Radiance (34 page)

 

The Deep Blue Devil
The Man in the Malachite Mask
Doctor Callow's Dream
:
The Land of Milk and Desire

Once upon a time, not so long ago at all, there lived a boy whose wishes never came true. The boy was born in the Land of Milk and Desire and had never known any other country. The Land of Milk and Desire had made him into himself, and he loved it the way some children love a velvet toy with a worn-out tail.

In the Land of Milk and Desire, everything is always wet. Everywhere you might want to step has, at the least, a river running through it; or a rich, golden-blue swamp; or a sweet-green suckling bog; or a bright, rosy lake; or a deep, quiet pond; or a fragrant, iridescent bayou; or one of the many seas, which are all as red as longing. The boy grew up in a little village on the shore of one of these seas: the very biggest one, the Qadesh. He played on the beach, collecting whelks (which are not really whelks, but rather rough, smoky crystals with frilly, fragile, florescent creatures living inside) and driftwood (which is not really driftwood, but the petrified bones of wily, whopping, woolly beasts that once roamed the Land of Milk and Desire before time woke up with a sore head and started ordering everyone about) and listening to the strange yelping songs of the seals (which are not really seals, but two-horned candy-striped aquatic ungulates with whiskers as long as tusks and as fuzzy as your father's moustache). And he stared out to sea, past headlands cluttered with thick, dripping jungle that smelled like salt and cinnamon and cocoa, past the lights of the boats in the harbour, past the pink breakers and the heavy mist, and out to the long, dark shapes that floated in the deeps of the Qadesh like islands, like places you could get to and climb, explore, lie down on, and dream up at the many, many stars.

But they were not really islands, and no child born in the Land of Milk and Desire could remember a time when he or she thought they were. For in the sea of Qadesh lived the callowhales, as mysterious as they were magical. The callowhales never said a word nor came out of the water, did not sing like the seals which were not really seals, nor leave their shells behind like the whelks which were not really whelks, nor behave carelessly with their bones like the driftwood that was not really driftwood. And from the time he was so small that he did not know what a lie was, the boy had one secret, silent, singular wish—a wish so secret he never once said it out loud: to see the face of a callowhale.

Now, for a long while, the boy did not know that he had the gift of wishes that never came true. He thought himself no different than any other boy or girl in Adonis. Adonis was the name of the village he had lived in since the beginning of the world, which, in his case, was July the third, when his mother gave birth to him in a cacao-hut with three rooms, while her husband and her midwife held her hands and told her she was doing
very
well indeed. She named him Anchises, who was the lover of Venus in a very old story.

Anchises was born in the morning, which in the Land of Milk and Desire is the same thing as saying he was born in the springtime, for on that wonderful planet, a day is as long as a year. The world takes as long to move on its murky-vivid golden path round the sun as the whole of the Land of Milk and Desire takes to turn itself around, though Venus manages both of these in two-thirds of the time that Earth takes, the old dawdler. This means that the morning lasts as long as springtime and it is morning for ages and ages; until the bright, glassy, humid summer brings the afternoon; which stretches on and on into the crisp, windy autumnal twilight that seems as though it will never end—until winter brings a night as long and dark as memory.

July the third was a kind year. There was plenty of rain in the morning, and in the afternoon the cacao (which is not really cacao, but a dark, dusty, dizzyingly tall tree that gives fruits which are not really dates and nuts which are not really cashews) produced thickly, the cows (which are not really cows, but four-hearted fern-eating fire-red brutes that give good meat and have reasonably even tempers) chewed cud and grew fat, and the divers brought back many groaning amphorae of milk from the callowhales. In the pale rosy melancholy fall of evening the children gathered so many cacao-nuts and cassowary eggs (which are not really cassowaries, but grumpy, green-blue, gobbling flightless lizard-birds with black marks on their breasts like human hands) that a Nutcake Festival was declared and held every autumn twilight thereafter. Even the interminable winter night was not so cold that anything froze, but not so warm that the plants that needed cold to thrive could not get their healthful midnight sleep.

The Nutcake Festival was the boy's favourite thing in the world—after his parents, callowhales, and chasing cassowaries until they squawked indignantly and told him he was
wicked, wicked!
in Mandarin, a language the birds had learned like parrots when the first humans arrived in the Land of Milk and Desire, on account of those first humans being Chinese. (The creatures have stubbornly refused to learn any of the other languages humans enjoy speaking, such as English and Turkish, Anchises's personal tongues, but at least it all had the enviable result that little children spoke passable Mandarin, albeit with a cassowary's clipped accent.)

At the conclusion of the Nutcake Festival of Adonis, each of the villagers chose their own glittery, painted egg and a large brown cacao-nut, still in its shell, from a great copper basket at the centre of town. Now, one of the nuts was not really a nut, but an empty shell containing a pretty little ring the same weight as a nut. Whoever drew this shell got to make a wish that was sure to come true, and also got to take home a sweetloaf and a barrel of black beer. The year Anchises was six, he chose the shell with the ring in it, and, holding up the copper ring (too big for even his fattest finger) for all to see, he quite solemnly wished that his parents should love him forever and live forever, too—which is really two wishes, but the villagers let it pass, because that is a very endearing thing to ask.

