Honestly, Ada Lop was the best interviewer I ever met. She got you off your guard. She asked things nobody asked. You never got to know her, but she’d get every last drop out of you and in her cup. I always wear her wedding ring when I interview somebody. It has a black amber stone in it with a golden flaw, like an eye. And she did exactly as I asked. Whatever my father failed to do, she picked up; taught me how to fix a cannon and do my own taxes and do a perfect plié and that to perform, to really perform, you have to make yourself ugly at some point. Nothing real is pretty, she said. Only a doll is pretty. And a pretty doll drinks out of a tiny cup forever. A woman wants a big cup.
There’s a fairy tale where all the good fairies come to bless a princess and give her something she needs. Beauty, a good singing voice, manners, skill at maths. But they forget to invite one fairy and so she curses the girl to die young and a whole heap of nonsense follows on—I don’t really care about the rest of it, it’s a just lot of overwrought handwringing about who marries who.
Point is, I didn’t have twelve fairies, but I guess I had seven.
[SEVERIN leans into the lens conspiratorially, inviting anyone and everyone into her confidence. Smoke curls around her face.]
I’m thinking of actually putting this stuff in the final cut. Everyone wants to know about my mothers, so why not lay it all out? But then I’d have to start over. From the beginning, because the beginning is where the end gets born. I suppose I could edit it back together so it looks like I started with Clotilde, which means starting with myself, with that morning and that doorstep and that ridiculous blanket. But that wouldn’t be honest. That wouldn’t be real. That would give you the idea that a life is a simple thing to tell, that it’s obvious where to start—BIRTH—and even more obvious where to stop—DEATH. Fade from black to black. I won’t have it. I won’t be one of the hundreds telling you that being alive flows like a story you write consciously, deliberately, full of linear narrative, foreshadowing, repetition, motifs. The emotional beats come down where they should, last as long as they should, end when they should, and that should come from somewhere real and natural, not from the tyranny of the theatre, the utter hegemony of fiction. Why, isn’t living easy? Isn’t it grand? As easy as reading out loud.
No.
If I slice it all up and stitch it back together, you might not understand what I’ve been trying to say all my life: that any story is a lie cunningly told to hide the real world from the poor bastards who live in it. I can’t. I can’t tell you that lie. That’s Dad’s game, and I’ve been sick of playing it since I was four.
If I fixed it so time goes the way you expect, you might come away thinking I know what the hell I’m doing.
So. Act One, Scene One. Arriving shortly after Scene Two but well before the swelling Overture. We’ll get to the trumpets and the timpani when this big bullet fires into Jupiter orbit.
[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.
I began my life as a character in my father’s films. It’s mortifying, really. I appeared one morning as if from nothing. A spontaneous child. A mystery afoot! The commencement of plot! I was, in point of fact, dropped in a literal basket on the actual doorstep of one Percival Unck. A note tied round my neck with a black velvet ribbon, wrapped in swaddling clothes of pewter-coloured satin. Even the wicker basket was silver. And I was, too—I had been prepared to meet my father. My dark hair and dark eyes needed no help, but the rest of me had been painted as welclass="underline" my blue skin tinted as white as death, my lips stained black with greasepaint, even my tiny fingers daubed as pale as a mime. I entered real life as monochromatic as a movie. And as archly, humiliatingly Gothic. I have been assured that the doorbell rang at the stroke of midnight and that there was a thunderstorm.