Radiance

ERASMO: Yes. Three people were dead. We panicked. And we were still out of sync with our own soundtrack. We heard Max reciting Shakespeare to the boy hours after he stopped. Forward and backward. I was securing the gondola in the wind and I could hear Cristabel singing I left my sugar standing in the rain and she melted away…all couched in the static, sunk deep in it, the song a pin down at the bottom of the ocean. Crissy started clawing up her arms with her fingernails. Santiago…well, you must know. The night Severin disappeared, he took one of the machetes and hacked that Type I Ekho Ultra Mic into a hundred vicious pieces and started swallowing them one by one. Konrad stopped him before he finished his bowlful of knives, but Retta had to open up his gut as soon as we got back to White Peony. He was going into shock, bleeding into his stomach, his teeth ground half off, his tongue sliced almost in half. I never heard him speak again. Never saw him blink. He just turned off all over.

We were finished. We could take the kid back to White Peony and get a few more interviews with people who had a cousin’s cousin’s dog in Adonis and we’d have a movie in six months. We could heal. Everything else could be edited in, fixed in post. We had enough film shot on site to make it look like we’d been there for ages. Like we’d been thorough.

CYTHERA: Why do you think Severin went out on that dive? After everything that had happened, everyone she’d lost, why would she go out alone?

ERASMO: She didn’t go out alone. I went with her. I know the cameraman is invisible, but come on. Give me a little credit for existing. Rin decided to go out to the callowhales because we were leaving.

[clears throat]

I’ve had a lot of time. Just…time. Life is long. You come to theories over time, and over time theories become convictions. And it’s my conviction that Severin only went to Venus at all to make that dive. She wanted to see the callowhales. That’s it. The kid, the village, sure. But the callowhales…they’re the only unexplainable thing we found on seventy worlds. She wanted them. Maybe they wanted her. No one wanted her to go, and they all tried—she came out in her mesh suit sporting a shiner that said just how hard Maximo had tried. But I think she made up her mind that night on Neptune when the lights went out. She was going to touch one. She was going to fly through the night and the heavens to the one magical thing in creation and grab onto it for dear life.

You’ve seen the shot. There’s nothing more to a dive than that. You take the boat out and go down. Aylin manned the hoses up top. What I remember isn’t that moment in the red dark, that moment when she was there and then she wasn’t. I’ve seen that happen so many times on film it’s like I don’t even remember it myself anymore. What I remember is the night before.

We were lying on our cot with Anchises between us, for all the world like a family. We were gonna take him home and raise him—we hadn’t talked about it yet, but we were going to. Just like Rin was going to go see the callowhales. She stroked his hair while he slept against her breast and she said, “There used to be a story. A Greek story, so you know it’s good. About three sisters. They were actually the sisters of the Gorgons, too. You know, Medusa. They were called the Graeae. Sometimes they’re painted as beautiful, sometimes as horrible and hideous. They have long white hair and they’re never apart. They have one eye and one tooth between them. They share it. Pop it out of one sister’s socket and into the other. I think about them a lot. I used to dream about them when I was little, when I first read about them. Oh, didn’t I say? Perseus comes along and kills them on his way to killing the Gorgons. That’s how it goes—as soon as there’s anything interesting in Ancient Greece, some arsehole with a magic hat comes along to murder it. I used to dream about it. About the eye. In my dream I was waiting for my father to give it to me. I was blind and cold and I wanted so badly to play with it. And now…and now when I think about it, I think we’re all Graeae. We live in a universe of lenses. We watch and watch. We all share one eye between us, the big black camera iris. We wait for our turn to see what someone else saw on a screen. And then we pass it on. All I’ve ever wanted was just to play with it. I still feel like I’m in that dream, jumping up and trying to grab onto the eye, and I can’t reach it.”

She fell asleep almost before she finished saying I can’t reach it. I watched her. And I could see…little bronze threads on her cheek, tiny fronds, by her hairline, growing like gold veins across her face.

And months later when I touched Anchises’s poor hand, I heard her say it again. One eye. And then giggle like she was three and say oh wow, oh wow oh—and then nothing.