Anchises did not know yet that his wishes could not come true, that any wish he spoke out loud would echo among the stars and find no home there. And since forever is a long, long time, he did not discover this curse until long after that Nutcake Festival when the salt-sweet sea wind was so full of seal song and good promises.

And in the meantime, he kept on wishing.

The next thing that Anchises wished for was to be just like all the other children in the Land of Milk and Desire. Many children wish for something like that—not to stand out or be strange among others, lest one be left alone and abandoned when everyone else has gone home to rosy windows, to full arms and plates. Anchises wished this because other boys in his class liked to make fun of him for being dark skinned and for drawing callowhales in the margins of his books, their delicate fronds flowing all around the paragraphs in precise, complicated patterns like small labyrinths, the swollen gas bladders that bore the all-important callowmilk hanging off the corners of his lessons on the settlement of the Land of Milk and Desire by the Four Founding Nations. But as soon as the wish left Anchises's mouth, it began the work of not coming true.

He grew tall first of all the boys in his class, sitting in his desk uncomfortably like a carrot ripened too soon. And he began to grow very beautiful, with high, broad cheekbones and brooding, dark eyes, with shining hair that fell just so, no matter how hard he tried to leave it messy and uncombed. Soon the parents of the other children began to talk of him leaving the Land of Milk and Desire for some other, more civilized, more cosmopolitan, less out-of-the-way place, such as the Country of Seeing and Being Seen or the Land of Wild Rancheros, or even Home (which was not really the home of anyone Anchises knew—in fact, most of the bakers and divers and packers and dairymen he said hello to every day had never seen the place they called Home, which was really the fertile, faraway, foreign world where their grandparents and great-grandparents had been born). Surely a boy with his face could become famous if only he were living someplace where folk appreciated more refined things than milk and desire. But Anchises wished to stay in Adonis by the shores of the Qadesh forever, to be a diver like his mother and father, and to one day bring children of his own to the Nutcake Festival.

Whether he wished for big things or little things, Anchises was thwarted. When he wished for a diver's bell of his very own for Christmas, he received a bicycle with a horn and a case of terrible eczema that meant he could not even put his poor, peeling toe in the red Qadesh for the rest of the night. When a girl in his class, who wore a black ponytail and loved cassowaries so much she could hardly bring herself to speak English at all, grew sick with scarlet fever (which is not really scarlet fever, but a horrible, heedless, haemorrhagic virus that occasionally strikes delicate children in the Land of Milk and Desire), Anchises wished fervently that she should get well. He loved her a little for the softness of her voice and the thickness of her ponytail, but the girl died quickly in a lonely ward in White Peony Station, the great electric city where all the doctors lived. Anchises wept on his cacao-bark bed for days upon days, wishing to the red rafters that he could die with his friend and live in heaven with her and a hundred cassowaries and a hundred callowhales all singing together in perfect Mandarin.

But he did not die.

Anchises had begun to have suspicions. He did not speak of them, lest others think him mad. He drew his callowhale pictures and thought hard while he drew them. This is what Anchises drew when he made a picture of a callowhale:

As far as beginner naturalist's drawings go, it was not bad. It was basically accurate. Anchises always drew the top half of a whale the same way, the way he had seen them all his life. But he had no idea what the bottom half of a callowhale looked like. He had never been allowed to go diving with his mother or his father, no matter how hard he had wished it. And besides, even divers didn't really know what a callowhale looked like. They were too big to see all at once. It would be like trying to guess what South America looked like when you have only seen one cafe in Buenos Aires. But Anchises guessed anyway. He tried many times to make one that seemed
right
to him, but none of them really did. They looked like a blimp wearing a hula skirt, or a pinto bean with noodles growing out of it. They looked silly to him, and stupid. But callowhales were not silly or stupid. He knew that. He knew it, though he had no reason to know anything about them. Even the people who did know something about the vast, beautiful animals that lived in the wonderful scarlet sea couldn't seem to agree on anything about them, though Anchises felt quite certain they
were
animals, and not “great bloody meatloafs,” as Mr Preakness called them, nor “overgrown Brussels sprouts,” as Miss Bao insisted.

Finally, Anchises decided to try something new. He laid out a piece of fresh, new paper, the best sheet he could find, with only a few bits of cacao-seed flecking the fibre. He sharpened his pencil with his knife and made sure he had a good breakfast and a glass of orange juice by his side (which was not really orange juice, but a tangy, thready, tingly juice from a plant whose fruit is orange, but whose exterior is the size of a doctor's satchel and covered in lilac fur) in case he got thirsty. He sat at his desk, which faced the beach and the foamy Qadesh, and said, very clearly, to the surf: “I wish that I can't ever draw what a callowhale really looks like, and always make a real hash job of it.”

Anchises put his pencil to his paper, and this is what he drew: