But they were not really islands, and no child born in the Land of Milk and Desire could remember a time when he or she thought they were. For in the sea of Qadesh lived the callowhales, as mysterious as they were magical. The callowhales never said a word nor came out of the water, did not sing like the seals which were not really seals, nor leave their shells behind like the whelks which were not really whelks, nor behave carelessly with their bones like the driftwood that was not really driftwood. And from the time he was so small that he did not know what a lie was, the boy had one secret, silent, singular wish—a wish so secret he never once said it out loud: to see the face of a callowhale.
Now, for a long while, the boy did not know that he had the gift of wishes that never came true. He thought himself no different than any other boy or girl in Adonis. Adonis was the name of the village he had lived in since the beginning of the world, which, in his case, was July the third, when his mother gave birth to him in a cacao-hut with three rooms, while her husband and her midwife held her hands and told her she was doing very well indeed. She named him Anchises, who was the lover of Venus in a very old story.
Anchises was born in the morning, which in the Land of Milk and Desire is the same thing as saying he was born in the springtime, for on that wonderful planet, a day is as long as a year. The world takes as long to move on its murky-vivid golden path round the sun as the whole of the Land of Milk and Desire takes to turn itself around, though Venus manages both of these in two-thirds of the time that Earth takes, the old dawdler. This means that the morning lasts as long as springtime and it is morning for ages and ages; until the bright, glassy, humid summer brings the afternoon; which stretches on and on into the crisp, windy autumnal twilight that seems as though it will never end—until winter brings a night as long and dark as memory.
July the third was a kind year. There was plenty of rain in the morning, and in the afternoon the cacao (which is not really cacao, but a dark, dusty, dizzyingly tall tree that gives fruits which are not really dates and nuts which are not really cashews) produced thickly, the cows (which are not really cows, but four-hearted fern-eating fire-red brutes that give good meat and have reasonably even tempers) chewed cud and grew fat, and the divers brought back many groaning amphorae of milk from the callowhales. In the pale rosy melancholy fall of evening the children gathered so many cacao-nuts and cassowary eggs (which are not really cassowaries, but grumpy, green-blue, gobbling flightless lizard-birds with black marks on their breasts like human hands) that a Nutcake Festival was declared and held every autumn twilight thereafter. Even the interminable winter night was not so cold that anything froze, but not so warm that the plants that needed cold to thrive could not get their healthful midnight sleep.
The Nutcake Festival was the boy’s favourite thing in the world—after his parents, callowhales, and chasing cassowaries until they squawked indignantly and told him he was wicked, wicked! in Mandarin, a language the birds had learned like parrots when the first humans arrived in the Land of Milk and Desire, on account of those first humans being Chinese. (The creatures have stubbornly refused to learn any of the other languages humans enjoy speaking, such as English and Turkish, Anchises’s personal tongues, but at least it all had the enviable result that little children spoke passable Mandarin, albeit with a cassowary’s clipped accent.)
At the conclusion of the Nutcake Festival of Adonis, each of the villagers chose their own glittery, painted egg and a large brown cacao-nut, still in its shell, from a great copper basket at the centre of town. Now, one of the nuts was not really a nut, but an empty shell containing a pretty little ring the same weight as a nut. Whoever drew this shell got to make a wish that was sure to come true, and also got to take home a sweetloaf and a barrel of black beer. The year Anchises was six, he chose the shell with the ring in it, and, holding up the copper ring (too big for even his fattest finger) for all to see, he quite solemnly wished that his parents should love him forever and live forever, too—which is really two wishes, but the villagers let it pass, because that is a very endearing thing to ask.
Anchises did not know yet that his wishes could not come true, that any wish he spoke out loud would echo among the stars and find no home there. And since forever is a long, long time, he did not discover this curse until long after that Nutcake Festival when the salt-sweet sea wind was so full of seal song and good promises.
And in the meantime, he kept on wishing.
The next thing that Anchises wished for was to be just like all the other children in the Land of Milk and Desire. Many children wish for something like that—not to stand out or be strange among others, lest one be left alone and abandoned when everyone else has gone home to rosy windows, to full arms and plates. Anchises wished this because other boys in his class liked to make fun of him for being dark skinned and for drawing callowhales in the margins of his books, their delicate fronds flowing all around the paragraphs in precise, complicated patterns like small labyrinths, the swollen gas bladders that bore the all-important callowmilk hanging off the corners of his lessons on the settlement of the Land of Milk and Desire by the Four Founding Nations. But as soon as the wish left Anchises’s mouth, it began the work of not coming true.
He grew tall first of all the boys in his class, sitting in his desk uncomfortably like a carrot ripened too soon. And he began to grow very beautiful, with high, broad cheekbones and brooding, dark eyes, with shining hair that fell just so, no matter how hard he tried to leave it messy and uncombed. Soon the parents of the other children began to talk of him leaving the Land of Milk and Desire for some other, more civilized, more cosmopolitan, less out-of-the-way place, such as the Country of Seeing and Being Seen or the Land of Wild Rancheros, or even Home (which was not really the home of anyone Anchises knew—in fact, most of the bakers and divers and packers and dairymen he said hello to every day had never seen the place they called Home, which was really the fertile, faraway, foreign world where their grandparents and great-grandparents had been born). Surely a boy with his face could become famous if only he were living someplace where folk appreciated more refined things than milk and desire. But Anchises wished to stay in Adonis by the shores of the Qadesh forever, to be a diver like his mother and father, and to one day bring children of his own to the Nutcake Festival.
Whether he wished for big things or little things, Anchises was thwarted. When he wished for a diver’s bell of his very own for Christmas, he received a bicycle with a horn and a case of terrible eczema that meant he could not even put his poor, peeling toe in the red Qadesh for the rest of the night. When a girl in his class, who wore a black ponytail and loved cassowaries so much she could hardly bring herself to speak English at all, grew sick with scarlet fever (which is not really scarlet fever, but a horrible, heedless, haemorrhagic virus that occasionally strikes delicate children in the Land of Milk and Desire), Anchises wished fervently that she should get well. He loved her a little for the softness of her voice and the thickness of her ponytail, but the girl died quickly in a lonely ward in White Peony Station, the great electric city where all the doctors lived. Anchises wept on his cacao-bark bed for days upon days, wishing to the red rafters that he could die with his friend and live in heaven with her and a hundred cassowaries and a hundred callowhales all singing together in perfect Mandarin.