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  SEVERIN UNCK

  Daddy is telling the story!

  PERCIVAL

  [laughing] Well, Daddy made the movie, but Daddy is not telling the story. Look at the characters and how they speak to each other. Look at how the film begins, how the very first scenes shape everything else. Now, who is telling the story?

  [There is a long silence.]

  SEVERIN

  The camera is telling the story. It’s watching everything, and you can’t lie to it, or it will know.

  PERCIVAL

  My girl is so clever! No, the camera witnesses the story and records it, but it is outside the story. Like a very tiny god with one big, dark eye. Baby girl, look at the lovers, and the villain, and the doting father, and the soldiers, and the ghosts. Which one of them is the authority? Who controls how the story is told? And who is the audience, for whom all these wonderful things are meant?

  [Another long silence follows. There is a rustling, as of a little girl twisting her lace skirts while she tries to work out an answer.]

  SEVERIN

  They are all telling the story to me.

  Preproduction Meeting,

  The Deep Blue Devil [working title]

  (Tranquillity Studios, 1959, dir. Percival Unck)

  Audio recorded for reference by Vincenza Mako, screenwriter

  PERCIVAL UNCK: If you want to know about the beginnings of things, you have to talk to the dead.

  I know how that sounds. The dead should do endings. Surely that’s their squat. In the space after the story, they’re kings and queens, ruling with bony hands, pulling epilogues, last acts, climaxes, pulling finality from declining action like spinsters at black wheels.

  I wouldn’t know. I’ve always been aces at endings. At the Fin I’m like a ball player, balanced hips over knees, brandishing my bat, pointing to the outfield, pointing like I’ve been doing from the first word spoken, the first frame shot, at the revelation I intended to hit all along. Lean into the last scene; you can hear the whiff and the crack of my swing. If anything, I’ve always been too eager to get to the ending. I’ll throw the haunted, wild-eyed gamine from her tower too soon, slaughter a soliloquizing retinue complete with bicyclists and bears five minutes in. Endings are lush and lascivious, Vince; they call to me. All spread out on satin inevitabilities, waiting, beckoning, promising impossibly, obscenely elegant solutions—if you’ve been a good lad and dressed the house just so, for its comfort, for its arousal. All the rest of the nonsense a story requires is just a long seduction of the ending. You throw out murders and reversals and heroes and detectives and spies, juggle love affairs and near escapes and standoffs with marvellous guns, kidnappings and sorcery and comic relief and gravediggers and princesses and albino dragons, and it’s all just to lure an ending into your bed. The right ending can’t resist a spread like that. She sidles up like she’s lived there all along, sleepy-eyed, hair a fright, asking the antihero for coffee and be quick about it, wouldn’t you? There’s a love.

  But I’m rubbish at beginnings. Listen to that mess. My metaphors all rumpled about my ankles. So I talk to the dead. They’re the only ones who can see the whole story. All they’ve got is story. Look, say the ghosts, she was doomed all along because of how it began. You watched her to death. She started disappearing as soon as she was born. Just to get away from you. No one could have gotten out of this thing alive. Not with Acts I-V stacked against them like that. If Hamlet couldn’t swing it, what hope did she ever have?

  Anyway, nobody bothers with real beginnings anymore. We stopped making up stories about the creation of the world ages ago. But the deadest of the dead—the ancient, toga-tugging, sheep-fucking, olive-gobbling, laurel-spangled dead—they rattled on about nothing else. Gardens and clay and the Sky slinging back a nebula or two for courage then slicking back his hair to make nice with the Earth. They had it right. It’s downright dishonest to begin with anything but the Creation of the Known Universe, and a tale that ends before the destruction of all and sundry is a damnable lie. By fire? Well, that’s too obvious. And floods always look amateurish. Maybe it just winks out. Cut. Print.

