Radiance (5 page)

MAKO:
[long sigh] I'll talk to Freddy. So … our man needs a love interest. Someone more mysterious than he is. Long legs, long hair, long gazes. If you don't put someone on-screen who loves him, the audience won't know they're supposed to.

UNCK:
Yes, now you're talking. A proper dame, in stockings and a dress tighter than a close-up shot. Smoky, broken eyes. Not the innocent kind, though. A fatale. As if I know how to make any other kind of heroine. You'd think after all these years I'd be able to manage one Ophelia amidst all of my Lady Macs. But no. It's just not in me.

MAKO:
You know, I don't think we have to go to Venus at all. Our detective will know he needs to go, he'll
know
it's waiting up there, just sitting on the answers he wants like a stinking orange dragon, but he won't be able to face the idea of it. Of those red shores. Of the sound of the whales. Of going home. [wry laughter] Of course, you know Severin would hate every second of it.

UNCK:
[long pause] She's not here. She started out like a heroine in one of my films. Why should she end up as anything else?

 

The Deep Blue Devil
: Come Find Me

Case Log: 14 December, 1961

It was closing in on midnight, the kind of midnight you only get on Uranus after a three-day bender. Ultramarine fog reeking of ethanol and neon and some passing whore's rosewater. Snow piled up like bodies in the street. Twenty-seven moons lighting up what oughta be a respectable witching hour so you can't help but see yourself staring back in every slick glowpink skyscraper. And the rings, always the rings, slashing down the sky, slashing down the storm, spitting shadows at the fella humping his carcass down Caroline Street, hat yanked down over his bloodshot eyes, coat hugged tight, shoes that need shining and a soul that needs taking in hand.

That'd be me. Anchises St. John, private nothing.

You can look at yourself everywhere you turn in Te Deum. The whole city is your shaving glass. Stare yourself down, scrunch up your eyes, and drag a dull blade down your cheek. The wall of the pub next to me flushed leek-green and I saw those sickly rings slicing across the skyline, disappearing through my neck and punching out again, a pure white shiv. I hear they used to make a big fuss over the light in Italy, painters and that crowd. Well, I've been to Italy, and the old girl's got nothing to teach Uranus. A leprechaun would get a headache out here. It's the algae that does it. Algae in the ice, in the dirt, in the glass, in the big black dichroic swell of King George's Sea. They didn't build Te Deum, nor Herschel City, nor Harlequin. Didn't have to. They
grew
these stained-glass slum-gardens like mushrooms on a dead log. Salted the sea with a confetti of exotic hydrocarbons and up they sprung: unpredictable, enormous, disorganized—unless you dig an anemone's sense of feng shui. That's all they are. Anemones as hard as a man and as big as his ego. They only look like 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 practised 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.