Radiance

SEVERIN steps into frame, into the diffident, limping light, her bobbed hair sweat-curled in the wilting wind. She has thrown the exhibition costume into an offscreen campfire and is clothed now in her accustomed trousers and black aviator’s jacket.

Other shapes move with busy intensity as the CREW sets up camp. SEVERIN holds her hand out like she would to a horse or a dog—walking carefully, quietly—but she does not walk toward a horse or a dog. SEVERIN looks uncertainly over her shoulder at the long snarl of sea behind them—and at ERASMO ST. JOHN, temporarily trusted with the care and feeding of George. He says something to her offscreen—he must, because she cocks her head as though considering a riddle and says something back to him. Her mouth moves, but the microphones have not been set up yet. Her lips make words the audience can never quite read.

A SMALL BOY walks in circles around the stub of what was once a Divers Memorial. All such villages have a Memorial: a cairn of diving bells bolted together on a pedestal in the town square, one for each diver who perished fast to a whale, lost in pursuit of the precious pale gold of callowmilk. Adonis’s monument has its bells no longer, vanished with the population, but the pedestal remains. The boy stares down as he turns and turns, endlessly. His hands flicker and blur as if he is signing something, or writing on phantom paper. He wears an adult’s diving costume, its brass bell attached firmly round his neck. Its folds and grommets drag against him, slow him down.

SEVERIN calls to him. He does not flinch or stop. He does not look up. The camera watches him. SEVERIN watches him. Slowly, the CREW cease their activity and turn their gazes to the child. The footage crackles into life as the sound equipment comes online. SEVERIN squats down on her heels in a friendly, schoolteacherly fashion, still holding out her hand, beckoning. She tilts her head in an aw, come on gesture. Two kids in a garden. One wants to play. The other does not.]

SEVERIN

Hey, little guy…it’s okay now. It’s fine now. I’m here. My name’s Severin. You can call me Rinny if you like that better.

[The BOY simply turns and turns and turns, over and over. His huge diving bell casts a shadow like a black spotlight. The film is damaged. It has always been damaged. It was damaged in the dailies. No one has ever seen it uncorroded. The BOY seems to leap forward and backward round the ruined Memorial, jumping in and out of reality as the print cuts in and out, in and out.

CUT TO: EXT. ADONIS, DAY. 07:45: MARIANA ALFRIC is screaming, clutching her hand to her breast FILM DAMAGED FOOTAGE SPLICE CORRODED SKIP AFFECTED AREA SKIPPING SKIPPING UNABLE TO COMPENSATE ERROR 143 SEE ARCHIVIST FOR ASSISTANCE]

Production Meeting,

The Deep Blue Devil

The Man in the Malachite Mask

 (Tranquillity Studios, 1960, dir. Percival Unck) 

Audio Recorded for Reference by Vincenza Mako

MAKO: No, no, Percy, listen to me. It’s not working.

All right, it’s working, but it’s not right. The noir setup has a certain energy, I agree, but it sits pretty heavy on the action. Though I like making Cyth Brass a secretary. We should keep that. She’ll probably sue us for defamation. But we said we’d give him a love interest, not a probation officer! And what are we going to do when we get to Venus? And we do have to get to Venus, I promise. You can dawdle all you like, but it’s there in the middle of the story, throwing its gravity around, warping everything toward it. The point is, what kind of hardboiled finale did you mean to stick on it? Shootout at Adonis? Breathless bullets and betrayal and a fedora on her grave? Is that what you think happened? That she’s buried in a swamp somewhere with a hole in her head? If you go with noir, you’re building in a certain expectation of violence. Of death.

PERCIVAL UNCK: Varela has said she’s dead all along.

MAKO: And Erasmo has said she isn’t. You said you’d rather not have death, but you’re stuffing it in from all sides. And…Severin’s outside the scope of the story. She can’t help it. That’s all a script like that will let her be. An object on a mantle that has to go off by the third act. A gun that must be fired. She’s not a person, the way you’ve got it set up, with your broads and bitches and dark streets at the edge of space. She’s just a goal.

UNCK: Not a goal, Vince. A Grail.