Radiance

Whether he wished for big things or little things, Anchises was thwarted. When he wished for a diver’s bell of his very own for Christmas, he received a bicycle with a horn and a case of terrible eczema that meant he could not even put his poor, peeling toe in the red Qadesh for the rest of the night. When a girl in his class, who wore a black ponytail and loved cassowaries so much she could hardly bring herself to speak English at all, grew sick with scarlet fever (which is not really scarlet fever, but a horrible, heedless, haemorrhagic virus that occasionally strikes delicate children in the Land of Milk and Desire), Anchises wished fervently that she should get well. He loved her a little for the softness of her voice and the thickness of her ponytail, but the girl died quickly in a lonely ward in White Peony Station, the great electric city where all the doctors lived. Anchises wept on his cacao-bark bed for days upon days, wishing to the red rafters that he could die with his friend and live in heaven with her and a hundred cassowaries and a hundred callowhales all singing together in perfect Mandarin.

But he did not die.

Anchises had begun to have suspicions. He did not speak of them, lest others think him mad. He drew his callowhale pictures and thought hard while he drew them. This is what Anchises drew when he made a picture of a callowhale:

As far as beginner naturalist’s drawings go, it was not bad. It was basically accurate. Anchises always drew the top half of a whale the same way, the way he had seen them all his life. But he had no idea what the bottom half of a callowhale looked like. He had never been allowed to go diving with his mother or his father, no matter how hard he had wished it. And besides, even divers didn’t really know what a callowhale looked like. They were too big to see all at once. It would be like trying to guess what South America looked like when you have only seen one cafe in Buenos Aires. But Anchises guessed anyway. He tried many times to make one that seemed right to him, but none of them really did. They looked like a blimp wearing a hula skirt, or a pinto bean with noodles growing out of it. They looked silly to him, and stupid. But callowhales were not silly or stupid. He knew that. He knew it, though he had no reason to know anything about them. Even the people who did know something about the vast, beautiful animals that lived in the wonderful scarlet sea couldn’t seem to agree on anything about them, though Anchises felt quite certain they were animals, and not “great bloody meatloafs,” as Mr Preakness called them, nor “overgrown Brussels sprouts,” as Miss Bao insisted.

Finally, Anchises decided to try something new. He laid out a piece of fresh, new paper, the best sheet he could find, with only a few bits of cacao-seed flecking the fibre. He sharpened his pencil with his knife and made sure he had a good breakfast and a glass of orange juice by his side (which was not really orange juice, but a tangy, thready, tingly juice from a plant whose fruit is orange, but whose exterior is the size of a doctor’s satchel and covered in lilac fur) in case he got thirsty. He sat at his desk, which faced the beach and the foamy Qadesh, and said, very clearly, to the surf: “I wish that I can’t ever draw what a callowhale really looks like, and always make a real hash job of it.”

Anchises put his pencil to his paper, and this is what he drew:

After that, Anchises put his pencil and paper away under the floorboards and only took out his bottom-half-of-a-callowhale picture to look at when everyone else had gone to bed. He never asked his mother or his father whether his drawing looked right to them. He didn’t have to.

And day after day, when his chores were done and he had read all the passages required for the next day’s lessons, Anchises went down to the shore near his house. He no longer collected whelk shells which were not really whelk shells, nor driftwood which was not really driftwood. He did not try to sing along with the striped seals which were not really seals. He only watched the callowhales. In his mind, he kept drawing them, over and over, their endless arms beneath the red water wrapping him up like love.

The boy whose wishes couldn’t come true was a good child with a good heart in his good chest. Even after he discovered how to wish for the opposite of what he wanted, he did not abuse the privilege. If you play too hard with a toy, it will break. Anchises had never broken any of his toys, even when he was so small he thought his stuffed velvet turtle was a real turtle. He spent his wishes carefully, like a miser spends his coins.