Radiance

ke casinos or banks or dancehalls. Just the littlest bit alive, but nothing to lose sleep over.

If you have any sleep to lose. I like the idea of sleep, myself. Sounds like a nice place to visit.

So there I was, on Caroline Street, the hairiest street in the rowdiest city on the snowball. A good place to get forgotten. I was unshaved, unwashed, unslept, unwell, profoundly unsober, and had thus achieved all my aims in life. I had on the only suit I still owned under my jacket, a conservative raisin-coloured number with a chartreuse tie. And gloves, always gloves, even if the cold didn’t slap me around like a whining brat, always gloves. I have a trunk of leather gloves lined with fleece and hydrostatic furpack. Yeah, leather. My only luxury. None of that brownfalse rubbish they say is just as good. Made special on Mars, where you gotta bat away steers like bottle flies. I need them thick, but they’re never thick enough.

It was a suit fit for a job interview, though I hadn’t let one of those get near me in years. I didn’t think I could manage a conversation longer than How much? anyway. I can’t stomach a man telling me what to do and when to do it. That cog got banged up good in me. The one that lets normal folks say, Yes, sir; right away, sir, and mean it. And then get the business done for the sirs of the world, right away, on the double-quick.

And yet. I wasn’t on Caroline Street to scare up a woman or to sell my cufflinks for a lump of af-yun or put the last of my emergency protein fund on the ammonite races. I was calling on a million quid. A job. Gainful employment. A gig particularly suited to my extremely specific talents and Historia Calamitatum. If you lined up all the soul-choking jobs a body ever dreamed up, neat as a chorus line and twice as hungry, this’d be about the last dame I’d wanna take round the floor. And yet.

Being on time is a filthy habit practiced only by roosters and retirees. Frankly, the roosters can’t even get their heads on straight round here. The sun, such as it is, comes up every seventeen hours on Uranus. It’s hard on the poultry. Still, I probably woulda made it, despite all my efforts to black out before the hour struck Cinderella, if the Astor hadn’t put up a midnight show. One of those weird, off-putting studio talkies from back in the bad old days when Edison ruled the nickelodeon universe with a celluloid fist. We get a lot of that stuff out here. This is the end of the line for movie prints. It takes ten years to get them out to Uranus and once they make landfall they tend to stick. Just kind of swirl around the theatres like water down a drain till the reels break or someone steals them. If you’re looking for a flick that no one’s seen hide of for a good long howl, there’s probably one kicking round some freezer case in a Uranian cellar. Who knows where they dug this one up?

The Astor marquee came ghosting up out of the blue brume, sickly topaz pop-bulbs and black block letters bearded with ice.

Self-Portrait with Saturn.

Well, fuck me sideways.

I didn’t wanna buy a ticket. For one thing, I’ve seen it. Boy howdy, have I seen it. For another, my petty cash was feeling particularly petty that night. There’s probably a third thing. I didn’t want a ticket. I sure as hell didn’t want the booth jockey to smell my breath and wrinkle her pretty little pierced nose like her opinion kept the lights on. I didn’t wanna sit fifth row centre in a chair whose springs would leave red half-moons on my arse by the end of that self-indulgently long barely-a-movie. I did want the cheap pus-yellow port wine they make up on Miranda out of callowmilk, freeze-dried coca, grapes that once sneezed in the general direction of France, and whatever else is lying around the floor for flavour. Popcorn alone won’t pay the rent on Caroline Street. I did want to sit in the clammy warmth of that god-awful cathedral-arched candy-cane decoglass theatre, under the headless, broken saltrock cherubs and breadcoral mermaids holding up the sconces on the wall, the threadbare peacock curtain, the greened brass EXIT sign.

And I did want to see her.

I didn’t want to watch her. But I wanted to see her. The way you want to see an old friend, or an ex-lover you hope is miserable without you. Fix her coffee and listen to her troubles, make concerned faces and sympathetic mooing noises in all the right places while she gets bitter and hot as the coffee. But all the while you’re sizzling with excitement; your heart’s a champagne burn. Her sorrow tastes fantastic. It’s a sorrow for savouring, and when she wants to spend her despair in your bed, you’ll say no, and that’ll taste fantastic, too.

