Radiance

Point is, the Greeks had their heads on straight: If you’re going to bother beginning at all, you have to throw up a believable theory of origin or it’s got no anchor. No root. Why four seasons? Why seasons at all? Why just the one moon? Why green trees and red roses and not the other way round? Why death and time and is there such a thing as fate, and what, percentage-wise, is the efficacy of human sacrifice? You have to answer those questions before anyone comes on stage, you know. In even the littlest story about a…let’s say a housewife in an aqua-blue print dress and matching apron making a roast, only she’s planning to kill herself later, obviously, or maybe her husband—otherwise why should we care one soggy whit about the vagaries of beef at temperature? At any rate, someone’s got to die. That’s why she’s wearing aqua. Blue invariably means death. Even in poor lost Millicent’s kitchen—yes, Vince, her name is clearly Millicent, do try to keep up! Before she even pricks the meat to slide the garlic in, it’s all been arranged for her. Does death do its thing, in this universe? Yes. Time, in Millicent World? Progressing one second per second, twenty-four and seven and three hundred-odd. Seasons: four. The moon: intact, in orbit, in phase. Green elm, red peony. Seventeen per cent sacrificial success rate under ideal conditions, results not peer reviewed. And of course in stories there is always fate. It goes by the name of foreshadowing and it is the emperor of everybody. Given all these parameters, husband Humphrey should be dead by dessert. See? It’s only that the answers in most stories are boring because they are supplied by the real world rather than—well, something better. Something more stimulating. Sit down with the Greeks and the Romans, and the boring answers get more interesting. Seasons because a girl and a crocus. Death because a girl and an apple. The moon because a girl keeps driving her daft chariot into the sea.

It’s all down to girls, one way or another.

[indistinct]

All right, all right, I’m boring you. I’m babbling. I haven’t made up my mind about this one yet. I don’t even know how to go about making up my mind. I would rather not have death. I would rather that. Time is terribly tawdry, as well. And let’s see what we can do about that percentage.

Let us begin properly. This is what I’m thinking: She came from nowhere. She came from the sea. She came from the dark. The Earth fucked the Sky and made a hundred children—or maybe just nine. Mercury, Venus, Mars, the whole ragtag family. And the nine had their own kids: Phobos, Triton, Io, Charon, all the brats. Maybe we can do this like we used to do, way back when. You know I can never quit Vaudeville. Toga up the main cast as the planets and the moons: rings around Saturn’s head; Venus dripping wet; Mars in a cowboy getup; Neptune, I don’t know, up on strings like the levitators, maybe? Stupid on af-yun, all heroin eyes and running makeup. Stand them in tableaux against a spangly cloth backdrop. Then they can start killing each other. It’ll be Shakespearian. Barking big knives. Buckets of blood. Blood and callowmilk.

So the little bastards stab the Sky to death and throw the spangles into the sea, and they turn into the title, and that’s where she comes from. Out of the words and the water. She can rise up on a clamshell naked and covered with blood and milk. That’s what birth looks like, after all. Naked, with a myrtle branch in one hand and a camera in the other.

I have no ideas for casting. Someone new. I don’t want anyone whose face has been someone else. I’ll have to call Richard. He’ll find somebody fresh off the rocket who looks like her. He always knows what I want. So, whoever she is, she’ll look through the camera in her hand at the camera in my hand. The waves hit her and wash her clean. Mostly clean. Leave a mark on her face. Like a wound. Presto: Birth of Venus.

[indistinct]

Yes. Severin’s birth, too. No difference.

But that’s the last time we use her name, Vince. What’s our rule? You can’t name the subject. You can’t say the word death in a murder mystery after the body gets discovered; no more than you can say love in a romantic flick until the end, until it’s a bullet firing, the bullet you’ve had on deck since the scene-one-take-one clapper smacked its lips. You circle it. You stalk it. But you don’t call it out.

MAKO: But everyone will know who it’s meant to be. What’s the point of being coy?

UNCK: Coyness is what makes it art, darling. Otherwise…otherwise it’s nothing but a funeral.