“I wasn’t anything until Saturn. A purveyor of cheap tricks. But I learned. I learned the lantern trade. A trick of the light, boy, just a trick of the light. Everything in creation is just a trick of the light—the only difference between heaven and hell is who’s running those lights, who’s got the switch, who knows the cues.” Varela turned and stomped on the hearth, the night table, the lovely little secretary on which I’d written my previous entries. They crumpled like drywall and ash, no more mahogany and metal and lacquer than my own flesh. “A couple of times Severin got up there with me, played my girl in the box. She looked up at me with trust as complete as a promise. You can’t even imagine. You think she’s yours because she let you play the urchin in some miserable B-plot scene, but she isn’t yours—you never even knew her; she’s just a face to you. I saw that face under my hands in a box like a coffin; I saw her understand totally that I would never hurt her, that I would always protect her. And I saw that face go under a diving bell with that same expression, not a twitch of the mouth or slant of the eye different. But what she trusted wasn’t me, wasn’t Erasmo, wasn’t Amandine or Mariana or any of us who had kept her whole on every planet we visited. No, she trusted…Venus. The Qadesh. Her own fucking specialness. And look what happened.”
I had drawn myself up into a corner of the room near the curtained bathroom door that concealed Cythera. I could not see how to get out, past his rampage, to anywhere safer. I summoned up a whisper: “What happened? What did happen?”
“Nothing! Nothing! She was nothing, and nothing happened. Nothing is happening. Nothing is all that ever happens. You look at this place and see a palace: elephants; griffins; a Ferris wheel; lights, lights, everywhere. You look at a masked girl screaming and think she’s dead. I tell you this is the island of the lotus-eaters, and it never occurs to you to stop eating the lotus.” Varela overturned a plate of infanta flowers, their petals already curling brown. “You see everything in such plain terms. You and her and nothing else. I’m an extra in your story. Well, you’re an extra in mine, boy. A punter picking cards out of the rigged deck I offer. The thing about a magic trick is that you have to play fair. You show the audience everything you’re going to do before you do it. You tell them to their faces that you’re going to lie to them. You show them the tools—see how they shine! You show them the girl—see how innocent and lovely she looks in her spangled costume! You show them the knives. You say: I am going to cut her in half and you are going to applaud. And then you keep your promise. If you’re any good, the shock is worse because they knew it was coming, but no one ever believes a man on a stage.”
Varela turned and punched through the polished ebony wall—it crackled away beneath his fist like the sugared crust on a French custard.
“Yet you believe her. Her! You look at her pretty little face on the screen emoting and stuttering and blushing and contemplating her rich girl’s life, and you think there wasn’t a script out of frame at her feet, rewritten to an inch of its life, every rewrite thatched in on coloured papers to keep it straight. Oh, are we on the red pages today, where Severin is a rebel and a champion of truth? Or blue, where she cries about her mothers for thirty minutes? Or green, where the lady who’s never wanted for a thing in her life whines about how much someone else has to pay for her to speak on camera? It was a rainbow by the end, every movie she ever made. And you think it’s real, that Venus was any different. That the heart of that girl wasn’t always an empty goddamned soundstage, and her soul wasn’t a hack-job screenplay with half the pages torn out and floating down the length of the solar system. What happened to her? The same thing that happens to any bad script: Too many people get their hands on it, trying to fix it, ’til it turns into nothing—nothing; not a trick, not a twist ending, just a girl bleeding out in a box. There’s no artistry to that. You can’t cram artistry into it, no matter how hard you try. She’s just a dead girl.”
“That’s not an answer. Did you kill her? Tell me!”
He calmed himself, assessing the wreckage of the room, the torn cardboard and shattered coloured lights and crepe tapestries. I knew he was right, that he was showing me his trick, but the infanta had so addled my senses that even amid the trash heap of the ochre bedroom, everything I saw was still limned with light, with richness, an afterimage of opulence, ghosts in the architecture.
“Listen, boy—and look! Behold my beautiful assistant strapped to the wheel! Vulnerable, tender, entirely within my power! See how the light catches her jewelled bodice like a burst of starlight. We landed on Venus with no complications. Transport from the International Station to Adonis took two weeks. Before your very eyes, I shall drive five knives into her unblemished body! You see the knives are sharp; I do not deceive you—I’ve cut my own finger with their points: one, two, three, four, five!
“We arrived on site and set up camp. We found you on the first day of scouting. I had my light meters and she had George, but she hadn’t intended to shoot anything that day. You were extremely anaemic and dehydrated. We fed you and washed you and Severin took charge of you like a pet. Now the wheel starts to spin! Her sequins dazzle! Her cries arouse! The first knife—ah, direct hit in the left shoulder! See how she bleeds!
“The angels first appeared that night. Seraphim, you understand? Not frilly angels with blousy pink wings and haloes like wedding rings. These ones had wheels full of eyes and voices like the noise of the deep. We poor fools! We thought it was equipment, feedback. All that expensive sound shit nobody needs but Severin just insisted on. Mariana was the only one who could make those machines heel, but even she was new to it; she’d never gotten to work with anything that high-end before. We thought the whining, the thrumming, that horrible, horrible vibrating, was Mariana’s problem. Ignore it, ignore it, just go to sleep.” He covered his face with his hands for a moment, but snapped up again, his mask barely concealing the livid excitement in his quivering body. “Observe the flight path of the second knife: I’ve sunk it in the right shoulder, perfectly parallel to the first—what artistry! What skill!