Radiance (32 page)

“I am fine. Yes, fine, really—please don't trouble yourself. Only—what was that all about?”
Be a detective
, I thought.
Questions. It's always about the questions. Seeking the right one like an optometrist's lenses. Can you see clearly now? And now? And now?
“What I mean is, no one really turned into a tiger and ate Severin Unck, did they? Art has its limits.”

“You are the only one who can understand me, Anchises,” came his reply. He scratched his cheek beneath his starry mask. “You were there—you saw everything. You know my heart. Her heart. I used to take you walking along the beach in the mornings, do you remember? Every morning from the first day we met you. I recited everything I could think of, just so you could hear language again and remember how to make it yourself. Homer, Marlowe, Coleridge, Chaucer, a little Poe, a little Grimm. I managed most of
The Tempest
the day before she … the day before. I was proud of that. I gave you a little chocolate from craft services after every walk, so you'd associate words and sweetness. Didn't work, but it seemed important. Tell me you remember. Tell me it mattered.”

I considered it. I considered telling him,
Of course. Of course I remember: “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan his stately pleasure dome decree.” Yes, of course. Your voice brought me back to the country of human speech on a chariot drawn by Chaucer and Shakespeare. You saved me. Quoth Kubla Khan: Nevermore.
It would have been kind, and he looked more strung out than me on my worst day. And in camaraderie he might have told me more than he would otherwise. But I could not do it.
He killed her. This is her killer.
I felt his guilt sliding off of him like oil.

I felt that old compulsion to speak the truth surge up within me—so inconvenient, so detrimental to my vocation. “I don't remember any of it, Maximo.” He flinched at the sound of his real name. “I have no memory before she grabbed me in Adonis, and after that … just pieces. Moments. Nothing more. My ‘memory'—in the sense of a series of events that occur in order, in which there is some respect paid to cause and effect, proceeding more or less in real time—that doesn't start 'til Mars. Erasmo's house on Mount Penglai. Everything before that, the hospital on Luna, the hacienda on Mercury is … blurred. Scene Missing. I remember Severin's face. Her voice. I remember her laughing. I remember Mariana screaming. I remember the smell of the cacao and the red sea. Why don't you tell me what happened? That's what I'm here for.”

Varela studied my face in disbelief. Our masks faced each other, revealing nothing. Clever, that. Perhaps Pluto had hit upon something essential, necessary. Now that I had one, I certainly did not want to take it off, here or anywhere.

Finally, he sighed. “I don't deal in unvarnished truths. It's the varnish that counts. That makes it true. Give me enough light and I can do anything. Make you believe anything. Ghosts, fairies, vampires: Just tell me what you want and I can make it real. Just tell me what you want and I'll make it so it happened.”

He gripped my hand horribly. His nails were long. “You have no idea what I can do. I made you believe in this place. In death and tigers. I have made a
planet
believe I am their King. Look around: This is the island of the lotus-eaters, and I am the hungriest of all.”

“What about the dead girl? Was there a real girl dying under all those tigers?”

The tiniest sliver of mirth crept into Varela's voice. “A magician cannot share all his tricks.”

He leapt up, swung round one of the thick pillars of the bed, and slapped the wall. The room seemed to quiver with the force of his mood.

“Something has to be real, you know. Something real has to anchor the magic. Death is the realest thing there is. Death holds the rest together. You'll believe everything else if you believe in the death. Once someone
exsanguinates
in front of you, well, anything can happen. You're on the edge of your seat. The tension, the tension just
rears
up. I'm aces at deaths. Always have been.” Varela struck the door with the flat of his palm and it cracked, sending up puffs of dust. “Do you know how I met Severin? I was part of her mother's circus. Lumen Molnar, I mean, the last mother. I was the magician. Prestidigitation. Knife acts, girls cut in half, disappearances. I loved my work. I went to Saturn with Lumen, me and the whole troupe—even the monkeys. And, Christ, they loved us on Saturn. We lit up every halfpenny theatre in Enuma Elish—they didn't even care what the act was, they were just so hungry for a show; so hungry. You know, a person will give up food for a good show. Push comes to shove, they'll give up their
last
food. They'll do it and they'll think they got a good bargain. That hunger goes deeper and bitterer than the need for bread. And we came sailing in just dripping with gravy. They slurped us up. Licked their fingers dry and banged the table for more.” He dragged down one of the orange tapestries that covered the walls. It ripped easily, like crepe paper, and floated down to the floor. “Half the time you could see the rabbit in my trousers, but it never mattered. I've had more Saturnine girls than you've had cups of tea, boy, with more lined up round the block that I was too tired to see to. Elish would have given Severin the key to the city if they'd had one. Anything she wanted—any access, any transport, anything. Because she brought the circus, and it was better than gold. Boredom will murder you dead on the outer worlds.

