Well, I began with her. And she began on-screen.
I hunt for likenesses between us. For places where, laid over one another, our topographies would match. Capital to capital. River to river. There aren’t many. I try to make more, but she’s done, finished, finite, and I am not.
And what about me? I don’t remember a damn thing before the age of ten. A man is nothing but memory, and by that count I was born on a burnt grass shore with a woman grabbing my wrist so hard she bruised me, a neat line of her four fingers on my skin, over my pulse, over my heart. A flash of light: fiat fucking lux. The smoky, acidic smell of the sea. Hot, pollen-drunk wind. A whirr and a clatter. I’ve been recorded since I was born. So has she. That great black eye got us good. I was born the minute I was noticed.
Before that there’s just a calm pre-credits wipe of darkness, nothing into nothing. There’s footage of my entrance; there’s footage of her exit. We’re each missing the other half. I only know my parents’ names because people who oughta know wrote them down for me. Her father sat astride her life. His name is her name. What luxury.
The fifty-foot woman winks. To no one. To me. To the hatless man and his orally-fixated buddy. To the Astor and Te Deum and the mermaids with their miniature Titans. But really to a solemn goatee’d bellhop in a blue cap who dutifully dropped the needle on an old phonograph so that we could all hear her deep yet somehow nasal voice echo loudly—too loud, too loud—in the theatre.
It hurt our ears. Everyone winced, straightened up. Hatless got his jollies interruptus. We all hated it. We all squirmed.
Nobody makes talkies anymore.
I could stand her face, but her voice did me to pieces. I heard her say the first words of her first movie and her first words to me all at once; and I’ve taken punches, I’ve taken gut stabs, but I couldn’t take that.
I used to look up at night and dream of the solar system.
Hey, little guy. It’s good now. It’s fine now. I’m here. My name’s Severin. You can call me Rinny if you like that better.
I stumbled out of the Astor and onto Caroline Street, into the blue fog and the smell and the wet, snowed-in trash. Into the bells bonging out my missed midnight appointment. Coughing, crying like a damned widow, wiping sour, half-digested port wine slime from my mouth. The glowglass alley pulsed grape to apricot. Juliet and Titania, coupla old crescent hags, judged me from the heavens. Umbriel sloshed up slowly under the girls, the lights of Wunda coming on across its blasted moonface. All those moons. The sky over Uranus always looked like a bloody traffic jam to me. Venus doesn’t have any moons. The sky is unbroken. Perfect. A sky that can’t look back.
Tears froze on my face. Very unmanly. But of the things I’ve lost, manliness left first and easiest.
Radiant Car’s a horror flick, is what it is. An old Gothic screamer with tits just barely kept in check by veils and corsets and the rating system. A girl went into the dark and met a monster there. So simple. So easy to fill the seats with that kind of thing.
So easy to empty them with the truth.
I wasn’t even allowed to enjoy my misery. Caroline Street gagged on the mobs getting riled up for All-Clear. Nothing but elbows and eyeshadow. A car pulled up alongside me, a gorgeous red Talbot that would part the seas anywhere else, but the All-Clear has no respect for vehicles. See, old buddy Uranus, he got a day as short as your mama’s skirt. Humans don’t like it. Keeping a seventeen-hour day jitters you up like bad cocaine. Feels like you’ve got engines behind your eyes burning out your fluids. Like you carried the sun with you all this way, and lord but the old bitch hates being ignored. At this distance, she’s not much more than a foggy streetlight through the snow and the fumes. Jupiter’s bigger and badder and brighter. But the lady does like things done her way. Thing of it is, seven hours is just too big a gap to be able to make it up with a nice Martian nap at 12:01 Greenwich. You notice seven hours when they don’t come home from the bar. So they built us a fake day out of the outworld twilight that goes on forever. Ignore that little splatter of phlegm in the sky; the glowglass will tell the hours: bright in the morning, dim in the evening. If you know what’s good for you, you let your neon tenement tuck you in with a cup of warm shut-your-mouth at 2100 sharp. These All-Clear kids, though. They sleep the short sleep. In their clock-addled heads, they’ve gone Uranian. They keep the seventeen-hour day, sped up, catnapping, caffeine-surfing, cramming their living and sleeping and joyful noise into a horrid squeezebox. And at 1700, that no-man’s time in which their midnight ticks over while the rest of the world grinds home to supper, they begin their dalliance with the Uranian clock. They’re all dead asleep by the time most of TD is tucking into the evening’s drink, and up again for work and wickedness when everybody’s babies are snoozing away the lightless night. The All-Clear rings out at midnight proper, midnight mean time, and in their dawn and our dead of nothing, they have their church. God is in the overlap, they say.
