Radiance (15 page)

CYTHERA:
There's no need for belligerence, Mr St. John. Let's start with something easy.

ERASMO:
[laughs]

CYTHERA:
You were involved in a romantic relationship with Severin Unck, correct?

ERASMO:
You're right, that is easy. Yes. Please do not use the past tense, or I shall have to start swearing again.

CYTHERA:
When did this relationship commence?

ERASMO:
Officially? Christmas … um … 1937. At the
Phobos
wrap party. Unofficially, I met her when I was ten and she was twelve. Felix—that's my father—contracted on
Atom Riders
. Mum was off working on some Blom flick. They never worked on the same film at the same time. People felt uncomfortable with a black man and his white wife just walking about, holding hands, laughing, other assorted sins against civilization. So I was helping Dad paint the flats for the shadow rodeo scene, shading depth on the radioactive lassos when Rinny wandered over to me. I saw her shadow on my shadows before I ever saw her. She said:
Gosh, that's just splendid! I feel as though they're about to leap out and snatch me round the neck!
And that was it for me. The rest of us just took a while to catch up.

CYTHERA:
Very romantic. Did you ever have similar trouble when you and Severin worked on the same projects? On
Radiant Car
?

ERASMO:
If we did, it didn't matter. Come now, you know better. The director can do as they like. My parents were just set painters. Instantly expendable, if a producer happened to glance at them and get a crick in his soul.

CYTHERA:
[amused snort] So you and Unck were together from 1937 through to 1944, is that right?

ERASMO:
We broke up for a while on the way back from Neptune. There was another girl, a levitator. Rin was crazy about her, too. That was the problem, I guess. We both strayed. Took most of a trip across the solar system to spackle over it. That, and Rin didn't want to get married. You can't blame her, given her history. Then we split again when she was doing preproduction for
Radiant Car
. I thought she was being pigheaded, refusing to go into the shoot with an open mind. It wasn't like
Self-Portrait
or
And the Sea
, which were personal and confessional, or even like
Phobos
and
The Sleeping Peacock
, where we were in the right place at the right time and filmed what was happening; the food riots or the proxy war on Io.
Radiant Car
was supposed to be almost … journalism. We were seeking answers. And if you think you've already got all the answers before you start investigating, you … alter what you find. You miss things. Ignore things. I told Rinny Bart Worley wanted me on
Let Them Eat Death
, his big French Revolution epic. Would have been a good gig for me, a huge production like that. But she gave in for once. Maybe she shouldn't have. We would have patched it up anyway. Being apart never really stuck.

CYTHERA:
But you would describe your relationship as stable during the Venus expedition?

ERASMO:
As stable as we ever were. We're not … easy people, either of us. We're both selfish and stubborn and want our own way all the time, every time. We fought. We'd start laughing in the middle of the fight. Then pick up the argument a week later like we hadn't even taken a breath.

CYTHERA:
[clears throat] Are you sure you want to say that you and your girlfriend were having problems when her whereabouts are in question?

ERASMO:
What the hell does that mean? We fought about what to have for breakfast. Who'd left their washing all over the trailer and thus was the bigger pig. The shooting schedule. Whether she or I or everyone on Venus was drinking too much. Normal couple things! Are you insinuating that I did something to her?

CYTHERA:
I'm not insinuating anything, Mr St. John. I think we're getting ahead of ourselves. Let's go back to easy questions. What was your crew compliment at launch?

ERASMO:
Oh, fuck off. You know all this. Eight attached to
Radiant Car
, ten support staff.

CYTHERA:
And upon return?

ERASMO:
I don't know, what does your expense report say?

CYTHERA:
Please, Mr St. John.

ERASMO:
Well, I think that depends how you count. How is Santiago doing these days?

CYTHERA:
[clears throat] I have been instructed not to discuss that with you, Mr St. John.

ERASMO:
Of course. Fine. We got back on the
Clamshell
in White Peony Station light one director, one sound engineer, one idiot, one cameraman, and heavy one kid. Happy?

