Radiance

You’re joking.

BERGAMOT

Do you know what a movie is, though?

SEVERIN

Is this a riddle?

BERGAMOT

A movie is a ribbon. A long, long ribbon with thousands of pictures on it. Each one slightly different, so that when you run through the pictures very fast, they look like they’re moving. But when the movie is playing, the thousands of pictures are all still there on the ribbon. They just look like one picture. There are a million million frames, each one of them only a little different, and callowhales move through those frames like a cigarette burn in the corner of the image. Each frame is a world; a universe. Some of them are full of panthers. Some are full of dancing. Some are so sad I think you would never stop crying if you saw them, far sadder than this one, with its teeming Earth. You and Venus and your lover and your ship and the Moon and your father are only one frame, and there are ever so many more than twenty-four per second.

This frame has only one living world. It is where I died. Sometimes we are not very tidy when we die. Pieces of my body washed up in every possible reality. A scale here, a pneumatocyst there, a frond on a beach near a village called Adonis. I spasmed all the way through my death. When I got sick, I shook and shivered, and my shaking and shivering happened not to this Pluto, but to the one you know, to a town called Proserpine. When I died, I screamed in pain, and my screaming happened not to that cold Mars but to a town called Enyo. We have no manners when we are sick. I am ashamed.

SEVERIN

If you died, how are we speaking? Am I dead?

BERGAMOT

I would prefer you not to be dead.

SEVERIN

You and me both, buddy.

BERGAMOT

This octopus, sitting with you, is just a piece of my body washing up, like the others. It will dissolve, eventually, like the rest. I wish you could stay here forever with us under the sea.

SEVERIN

But I can’t. I have to go back. I have people to look after.

BERGAMOT

You were vaporised at the point of contact. You cannot go back, only forward. Back and forward are nonsense words, anyway. But you can still look after your people, if you want to.

You do not understand what a callowhale is. You have never seen like we see. In some places, we look like a camera. Like an eye shared between three women. Like a story about seeing and being seen.

[The screen shows a parade of images, of scenes, each lapping at the next like a wave. ERASMO in a small room with an espresso, agony and anger and exhaustion on his face. MARY PELLAM sleeping next to a green creature with lion paws. MARY as a child in Oxford. PENELOPE leaving a basket on the doorstep of a grand house. PERCY and VINCE, arguing over a script, swimming naked in a lake on the Moon. PERCY and FREDDY arguing; Freddy running off with PERCY’s gun, shooting THADDEUS IRIGARAY, weeping. MAUD LOCKSLEY and ALGERNON B washing blood off a floor. ERASMO and ANCHISES eating biscuits on Mars, laughing. ERASMO and CRISTABEL jogging together in the morning. MARIANA sleeping in a morphine haze. MARIANA singing to the dragon SANCHO PANZA in the broiling sun. SEVERIN, very little, trying to work out who is telling the story to whom. Many more flash by, millions more. Wars that come sooner in one universe come later in another, but come all the same. There are great rockets instead of airplanes; battles stretched by transit windows and orbits until they fray to pieces, leaving fleets abandoned in the night; more and more; human bodies sailing further out, past the solar system, filling with milk and starlight until fiddleheads open out of their navels, blossoming with flowers; great-grandchildren playing with CLARA without understanding what she could ever have been, more; until SEVERIN is crying; until she puts her hands over her face.]

BERGAMOT

Buck up, baby blowfish. Just puff up bigger than your sadness and scare it right off. That’s the only way to live in the awful old ocean.

[SEVERIN looks up. She laughs.]

BERGAMOT

Why are you laughing?

SEVERIN

I just…I really wish you could’ve met my dad. I wish I could tell him it really was an ice dragon, after all. [She wipes her eyes.]

All right, mister. Put me in the picture.