Radiance Read online

  Funny thing about Clotilde. She remarried-didn’t even take long to manage it. To a Battersea backdrop artist indentured to Oxblood Films. Practically every forest and starscape and lonely moor you’ve ever seen were his, excepting the ones done by her after she signed on to his contract. His name was Felix St. John.

  [SEVERIN extends her hand offscreen and pulls ERASMO ST. JOHN toward her. He perches delicately on the arm of the navigator’s chair, incongruously graceful for a man of his size. He kisses her; they grin at each other.]

  ERASMO

  Which mum are you on?

  SEVERIN

  I’d only just got through ours. But I already did Mary and Ada. It’s a little jumbled at this point.

  ERASMO

  Ah, then it’s Amal next, is it? Number Four.

  SEVERIN

  Queen of the Tigers. I’m impressed you remember.

  ERASMO

  [He reaches out, tucks her hair behind her ear.] I know your life story cold. It’s like the twelve days of Christmas. Five golden rings, four calling birds, three French hens, two turtledoves, and Amal Zahara the Tiger Queen.

  SEVERIN

  She was the animal wrangler on The Virgin of Venus. Almost as tall as you.

  ERASMO

  You first saw her leading six tigers to the set, dressed as a squid-princess so that she could direct the animals without seeming out of place in the shot. She had on a crown of tentacles and stars. The alpha tiger was called Gloucester.

  SEVERIN

  I was twelve. She let me ride him home. He had fur like a chimney brush and he licked my face all over.

  ERASMO

  Your father loved her selfishly for once—for himself, for herself—and they were happy. The tigers moved in. She refused to dye their fur. They were a constant, cheeky orange eyesore in Virago.

  SEVERIN

  Ravens, too. And parrots who could all say one line of Chekhov each, but nothing else. A brace of black bears; four peacocks; two pythons; an albino deer; a komodo dragon; several lynx; seven ponies; and a tame, elderly kangaroo.

  ERASMO

  They all had something wrong with them. The albino deer, the aged kangaroo, one of the bears was missing an eye…Which one?

  SEVERIN

  Gonzalo. Trinculo had had his hind foot mashed in a trap.

  ERASMO

  The peacocks were deaf. The pythons had eczema. Half the ravens had broken wings and the other half couldn’t stop imitating babies crying. Gloucester had a stomach condition and could only eat meat ground up to slurry and mixed with milk, which Amal fed him by hand three times a day.

  SEVERIN

  The komodo dragon—Andromache—seemed all right at first. The only one of the lot fitted out for life in this world. But she fixated on Percy. Wouldn’t leave him alone. Insisted on sleeping with the pair of them every night or else she’d put up this terrible hue and cry, keening like a broken trumpet till they relented.

  ERASMO

  You tried to learn that cry.

  SEVERIN

  But they wouldn’t let me sleep with them.

  ERASMO

  Amal collected broken beasts.

  SEVERIN

  So naturally she collected us. The tigers slept in my room when they weren’t working. When I had tea parties, only tigers were invited.

  ERASMO

  Amal was the first person in your life who didn’t slather you with attention.

  SEVERIN

  [laughing] Hey.

  ERASMO

  Hey yourself. Not even six tigers could give you enough attention to let you rest easy. Hey, let’s talk about you a little more, and then we can address the issue of whether or not the world revolves directly around Severin Unck. I like Amal. I’ve never met her, but I like her. She had her zoo and she was in love with Percy and she treated you a little better than the deaf peacocks but not quite as well as Gloucester the tiger. You didn’t need your meat slurried, after all. There’re whole weeks when you were that age where there’s no film of you at all.

  SEVERIN

  Don’t let Percy hear you say that.

  ERASMO

  I like thinking about a version of you that doesn’t look for a camera all the time.

  SEVERIN

  Amal said once that I needed her tigers more than I needed a mother. That I had all the wildness of a plate of cheese. And a little tiger shit was good for a girl who lived in a fairy tale.

  ERASMO

  [His smile is enormous, frank, warm.] I can be a tiger if you want. What big teeth I’ve got.

