Anchises, Anchises, you’ve come home.
From the Personal Reels of
Percival Alfred Unck
[SEVERIN UNCK stands amid a tangle of cables on the set of The Abduction of Proserpine. Vampire extras mill around her, touching up their makeup, chatting, taking their teeth out to smoke. She is very small, perhaps four or five. She wears a black dress with a black bow and black stockings. Her face is painted deathly white. She looks up at a demonic ice dragon with sword whiskers and icicle teeth, a massive puppet managed by the renowned TALMADGE BRACE and his team. She does not see her Uncle Madge pulling on the puppet’s works. It towers over her. She stares at its tinfoil eyes intently, quietly, hands clasped behind her back. She rocks up on her toes.]
SEVERIN
Did you eat that big old city all up?
[The ice dragon nods solemnly. His lines creak.]
SEVERIN
What a bad thing you are. You ought to be punished.
[The ice dragon nods again. TALMADGE works his lines and pulleys just out of frame, slumping the creature’s snow-puff shoulders in deep shame. He can barely suppress his amusement.]
SEVERIN
Why did you do it? If you were really so keen, I should think you’d have waited till the city fattened up a bit. It couldn’t have filled you up! It was only little.
[TALMADGE cannot answer; the beast will never have a voice, so he had no reason to devise one to match its vast crinoline body.]
SEVERIN
Daddy says the settlers dug too deep and woke the ancient heart of Pluto. But you have wet glue on your nose, so I don’t think you are the ancient heart of Pluto.
[The ice dragon shakes with TALMADGE’S silent laughter. Severin reaches up and wipes away the glue with her thumb. She whispers into the puppet’s huge, glitter-spackled nostril.]
SEVERIN
I forgive you. I get hungry, too.
And the Sea Remembered, Suddenly
(Oxblood Films, 1941, dir. Severin Unck)
(ACCOMPANYING MATERIAL: RECORD 8, SIDE 1, COMMENCE 0:12)
SC1 INT. LOCATION #19 NEPTUNE/ENKI—STORM
OBSERVATION DECK, DAY 671. NIGHT
[29 NOVEMBER, 1939]
[FADE IN on a balcony crusted with salt and electric green coral. Its coils and floral motifs and columns recall the balustrades of New Orleans. Rust-bound lanterns hang on long, Marleyesque chains, casting white-blue light onto the churning cobalt sea that covers the whole of the unspeakably vast surface of Neptune. A semipermeable glass bell encloses the balcony; rain spatters onto the crystal and rolls down, but wisps of marine wind are allowed through—nothing, however, compared to the gales outside, which would murder any human in their path in the space of a thunderclap. The soft, grinding, gentle rumbling of Enki moving through its equatorial circuit underlines every spoken word.]
SEVERIN UNCK
The city of Enki is also a ship, perhaps the greatest ship ever sailed. She circumnavigates her planet once a decade, following a lugubrious echo of the Gulf Stream that flows more or less true, avoiding with grace the white and squalling knot of the mother storm from which all the other cyclones of this world descend. This balcony and thousands like it blister the exterior walls of the Neptunian capital. Whatever else occurs in this city—whatever work, whatever ambition, whatever decadence—its souls always return to these lookouts: a pilgrimage, a comforting hearth, a night watch. They come to see the storm. To stare it down. Whether for an hour or eight—or, in the cases of some old-timers, every moment not spent sleeping or eating—Enki-siders are drawn to this primeval sight of their world contorted, writhing in her constant oceanic distress, to bear witness to the eternal maelstrom that is the ancient heart of Neptune.
[All the camera can see is blue. Monstrous waves lash an indigo sky oppressed by clouds. Whitecaps crest and shatter; shadows of kelp forests the size of Asia skitter and dance. But there is no scale, can be no scale, because there is no land in sight. It could be the Pacific; it could be Lake Geneva. But it is neither. Only when a fishing vessel drifts into frame and, a moment later, the body of some unphylumed leviathan breaks the surface off its portside, geysering the sea into the methane-rich air, is there a moment of sickening understanding. There are cities on Earth smaller than that barnacled beryline beast.]
SEVERIN (V.O)
Enki is a nomad; she follows the tide. There are, of course, other ships on this sea: Manannan, Snegurochka, Ys, Lyonesse, Sequana. But Enki dwarfs them all.
[SEVERIN rests her hand on the balcony rail. Coral crinkles and drifts away under her fingers. She looks exhausted—dark rings around her eyes, a thinness to her skin.]
SEVERIN
Silence is the rarest commodity in Enki. The ear never rests; the engines that roar life into the city call and answer, call and answer, without ceasing.
And yet, from home? Nothing. Though nominally a French colony, Neptune will pass behind the sun tonight, disappearing from radio contact with Earth for an estimated seventy-two years. The voices will stop. The only news will come from lonely ships creeping through the black on the longest of roads. They will not hear any rumbling of war, any rattling of Viennese sabres or English guns. If the government in Paris changes once again, they will learn too late for it to matter much. No one will know whether Tybault will defeat the Invisible Hussar this time, or whether Doctor Gruel will succeed at last in making Vespertine his bride and his victim. It will all happen without us.
I say us. There is, of course, a passenger liner leaving before the lines go dark. A last chance to jump ship for civilization. The truth is, I have not yet decided whether I will be on it. My crew is going home. Tickets in their breast pockets, cabins reserved, champagne already chilling in silver buckets below polished portholes. Mariana, Amandine, Max, Margareta, Santiago, Horace, Konrad. Even my Raz has tired of kicking snowballs around on the frozen arse-end of the universe.
But me? Me, I don’t know. I find myself at the end of this journey I mapped out after the death of dear Uncle Thaddeus—how many uncles have I had? I think every man on the moon has been my fuddy old uncle at one time or another. I suppose it has all been a funeral march to outlast the dreams of Hades. Saturn back to Mars and out again to Neptune. And I do not know if I am done. There is always somewhere further to go. Until there isn’t.
[PAN LEFT to the warmly lit interior of Enki’s starboard hull. Women in dresses with iridescent hoopskirts wide enough to conceal small armies raise their hands to the glass; rain drives down across their dry palms. The women, men, and children all wear shades of blue and green, sea shades, full-fathom colours, the turquoise of each rosette, the emerald of each brooch painted onto the film frame by frame, as Virago Studios did in the old days, as Clotilde Charbonneau did. The clothes were chosen for the evening’s celebration: old-fashioned, seventy years out of date, dug out of grandmothers’ trousseaus and costume trunks, just as their own clothes, made new today, will be seventy years past la mode when Earth comes round again. Chandeliers dangle like seabirds and music can be heard, harpsichords and strings and drums made tinny by the thickness of glass.]