Radiance

I did, in a moment of extreme and regrettable sobriety, try to kiss Cythera at the little Christmas ball held in the starboard conservatory. Shards of the ice road swirled and banged beyond panes of submarine glass overhead. Pine boughs hung festively all about—though of course not actual pine. Our yuletide green had been knitted out of jute and wire and shredded dresses by the Udolpho triplets, those wanton Martian contortionists and—as I had discovered—wanted counterfeiters, from Guan Yu. Each of the nine women aboard had donated a green gown to the effort. We whirled away under Cythera’s lime spangled flapper-fringes, Harper Ibbott’s hunting cloak, every girl’s bright emerald and olive hoopskirts cut and ruched into garlands. We were a strange lot, the Obolus cargo, some famous, most not, all vibrating with the things we did not tell each other. Cythera seemed happy for once, in a long, ghost-grey sigh of a dress, assaying a Charleston, singing carols. True to the word of our mutual masters, Miss Brass had brought along a steamer of intoxicants and exotics that would turn a pirate into a teetotaller, but in those early days I had hatched the comical notion that I would do my job well. I spent my nights reading and rereading the histories and reports provided by Oxblood, staring at photographs as though my gaze could set them ablaze; coming close, I thought, to connections that danced just beyond the reach of my deprived, shrivelled brain, which had thrived on liquor, opiates, and hallucinogens. I could see her, I could see Severin, big and dark as a heart, at the nexus of some glowing web whose edges I was so close to touching.

Alas, that is the danger of sobriety. Everything seems possible.

At midnight on Christmas, with the disc of distant, turquoise Uranus like a tiny crescent moon above us, I slung my arm around the waist of Cythera Brass and kissed her. It was a good kiss, one of my best. We are the same height, but our noses did not clash, nor our foreheads collide. The scent of My Sin drenched my fingers, my eyelids, my mouth. I thought perhaps I had impressed her with my dedication to the work, that though we had been forced into sharing a certain chain of events, we might find warmth—indeed, even strength—in each other.

Those long limbs went to stone in my arms. When I withdrew, her face crackled with contempt. “I am not a perk of your position, Mr St. John,” she said, with the finality of the grave. “Do not mistake me for an opium pipe.”

And that was the utter terminus of any camaraderie or goodwill between us.

Yes, I despised her. But I am a strange creature. I am strange even to myself. There is no specialness in my ashen feelings toward Miss Brass. I despise myself as well, and all my works. It does no good. No matter how I practice my despising, I remain Anchises, and my works keep working.

“Wake up,” I barked, and though I did not mean to bark, I was not sorry. “We make Charon orbit in ten hours.”

She stirred beneath those soft green linens. My Sin filled the air.

I spoke more softly, then. I doubt she heard me. “By the way, I think I just had breakfast with Violet El-Hashem.”

21 February, 1962. Noon (thereabouts). Pluto, High Orbit.

Shall we have trumpets? Shall we have banners? Shall we have garlands and chords and bursts of coloured flame to announce our presence, descending in a slow angelic spiral from high Plutonian orbit down, down, down into the fields of pale flowers that soften the face of that little lonely world and her twin?

Perhaps a little trumpeting. Perhaps a little flame.

Night is Pluto’s native crop. I thought myself darkness’s man, but I had never even kissed her cheek until the sun set on that flower-choked world. Night poured itself down my throat. Night was my wine and my meat. Night wed me and bedded me, widowed me and murdered me and resurrected me whole a thousand times over with each hour. I saw before me, in that selfsame hall that had boasted our Christmas ball, beyond the veins of frost forking through the glass panes, a carousel hanging in space. Severin never came here. The one world she missed in all her profligate travels. At last, I shall have something she did not.

I will warn you now, Reader: Pluto is a place too mad for metaphor. What is there can only be what it is: a world far gone, decayed from the moment of its birth, lost in the unfathomable tides of these black rivers, so far from the sun that is our heart that it is, quite plainly, a place of delirium and dissolution.

It is a bestiary of the grotesque.

It is a Jacobean horror-hall.

It is a brothel of the undead.

It is so beautiful.

Welcome to America, to the Grand Experiment’s last light bulb, left burning long after the household has locked up and fled.

Your Friend Pluto!

 (Patriot Films, 1921) 

[VISUAL DAMAGED, UNSUITABLE FOR VIEWING.]

VOICE-OVER