Radiance (6 page)

I loved to hear her say those words.
Come find me in two years
. Half a year's shooting, plus transit to and from and post-production back home. I watched with my face so close to hers, waiting for her to say she's nothing yet. She's nothing yet because she hasn't met me. Just a rich, beautiful girl—and there she is, saying flat out that she's not worthy of me or even good. Her words taste like whiskey and oh, how the bouquet improves when you play them back over a long shot of her rocket disappearing in the sky, becoming a punctuation mark in that last, sad sentence.

Her flicks packed the nickelodeons and wrapped the streets three times round. Weeks before her movies opened, buskers and salesmen would camp out on the thoroughfares beside every theatre, selling genuine cells she touched with her own hand and replica spangled cages from
Self-Portrait,
sized just right to hold a gravity-challenged male of Saturnine extraction. Why? Why all that crass excitement? I still can't figure it out. Her father was Percival Unck, a brooding, notorious director in his time. Made a heap of sweaty gothic dramas full of wraith-like heroines with black, bruised eyes and mouths hanging open in horror or orgiastic transcendence or both. Her mother was probably one of those ever-transcendent actresses, though which one it was, the man kept to himself. Each Unck leading lady became, by association and binding contract, the poor kid's mother. You can see in her flickering, dust-scratched face the echoes of a half-dozen fleeting, hopeful actresses, some still famous, some easily forgotten except in the odd mood flashing across their daughter's lean features, her cryptic glances, her scornful, knowing grin.

She washed her hands of Daddy sometime between
Famine Queen
and
The Sleeping Peacock
. Her film debut in
The Spectres of Mare Nubium
is charming, if you go for the cute kid shtick. During the famous ballroom sequence where the decadent dowager Clarena Schirm is beset with the ghosts of her victims, Severin can be seen picking at the pearls on her bonnet and rubbing at her makeup. The legend goes that when the great man tried to stick eyeshadow on his girl and convince her to pretend to be a Schirm relation while a hungry shade—a young Maud Locksley, no less—swooped down upon the innocent child, she looked up exasperatedly and said, “Papa. This is silly! I want only to be myself!”

And so she would be, only herself, forever and always. As soon as she could work the crank on a camera by her lonesome, she set about recording “the really real and actual world” (age seven) or “the genuine and righteous world of the true tale” (age twenty-one) and declaring her father's beloved ghosts and devils “a load of double-exposure drivel.” Her second documentary,
The Famine Queen of Phobos
, brought that blasted little colony's food riots to harsh light and earned her a Lumière medal, a prize Papa would never get his paws on. Maybe that was it. She told the truth once or twice, and she told it with a bleeding head and a broken arm: Old Mummy Earth is a mean drunk, and she doesn't look after her babies too well.

When asked if his daughter's fury in the face of fiction ever got to him, Unck smiled in his raffish, canine way and said, “The lens, my good man, does not discriminate between the real and the unreal.”

Of her final film,
The Radiant Car Thy Sparrows Drew
, only four sequences remain. They're all badly damaged. Everybody copies them, cuts them up and spits them out again into endless anaemic tell-all docs I wouldn't wipe my feet on. The originals continue to putrefy in some museum in Chicago. More people than you'd think go there to watch them rot. I did. It was comforting. You plonked your head against the cool wall on a soft pink Midwestern evening that seems impossible when you're freezing to death on Uranus. She flashes before your eyes: a sprite, a fairy at the end of a long, dark tunnel, smiling, waving, crawling into the mouth of the cannon capsule with the ease of a natural performer.

Sometimes folk recognize me, even this far out, from the old newsreels, though I never gave interviews and the lawyers haven't let anybody show my face since '51. I don't like looking at myself on-screen. It's what you call existentially upsetting: I am here and I am there. But I can't chase down all the images of myself.

Here's the short of it: A handful of people survived Unck's Venus expedition, and I'm one of them. I don't remember everything, and not everything I remember is important. My life, my life proper, began when a woman with short black hair and a leather aviator's cap and coat crouched down in front of me and asked my name. The lost boy, the turning boy. I came back, and she didn't.