  SEVERIN

  [ignoring him] She left anyway. One of the younger tigers, Cortez, bit off most of her hand when they were doing The Jupiter Circus. She was putting the bellhop’s hat on him and he just took it off at the wrist. No matter how you think you know a beast, she said in hospital, no matter how much love you’ve spent on him…then she waggled her stump. But she had an extra-wide bed brought into her room so that Cortez could lie next to her while she recovered. He rested his big old head in her lap and never moved from her side. She slept with her good arm around his scruff. Percy didn’t come to visit once. I suppose a twelve-year-old can’t begin to guess what goes on inside a marriage, most especially a marriage primarily concerned with lenses and the half-tamed. But when Amal got her clean bill of health she went to her chalet on Mount Ampère and sent for the rest of her animals.

  ERASMO

  Except two.

  SEVERIN

  Except Gloucester. I found him sprawled on my bed with his belly ready for scratching and a note round his neck that had instructions for his slurry on one side and on the other: No matter how much love you’ve spent.

  ERASMO

  And?

  SEVERIN

  [laughs softly] And Andromache. I bet she was sprawled on Percy’s bed, too, cooing and flicking her tongue at the pillows. Sometimes I think Amal was having a last joke at his expense. Percy complained about Andromache noon and night, but he grudgingly gave her soft-boiled eggs at breakfast when she came nosing at his bathrobe and called her a hell-bitch just like he called me sweetheart. I caught him rubbing her nose just once, and he looked ashamed of himself. But really, I think Andromache would have lain down and died if she’d been parted from her Percival. I think Amal left a lizard in lieu of a wife.

  ERASMO

  And then Faustine.

  SEVERIN

  [Her eyes take on a faraway, clouded expression. She chews on the inside of her cheek.] And then Faustine, my fifth mother. She only lasted a year. Opera singer. She started out a soprano, but she was an alto by the end. Chest like a barrel of bourbon. Everyone adored her. She was like laughter turned into a person.

  ERASMO

  And a baleen addict.

  SEVERIN

  Well, who isn’t? [SEVERIN peels a rind of af-yun with her fingernail and sucks on it ruefully.] But Faustine grew up on Venus. I’d never met anyone who’d been born on Venus. I thought she was magic. A real life Vespertine Hyperia come to live in my house and lie on my bed and tell me tales of pirates on the callowseas. Her parents were divers, then homesteaders. She floated in callowmilk in utero—literally. Her mother tapped a huge lode on one of the outer whales when she was six months along. We think it’s in everything here, but on Venus…on Venus it is everything.

  ERASMO

  Baleen, though…

  SEVERIN

  I know. A lady can smoke her af-yun on the steps of the Actaeon and still be called a swan in girl’s clothing, a gift to man and the stage. It’s delicate, pure callowmilk, nothing added but a little cacao-butter, a little ergot, a little cocaine. A drawing-room vice. Baleen is the whore’s luncheon. Have you ever seen a piece of baleen? When you’re married to my father you can afford the best. She had it brought in on a jade tray every morning. On a piece of black lace. It looks like a white piano key. About that long, about that thick. It snaps like cold chocolate. Smells like Monday laundry. Raw callowmilk protein cut with soya, industrial
bleach, sugar cane, a dash of oleander, a whiff of boric acid, and a healthy lashing of heroin.

  ERASMO

  She gave it to you.

  SEVERIN

  Well, of course she did. I was fourteen. Do you have any idea what a fourteen-year-old girl will do to be loved? I wasn’t any kind of innocent at fourteen—she didn’t corrupt me. If you could pour it down your throat or stick it up your nose, I had managed to get my hands on it and give it a go. Percy didn’t care. Experience, he said. Experience is the only reason and the only master. I asked Faustine one afternoon what Venus was like. She put a stick of baleen in my hand and said it’s like this, baby girl. I ate it and curled up into my tiger and went to Venus with my mother.

  ERASMO

  And what was it like?