CYTHERA:
And for the record, how do you account for the discrepancy?

ERASMO:
Are you joking?

CYTHERA:
I am not. Let's take them one by one. Mariana Alfric, your sound engineer?

ERASMO:
[shakes his head] Dead. We buried her in the village cemetery.

CYTHERA:
Arlo Covington, the Oxblood representative?

ERASMO:
Emphatically dead. Most likely, almost certainly, probably dead.

CYTHERA:
Horace St. John, your cameraman? You knew him well, is that right?

ERASMO:
He's my cousin, yes. Dead … ish. I don't know. We had to leave him.

CYTHERA:
And Severin Unck, the director?

ERASMO:
[unresponsive]

CYTHERA:
Well, we'll get to that. Can you take me through the landing and establishment of base camp? In your own words.

ERASMO:
[long pause] [When he speaks again, it is in a whisper.] When I shut my eyes I see the film we meant to make. It was something elegant. Something accessible but still stylized, beautiful, satisfying. We saw a mystery in Adonis—the village that vanished. The movie would be like one of those wonderful scenes at the end of a Madame Mortimer flick, where she tells a room full of suspicious types how it all went down and you feel … you feel like you were groping around in the dark and your hand finally found a light switch. And the light comes on and it's such a relief to see that those awful, frightening shapes in the shadows were just boxes of old clothes and a chest of drawers and a staircase. Our movie was meant to be a light switched on. It was our baby. We'd flip the switch and show how two hundred people could up and disappear in a night and leave nothing but wreckage. There was a solution, obviously. We just had to find it.

CYTHERA:
The lighting master, Mr Varela, has indicated that a rough edit was completed at some point? Is this true?

ERASMO:
Don't. Don't talk to me about Max. I don't want to hear his name. Yes. We had enough footage for a feature. (Well, I say enough. You never have enough.) Not enough to make
Radiant Car
the way we'd broken it coming home from Enki. But enough for
something
. Cristabel and I worked on it in the
Clamshell
darkroom, cutting like Fates. Putting her together again. It was good in there, in the darkroom. Cristabel and I didn't have to look at each other. Didn't have to look at anyone else. Shadows and red light and little Anchises sitting in the corner not making a peep. Just looking at us and listening to us playing back the sound of screaming in the wind. If we stopped working, we'd have to look at everyone else. At Maximo and Santiago staring at nothing and Aylin and the Sallandars, at the crew who'd been gambling and drinking and swimming their brunches off in White Peony and were too polite to ask what happened. Their
politeness
just wrecked me. The only one of the lot who even seemed to care where the hell Severin went was the ship's cat. Mr Tobias kept yowling and clawing up her berth. Just kept looking for her.
     If not for Maximo, I'd have come home with a movie and you wouldn't give two dry shits who died. Because the story's better if people died for it. Disaster sends ticket sales through the roof. It's a better mystery, a better
story
, if it hurt to make it. If not for Max, I'd just load up a reel and I wouldn't have to try to say all this with words like a caveman poking at a rock wall with a damned stick.
     I wonder … I wonder if I'd have been able to forget if it had happened somewhere else. If Horace had gotten torn up by a slickboar on Ganymede. If Arlo had drowned on a Nereid hunt off Enki. If an Edison man had shot Mari in a Tithonus back alley. If I didn't have to drink Severin's death every day, if I didn't need that whale slime just to keep puttering along. I imagine other deaths for her quite a bit, you know. Uranian influenza. Trampled in the Phobos food riots. Strangled by a mad Belt miner. It's a morbid hobby. It keeps me going. But a death is a death. It's a thing you can't get around. It just sits there like a fat arsehole in black pyjamas, eats all your food, drinks all your wine, and demands you call it mister for the privilege. I could handle a death. I could live with a death. Cook for both of us. Clean up after it. Pay its way. But I don't get that luxury.

CYTHERA:
The landing, Mr St. John.