  Point is, the Greeks had their heads on straight: If you’re going to bother beginning at all, you have to throw up a believable theory of origin or it’s got no anchor. No root. Why four seasons? Why seasons at all? Why just the one moon? Why green trees and red roses and not the other way round? Why death and time and is there such a thing as fate, and what, percentage-wise, is the efficacy of human sacrifice? You have to answer those questions before anyone comes on stage, you know. In even the littlest story about a…let’s say a housewife in an aqua-blue print dress and matching apron making a roast, only she’s planning to kill herself later, obviously, or maybe her husband—otherwise why should we care one soggy whit about the vagaries of beef at temperature? At any rate, someone’s got to die. That’s why she’s wearing aqua. Blue invariably means death. Even in poor lost Millicent’s kitchen—yes, Vince, her name is clearly Millicent, do try to keep up! Before she even pricks the meat to slide the garlic in, it’s all been arranged for her. Does death do its thing, in this universe? Yes. Time, in Millicent World? Progressing one second per second, twenty-four and seven and three hundred-odd. Seasons: four. The moon: intact, in orbit, in phase. Green elm, red peony. Seventeen per cent sacrificial success rate under ideal conditions, results not peer reviewed. And of course in stories there is always fate. It goes by the name of foreshadowing and it is the emperor of everybody. Given all these parameters, husband Humphrey should be dead by dessert. See? It’s only that the answers in most stories are boring because they are supplied by the real world rather than—well, something better. Something more stimulating. Sit down with the Greeks and the Romans, and the boring answers get more interesting. Seasons because a girl and a crocus. Death because a girl and an apple. The moon because a girl keeps driving her daft chariot into the sea.

  It’s all down to girls, one way or another.

  [indistinct]

  All right, all right, I’m boring you. I’m babbling. I haven’t made up my mind about this one yet. I don’t even know how to go about making up my mind. I would rather not have death. I would rather that. Time is terribly tawdry, as well. And let’s see what we can do about that percentage.

  Let us begin properly. This is what I’m thinking: She came from nowhere. She came from the sea. She came from the dark. The Earth fucked the Sky and made a hundred children—or maybe just nine. Mercury, Venus, Mars, the whole ragtag family. And the nine had their own kids: Phobos, Triton, Io, Charon, all the brats. Maybe we can do this like we used to do, way back when. You know I can never quit Vaudeville. Toga up the main cast as the planets and the moons: rings around Saturn’s head; Venus dripping wet; Mars in a cowboy getup; Neptune, I don’t know, up on strings like the levitators, maybe? Stupid on af-yun, all heroin eyes and running makeup. Stand them in tableaux against a spangly cloth backdrop. Then they can start killing each other. It’ll be Shakespearian. Barking big knives. Buckets of blood. Blood and callowmilk.

  So the little bastards stab the Sky to death and throw the spangles into the sea, and they turn into the title, and that’s where she comes from. Out of the words and the water. She can rise up on a clamshell naked and covered with blood and milk. That’s what birth looks like, after all. Naked, with a myrtle branch in one hand and a camera in the other.

  I have no ideas for casting. Someone new. I don’t want anyone whose face has been someone else. I’ll have to call Richard. He’ll find somebody fresh off the rocket who looks like her. He always knows what I want. So, whoever she is, she’ll look through the camera in her hand at the camera in my hand. The waves hit her and wash her clean. Mostly clean. Leave a mark on her face. Like a wound. Presto: Birth of Venus.

  [indistinct]

  Yes. Severin’s birth, too. No difference.

  But that’s the last time we use her name, Vince. What’s our rule? You can’t name the subject. You can’t say the word death in a m
urder mystery after the body gets discovered; no more than you can say love in a romantic flick until the end, until it’s a bullet firing, the bullet you’ve had on deck since the scene-one-take-one clapper smacked its lips. You circle it. You stalk it. But you don’t call it out.

  MAKO: But everyone will know who it’s meant to be. What’s the point of being coy?

  UNCK: Coyness is what makes it art, darling. Otherwise…otherwise it’s nothing but a funeral.

  [long pause] We’ll call her something else. Hell, I named her once, I can do it again. Something bombastic, something mythic, something Venusian. All the names have to come back to Venus in the end. I remember what you said when we were writing Rocketship Banshee—we went up to that cabin on the Sea of Fertility and trotted out our old dance, writing movies instead of fucking. Two rooms, two typewriters, the blue cassia forests, moon-daisies by the door. We swam naked in the bitter silver sea and you floated on your back under the Earthlight with water running off your colloidal blue breasts and said: Names aren’t loners, they’re connected, even in real life. You name your kids for someone dead or what you hope they will become or what you wish you were and your parents did the same to you and that big, glittering net of names tells the story of the whole world. Names are load-bearing struts. Names are destiny. You wouldn’t just let me name our hero John and his demon bride Molly.

