, where all waveforms meet in a radiant scarlet sea, where the milk of creation is whipped to a froth, and we have pillaged it, gorged upon it, all unknowing. Perhaps in each bubble of milk is a world suckled at the breast of a pearlescent cetacean. Perhaps there is one where Venus is no watery Eden as close as a sister, but a distant inferno of steam and stone, lifeless, blistered. Perhaps you have drunk the milk of this world—or perhaps I have, and destroyed it with my digestion. Perhaps a skin of probabilistic milk, dribbling from the mouths of babes, is all that separates our world from the others. Perhaps the villagers of Adonis drank so deeply of the primordial milk that they became as the great mothers.

I dream of the sea. Always the sea.

Perhaps we are all only pieces. But we are stitching ourselves together, into something resembling a prologue.

Go out into the Fair. Into the light. Breathe the lunar air. Eat, drink, and be happy, for you have reached the end—which is not really the end.

The Howler and the Lord of the World

FILM REEL FROM THE ENYO SITE ON MARS

[INT. A cinema. The seats glow a deep, heart-like red. Cherubs with the heads of fish frame the screen. SEVERIN UNCK sits in one of the seats, soaking wet. She looks confused, upset. She shivers; her teeth chatter. She turns to see if anyone else is in the theatre, but she is alone. When she turns back, MR BERGAMOT is seated next to her, a green cartoon octopus wearing spats and a monocle.]

SEVERIN

Uncle Talmadge?

MR BERGAMOT

I’m afraid not. But this was my favourite of all the bodies you remember. I like his appendages. [MR BERGAMOT flourishes his tentacles.] Can I get you some popcorn?

SEVERIN

Who are you?

BERGAMOT

Who you came for. You stuck a bloody great camera in my face, remember?

SEVERIN

Sorry.

BERGAMOT

No, you’re not.

SEVERIN