Radiance (45 page)

Transcript from 1946 debriefing interview with Erasmo St. John, property of Oxblood Films, all rights reserved. Security clearance required.

CYTHERA BRASS:
Session four, day three. This will be our last session, I think. How do you feel about that, Mr St. John?

ERASMO:
Dandy.

CYTHERA:
I've enjoyed talking to you.

ERASMO:
Then you are out of your mind. There is nothing enjoyable in this. It's just eating ashes.

CYTHERA:
Who checked on Mariana, after you lost contact with Arlo?

ERASMO:
Severin and I. Rinny took care of everyone who would let her.

CYTHERA:
And what was Miss Alfric's condition?

ERASMO:
She was gone. Dissolved into long, stringy fern blades and spores and mud and withered leafy things. She hadn't run off. The pin in her knee from when she tried to ride Sancho Panza one last time was lying in the muck. No blood. Just … muck.

CYTHERA:
Do you have any thoughts on the infection vector? Severin and Mariana both touched Anchises, but neither the child nor Unck had that kind of catastrophic reaction. In fact, Severin had much more contact than Alfric.

ERASMO:
How should I know? Talk to Retta.

CYTHERA:
Dr Nantakarn. [sounds of papers shuffling, file folders moving against each other.]
It is the opinion of this doctor that, once transmitted, the infection entered a state of dormancy in the Adonis subject. Neither Alfric nor Unck seemed to be contagious—it is possible that they would have become so given enough time. I can offer no firm reasoning as to why Unck showed no ill effects without the ability to take post-contact blood samples. Perhaps she had an immunity. Perhaps symptoms develop at different rates depending on any number of metabolic, environmental, or genetic factors. Perhaps it just liked her better.

ERASMO:
I don't know. Mari was fine until we cut it out of her. Well, not fine, but other than the fronds, she had no pain, no fever. But I think … sometimes I think it killed her because she hit Anchises. It defended itself. Reacted in fear. Severin just held him while he slept. It didn't have to be afraid of her. I don't know. I didn't have any time to think about the science of it.

CYTHERA:
You had decided to break camp.

ERASMO:
Yes. Three people were dead. We panicked. And we were still out of sync with our own soundtrack. We heard Max reciting Shakespeare to the boy hours after he stopped. Forward and backward. I was securing the gondola in the wind and I could hear Cristabel singing
I left my sugar standing in the rain and she melted away …
all couched in the static, sunk deep in it, the song a pin down at the bottom of the ocean. Crissy started clawing up her arms with her fingernails. Santiago … well, you must know. The night Severin disappeared, he took one of the machetes and hacked that Type I Ekho Ultra Mic into a hundred vicious pieces and started swallowing them one by one. Konrad stopped him before he finished his bowlful of knives, but Retta had to open up his gut as soon as we got back to White Peony. He was going into shock, bleeding into his stomach, his teeth ground half off, his tongue sliced almost in half. I never heard him speak again. Never saw him blink. He just turned off all over.
     We were finished. We could take the kid back to White Peony and get a few more interviews with people who had a cousin's cousin's dog in Adonis and we'd have a movie in six months. We could heal. Everything else could be edited in, fixed in post. We had enough film shot on site to make it look like we'd been there for ages. Like we'd been thorough.

CYTHERA:
Why do you think Severin went out on that dive? After everything that had happened, everyone she'd lost, why would she go out alone?

ERASMO:
She didn't go out alone. I went with her. I know the cameraman is invisible, but come on. Give me a little credit for existing. Rin decided to go out to the callowhales because we were leaving.
     [clears throat]
     I've had a lot of time. Just … time. Life is long. You come to theories over time, and over time theories become convictions. And it's my conviction that Severin only went to Venus at all to make that dive. She wanted to see the callowhales. That's it. The kid, the village, sure. But the callowhales … they're the only unexplainable thing we found on seventy worlds. She wanted them. Maybe they wanted her. No one wanted her to go, and they all tried—she came out in her mesh suit sporting a shiner that said just how hard Maximo had tried. But I think she made up her mind that night on Neptune when the lights went out. She was going to touch one. She was going to fly through the night and the heavens to the one magical thing in creation and grab onto it for dear life.
     You've seen the shot. There's nothing more to a dive than that. You take the boat out and go down. Aylin manned the hoses up top. What I remember isn't that moment in the red dark, that moment when she was there and then she wasn't. I've seen that happen so many times on film it's like I don't even remember it myself anymore. What I remember is the night before.
     We were lying on our cot with Anchises between us, for all the world like a family. We were gonna take him home and raise him—we hadn't talked about it yet, but we were going to. Just like Rin was going to go see the callowhales. She stroked his hair while he slept against her breast and she said, “There used to be a story. A Greek story, so you know it's good. About three sisters. They were actually the sisters of the Gorgons, too. You know, Medusa. They were called the Graeae. Sometimes they're painted as beautiful, sometimes as horrible and hideous. They have long white hair and they're never apart. They have one eye and one tooth between them. They share it. Pop it out of one sister's socket and into the other. I think about them a lot. I used to dream about them when I was little, when I first read about them. Oh, didn't I say? Perseus comes along and kills them on his way to killing the Gorgons. That's how it goes—as soon as there's anything interesting in Ancient Greece, some arsehole with a magic hat comes along to murder it. I used to dream about it. About the eye. In my dream I was waiting for my father to give it to me. I was blind and cold and I wanted so badly to play with it. And now … and now when I think about it, I think we're all Graeae. We live in a universe of lenses. We watch and watch. We all share one eye between us, the big black camera iris. We wait for our turn to see what someone else saw on a screen. And then we pass it on. All I've ever wanted was just to play with it. I still feel like I'm in that dream, jumping up and trying to grab onto the eye, and I can't reach it.”
     She fell asleep almost before she finished saying
I can't reach it.
I watched her. And I could see … little bronze threads on her cheek, tiny fronds, by her hairline, growing like gold veins across her face.
     And months later when I touched Anchises's poor hand, I heard her say it again.
One eye.
And then giggle like she was three and say
oh wow, oh wow oh
—and then nothing.
     And that's the end of it—nothing. I didn't hit her over the head with a tripod and dump her body, though I heard that said plenty once we got back. Always suspect the boyfriend. Maximo didn't bury her in the delta. I loved a girl and she left me. I don't know where she is. I want to know. I want to know. But I was there and I still don't.
     Maybe I don't get to see the end of this show. Maybe I just live out the rest of my days between reels. Maybe Anchises will figure it out. Maybe not. Who knows, maybe death is the darkroom where you get to see it all like it was supposed to come out. Bright and crisp and clean. No shadows unless you want them. But it ended like it started, which I guess is how you know it's an Unck story. Suckers for symmetry, those two.
I left my sugar standing in the rain and she melted away.

