Radiance

ERASMO: Like a radio stuck between stations. It was diffuse, coming from everywhere at once. But it was still very, very distant. You had to shush everyone to hear it. Mariana checked her mics but everything was dark, wrapped up, A-OK. So we all went back to bed and didn’t give it another thought.

CYTHERA: And the next morning?

ERASMO: Up at 0600. Toast and sausages and Venusian coffee and not a worry in the world or a sound in the sky, except those mad black birds that sing in Mandarin.

CYTHERA: And this is December second, the first day of actual filming. The day Severin made contact with the boy.

ERASMO: Anchises.

CYTHERA: That’s not his name, you know.

ERASMO: It has been for a year. That’s long enough to stick to his ribs.

CYTHERA: Do you want to know his legal name?

ERASMO: [surprised snort] Actually, yes. I’d like that.

CYTHERA: It’s Turan Kephus.

ERASMO: [long pause] He likes Anchises.

CYTHERA: Tell me your first impressions of him.

ERASMO: I told you already—we spent most of the morning setting up cameras and lighting rigs. Horace and I set up coverage. Mari’s equipment didn’t seem to like the humidity—she was way behind schedule. We all kept busy…because if you looked at him once, you’d never stop.

CYTHERA: Walking in circles?

ERASMO: You’ve seen the film. But in real life it was…it was just awful. That poor boy. He’d been like that for years, but he still looked like a child. Like all the photos we’d collected of Adonis before the…event. The disaster. It was a genuinely unexplainable thing. Severin kept saying somebody must be feeding him. But I don’t know. Every once in a while he would kind of…wink out. Like a shutter clicking. And then he’d come back, so fast you told yourself it was nothing, it was just you blinking, moron. Until we watched the dailies.

It got to me. I felt sick. I felt like I’d run at full speed straight into a brick wall. We’d come all the way across space to see him, and he was exactly like the stories. Exactly like the photographs. There was no new information. Everybody exaggerates; everyone embellishes. But Anchises was just so bizarre that you couldn’t top him.

CYTHERA: What time did Severin make contact?

ERASMO: Around 1300, I think. The light was perfect; the light is always perfect on Venus. Max didn’t think she should touch him. He said, “Just try talking first. We have all the time in the world.” And Dr Nantakarn said something about trauma victims and how you couldn’t predict their reactions to human touch. I wasn’t really listening. Rinny was definitely gonna hug that kid, so I didn’t consider it an important debate. Rinny didn’t like being hugged all that much, but she was a great practitioner of hugging others. She liked to initiate the whole process. When she was younger, she said it could fix anything, if you timed a hug right and were really good at it. And she was. Really good at it.

Later, she revised that to “almost anything.”

But she did try talking to him first. I don’t remember what she said. Generically soothing stuff. She could be so comforting, if you really needed it. Needed her. Not if you’d just had a bad day or lost your watch or something. She didn’t have a lot of pity for the little tragedies. But if you got stuck in a big one, you’d want her there to kiss it better. [clears throat] Right. So she said a few sweet nothings and then she went in for the hug, and then all hell broke loose.

CYTHERA: What particular kind of hell?

ERASMO: The kid started screaming bloody murder. I thought for a moment he was going to blink out again, to get away from Severin, but she held him still. Held him while he shrieked and shook and clawed at her. Like that girl in the story. Who holds onto Tam Lin ’til the wicked fairies have all marched by. What’s her name?

CYTHERA: Janet.

ERASMO: [chair squeaks] That was quick. Under other circumstances, I think you might be an interesting person to know, Cyth. Janet. She held him like Janet, and at the same time the sound roared up again, nothing like the night before. Loud—and I mean marching band-loud. It was absolutely mechanical this time. Machine noise and voices. We didn’t recognize them at first. We couldn’t begin to understand words out of all that junked-up static—skipping, popping, screeching feedback, looped back on itself, the timbre fucked from top to bottom. But somewhere in there we could hear…voices. We were all pretty freaked out—but that kind of freaked out where you’re excited and alive and so fucking curious your curiosity could punch a hole in the ground.

CYTHERA: Can we discuss the boy’s hand for a moment?