“I wasn't anything until Saturn. A purveyor of cheap tricks. But I learned. I learned the lantern trade. A trick of the light, boy, just a trick of the light. Everything in creation is just a trick of the light—the only difference between heaven and hell is who's running those lights, who's got the switch, who knows the cues.” Varela turned and stomped on the hearth, the night table, the lovely little secretary on which I'd written my previous entries. They crumpled like drywall and ash, no more mahogany and metal and lacquer than my own flesh. “A couple of times Severin got up there with me, played my girl in the box. She looked up at me with trust as complete as a promise. You can't even imagine. You think she's yours because she let you play the urchin in some miserable B-plot scene, but she isn't yours—you never even
knew
her; she's just a face to you. I saw that face under my hands in a box like a coffin; I saw her understand totally that I would never hurt her, that I would always protect her. And I saw that face go under a diving bell with that same expression, not a twitch of the mouth or slant of the eye different. But what she trusted wasn't me, wasn't Erasmo, wasn't Amandine or Mariana or any of us who had kept her whole on every planet we visited. No, she trusted … Venus. The Qadesh. Her own fucking specialness. And look what happened.”

I had drawn myself up into a corner of the room near the curtained bathroom door that concealed Cythera. I could not see how to get out, past his rampage, to anywhere safer. I summoned up a whisper: “
What
happened? What
did
happen?”

“Nothing! Nothing! She was nothing, and nothing happened. Nothing is happening. Nothing is all that ever happens. You look at this place and see a palace: elephants; griffins; a Ferris wheel; lights, lights, everywhere. You look at a masked girl screaming and think she's dead. I tell you this is the island of the lotus-eaters, and it never occurs to you to stop eating the lotus.” Varela overturned a plate of infanta flowers, their petals already curling brown. “You see everything in such plain terms. You and her and nothing else. I'm an extra in your story. Well, you're an extra in mine, boy. A punter picking cards out of the rigged deck I offer. The thing about a magic trick is that you have to play fair. You show the audience everything you're going to do before you do it. You tell them to their faces that you're going to lie to them. You show them the tools—see how they shine! You show them the girl—see how innocent and lovely she looks in her spangled costume! You show them the knives. You say: I am going to cut her in half and you are going to applaud. And then you keep your promise. If you're any good, the shock is worse because they knew it was coming, but no one ever
believes
a man on a stage.”

Varela turned and punched through the polished ebony wall—it crackled away beneath his fist like the sugared crust on a French custard.

“Yet you believe
her
. Her! You look at her pretty little face on the screen emoting and stuttering and blushing and contemplating her rich girl's life, and you think there wasn't a script out of frame at her feet, rewritten to an inch of its life, every rewrite thatched in on coloured papers to keep it straight. Oh, are we on the red pages today, where Severin is a rebel and a champion of truth? Or blue, where she cries about her mothers for thirty minutes? Or green, where the lady who's never wanted for a thing in her life whines about how much someone else has to pay for her to speak on camera? It was a rainbow by the end, every movie she ever made. And you think it's real, that Venus was any different. That the heart of that girl wasn't always an empty goddamned soundstage, and her soul wasn't a hack-job screenplay with half the pages torn out and floating down the length of the solar system. What happened to her? The same thing that happens to any bad script: Too many people get their hands on it, trying to fix it, 'til it turns into nothing—nothing; not a trick, not a twist ending, just a girl bleeding out in a box. There's no artistry to that. You can't cram artistry into it, no matter how hard you try. She's just a dead girl.”