Don't think I've forgiven myself for that.

Now I watch. I've watched everything. I can't stop watching. Waiting for the docs to show me just a little of her face; show her laughing; show her when she was a child, her arms stretched up, asking her father to lift her onto his shoulders, away from the chaos of adult feet and canes and slippers dancing to Mickey Hull's latest 'dustrial-Charleston rag. Show me anything of hers. I'm as bad as any of them, begging to stare at her corpse for just one more moment—or, if not her corpse, the places where she once stood and stands no more. Tell me, invisible voice-over, voice of god and memory, tell me everything I already know. Tell me my life.

But her face was a slow poison to me. I knew it, I knew it, and I tucked in anyway, starving for her narrow, monkish, poreless cheeks, her eyes huge and sly and as black as her hair.

I can't even say her name. She doesn't have a name. She is
she
. She is
her
. She possesses the pronoun so completely that no one else can touch it. There is only one
her
in the great stinking gas giant of my heart, fifty feet high. She is a giantess. I am no one. Well, not “no one.” I am Anchises St. John. But I am no one's
him
.

Do you know what she does first in
Self-Portrait
? She smiles. She fucking
smiles
. And then she laughs. A sweet, wry little self-deprecating laugh. Like she's embarrassed to be taking up so much space in the shot. Like she has stage fright. But she wasn't. She didn't. Nothing embarrassed her. Maybe she had stage fright when her ma first put a tit in her mouth, but never a day since.
Off
stage fright, maybe. She never knew what to do with herself if the camera wasn't running. But the laugh
says
she's embarrassed. The smile tells us she has butterflies.
Oh, isn't it a funny damn racket, to be in the flickies? Who,
me
?
This
old thing? I'm so nervous! Who needs a drink?

I haven't earned anything yet.

Come find me in two years.

Her smile yawns up over me, black and white and enormous—and I knew, as only a man who's stared at it until he ralphed into his own lap can know—entirely fake. It's a good one, though. One of my favourites of hers. Full of the feral thrill that surrounded All Things Venus back then. People couldn't get enough of that shitty little burg—the one world that made all the others possible. But it's
their
smile, not hers. Look at her,
look
at her, don't you see? She's going to Venus. She smiles like people smile when they're obsessed with Venus. It's a smile like a trailer for the real thing.

But no, it's too soon for that. I was drunk. I hadn't slept in three days. When I think of
her
I see all her movies, all her faces, at the same time. Stacked up into orbit. But you can't see what I see. I see the Venus smile, but it's not there yet. This one's a baby version of that nine-thousand-watt grin. It's Face #212: Intrepid Girl Reporter. She hadn't been to Venus yet.
Venus always felt so obvious
, she told me under the hot, wet stars of Adonis, when she didn't think I could hear her. In
Self-Portrait with Saturn
, Venus was four movies and nine years away. Up there, she's just a kid. Twenty-one. Sleeps like a dragonfly so she never misses a thing. Lovers like a revolving door. Drinks like she's allergic to water. She's barely a person yet. The girl in that decrepit print with a cigarette burn in the middle of her forehead like the mark of Cain and film scratches all down her cheeks doesn't even know that
Self-Portrait
will be a hit. Better than a hit. It'll make her name.
Her
name. Not her old man's.

These're things I know about her. These're things everyone knows about her. It's not fair that I should know as much as anyone who cares to pick up a magazine. I should know more. I should know it all. But you begin where you begin, and hope—even if hope is a pickpocket with both fists full—to go, somehow, further and higher.

Well, I began with her. And she began on-screen.

I hunt for likenesses between us. For places where, laid over one another, our topographies would match. Capital to capital. River to river. There aren't many. I try to make more, but she's done, finished, finite, and I am not.

And what about me? I don't remember a damn thing before the age of ten. A man is nothing but memory, and by that count I was born on a burnt grass shore with a woman grabbing my wrist so hard she bruised me, a neat line of her four fingers on my skin, over my pulse, over my heart. A flash of light:
fiat
fucking
lux
. The smoky, acidic smell of the sea. Hot, pollen-drunk wind. A whirr and a clatter. I've been recorded since I was born. So has she. That great black eye got us good. I was born the minute I was noticed.

