Radiance

[SEVERIN UNCK walks hand in hand with CLOTILDE CHARBONNEAU down Usagi Avenue in Tithonus. Christmas lanterns glitter all around them. The Actaeon Theatre is visible behind them, searchlights swinging wildly over the night sky. CLOTILDE and SEVERIN are bundled in thick coats. Identical furs frame their faces. PERCIVAL UNCK walks backward down the street, filming them as steadily as his camera Clara will allow. SEVERIN sucks the filling from a street vendor’s blin. CLOTILDE’S face is sullen. She scratches at ruby earrings. She will leave them within a month.]

PERCIVAL

How did you like the picture, pumpkin?

SEVERIN

I’m not a pumpkin!

CLOTILDE

Are so. If we put a candle in your head you’d be a jack-o’-lantern.

SEVERIN

Ew! There’s no room in my head for a candle, Mama.

PERCIVAL

All right, you are definitely not a pumpkin, and we will definitely not put any candles in your head or make a tart out of you or turn you into a coach at midnight. Now, did you like your papa’s movie? He made it just for you, his first one for children.

SEVERIN

[long pause] No.

PERCIVAL

But you were so wonderful in it, darling! Didn’t you have fun filming your little bit? Isn’t it nice to see yourself on that big giant screen?

SEVERIN

[bursts into tears] I’m sorry, Papa! But there just aren’t such things as octopuses that talk or wear spectacles and spats in real life. It’s only Uncle Talmadge in a suit with sequins stuck on him. I shall never meet a talking octopus like Mr Bergamot, never, never! [Tears roll down SEVERIN’s cheeks and into her blin. She dries her face on one furry sleeve, sniffing in the cold.] It’s just a lot of silliness.

The Deep Blue Devil:

The Dame in Question

Case Log: 14 December, 1961

“Mr St. John, my name is Cythera Brass,” said the dame in question, shaking my hand like an adman while the Talbot drove itself calm as you please through a particularly obnoxious All-Clear mob and into the money-gargling heart of the Te Deum business district.

She let me eat. She let me drink. I feel about the same describing that as I do describing a quality fuck. It’s private, you pervert, take a hike. What I do with my gullet is my business. I mumbled my name back at Cythera Brass. I don’t care to say it too often. I barely live in that name. Hangs on me like someone else’s coat. It’s a name with too much room in it for a chap like me. Too famous, too fancy, too much chance of someone looking me up and down and belching out the dreaded: Oh, you’re him. But Miss Brass, she already knew who I was. She wouldn’t’ve come to scarf me up if I wasn’t who I was, so she and I, we could just sit tight, each knowing what we knew. Except she had me at a disadvantage, as I didn’t know a blessed thing about her. I hate that. Goes against my nature. I’m a hoarder of information.

“You American?” I asked her. Slugged back more of her bourbon.

She nodded; barely moved her chin, but it was a nod. “Seneca.”

Right. Sure. I’d thought Sioux, but hell, Americans all sound the same to me. “I went to the Nation once, when I was a kid. Toured the League halls and grounds. Shook hands with a coupla judges. Liked it better than the States, myself.”

“Mmmm,” answered that long-legged dame, without taking her eyes off a fish-masked fella jumping around outside the limousine like a particularly unnecessary exclamation point.

“I’m nothing, me. Don’t even know what ball I got myself born on. Spent time on Venus, obviously. Good long spate on the Moon, which was miserable as a year of Lent. Just about everywhere else, too. If you count up all the orbits on which I’ve hung my hat, I’ve been a subject of four different Crowns; a citizen of China, France, and Argentina; and a serf on Io—which I think technically made me Italian—but only for a month.”

Look at me. Hoarder of information, spilling my worthless biography to a lady just because her pretty bronze knees looked like a premonition of kingdom come. I didn’t have to say anything. I coulda soaked up the Talbot and the quiet and the drink. Cythera Brass had it all in a file somewhere anyway. She was the kind of broad whose job it was to keep files. To keep the secrets in a straight line and working toward payday. And still, I sat there on leather the colour of chicken fat trying to get her to like me.