  SEVERIN

  It was like being inside a star. Like a star turning on inside of you. And then Faustine sang and that was like a star, too. A blue one sizzling down the dark alongside the red star of me. I remember she sang the opening aria from Her Last Nocturne and I saw the night sky pour out of her mouth. Every time I went to hear her sing afterward, even months afterward, I saw the same thing. Blackness and stars flooding her mouth and splashing onto the boards in great gouts. Galaxies and the void dripping off her chin. Her teeth burning. I told her about it on a night in December and she whispered: I know it, baby. I see it, too. That’s my insides coming out. Sometimes I see it so clear I pull back my feet to keep my shoes clean. But that’s what it looks like when you’re doin’ okay up there. Maybe you’ll do okay someday and I’ll get to see your guts blown out. That’d be nice. Wouldn’t that be nice? And then she put her head in my lap and died. Miss Faustine had so much baleen in her stomach that it backed up her works and she was poisoned to death by her own fluids.

  [SEVERIN and ERASMO are quiet for several seconds. The displays tick on, lights faithfully flickering like candles.]

  Araceli Garrastazu came after that. The femme fatale, Mary Pellam’s opposite—the perfect witch-seductress for my father’s every overwrought phantasmagoria. I barely knew her. I was running with whatever wolves would have me by then. The colours of Tithonus beat grey Virago every time. I didn’t want to act, but I slept with producers anyway; Gloucester and I danced on the carousel boats every weekend with my father’s rivals and I took girls and boys to my cabin on endless ugly promises of introducing them to Percy: Yes, of course, darling, he’s just dying to find the next big thing and you’re so lovely. You’re devastatingly talented. You’re perfect. You’re perfect. Until that horror show with Thaddeus Irigaray. That turned off my faucet, I can tell you. And by then Araceli was off to reinvent herself on the radio. [SEVERIN strokes her throat with her hand, a throttling, effacing gesture.] We’re almost done, aren’t we? Lumen’s left. Lumen’s my mother now, lucky number seven. She’s the reason I’ve got a boatload of circus with me. I love her. I love Lumen Molnar for everything she is not. I love her because she is nothing like me. I love her because she has never been to Venus. I love her because she has only one face. I love her because she is at this moment having supper in the cantina with Maximo and Mariana and Augustine and Gloucester. Because she came with me. Come with me, and I’ll love you until Jupiter burns out and the callowhales speak.

  [SEVERIN clutches ERASMO’S arm. Her nails dig in. But she speaks to the camera.]

  Do you want to know the truth about my mother? She was wonderful. She was kind. She never left me. She tucked me in at night and woke me in the morning. She played with me every day and she never missed a recital or a bedtime story.

  Her name was Clara.

  She could hold just under 150 metres of film at a time.

  Oh, Those Scandalous Stars!

  Limelight, 20th February 1933

  Editor’s Note: The Iron Hand of Edison

  A simple rule, enforced simply:

  Movies don’t talk.

  But whose rule is this? What Moses came down from the mount with such a thing engraved upon his personal stone?

  Surely, our current state could not have been the shining future meant by those early masters of light and sound. It is Edison’s rule, enforced not by the Burning Bush but by Lawyers Burning for Their Fees. The name of Edison has become synonymous with the dastardliest of business practices, the most crushing arrogance. It stains the whole family, from Thomas Alva, who collected patents like baseball cards, to Our Present Edison, who continues such draconian strategies that he has, single-handedly, retarded the progress of motion picture technology by fifty years.

  Your humble host has taken out editorials of this sort before. My readers must forbear. Given the upcoming Worlds’ Fair in the glorious metropolis of Guan Yu, overlooking the glittering shores of Yellowknife Bay on our dear sister planet of Mars, the very first to be hosted offworld, what better time can there be for Mr Franklin R. Edison (Freddy to his friends) to release his patents’ vice grip on reel, recording, and exhibition equipment and allow talking pictures to run wild and free? That is, after all, the natural state of technology. And so it was, once upon a time. Before the right to speak, the privilege of the voice, became the property of one man, to give and take away as he pleases.

  Places, Everyone!, 14th April, 1933

  Editor’s Note

  In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. That’s how the song goes. It does not go, In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with the Patent Office and the Word could only be afforded by God. In the early days, for a brief moment, the wealthiest of studios and directors—and of course, governments—could afford the exorbitant fees demanded by Edison and his descendants for the use and exhibition of films. For a dim, glimmering moment, the great epics of Worley and Dufresne crackled with orchestras and soliloquies. But it did not last.

