Radiance

Anchises sits down at the gleaming grand piano in the corner of the Myrtle Lounge. He plays a flourish on the keys. Severin walks across the room. She shrugs off her aviator jacket, musses her hair. She slides up to the top of the black grand and lies across it. As she does so, her flickering black-and-white skin flushes into colour, her dress turns a throbbing shade of deep green, her shoes bright gold, her lips redder than Mars.

“How’s your night going, Miss S?” Anchises asks, sliding into the old, comforting patter of a lounge act, his fingers coaxing the keys.

“Oh, not too bad, Mr A,” Severin croons. “I was dead for a little while, but I got over it.”

“Glad to hear it. You got a song for all these lonelyhearts?”

“I just might. It’s called ‘The Quantum Stability Axis Blues.’ You wanna hear it?”

“I’m dying to hear it.”

And so Severin Unck begins to sing, in a thick, low voice like bourbon pouring into a wooden cup.

I met my honey way down under the sea

Where the sun never goes so nobody can see

What my honey,

Oh, what my honey

does to me

Severin rolls onto her back, green sequins pulsing with light.

My honey put the moon on my finger

My honey put the stars on my plate

My papa told me good girls don’t linger

When a honey comes

Oh, when a honey comes

a-rattlin’ her gate

“I never said such a thing,” Percy grumbles.

“I know, Daddy, it’s a song,” whispers Severin, putting her finger over her red lips. Shhh.

My honey he was dyin’ without me

His heart was all locked up but I was the key

I said I should go,

but my honey said no,

Oh, no, no, no,

Let me show you what a good girl can be

Severin slides gracefully off the piano and walks through the lounge. Her green dress fades back to black, her skin to silver. She sits down on Erasmo’s lap; she runs her fingers through his hair. The key changes, and Calliope begins to hum a plaintive counterpoint. Mr Bergamot joins in.

My honey and me floated out on the foam

Still I sighed: I miss my baby back home

How can I leave him so lonesome and blue?

Don’t seem the kind of thing a good girl should do.

Severin snaps her fingers. She presses her knuckle under Erasmo’s chin.

But with honey, ain’t no such thing as leavin’

Anyone I want I can find just like that

So baby, don’t you get lost in grievin’

Wherever you go, that’s where I’m at.

“Because I am a nexus point connecting all possible realities and unrealities,” Severin purrs seductively. “I exist in innumerable forms throughout the liquid structure of space/time, and neither self nor causality have any meaning for me.” She kisses Erasmo as the song ends. Tears slide off his cheeks, onto his chin, and onto her film-shivering fingers, where they burn. “I love you right in the face.”

Severin stands and bows. Marvin the Mongoose throws gardenias at her feet. She holds her hand out to her father, who takes it, and holds it to his breast. He’s sobbing, a big ugly cry, but there’s no shame. In point of fact, there’s not a dry eye in the house.

“I’m okay, Daddy. It’s okay now.”

PART FIVE

  

THE RED PAGES

The radiant car your sparrows drew

You gave the word and swift they flew,

Through liquid air they wing’d their way,

I saw their quivering pinions play;

To my plain roof they bore their queen,

Of aspect mild, and look serene.

—Sappho, “Hymn to Aphrodite”

In the end, everything is a gag.

—Charlie Chaplin

The Man of the Hours

13 June, 1971

The afternoon sun knocks politely at the doors of Mount Penglai. It wears a soft orange dress with red buttons and a gold sash.

Mount Penglai meant to be a metropolis, but it got a little lost along the way. You can still see evidence of its grander destiny: a pronged glass hotel rising like a trident from the central business district: the mammoth bronze qilin statues outside Anqi Sheng Theatre whose marquee, on this particular day, reads: Mr Bergamot Goes to France. The city lies in the Chinese hemisphere, fed by the happy canals of the Mangala Valles, not so far from the enormous orange cone of Nix Olympia, a kindly volcano the size of Bulgaria that never makes any trouble. Prosperous kangaroo ranches dot the outskirts, and that’s about the size of the wealth around here—the fancier folk just didn’t want to live so far from Guan Yu.

Or too close to Enyo, after everything. It’s only five kilometres down the road.

Vincenza Mako knocks politely at the door of a large and handsome house. She is, by coincidence, wearing the same outfit as the sun. Orange, red buttons, gold sash. A man built this house because he wanted a place to try for happiness. Behind Vincenza, mango sellers and ice hawkers make the first market-cries of the day. She is nervous, a little. She has come bearing a gift: a box containing several reels of film.