Radiance

Now. Gaze, behold, witness: A third projector judders on, seeing but unseen, hidden in the curtains. It fires its beam at the laughing couple, the shaving cream, the razor that once belonged to a bassoon-loving grandfather. Image over image over flesh. The woman seems to step out of her lover’s arms and into a ballroom, becoming suddenly a pouting, sour-faced little girl practically drowning in the stiff lace and crinoline of one of those old Gothics we love so well—would you care to name it, sir? You know so much; I will not believe for a moment you do not recognize The Spectre of Mare Nubium, the marvellously morbid masterwork that earned its director, Percival Unck, his first Academy Award. Your fine chest sports the classic ballroom sequence, wherein the blood-soaked villain receives her much-deserved comeuppance. The little girl can be seen crouching miserably near the rice-wine fountain, chewing her fingers and spitting the nails at the whirling dancers. The grand dresses of the waltzing ghosts pass over her face like veils.

Please, ladies and gentlemen! Your protestations destroy the dark quiet of our little universe. I can see you leap quite out of your skin. You must be prepared for these interruptions, invasions, intersections. They are necessary. They are the exhalations of the dead. Humans do not proceed in an orderly fashion from one scene to the next. Memory lies underneath happenstance; hope and dread sprawl on top. Our days and nights are their endless orgies.

Now, listen: Our phonograph scratches up a man’s voice and a small girl’s, the very girl who at this moment is flickering silver and black on your thighs, sinking her face into balled fists under the murderous Clarena Schirm’s banquet table.

“How many beginnings can a story have, Daddy?”

The man chuckles. It is a nice chuckle, tobacco-velvet, a chuckle that says: Oh, the questions my kid asks!

“As many as you can eat, my lamb. But only one ending. Or maybe it’s the other way around: one beginning but a whole Easter basket of endings.”

“Papa, don’t be silly,” the child admonishes in a voice accustomed to getting its way. “A story has to start somewhere. And then it has to end somewhere. That’s the whole point. That’s how it is in real life.”