Radiance

“Yet you believe her. Her! You look at her pretty little face on the screen emoting and stuttering and blushing and contemplating her rich girl’s life, and you think there wasn’t a script out of frame at her feet, rewritten to an inch of its life, every rewrite thatched in on coloured papers to keep it straight. Oh, are we on the red pages today, where Severin is a rebel and a champion of truth? Or blue, where she cries about her mothers for thirty minutes? Or green, where the lady who’s never wanted for a thing in her life whines about how much someone else has to pay for her to speak on camera? It was a rainbow by the end, every movie she ever made. And you think it’s real, that Venus was any different. That the heart of that girl wasn’t always an empty goddamned soundstage, and her soul wasn’t a hack-job screenplay with half the pages torn out and floating down the length of the solar system. What happened to her? The same thing that happens to any bad script: Too many people get their hands on it, trying to fix it, ’til it turns into nothing—nothing; not a trick, not a twist ending, just a girl bleeding out in a box. There’s no artistry to that. You can’t cram artistry into it, no matter how hard you try. She’s just a dead girl.”

“That’s not an answer. Did you kill her? Tell me!”

He calmed himself, assessing the wreckage of the room, the torn cardboard and shattered coloured lights and crepe tapestries. I knew he was right, that he was showing me his trick, but the infanta had so addled my senses that even amid the trash heap of the ochre bedroom, everything I saw was still limned with light, with richness, an afterimage of opulence, ghosts in the architecture.

“Listen, boy—and look! Behold my beautiful assistant strapped to the wheel! Vulnerable, tender, entirely within my power! See how the light catches her jewelled bodice like a burst of starlight. We landed on Venus with no complications. Transport from the International Station to Adonis took two weeks. Before your very eyes, I shall drive five knives into her unblemished body! You see the knives are sharp; I do not deceive you—I’ve cut my own finger with their points: one, two, three, four, five!

“We arrived on site and set up camp. We found you on the first day of scouting. I had my light meters and she had George, but she hadn’t intended to shoot anything that day. You were extremely anaemic and dehydrated. We fed you and washed you and Severin took charge of you like a pet. Now the wheel starts to spin! Her sequins dazzle! Her cries arouse! The first knife—ah, direct hit in the left shoulder! See how she bleeds!

“The angels first appeared that night. Seraphim, you understand? Not frilly angels with blousy pink wings and haloes like wedding rings. These ones had wheels full of eyes and voices like the noise of the deep. We poor fools! We thought it was equipment, feedback. All that expensive sound shit nobody needs but Severin just insisted on. Mariana was the only one who could make those machines heel, but even she was new to it; she’d never gotten to work with anything that high-end before. We thought the whining, the thrumming, that horrible, horrible vibrating, was Mariana’s problem. Ignore it, ignore it, just go to sleep.” He covered his face with his hands for a moment, but snapped up again, his mask barely concealing the livid excitement in his quivering body. “Observe the flight path of the second knife: I’ve sunk it in the right shoulder, perfectly parallel to the first—what artistry! What skill!

“But the angels came again in the morning. It wasn’t feedback. The voices of seraphim are the colour of need. When their words entered me, I felt a cancer in my heart, and, at the same time, the blossoming of my body into beauty. Thrumming. Voices. Quiet at first, like when you’re in a room full of people and everyone is talking constantly but you can’t make out the words, just an ocean of sound. A tide, sometimes louder, sometimes softer. The third knife, ladies and gentleman, a blow to the left hip! Oh, that one hurt her, you can tell! Blood running down the inside of her beautiful thigh. See it drip onto the stage.