ERASMO:
I know. I know you want a simple accounting. Put it to bed, Raz. But the thing is, you already have the simple accounting. You know what happened. I know it. That's not the mystery. You ask me to take you through it as though you don't already have fourteen versions typed up neatly on your desk. As if it's not public record. The facts are easy. See? I'll do them standing on my head. I can recite them like a poem. Anything is a poem if you say it often enough. My poem goes:
I loved a girl and she left me.
You know that one?

CYTHERA:
[sounds of china clinking, spoons knocking against cups, knives scraping against bread] Shut the door when you leave, Jane. We'll take lunch at one o'clock. Now, back to the landing…?

ERASMO:
[long pause] We landed in White Peony Station on the seventeenth of November, 1944.

CYTHERA:
Earth time.

ERASMO:
Yes. We kept to the home clock throughout. I won't be giving you any headaches with a November sixteenth that lasts a year. We weren't staying; no need to synchronize our watches with the local time in Wonderland. November sixteenth means autumn, and on Venus autumn means permanent dusk. No dawn 'til spring. Our rendezvous with our liaison, Aylin Novalis, at the Waldorf on Idun Avenue, went off fine.
     Principal photography commenced on the seventeenth—interviews, man-on-the-street stuff with every crazy person who thought that Adonis had been taken by aliens, or God, or Hathor Callowmilk Corporation, or that the villagers had succumbed to religious mania and killed themselves at the climax of some orgiastic cannibalistic ritual coinciding with the Venus-Mercury alignment. The utter bullshit we heard, Miss Brass, I cannot begin to tell you. Every shade and flavour.
     We spent three nights in the hotel—the ship's crew, too. Everything was beautiful, though mostly broken and very damp. Some of the ceiling tiles had fallen down into the lobby. I remember the pink stone columns out front were all sort of pockmarked from the salt air. They looked like an old man's skin. Even inside, there was pale white moss everywhere like velvet, on the chairs, on the bar, on the walls, on the beds. I think we checked in on a Tuesday. Like today. I suppose that makes it an anniversary. I'll expect cake with lunch, Miss Brass. And a candle.
     Anyway, on our last night in White Peony Station, everyone got out one last pretty thing to wear before we all had to start living in our hiking kit and waterproof socks. We all drank a great deal and gorged on ice cream like a gang of kids after school. Even Arlo seemed to have a good time. He kept trying to remember these dumb jokes, but he couldn't get them right.
So there's this mummy snake and this baby snake and the mummy snake says, “Honey, I just bit myself!” No, wait, the baby snake says, “Mumsy, are we poisonous?” Wait, shit …
     The ceiling dripped onto the plastic tubs we'd hauled over a hundred thousand kilometres, and before I finished my Quandong Ripple my spoon had grown a little fur of moss on it as well. Mariana and Cristabel sang “I Left My Sugar Standing in the Rain” up at a big mouldy baby grand while Aylin played, and pretty well, too. Crissy wore silver sequins. Mariana had a lavender flower in her hair. Maximo fired back with “It Never Rains on Venus” in his old rye-whiskey baritone, and you'd have thought no one in that shabby hotel bar had ever realised the irony of that tune before, the way we laughed while the chandeliers leaked onto our heads. They all tried to get Rinny to sing, but they took the wrong tack. I know my girl. She'll sing you the moon—no kid raised in a theatre can turn down applause any more than they can turn down a meal. But Van Rooyen—that was our navigator—wanted to hear “Callisto Lullaby.” Too bad, Roo! That's from
Thief of Light
and Severin would rather take an ice pick to the eye than do anything even the littlest bit Percy-adjacent, so she demurred. I don't think I ever saw her demur before. It was interesting. Didn't look quite right on her.
     That was the worst Waldorf from Mercury to Pluto, but it felt like the most exciting place we could possibly be. Just us, the old crew. Except Cristabel, who we nabbed right out of film school, before anyone else could snap her up, and Franco, who was barely in long pants, we'd all been together since Saturn. We'd all fucked one another and cried over one another and gotten right with one another again. Maximo taught me how to juggle. I taught Santiago how to play the squeezebox and order a cocktail in eleven languages. Mariana and Severin swam together every morning at dawn in any town with so much as a puddle. Just the two of them, their arms flashing up in the mist, two dark heads like seals heading out to sea.
