Radiance

I made a noise in my throat that could be interpreted as agreement, rebuttal, amusement, disgust, or commiseration—I have perfected this noise. I consider it vital, for rarely do I wish to say anything to another person which a well-timed grunt cannot replace.

My tormentor, however, wheedled on as though I had clasped her to my chest and implored her to speak, speak now, speak forever, speak until the sun gutters and the snow road melts! “But you are a young man. Only the young are so rude and unpleasant. There’s no fortune to be made on Pluto, if that’s your mind. Someone ought to have told you.”

“I have business.”

“With whom? The buffalo?”

I sighed and fixed her with a black gaze. I have perfected that gaze also—it is necessary in Te Deum and elsewhere. If you cannot wither a man with your eyes you will be withered by his fists. Yet my best back-alley glare did not move that ridiculous soul whom I by now had to admit had become my breakfast companion. “With Maximo Varela, if you insist on prying into my affairs. Though it has been indicated to me that he is no longer going by that name.”

The woman snorted. Even her snort had melody. Incredulity shaped itself upon her face. “That…that he is not.”

“We are to be met at the Depot by his daughters and escorted safely to his house, though neither the house, nor the daughters, nor the Depot, nor the meeting are any concern of yours.”

Her rheumy eyes swam with dark mirth. “Poor lamb,” she crooned, and patted my hand in a grandmotherly fashion. “What a pity we wasted this voyage in not knowing one another. I might have told you tales. I might have told your fortune. I might have told you to yourself. People used to listen to me, oh how they used to listen! Hung on every word. I made gold out of horseshit in my day, my boy. Imagine what I could have done with you.”

I, naturally, did not share her sentiment. We would disembark at midnight tomorrow and already my feet itched for earth, my heart for silence, for the surcease of the endless thrum of engines in the walls, the constant hum and rumble that maddened me, made my blood ricochet up and down my spine, no less than the equally endless need for the smallest of talk shared between the few rarefied passengers, all of us avoiding the plain fact of the ghastly waste of this ship, its food and fuel and polish spent on sixteen nervous, uncertain souls.

“If you have information on Varela, I will certainly hear it,” I allowed, knowing I might as well accept my defeat. I would be her creature until lunch service, and probably dinner, too. She would never let me be.

The crone with the bronzed voice looked out the bolted porthole at the growing spheres of Pluto and Charon, opals hanging in the stony blackness, clouds like hands clutching their few, scattered continents, clutching warmth, clutching life. When she spoke, the pitch of her voice plucked at my sinews. It was as familiar as my own shadow, yet I could not, could not recall where I had heard it before. Its rhythms changed, peaked, rolled—and I felt as though my mother were telling me a tale before bedtime, though I have no memory of my mother and would not know her if she called my name from the depths of hell.

“Once upon a time, a man, weary of both body and soul, shipwrecked upon a faraway isle. This isle dwelt in the midst of an endless, wine-dark sea whose depths were strewn with stars and horned leviathans and secrets kept by unguessable fathoms—and upon this isle it was always night. This man possessed in his heart and his hands the power to command light and force it to follow his will, but this power no longer comforted him, for he had once been charged with the protection of a maid both good and beautiful, and had lost her. But the whispers of the world said that he had done more than lose her, that he had killed her with his own hand. In shame, this man threw his name, the name of a man who could cast an innocent girl into darkness, underfoot and trampled upon it. From the moment his foot touched the sweet-smelling shores of that faraway isle, he called himself Prospero, a name so famous he could bury himself within it. He put upon his head a jester’s crown and on his feet the belled dancing shoes of a fool, and spoke only madness to any who came before him, begging him to perform his old feats of light and shadow. Yet even this did not bring him the oblivion he craved, the anonymity of the guilty or the rest of the defeated. The more absurd his speech, the more frenzied his dance, the more he behaved like a jungle creature in a man’s skin, the more he found himself sought after by the folk of Pluto, for whom amusement is the only currency.