  One must praise the independents, who simply ignored Edison and continued to make beautiful silent movies, more advanced and complex and heartbreaking than any throwaway studio talkie stinking up the summertime. I remember it: how slowly, then less slowly, sound ebbed away. Sooner rather than later, for an actor to talk on-screen became the mark of the Sellout—someone with deep enough pockets to pay Edison’s blood price. No True Artist, no Work of Quality, no Real Film would be caught dead making that kind of obnoxious noise. And bit by bit, the Big Boys on the Moon copied the starving artists so that they could convince the public of their Authenticity, their Great Aesthetic Merit, so that they could butter their bread on both sides. We are the People’s Entertainment! Bang, Smash, Yell, Crescendo! No, wait! We are Radical, Envelope-Pushing Artists! Hush, Hush, Soft Now. Win awards, stuff cannons with cash, bask in acclaim—and, hell, it saves money not having to deal with the devil in a back room, dithering over the price of a microphone.

  And thus we find ourselves in an upside-down land where the technology exists, works beautifully, has even advanced—for no Edison can keep his hands to himself for long—but no fashionable soul would be caught dead using it. Men stand astride our world and call out: STOP. The System Works. They ask that everything stay the same forever, for Sameness is Profitable. Our Man Freddy E still bleeds filmmakers for exhibition rights, and we may all look the other way while he rolls piggily in his piles of lucre. Time passes, and we become accustomed to the status quo. Theatre Speaks, Vaudeville Sings, Radio Yammers Away Nonstop, but the movie hall is quiet as a church. Time passes, and audiences drink in this Truth with their mother’s milk. I have seen with my own eyes the recoil of audiences when faced with some flickie that sliced up its producers’ hearts at Edison’s golden table for the right to let poor Hamlet ask his famous question instead of staring dumbly at a plaster skull and waiting for the title card to do his job for him. Today’s moviegoer will get up and leave, convinced he has been swindled, rather than listen to a human voice.

  What could it cost Friend Freddy to, quite simply, let us speak?

  And yet, and yet. There is beauty in silence. I do not believe a film like Saul Amsel’s Bring Me the Heart
of Titan would have been made in a world where every film chattered on to its contentment. What of The Moon of Arden? The Last Cannoneer? If I were to turn back the clock and pluck Fred Edison from his ill-gotten celluloid throne, I should lose these reels which wrapped my heart three times round. He has bound us to Prometheus’s rock—but have we not made friends with the eagle? Have we not learned to love life without our livers?

  The Worlds’ Fair is a time of brotherhood and goodwill. It is an expression of Progress and Marvels of Modernity.

  Let me put it baldly: Mr Edison, get out of the way.

  Halfrid H

  Editor-in-Chief

  I am not willing to relinquish the rare and rough magic of our silent movie halls. They are silent as a church, yes. Because they are churches. Yet I am no less willing to never hear the dreary Dane fail to decide his own fate. For him, the question will ever remain: To be or not to be? For us, it is: To speak or not to speak?

  I myself can put nothing baldly, for I feel quite hirsute on the matter, tangled, knotted. But I will say: Mr Edison, you have exiled us to an uncanny country of the mind. We cannot love you for it.

  Algernon B

  Editor-in-Chief

  Look Down

  Look down.

  Across the stage of your skin. The graceful proscenium of your clavicle, your shoulder, the long bones of your arms. The apron of your gentle belly. The skene of your skull, where all the gods and machines hide away, awaiting their cues, clanking away in their cases, puffing smoke and longing. Look down; something is happening on your navel, your omphalos, your knotted core of the world. You cannot feel the light playing over your skin, but you prickle with gooseflesh anyway. Light has no personal temperature. But your body knows instinctively that light is cold. The idea of light, the narrative of light. Light will chill you blue. The trickster hemispheres of your brain insist that the flickering images do have weight; they press on you like greyscale fingers, corpse fingers, angelic fingers, unworlded hands. The touch of images alters you—it must, it cannot help but. And more than touch you, these pictures, these maps of illumination enter you. Photons collide with flesh; most reflect, some penetrate. You carry them inside you. You carry them away and far.