CYTHERA:
Is that all?

ERASMO:
Probably not. I'll ring if I think of anything new.

CYTHERA:
Oxblood will pay for resettlement anywhere you like, Erasmo. And you'll always have a job with us if you decide to come home.

ERASMO:
I'm thinking Mars. Mount Penglai. I was born near there, you know. Didn't mean to come into this life anywhere but the Moon. Still seems strange that I didn't pull it off. Mum and Dad were working on
Kangaroo Khan,
and whoops—congratulations on your bouncing baby Martian.

CYTHERA:
Mount Penglai is lovely. The mangoes are amazing.

ERASMO:
You'll let me take him, won't you? [Cythera says nothing.] He's worth nothing to you. He's just a kid. He's going to be bent into all kinds of unpleasant shapes by this. He needs a father. Or at least someone who can un-pretzel him from time to time. Trust me, you don't want him. I do. Let me give him a childhood.

CYTHERA:
We'll consider it. May I … may I ask? You wear a wedding ring, but on the wrong hand. Indulge my curiosity?

ERASMO:
She didn't want to get married. Doesn't mean I wasn't her husband.

CYTHERA:
[pause] Can I get you a last coffee before you go?

 

Christmas Card,

mailed to C. Brass c/o Oxblood Films, Yemaya, December 1952

To be included in the manuscript of Erasmo St. John's memoir,
The Sound of a Voice That Is Still
, scheduled for publication Spring 1959 (Random House)

Front:

SNOW HO HO!

HAPPY CHRISTMAS

FROM MERRY MARS!

Inside:

Hiya, Cyth,

Well, he's gone to seek his fortune, and I'm drinking alone at Yuletide with no one else to write to.

I don't know if he ever loved me, and I don't know what the thing in his hand means. It never gave him any pain that I could tell. I don't know if it ever changed much; he started wearing gloves when we were living in New York (what a cock-up that was! Six months of yelling at each other in brownstones neither of us will be able to fish out of the back drawer again) and never took them off. Wouldn't show me the hand any more than a boy shows himself naked to his father past a certain age.

Not that I was his father. I wanted to be. I did. It would have been … well, there's no point in dressing it up. It would have been like Rin and me had a kid together. That's not fair, it's not a fair thing to put on a traumatized little boy, but we all put something too heavy on our babies.

It moved in his sleep. I remember that, in the days before the gloves. It moved in his sleep like it was underwater. Like it was drifting in a current, a tide that you couldn't see. I touched it once. He was sick, really sick—he was sick a lot back then. Nowhere sat right with him 'til Mars. He reached out to me in his fever, and he did that seldom enough. I held him tight and took his hands and I could feel it, moving against my palm, like it was looking for something. Maybe purchase, maybe a way out, maybe it couldn't breathe with my palm against it. But its little tendrils touched my skin and that is the only time I have heard Severin Unck's voice since the
Clamshell
made moonfall. I never told him. How do you tell a kid that?

Cristabel got her Russian citizenship six or seven years ago and came out to our little red planet. I bet you saw that coming, didn't you? She can play the bassoon. I didn't really think anyone played the bassoon anymore. It's an instrument out of books and poems and grandads manning the watch on the prow of lonely, starlit ships. It sounds plaintive and kind in the desert dark.

The plain fact is, after everything that happened in Adonis, I could never love anyone who wasn't there.

I might try to write a book. We'll see. I'm not much of a writer. Anything more than a title card seems wasteful to me. I spent the best years of my life under the law of silent flicks:
Show everything, because you can't say much.
But I think I might give it a go.

It's almost dark in Mount Penglai. The way my house sits, I can watch the kangaroos out on the red plains. Who knew those funny creatures would take to Mars so well?

 

The Ingénue's Handbook