Radiance

Prospero yanked Severin down from her silver mount by her hair. For a moment, a silken, elastic moment, he danced with her. A formal dance, a waltz, her face tipped up, straining to reach his. He touched her cheek, the cheek of her mask, the cheek beneath. And then he threw her savagely against the green-lit rocks, splashing through the blood and milk and mire. Before my eyes, the remaining dancers shuddered, howled, and transformed into four red tigers and a cub, maskless and striped: real tigers, starving tigers.

In the pit of drums and milk they bent their heads and ate her. I saw her bones snap, I saw the marrow within, I saw her rictus of anguish, I saw the King of Pluto drink her blood, and I saw that woman die with the face of Severin fixed to her skull.

But past the moment of her red death I remember nothing, for it was then that I lost consciousness.

25 February, 1962. I know not what hour.

I have seen her. I have seen her here on Pluto, in this damned city of Prospero’s, of Varela’s, alive, whole, laughing.

She came to me in the ochre bedchamber—how I got there and who brought me, I cannot say. I woke in the night, flushed, trembling, the memory of that poor girl’s clavicle snapping under a tiger’s mouth washing my brain in blood. I clamped my hand over my mouth to keep either shouts or sickness inside, and I still could not say which would have won out. But at that instant, the pale door of my room opened and someone stole in, sneaking—though not very well—through the shadows. Her smell filled the room, her sweat, her hair oil, her breath. Severin, Severin, all the pieces of her that my mendicant memory could scrape together. She crawled in beside me, her skin cold, beyond cold, glowing blue and bloodless. She wore no mask in the dark. Her black hair, a little mussed and frizzy, framed her heart-shaped face, that face bending down over me as it did on the first moment of the miserable life I now lead.

“Move over, silly,” she whispered. “I’m freezing.”

And then I was holding her in my arms. She was naked. Her long, space-stretched bones, her smallish breasts pressed against my chest, her breath light against my throat. A dream, yes; it must be a dream. Impossible to conceive of anything but dreaming. But she had such weight. Such aliveness.

“Didya miss me?”

Her voice was the voice from the cinema, from the phonograph—crackling, even, as a phonograph crackles. Static poured out of her mouth.

“All I’ve done my whole life is miss you,” I answered. I am what I am, and what I am is an answer. I must tell the truth. I can commit every sin but false witness.

“Well, isn’t that nice?” She laughed, and her laugh skipped like a needle over a scratch. I stroked her hair—I could feel it, each strand, beneath my fingers.

“What happened to you? Just tell me, tell me so I can stop wondering.”

“I’m right here, sweetheart. That’s all that matters. I’m here.”

“It’s not all that matters. Everything matters. You disappeared right in front of me…”

Severin raised her perfect black eyebrow. “Did I? What a funny thing for a girl to do.” She punched my arm playfully. “And you said you didn’t remember anything.”

I didn’t remember. I didn’t—until that moment, with her frozen lips nearly touching mine—remember the morning light of Venus and the jungle and the molten, brilliant water shining around her, and then through her, and then through nothing but an empty strand following down to the surf.

She took my face in her hands. “Hey now. Rest easy. It’s okay now. It’s fine now. I’m okay. You don’t have to be so sore about it. You’re a good boy. You always were a good boy. Everybody just loved you, right from the start. Like a little puppy.” She looked so serious and sad, her great deep eyes full of shadows. “Just close your eyes, Anchises. Close your eyes and listen to what I say. Everybody’s alive. Everybody’s alive and happy and I got the shot I wanted. Just the perfect shot. It’ll be shown in film school for a million years, it’s that good. I’m that good, and so are you. So are all of us. There is such a thing as grace. I’m supposed to tell you that. There is such a thing as

grace. Everybody’s alive. Mariana and Horace and Arlo and Erasmo and Max and Aylin and you and me. What I say three times is true.”

Severin moved her cold hands over my body, in the secret world of the ochre bed sheets and the unutterably Plutonian night. She stroked me, clutched me, her gestures needful and knowing. Her breath quickened. It smelled of the cacao-ferns of my village. Of Adonis.

“It’s not so bad, where I am,” she whispered, guiding me into her, into the ice palace of her body. “You can see so far from here. So far. I love you, Anchises. I love you. You found me, and I love you. I couldn’t stay dead with an audience like you waiting for me. Clap for me, darling; clap like the curtain’s coming down. Harder, harder, harder.”

As I broke inside her, Severin threw back her head, laughed, and came down on my throat like a guillotine. Her small teeth pierced my skin and she drank as deeply of my body as I ever did of her image.

I woke alone. But I can still smell her on my hands.

26 February, 1962. Seven in the evening. Setebos Hall.

“Is that your answer, then?” Cythera sighed beside me, holding a cup of beef broth with more irritation than I have seen from women holding wet laundry. “Murder? Varela was what…a madman? Well, he’s clearly that. But was he always? After all, no one accused him back then, and why wouldn’t they have pinned it to his chest? How much easier for everyone if it was a massacre. Disappearances invite a lot more questions than massacres.”

“He confessed it!” I coughed and sank further into my sickbed, into my dank cavern of sweat-stiff blankets. I could hardly lift my head. I put a hand to my throat: bandaged neatly. But there had been a wound. Who had nursed me? My head pounded meatily. I could taste nothing but stale infanta and bile in my mouth.

“Come now,” she said, and I do believe there was a softening in her voice, a coaxing. I had studied the haruspicy of her tones for so long I could scry the tiniest alteration. “Be the detective we went all the way to Uranus for. With enough of those damned flowers in my system, I’d confess to assassinating Thomas À Becket with a ray gun. He’ll come and see you soon. Maybe he’ll gloat over getting you to faint like a maiden on her wedding night, maybe he’ll blubber all over you again; but either way, you need to pull yourself together and act like you’ve got a job to do.”

“So do you,” I spat. “You’re meant to protect me from assaults like that, from…from depredations. And that girl! God, the dancing girl! He killed her, no matter what he did or didn’t do on Venus…”

“Did he, though? I was there. I saw what you saw. I saw more, since I didn’t shriek and collapse like a startled grandmother. And I listened, it would seem, somewhat better. He told us the story of Iphigenia. But Iphigenia doesn’t die in the end, you know. She’s replaced with a deer at the last moment and spirited away to a temple on the other side of the world. She finds steady work and lives quietly until the day her brother and his comrade turn up, trussed and shaved for sacrifice, on the steps of the house of those distant, foreign gods—and there she is, like nothing ever happened, gathering bowls to catch their blood. You really ought to read more. People always lie, Anchises. They lie like they eat, without manners, without restraint. They love lying.”

“Even you?”