That’s why I slunk into my seat instead of showing up where I shoulda been. Rigorously ignoring the five or ten other sets of eyeballs in that dank cave of a theatre. Barely able to get my yammering heart or my pickled gut under control. Leaning forward like she’d notice me if I got far enough in her face. Like she was a schoolteacher who’d choose somebody out of the shiny row of brats spelling furiously for her pleasure and love the kid who had the right answer best of all. Except, I didn’t have it. Nobody did. But nobody felt bad about that the way I did.

Nobody was supposed to know how to spell “Venus” but me.

I stopped breathing when the lights went down. Gripping the arms of my seat like the paws on a claw-foot tub, my nails going right down into the damp wood. The breadcoral broads up on the wall leered down, acting out the birth of the Titans, I think, their rough carrot-coloured arms full of lights and tiny monsters with tails and feathers and snouts. Two rows up a fella took off his hat. A head already moved rhythmically up and down in his lap. Before the credits! Have a little class!

She came on-screen eyes first. The sight of her irises slammed into me like a pair of heart attacks. I felt the port wine come up, harsh sulphur bile in the back of my throat. I smelled a storm of phantoms: cacao-fern, burnt coconut bark, the terrible copper-sugar whip of a faraway sea. My wrists throbbed. The opening music jangled in my ears, a nauseating player piano going fifteen rounds with my one working eardrum. Her face: fifty feet high.

She is a planet. She is the sun. She is the only woman in the world. She is so young. She is adjusting the camera in a self-indulgent little bit of metafilm that always made me embarrassed for her. I hate her and I am hard and I am sick and I adore her and I want to fuck her and I want to tear her apart and I want to save her and I want her to tell me it’s all okay and I am ten years old again and nothing bad has happened yet. I turned to the empty seat next to me and threw up onto the floor of the Astor, a milky, mewling splash of stomach juices and Miranda’s best, my head moving rhythmically up and down. No one cared. It was for someone else to clean up.

I couldn’t stand looking at her anymore. I used to do nothing else. I lived to stare at her. I worked enough to eat enough to look at her. Every image; any image. All of them. And there were always so many to choose from. I could sit down to a banquet of her and gorge myself. On some nights I might even have started with Self-Portrait—it’s such a rookie’s flick, a young wine, untried, raw, too afraid of the palate to use it well. But then I’d pull back, pace myself, nibble on her cameos in her old man’s films: a little baby in an interplanetary stagecoach beset by pirates, a cherub devil besetting a nun’s big, bright soul. A quick salad of red carpets and Percy’s home movies before gobbling down another of her features. Always keeping Venus for last, always putting off Radiant Car as long as possible, always dreading that first savage moment when she and I shared the stage. Not yet, not yet. First a soup course of interviews and newsreels—I always liked to end with the last interview.

You’ve seen it. Who hasn’t seen it?

The sacrificial not-even-close-to-a-virgin laughing in a soft grey chair, wearing long silk trousers and a dark scrap of Tritonic fabric flung over her shoulders. It hides her breasts, binds them down something breathless, but shows her belly, and she’s just so languid, so unconcerned, gesturing with a cigarette in a long black holder. A party wheels around her. Hartford Crane kisses her hand while the Grenadine sisters dance in shimmering sheaths nearby. Torn-out ransom letters of her talk flash on-screen between the dancers and the champagne like cut sequins spilling all over the floor as the night grows wild and thick.

It’s her eulogy. She gave it herself and no one’s ever managed better. Recorded on sound equipment that must have cost more than the house she drank in, sewn together to make a good monologue from whatever she said before Annabelle August collapsed into her lap in a tangled heap of long limbs and giggles and blue pearls and she lost interest in anything else.

I know her pearls were blue, though the film shows only smooth grey. Sometimes the things I know are of no use at all.

