Radiance

The journey—which, in truth, took us through to dawn—unfolded over a long, flat countryside. Infanta blossomed everywhere, their perfume flooding through the mouths of our masks, stomping upon and drowning the last of My Sin with velvet shoes. I took deep, gulping breaths. The scent was so sweet I felt I was not inhaling it but eating it and gaining sustenance, but it left an aftertaste of unsettling, dank musk. Yet I drank and drank of the air and felt so drunk as to fall down flat. The fields of blossoms gave an illusion of fertility—what land could be lonely that gave birth to such wild and splendid things? And yet, as the hours drew on, their sameness began to look like meanness, a paucity of imagination in the core of the planet itself.

As the morning crept in, we watched the carnival bridge between Pluto and its moon brighten in the sky, a harlequin umbilicus. Its light haloed and twisted in the freezing air, brightening the hills around us. The slabs of ice, the long black cliffs falling off into shallows, the glassy seas took on that same rainbow halo, that prism-corona, rimmed in shimmering St. Elmo’s fire. That mad bridge called Styx was their sun, its waxing and dimming cutting a rough day and night out of the single black cloth provided by this miserly world. The long cries of untamed buffalo echoed on the pampas and the ruffs of our own mounts rippled in reply, each individual bristle glowing with its own savage colour. Though the carriage possessed a curling horn through which we might have spoken to the twins, asked after all that we saw, silence was strictly observed until the great house reared into view.

Cythera, in a rare unguarded moment, had fallen asleep and allowed her head to droop, ever so lightly and hesitantly, onto my shoulder. Infanta juice dribbled off her chin and dried on her collarbone, like a fingerprint, faintly shuddering with phosphorescence. I stared at it for a moment. The mark writhed and bubbled in my vision, a sweet, painless acid burning into her body, altering her, filling her with light. And then, as the carriage pranged upon an outcropping of black rock, the light on Cythera’s skin guttered out and became once again no more than crusted sap and spittle. I roused her then to see what waited for us like an open mouth: a house alive, a house beating against the ancient glaciers like Hades’ own pulse, a house no more a house than those four cerulean lizards were buffalo.

My pupils contracted with pugilistic force. Within a crystal dome as wide and high as Vesuvius, a volcano of light released its heart’s blood in gouts and arterial sprays. Like a terrible wedding cake, it rose in tiers of porphyries and agate and deep red wood. The castle began with elephants: a ring of carved stone beasts, their trunks raised, tusks displayed, legs fused together to make a glimmering wall of violet rock. Cathedral windows rose from their heads; candlelight and shadows moved within them. Above the windows rose green stone griffins, their paws outstretched, their haunches flowing into one another, delicate balconies hanging from their chests. Up and up it went, in rings of black unicorns thrusting their horns into the air like spiked ramparts, red polished wood bears, and weathered grey walruses. The whole structure was crowned with a small ring of smoky quartz girls sitting with their legs kicking out over the great menagerie, laughing in stone, their crystal chins in their crystal hands. Within their circle a Ferris wheel turned, empty but lit, an absurd diadem for that maddened and maddening place. Light dripped from every crease in the rock, the wood, the glass.

I was dazzled. I covered my face with my hands.

“Home,” said a voice, and the voice belonged to one of the buffalo. Her feathers ruffled in the black wind.

In that haze we entered Setebos Hall, the castle of Prospero, through the bodies of the elephants, dragged and prodded by Mariner and Boatswain, their masks catching and exploding every candelabra’s exhalation until their faces seemed to become stars. Even within the crystal dome they did not remove those masks, whether due to some Yankee affectation or personal deformity or local custom, I shall hazard no guess. I cannot begin to recount the stairs and hallways we sped down and through—they streamed by in a rich, jagged blur. Wild laughter and music echoed from deep within the hall, but the passageways we ran along were utterly empty.