And when the All-Clear sounds, Bedlam would call it madness. They dance this no-skill-required rabbit-jumping dance and shove stimulants up their noses, down their throats, in their arms, under their tongues, anywhere a fix will fit. They wear big glittery fish-fin masks dripping with snowmelt and those wizened little glass pearls that fall out of the sky in the gorgeous, higrav spring monsoons. Rainpearls. Or so I hear. I arrived in winter, and it’ll be another twenty years before I see the crocus shrimp mass on King George’s Sea.
I tried the All-Clear when I first got here. You always gotta try the local madness once. It gave me a heart murmur. There’s an awful little pantomime right before it ends. Like one of those old Punch and Judy shows. The whole thing is pretty low-rent, but religion usually is. Takes some piss-poor manners to worship a planet. It’s already doing everything it can for you.
I didn’t want any part of their hallelujah, or, for that matter, anything the long, lurid, teardrop-shaped Talbot had to offer. I was nowhere near far gone enough for whoring, and I had no scratch for purchasing distraction. I turned up my collar. Houndstooth light stung my eyes like snow. I made a sharp left onto Tethys Road. A dark spit of nothing, is Tethys. All back doors, no front. Strictly corridor action, running from Caroline Street to Epimetheus ’Vard. But that bastard car ground on in after me over the snow. Its headlights swung round, pink whips against my back. I knew the drilclass="underline" Sooner or later they’d get bored with lumbering after me in first gear and step on it, swing wide, roll down the window, and out would come the girl with rouge on her face and eyes practically spinning a merry-go-round with af-yun and King George’s Fumes. She’d offer to buy me or sell herself for the men in the backseat. I’ve lived in Te Deum for seventeen months of winter. It is a fuck of a long block I’ve been around.
That’s about how it happened. Before I could disappear into the All-Clear crowds on Epi ’Vard, the Talbot swung out in front and cut me off. Just sat there glowing like a hot coal. So dark a red as to be black, so bright a black as to be red. Steam coming off the cherry hood, fog on the smoky windows. Christ, it had to be so warm in there. Warm enough to sleep. Warm enough to lay down naked with that long leather bench seat—leather from a cow, not squeaky brownfalse imitation—under your bum. The driver kept the engine running. Mocking me. Even in this snap I bet you could fry a ham on that hood. Raise a Miranda pig in the boot, let it run wild in the acreage of the backseat, slaughter it in the passenger side, and fry it up on the hood.
The window stayed shut. The door swung open and a pair of long, long legs slid out. Legs like a pilgrimage. Silver stockings, pumpkin pumps, suit green as the salads I haven’t seen in years. Her scarf was a scrap of silk the same colour as the Talbot, disappearing down her cleavage—which, I’m happy to report, was both substantial and on display. The dame didn’t even get out. She leaned her elbows on her knees and plunked her sweet little face down into her hands. She was tall, but delicately built, like a moth. She had rouge on, but not a slut brand. The expensive stuff. The kind that comes in colours with names. The kind that comes from home. From Earth, where you can make anything as easy as tripping and falling. Lipstick to match her shoes. Eyelashes as long as my thumb, tipped in a soft fuchsia fringe. Nails to match her big violet eyes. I bet she had that shade done up special—the nails or the eyes; I wouldn’t know which. A classy piece by any measure. She smelled like accounts receivable. She looked like old money. The kind of money that can ship a Talbot all the way to the outer planets without chipping the paint.