  MAKO: This is different.

  UNCK: We’ll call her Ares. I gave her a boy’s name the first time around, so why not this time? It’s perfect. Ares went and shagged Venus when he should have stuck to what he was good at, which was fighting with anyone who’d put up half a fist. Good, right? Yeah. Yeah.

  MAKO: Let her have her name, Percy. Let everyone have her own name. She’d hate you for changing it. You know that.

  UNCK: [Clears his throat several times. His voice quavers.] I don’t want to. I don’t want to write it at the top of every page. I don’t want to have to say it. Every day. All day. I don’t want to have to call some nobody actress by my daughter’s name.

  MAKO: Too bad. It’s my script, too. I’m not your secretary. Her name is Severin. You don’t get to turn her into one of our demon brides.

  [Sounds of typewriter keys and cigarettes extinguishing, lighting, smoke exhaling.]

  UNCK: Fine. Fine. You win. Severin bloody Unck forever and ever amen.

  Back to it. Once we’ve got the world created—Sky, Earth, clamshell—we move on to more important business. The Plot at Hand. We switch scenes entirely. I want to go full noir: neon fritzing signs reflected in rainy streets on Luna. Unless it shouldn’t be Luna. Could do somewhere more interesting. They get vicious storms on Uranus. Wrath of God-type stuff. We shot something in Te Deum once, didn’t we? What was it? Thief of Light? The Oberon Assassin? Christ, I can never remember. We’ve made too many movies, you and I. Or too few. Always too few. Too many to have any meaning, too few to say what we meant. But TD is a spectacular city, really. All those coloured towers—bioluminescent, you know—thick as a fat man’s fingers, stubbing up pink and purple and hot green to the stars. Cheap as hell, too. Pubs everywhere like mushrooms in the morning. Good gravity, at least in the winter.

  MAKO: If you insist on shooting on location, at a minimum we’ll need permits for Neptune, Saturn, Jupiter. We’re fine for principal photography on Luna, obviously. Venus?

  UNCK: Oh, Vince, I don’t know. I don’t know if I can. Isn’t there somewhere on the Moon we can dress for Venus? We have enough seas. I’ll hose down half the globe if it means I don’t have to go to Venus. Or we could try Earth. Glum old Earth. Moscow, maybe. Or Chicago. Could try Australia, but the red tape is absolutely frightful. Melbourne, perhaps. I can’t stand Sydney. We almost did Hope Has No Master down there, remember? Looks quite a bit like the older parts of Mars. Then again, Mars actually gave us a better deal, when you figure in the tax incentives. Guan Yu is a fabulous town. You can see Mons Olympus from every balcony.

  MAKO: But ultimately, we want a city. Deep in a city. Noir has to have a city. And a detective. I presume we’re talking about Anchises.

  UNCK: I know, I know. Who else could it be? If we don’t produce him pretty quickly, everyone’ll just be waiting for his entrance. We’re telling a story everyone already knows. We gotta outrace their memory.

  MAKO: I think he’s living back on Venus, now. Shouldn’t be too hard to find him, if we want the man himself.

  UNCK: Christ, no, he’s not gonna play himself! I’m not a masochist. Let him rot in those stinking swamps. I’ll make him better than he ever was. Our great detective…and he’s an amnesiac. Looking for his memory. Piecing his life together—and he can’t do that without finding her. It writes itself. He hunts down the story, and he is the story. Get him a trench coat and a hat with a brim so sharp it’ll cut the night. A revolver strapped to his hip, something big and mean looking. Fucking never stop raining on him. If I see a dry patch on that lantern jaw, so help me. We can even afford a voice-over if we want it.

  [indistinct]

  UNCK: Well, I don’t particularly give a shit, Vince. Where’s your obsession with authenticity now? Severin made talkies. It practically has to have sound.

  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 li
ke 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 practiced 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?