Radiance

And that’s the end of it—nothing. I didn’t hit her over the head with a tripod and dump her body, though I heard that said plenty once we got back. Always suspect the boyfriend. Maximo didn’t bury her in the delta. I loved a girl and she left me. I don’t know where she is. I want to know. I want to know. But I was there and I still don’t.

Maybe I don’t get to see the end of this show. Maybe I just live out the rest of my days between reels. Maybe Anchises will figure it out. Maybe not. Who knows, maybe death is the darkroom where you get to see it all like it was supposed to come out. Bright and crisp and clean. No shadows unless you want them. But it ended like it started, which I guess is how you know it’s an Unck story. Suckers for symmetry, those two. I left my sugar standing in the rain and she melted away.

CYTHERA: Is that all?

ERASMO: Probably not. I’ll ring if I think of anything new.

CYTHERA: Oxblood will pay for resettlement anywhere you like, Erasmo. And you’ll always have a job with us if you decide to come home.

ERASMO: I’m thinking Mars. Mount Penglai. I was born near there, you know. Didn’t mean to come into this life anywhere but the Moon. Still seems strange that I didn’t pull it off. Mum and Dad were working on Kangaroo Khan, and whoops—congratulations on your bouncing baby Martian.

CYTHERA: Mount Penglai is lovely. The mangoes are amazing.

ERASMO: You’ll let me take him, won’t you? [Cythera says nothing.] He’s worth nothing to you. He’s just a kid. He’s going to be bent into all kinds of unpleasant shapes by this. He needs a father. Or at least someone who can un-pretzel him from time to time. Trust me, you don’t want him. I do. Let me give him a childhood.

CYTHERA: We’ll consider it. May I…may I ask? You wear a wedding ring, but on the wrong hand. Indulge my curiosity?

ERASMO: She didn’t want to get married. Doesn’t mean I wasn’t her husband.

CYTHERA: [pause] Can I get you a last coffee before you go?

Christmas Card,

mailed to C. Brass c/o Oxblood Films,

Yemaya, December 1952

To be included in the manuscript of Erasmo St. John’s memoir, The Sound of a Voice That Is Still, scheduled for publication Spring 1959 (Random House)

Front:

SNOW HO HO!

HAPPY CHRISTMAS

FROM MERRY MARS!

Inside:

Hiya, Cyth,

Well, he’s gone to seek his fortune, and I’m drinking alone at Yuletide with no one else to write to.

I don’t know if he ever loved me, and I don’t know what the thing in his hand means. It never gave him any pain that I could tell. I don’t know if it ever changed much; he started wearing gloves when we were living in New York (what a cock-up that was! Six months of yelling at each other in brownstones neither of us will be able to fish out of the back drawer again) and never took them off. Wouldn’t show me the hand any more than a boy shows himself naked to his father past a certain age.

Not that I was his father. I wanted to be. I did. It would have been…well, there’s no point in dressing it up. It would have been like Rin and me had a kid together. That’s not fair, it’s not a fair thing to put on a traumatized little boy, but we all put something too heavy on our babies.

It moved in his sleep. I remember that, in the days before the gloves. It moved in his sleep like it was underwater. Like it was drifting in a current, a tide that you couldn’t see. I touched it once. He was sick, really sick—he was sick a lot back then. Nowhere sat right with him ’til Mars. He reached out to me in his fever, and he did that seldom enough. I held him tight and took his hands and I could feel it, moving against my palm, like it was looking for something. Maybe purchase, maybe a way out, maybe it couldn’t breathe with my palm against it. But its little tendrils touched my skin and that is the only time I have heard Severin Unck’s voice since the Clamshell made moonfall. I never told him. How do you tell a kid that?

Cristabel got her Russian citizenship six or seven years ago and came out to our little red planet. I bet you saw that coming, didn’t you? She can play the bassoon. I didn’t really think anyone played the bassoon anymore. It’s an instrument out of books and poems and grandads manning the watch on the prow of lonely, starlit ships. It sounds plaintive and kind in the desert dark.

The plain fact is, after everything that happened in Adonis, I could never love anyone who wasn’t there.

I might try to write a book. We’ll see. I’m not much of a writer. Anything more than a title card seems wasteful to me. I spent the best years of my life under the law of silent flicks: Show everything, because you can’t say much. But I think I might give it a go.