Oh, I’m not famous. Don’t laugh! I’m not being disingenuous. I have money, and my father is famous, but that’s not the same thing as being famous, and that isn’t the same thing as being good, or being good at anything. That’s just people knowing your name and what you wore on Tuesday. I didn’t deserve any of that. It was pure chance that I was born in that place and at that certain time—and, unbelievable! Really, all those mothers! I think it needs a rewrite or two to make it relatable. I’ve tried to make good on that wholly unfair premise. But I haven’t yet. Famine Queen, you say—sure—and The Sea. Yes, those are certainly films I made. But they’re nothing. Journeyman stuff. I took a camera along while I saw the solar system. No better than half the lens freaks are doing, and worse than some. This one, though. When I think about Radiant Car, my heart hurts. Like the movie is already done and showing inside me, projecting onto the inside of my skin, flickering on the white screens of my bones. As long as I don’t fuck it up. As long as I don’t, then maybe, when I’ve come back and we all know what happened out there in Adonis, when I can sit in this chair and tell you about everything I saw, everything I felt, what the seas of Venus smelled like—well, then maybe we can talk about fame. Because to me, famous is only worth shit if you’ve earned it through the work of your hands, and I haven’t earned anything yet. I feel like I can almost touch the edge of goodness. But not yet, not yet. Come find me in two years. Maybe then I’ll be worthy of you.

I loved to hear her say those words. Come find me in two years. Half a year’s shooting, plus transit to and from and post-production back home. I watched with my face so close to hers, waiting for her to say she’s nothing yet. She’s nothing yet because she hasn’t met me. Just a rich, beautiful girl—and there she is, saying flat out that she’s not worthy of me or even good. Her words taste like whiskey and oh, how the bouquet improves when you play them back over a long shot of her rocket disappearing in the sky, becoming a punctuation mark in that last, sad sentence.

Her flicks packed the nickelodeons and wrapped the streets three times round. Weeks before her movies opened, buskers and salesmen would camp out on the thoroughfares beside every theatre, selling gen

uine cells she touched with her own hand and replica spangled cages from Self-Portrait, sized just right to hold a gravity-challenged male of Saturnine extraction. Why? Why all that crass excitement? I still can’t figure it out. Her father was Percival Unck, a brooding, notorious director in his time. Made a heap of sweaty gothic dramas full of wraith-like heroines with black, bruised eyes and mouths hanging open in horror or orgiastic transcendence or both. Her mother was probably one of those ever-transcendent actresses, though which one it was, the man kept to himself. Each Unck leading lady became, by association and binding contract, the poor kid’s mother. You can see in her flickering, dust-scratched face the echoes of a half-dozen fleeting, hopeful actresses, some still famous, some easily forgotten except in the odd mood flashing across their daughter’s lean features, her cryptic glances, her scornful, knowing grin.

She washed her hands of Daddy sometime between Famine Queen and The Sleeping Peacock. Her film debut in The Spectres of Mare Nubium is charming, if you go for the cute kid shtick. During the famous ballroom sequence where the decadent dowager Clarena Schirm is beset with the ghosts of her victims, Severin can be seen picking at the pearls on her bonnet and rubbing at her makeup. The legend goes that when the great man tried to stick eyeshadow on his girl and convince her to pretend to be a Schirm relation while a hungry shade—a young Maud Locksley, no less—swooped down upon the innocent child, she looked up exasperatedly and said, “Papa. This is silly! I want only to be myself!”

And so she would be, only herself, forever and always. As soon as she could work the crank on a camera by her lonesome, she set about recording “the really real and actual world” (age seven) or “the genuine and righteous world of the true tale” (age twenty-one) and declaring her father’s beloved ghosts and devils “a load of double-exposure drivel.” Her second documentary, The Famine Queen of Phobos, brought that blasted little colony’s food riots to harsh light and earned her a Lumière medal, a prize Papa would never get his paws on. Maybe that was it. She told the truth once or twice, and she told it with a bleeding head and a broken arm: Old Mummy Earth is a mean drunk, and she doesn’t look after her babies too well.

When asked if his daughter’s fury in the face of fiction ever got to him, Unck smiled in his raffish, canine way and said, “The lens, my good man, does not discriminate between the real and the unreal.”

Of her final film, The Radiant Car Thy Sparrows Drew, only four sequences remain. They’re all badly damaged. Everybody copies them, cuts them up and spits them out again into endless anaemic tell-all docs I wouldn’t wipe my feet on. The originals continue to putrefy in some museum in Chicago. More people than you’d think go there to watch them rot. I did. It was comforting. You plonked your head against the cool wall on a soft pink Midwestern evening that seems impossible when you’re freezing to death on Uranus. She flashes before your eyes: a sprite, a fairy at the end of a long, dark tunnel, smiling, waving, crawling into the mouth of the cannon capsule with the ease of a natural performer.