Before that there's just a calm pre-credits wipe of darkness, nothing into nothing. There's footage of my entrance; there's footage of her exit. We're each missing the other half. I only know my parents' names because people who oughta know wrote them down for me. Her father sat astride her life. His name is her name. What luxury.

The fifty-foot woman winks. To no one. To me. To the hatless man and his orally-fixated buddy. To the Astor and Te Deum and the mermaids with their miniature Titans. But really to a solemn goatee'd bellhop in a blue cap who dutifully dropped the needle on an old phonograph so that we could all hear her deep yet somehow nasal voice echo loudly—too loud, too loud—in the theatre.

It hurt our ears. Everyone winced, straightened up. Hatless got his jollies
interruptus
. We all hated it. We all squirmed.

Nobody makes talkies anymore.

I could stand her face, but her voice did me to pieces. I heard her say the first words of her first movie and her first words to me all at once; and I've taken punches, I've taken gut stabs, but I couldn't take that.

I used to look up at night and dream of the solar system.

Hey, little guy. It's good now. It's fine now. I'm here. My name's Severin. You can call me Rinny if you like that better.

I stumbled out of the Astor and onto Caroline Street, into the blue fog and the smell and the wet, snowed-in trash. Into the bells bonging out my missed midnight appointment. Coughing, crying like a damned widow, wiping sour, half-digested port wine slime from my mouth. The glowglass alley pulsed grape to apricot. Juliet and Titania, coupla old crescent hags, judged me from the heavens. Umbriel sloshed up slowly under the girls, the lights of Wunda coming on across its blasted moonface. All those moons. The sky over Uranus always looked like a bloody traffic jam to me. Venus doesn't have any moons. The sky is unbroken. Perfect. A sky that can't look back.

Tears froze on my face. Very unmanly. But of the things I've lost, manliness left first and easiest.

Radiant Car
's a horror flick, is what it is. An old Gothic screamer with tits just barely kept in check by veils and corsets and the rating system. A girl went into the dark and met a monster there. So simple. So easy to fill the seats with that kind of thing.

So easy to empty them with the truth.

I wasn't even allowed to enjoy my misery. Caroline Street gagged on the mobs getting riled up for All-Clear. Nothing but elbows and eyeshadow. A car pulled up alongside me, a gorgeous red Talbot that would part the seas anywhere else, but the All-Clear has no respect for vehicles. See, old buddy Uranus, he got a day as short as your mama's skirt. Humans don't like it. Keeping a seventeen-hour day jitters you up like bad cocaine. Feels like you've got engines behind your eyes burning out your fluids. Like you carried the sun with you all this way, and lord but the old bitch hates being ignored. At this distance, she's not much more than a foggy streetlight through the snow and the fumes. Jupiter's bigger and badder and brighter. But the lady does like things done her way. Thing of it is, seven hours is just too big a gap to be able to make it up with a nice Martian nap at 12:01 Greenwich. You notice seven hours when they don't come home from the bar. So they built us a fake day out of the outworld twilight that goes on forever. Ignore that little splatter of phlegm in the sky; the glowglass will tell the hours: bright in the morning, dim in the evening. If you know what's good for you, you let your neon tenement tuck you in with a cup of warm shut-your-mouth at 2100 sharp. These All-Clear kids, though. They sleep the short sleep. In their clock-addled heads, they've gone Uranian. They keep the seventeen-hour day, sped up, catnapping, caffeine-surfing, cramming their living and sleeping and joyful noise into a horrid squeezebox. And at 1700, that no-man's time in which their midnight ticks over while the rest of the world grinds home to supper, they begin their dalliance with the Uranian clock. They're all dead asleep by the time most of TD is tucking into the evening's drink, and up again for work and wickedness when everybody's babies are snoozing away the lightless night. The All-Clear rings out at midnight proper, midnight mean time, and in their dawn and our dead of nothing, they have their church. God is in the overlap, they say.