Radiance

“Do it!” the King of Pluto roared. He ran at me suddenly, as a lion after wounded prey, his limbs painted, streaked, splashed with black and white, stark, terrible. Pigment dripped from his biceps, his hipbones; viscous, greasy tears.

“Do it,” he cried again, and sank to his ruined knees. His fern-tangled mask implored me with its empty sockets. What did his face look like? I should remember it; should remember him, Max, the man with the lanterns; should recall him as vividly as any child recalls a favourite character from some charming tale told in the wee hours of their youth. But there was nothing. My mind refused. I shook my head, held up my hands, choked back the bile churning through my body. I was all bile; I was nothing else. I did not know what he wanted from me!

“Do it,” he whispered. “Forgive me. Forgive me. I killed her. Forgive me.”

I stared down at the pitiful wreckage before me. Could it be this easy? As simple, as quotidian, as quaint as murder? He loved her, and she didn’t love him; or she fired him, and he could not bear the shame; or they quarrelled, and he did not know his strength? I tried to imagine it, his choking the life from Severin, dashing her brains out on the flat rocks where my parents had laid out laundry to dry before they were clawed from the surface of the world. Perhaps…perhaps I saw it happen, and that is why my mind refuses to grasp those unspeakable days on the shores of the Qadesh.

“Never,” I hissed. “I will never forgive you.”

But he only laughed: high, screeching, shrill, boiling laughter that steamed away into the nothingness of that horrid vault.

Maximo Varela snapped his fingers. A campfire appeared in the centre of the room, its embers seething. Drums began, and pipes as well—hooting, owlish horns. Eight figures danced around it, naked, painted, masked: a silver man in a beaked mask with deep camera lenses over its eyes like a raccoon’s bandit face; a man and a woman painted like flame and forest, her mask a clock face, his the burnt ruin of a diving bell; two men, their clothes all woven of priceless grain, a woman cyclops, her single eye a pit of blackness; an indigo man with the face of a bull and a scar like a star on his cheek; and a chalk-marked child, clutching one of his hands with the other, his mask a simple, harlequin white with two black hearts where the dimples ought to be, his mouth a heart-shaped hole. I clutched my own hand reflexively, instinctively. Beneath my glove I felt the topography of my scars; the ropy flesh; the hidden, seeping wound; the soft, sinuous writhing of it…Saints in heaven, why now? It had not stirred in years.

The child spun among the dancing adults, reaching up to them, to be touched by them, to be held by them, comforted. They ignored him. The women embraced; the camera-eyed man lifted a bowl of milk and poured it over himself, over the others—they lapped it from one another’s skin, swallowed it, danced in its fall like pale rain. The cream beaded on their collarbones, their chests, their flat stomachs. The child sucked his fingers sullenly, crouching by the fire. Then, the woman painted like the forest cried out and vanished into the shadows.

No, no, no.

The man with the face of a bull began to choke. He clawed at his throat. His face began to swell; vomit flew from his lips and the vomit was not liquid but a torrent of light, bubbling, foaming, scarlet light. Long nails pricked at the rags of my memory. Hooks, shards. Ah, but there is nothing there for you, Prospero. My memory is a land where everything dies. The cyclops lurched unnaturally, his limbs jerking at hideous angles, and a blade appeared, stuck through the centre of his monstrous eye.