“That's not an answer. Did you kill her? Tell me!”

He calmed himself, assessing the wreckage of the room, the torn cardboard and shattered coloured lights and crepe tapestries. I knew he was right, that he was showing me his trick, but the infanta had so addled my senses that even amid the trash heap of the ochre bedroom, everything I saw was still limned with light, with richness, an afterimage of opulence, ghosts in the architecture.

“Listen, boy—and look! Behold my beautiful assistant strapped to the wheel! Vulnerable, tender, entirely within my power! See how the light catches her jewelled bodice like a burst of starlight. We landed on Venus with no complications. Transport from the International Station to Adonis took two weeks. Before your very eyes, I shall drive five knives into her unblemished body! You see the knives are sharp; I do not deceive you—I've cut my own finger with their points: one, two, three, four, five!

“We arrived on site and set up camp. We found you on the first day of scouting. I had my light meters and she had George, but she hadn't intended to shoot anything that day. You were extremely anaemic and dehydrated. We fed you and washed you and Severin took charge of you like a pet. Now the wheel starts to spin! Her sequins dazzle! Her cries arouse! The first knife—ah, direct hit in the left shoulder! See how she bleeds!

“The angels first appeared that night. Seraphim, you understand? Not frilly angels with blousy pink wings and haloes like wedding rings. These ones had wheels full of eyes and voices like the noise of the deep. We poor fools! We thought it was equipment, feedback. All that expensive sound shit nobody needs but Severin just
insisted
on. Mariana was the only one who could make those machines heel, but even she was new to it; she'd never gotten to work with anything that high-end before. We thought the whining, the
thrumming
, that horrible, horrible vibrating, was Mariana's problem. Ignore it, ignore it, just go to sleep.” He covered his face with his hands for a moment, but snapped up again, his mask barely concealing the livid excitement in his quivering body. “Observe the flight path of the second knife: I've sunk it in the right shoulder, perfectly parallel to the first—what artistry! What skill!

“But the angels came again in the morning. It wasn't feedback. The voices of seraphim are the colour of need. When their words entered me, I felt a cancer in my heart, and, at the same time, the blossoming of my body into beauty. Thrumming. Voices. Quiet at first, like when you're in a room full of people and everyone is talking constantly but you can't make out the words, just an ocean of sound. A tide, sometimes louder, sometimes softer. The third knife, ladies and gentleman, a blow to the left hip! Oh, that one hurt her, you can tell! Blood running down the inside of her beautiful thigh. See it drip onto the stage.

“On the fourth day, they woke us up in the middle of the night. 2:14 a.m., by my watch. Mariana singing. Singing, screaming. Screaming, singing. She was so beautiful; the look on her face when she heard the angels singing in her voice. How I loved her! It wouldn't stop. No one could sleep. But I loved it. I ran through the ocean surf trying to get closer—if I could only get closer! If I could get closer, I could see their faces, their eyes and their wheels. You can hear it on some of the footage, whispering in the trees. That's all an Edison mic can hear of God. They wanted us to leave, but Severin wouldn't listen. I loved her, too, for that. Something she couldn't explain was happening right in front of her. Something real. Something outside herself. I don't have a drug in my cabinet to compete with that. But she and I were the only ones talking about it. And she was convinced,
convinced
it was all due to the callowhales somehow, because she couldn't see the seraphim like I could. She couldn't understand their songs, their songs like rainbows and arrows and dying. She would just stare out to sea at those fish, those big, stupid islands like desiccated brains floating in blood. She stared. Just stared. Like she had been paused. Ah-ha! The fourth knife, as true as the rest, into the right hip like butter, my friends! Go on, gasp! Clutch your pearls! See the rictus of pain on her face—as real as you and I! Doesn't she wear her blood pretty—like jewellery, those trickles, like strands of rubies. Nothing finer!