Radiance

[SEVERIN rolls her eyes in disgust and runs her hand through bobbed hair full of split ends and static, scratching the back of her head, bashful. She pulls her knees up under her chin and watches the camera watching her. She peels a slice of af-yun from her ball and places it on her tongue like a Eucharist. A shower of ice shimmers outside the porthole ringing her head: a saint’s corona. The rest of her words play over exterior shots of the ice road intercut with old footage in which she is just leaving the frame: ice crystals; a girl running out the door of a soundstage; snowy seeds and pebbles; the back of her head as she burrows into a heap of costumes; frozen boulders, colliding and breaking apart, fracturing, bursting, tumbling through the dark. The Swaddling Clothes had to be kitted out prelaunch: fore, aft, two starboard and two portside cameras, each globed in a protective plasto-crystal lantern. The lantern warps the image slightly, fisheyes it so that we seem to see as we do when just waking: blurry at the edges, soft with frost and dust, only the centre of vision perfectly, painfully clear.

The flotsam dissolves to show their passage through the asteroid belt, never an easy slalom. Other ships pass by in the Orient Express, the ice road, the traffic jam of heaven, nearly clipping the corners of the swift, silent reef around them, sometimes just barrelling through and hoping for the best, streaming on undaunted, with dents buckling their hulls.]

SEVERIN (V.O.)

God, when I record sound, I feel so alive. I feel excited about my work. I feel like Ada Lop when she first crushed a hundred little capsules of black paint against her breast. I feel ugly. I feel real. My voice is raspy and kicks around a low tenor from the af-yun. The dryness of our recycled air kicks it down a note or two from true and makes it squeak when it should flow on. It’s not a leading lady’s voice.

But it’s mine.

And fuck Uncle Freddy if he thinks he can keep me quiet.

Well, once upon a time I was a baby. Everybody was, but no one remembers themselves as babies. There is some line in the sand, some pole vault of sentience over which we suddenly begin to learn the trick of memory. It’s not innate—I don’t think so, at least. I think if you left a baby alone it would grow up on the crest of now, experiencing time like a lion: only this instant, only the hunt and the blood and the cubs and the mating and the long savannah full of prey. Nothing comes before you sink your teeth into skin and meat and marrow. Nothing will come after. Everything is always happening for the first time.

But what baby ever got left alone?

Not me, if that’s what you’re thinking.

I hate talking about how I was born. Obviously I don’t remember it. It’s a story that’s been told to me. We all start out with this lie. Our parents tell us the story of our beginning and they have total control of it. Over the years they change it—they know they’ve changed it, and we know they’ve changed it, but we just let them. They massage the details to reflect who we are now, so that there will be a sense to it: You are this because that. We gave you a blanket with birdies on it and now you’re a pilot, how lovely! All so that we think of ourselves as being in…not just a story, but a good story. One written by someone in full command of their craft. Someone who abides by the contract with the audience, even if the audience is us. Everyone loves a System. Everyone relaxes.

In my case, this is the literal truth. I have been an audience to my own life. I can verify most of the events because I have watched them happen on film. I am told that the first time I saw my father without a camera held up to his eye I shrieked with terror and confusion and would not be consoled. His camera was his household god: Clara, an Edison Model B II handheld 35 mm, painted pearl-white with silver inlay and a walnut tripod. Even when more elegant, lighter, less cumbersome cameras flooded the market, old Percy just took Clara’s guts and transplanted them into a new, sleeker casing, or vice versa. These days there’s probably nothing left of the original girl but a bit of glass and polish, but it’s still Clara to him. The only woman he was ever faithful to.