     I can't imagine many of us slept much that night. I heard Maximo and Mariana going at it already when Rinny and me stumbled by their door on the way to ours. I found out later that Crissy had a thing going with the signalman, Ghanim. That fellow was handsome as a statue and talked like a book, which made him candy for our little AD.
     She told me about it in the darkroom while we watched some handheld stuff from that first night. We saw Carolyne (she was our wire walker) and Horace snuggling by the fountain—big brass Aphrodite, who else. We hadn't even known they were an item till that moment. We watched ourselves jumping around drunk and grinning for the camera. And we smiled at ourselves smiling, Crissy and me. Our first smiles since it happened. A camera collects secrets. It collects people and holds them prisoner forever. And that's when Cristabel told me about Ghanim and how he quoted Chaucer to her—in Middle English, no less—while they made love, all glottal stops and breathy German consonants, and how she couldn't look at him now because if she looked he'd come to her quarters, and if he came, he'd ask, and if he asked, she couldn't answer, so that was that over, she guessed.
     Severin and I had Room 35. I remember it had this huge fuck-off mirror, half-frosted over with moss and dried rain, and I watched Severin in it while she straddled me on our sticky, lichen-y bed in a black kimono; drank the most bog-awful grappa that has ever touched my lips; and sang “Callisto Lullaby” for me. Just for me. This is what you want to hear, right? Details? We kissed half the night—we could have kissed for England, her and me. We could kiss so long we'd forget to fuck. We didn't forget that night, and I'm glad. We listened to Idun Avenue and the drunks singing “Flower of Scotland” and “La Marseillaise” and some Chinese one we didn't know, listened to the shops closing up, to the rattling percussion of pachinko parlour doors opening and shutting, to trucks peeling down the road too fast, to little curls and wisps and crumbs of music floating out of dance halls, to the constant trickle of rain into the gutters and grates and sloughs and potholes, to last call. We talked about the things you talk about when it's two a.m. and you're naked and you've known the person you're naked with so long you could draw their face blind in the dark. About Clotilde, which other people always found strange, but never troubled us. We weren't related. Aren't. Her father married half the Moon and fucked the other half senseless. She'd have to go pretty far to find someone whose mum had never stopped round for supper. Clotilde connected us, from the beginning, like a story with foreshadowing. We talked about being children on the Moon, about the hole-in-the-wall curry place with the turquoise tureens in the Plantagenet Quarter back home, about the night on Phobos when we finally got together and how good it was. We both wore black and red, because we couldn't live without dressing the set first. I tasted funny to her at first, and she thought maybe it wouldn't last. A person has to taste right if you're gonna stick around. I joked that she just didn't like the taste of an honest man. I'd made that joke many times. It wasn't even a joke anymore so much as a refrain. And then she said:
You're not that honest,
because that's the next line.
     You know the first time we said
I love you
it got all banged up? She took a beating in that warehouse in Kallisti Square. I was patching her up in an emergency medical bay. Blood everywhere, both of us faint from hunger and adrenaline. One of her teeth didn't look like it was going to make it. I tied my shirt around her head to soak up the worst of it. She said: “He kicked me right in the face,” at just the same second as I said, “I love you.” She laughed and she kissed me. The Kallisti water tower exploded. And after that, we always said “I love you right in the face.” And bit by bit, that's how a couple gets pounded together out of two busted people.
     Christ, there are things I miss and there are things I miss, but I can hear her voice now just as clearly as when the rain fell through our talking and the moss closed in as quiet and soft as falling asleep.
     Am I making you uncomfortable?