Radiance

She told me about it in the darkroom while we watched some handheld stuff from that first night. We saw Carolyne (she was our wire walker) and Horace snuggling by the fountain—big brass Aphrodite, who else. We hadn’t even known they were an item till that moment. We watched ourselves jumping around drunk and grinning for the camera. And we smiled at ourselves smiling, Crissy and me. Our first smiles since it happened. A camera collects secrets. It collects people and holds them prisoner forever. And that’s when Cristabel told me about Ghanim and how he quoted Chaucer to her—in Middle English, no less—while they made love, all glottal stops and breathy German consonants, and how she couldn’t look at him now because if she looked he’d come to her quarters, and if he came, he’d ask, and if he asked, she couldn’t answer, so that was that over, she guessed.

Severin and I had Room 35. I remember it had this huge fuck-off mirror, half-frosted over with moss and dried rain, and I watched Severin in it while she straddled me on our sticky, lichen-y bed in a black kimono; drank the most bog-awful grappa that has ever touched my lips; and sang “Callisto Lullaby” for me. Just for me. This is what you want to hear, right? Details? We kissed half the night—we could have kissed for England, her and me. We could kiss so long we’d forget to fuck. We didn’t forget that night, and I’m glad. We listened to Idun Avenue and the drunks singing “Flower of Scotland” and “La Marseillaise” and some Chinese one we didn’t know, listened to the shops closing up, to the rattling percussion of pachinko parlour doors opening and shutting, to trucks peeling down the road too fast, to little curls and wisps and crumbs of music floating out of dance halls, to the constant trickle of rain into the gutters and grates and sloughs and potholes, to last call. We talked about the things you talk about when it’s two a.m. and you’re naked and you’ve known the person you’re naked with so long you could draw their face blind in the dark. About Clotilde, which other people always found strange, but never troubled us. We weren’t related. Aren’t. Her father married half the Moon and fucked the other half senseless. She’d have to go pretty far to find someone whose mum had never stopped round for supper. Clotilde connected us, from the beginning, like a story with foreshadowing. We talked about being children on the Moon, about the hole-in-the-wall curry place with the turquoise tureens in the Plantagenet Quarter back home, about the night on Phobos when we finally got together and how good it was. We both wore black and red, because we couldn’t live without dressing the set first. I tasted funny to her at first, and she thought maybe it wouldn’t last. A person has to taste right if you’re gonna stick around. I joked that she just didn’t like the taste of an honest man. I’d made that joke many times. It wasn’t even a joke anymore so much as a refrain. And then she said: You’re not that honest, because that’s the next line.

You know the first time we said I love you it got all banged up? She took a beating in that warehouse in Kallisti Square. I was patching her up in an emergency medical bay. Blood everywhere, both of us faint from hunger and adrenaline. One of her teeth didn’t look like it was going to make it. I tied my shirt around her head to soak up the worst of it. She said: “He kicked me right in the face,” at just the same second as I said, “I love you.” She laughed and she kissed me. The Kallisti water tower exploded. And after that, we always said “I love you right in the face.” And bit by bit, that’s how a couple gets pounded together out of two busted people.

Christ, there are things I miss and there are things I miss, but I can hear her voice now just as clearly as when the rain fell through our talking and the moss closed in as quiet and soft as falling asleep.

Am I making you uncomfortable?

CYTHERA: You’re certainly a very…frank man.

ERASMO: Good. Good. That makes me happy. I want to keep going, if I can make you squirm. If I can make you embarrassed to listen to me, because you should be.

I woke up like a shot at four in the morning. Severin was snoring away next to me. Only she didn’t quite snore. She made a sound with her jaw like a click, and then a sigh, and then a little soft choke. The first time I heard it I thought she was dying. Anyway. You know how sometimes you wake up and you’re certain as the grave that’s it for you and sleep? That’s how it was. So I got up and went down to the lounge. A proper hotel lounge never shuts, and I made sure the Waldorf was a proper hotel when Logistics was booking everything. I went down to the lounge. I wanted a pink lady. They’re my favourite. Do you have a favourite?

CYTHERA: Bourbon neat.