Radiance

“I am fine. Yes, fine, really—please don’t trouble yourself. Only—what was that all about?” Be a detective, I thought. Questions. It’s always about the questions. Seeking the right one like an optometrist’s lenses. Can you see clearly now? And now? And now? “What I mean is, no one really turned into a tiger and ate Severin Unck, did they? Art has its limits.”

“You are the only one who can understand me, Anchises,” came his reply. He scratched his cheek beneath his starry mask. “You were there—you saw everything. You know my heart. Her heart. I used to take you walking along the beach in the mornings, do you remember? Every morning from the first day we met you. I recited everything I could think of, just so you could hear language again and remember how to make it yourself. Homer, Marlowe, Coleridge, Chaucer, a little Poe, a little Grimm. I managed most of The Tempest the day before she…the day before. I was proud of that. I gave you a little chocolate from craft services after every walk, so you’d associate words and sweetness. Didn’t work, but it seemed important. Tell me you remember. Tell me it mattered.”

I considered it. I considered telling him, Of course. Of course I remember: “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan his stately pleasure dome decree.” Yes, of course. Your voice brought me back to the country of human speech on a chariot drawn by Chaucer and Shakespeare. You saved me. Quoth Kubla Khan: Nevermore. It would have been kind, and he looked more strung out than me on my worst day. And in camaraderie he might have told me more than he would otherwise. But I could not do it. He killed her. This is her killer. I felt his guilt sliding off of him like oil.

I felt that old compulsion to speak the truth surge up within me—so inconvenient, so detrimental to my vocation. “I don’t remember any of it, Maximo.” He flinched at the sound of his real name. “I have no memory before she grabbed me in Adonis, and after that…just pieces. Moments. Nothing more. My ‘memory’—in the sense of a series of events that occur in order, in which there is some respect paid to cause and effect, proceeding more or less in real time—that doesn’t start ’til Mars. Erasmo’s house on Mount Penglai. Everything before that, the hospital on Luna, the hacienda on Mercury is…blurred. Scene Missing. I remember Severin’s face. Her voice. I remember her laughing. I remember Mariana screaming. I remember the smell of the cacao and the red sea. Why don’t you tell me what happened? That’s what I’m here for.”

Varela studied my face in disbelief. Our masks faced each other, revealing nothing. Clever, that. Perhaps Pluto had hit upon something essential, necessary. Now that I had one, I certainly did not want to take it off, here or anywhere.

Finally, he sighed. “I don’t deal in unvarnished truths. It’s the varnish that counts. That makes it true. Give me enough light and I can do anything. Make you believe anything. Ghosts, fairies, vampires: Just tell me what you want and I can make it real. Just tell me what you want and I’ll make it so it happened.”

He gripped my hand horribly. His nails were long. “You have no idea what I can do. I made you believe in this place. In death and tigers. I have made a planet believe I am their King. Look around: This is the island of the lotus-eaters, and I am the hungriest of all.”

“What about the dead girl? Was there a real girl dying under all those tigers?”

The tiniest sliver of mirth crept into Varela’s voice. “A magician cannot share all his tricks.”

He leapt up, swung round one of the thick pillars of the bed, and slapped the wall. The room seemed to quiver with the force of his mood.