The elders kept the name of the film secret, so that everyone who was not an elder could have the pleasure of finding out what it was just as the cider was going to their heads and the world seemed very fine indeed. They had debated long and hard over which movie to request from White Peony Station—a movie the children would like, but that would not bore the adults too much, that would neither be too sad nor too cloying, too pretentious nor too stupid. Only five people in Adonis had ever seen a movie before, and all in their youths, when they had first arrived in White Peony Station, or Aizen-Myo Sector, or Judgment-of-Paris, or even back Home. Adonis was normally too small and busy for such diversions. Finally, they settled upon a film by Percival Unck, whose name the old timers remembered blazing from the marquees of those White Peony and Aizen-Myo movie halls. This film was called The Girl Who Made Fate Laugh, and it had an octopus in it.
Little Doctor Callow, along with his mother, who was pregnant again, and his father, and his baby sister, and the twins, thrilled with anticipation. Anchises ranged far and wide into the hills to find cacao-husks that rattled with seeds inside. He put his pole into the water off of the swimming dock, caught four lovely fish, and smoked the wine-dark trout himself. He chased cassowaries off of their nests, ignoring their squawks and caterwauling, bolting from a hen hollering Cao ni nainai de, ni ge wangbadan gouzazhong! Sizei, ni geiwo gun huilai, wo nie si nige guisunzi!, and carried home as many eggs as he could in an apron made from the bottom of his school shirt. All the other children did their share, wandering the jungle paths in the autumn dusk, giggling in the gloaming, chasing after wild piglets (which are not really piglets, but skinny, six-legged, spicy-tasting black miniature deer, with long searching snouts and longer teeth). Anchises tried to outdo them all, combing the beach for live scallops (which are not really scallops, and taste like slightly bitter mangoes), and clams (which are not really clams, but squirting, sallow, shell-dwelling molluscs whose meat is poisonous except in autumn).
After a long day of digging up clams-which-were-not-really-clams and prying whelks-which-were-not-really-whelks free of rocks, Anchises saw something on the magenta-mauve sand. It stopped him in his steps. It stopped his breath in his chest. He knew what it was faster than he would have known his own face in a mirror. He had drawn a picture of one a long time ago, had seen it so clearly in his head it had been like a photograph.
It was a callowhale frond.
The thing was the colour of copper and as long as three fishing boats. It lay on the beach like a dead serpent out of the corner of some old map. Fine, long hairs and thick viney stalks draped off of it, and each hair and stalk forked off into fringes like coral or ferns. Flaps of skin like flowers and leaves, silvery and mossy like verdigris, flopped helplessly in the foamy, calm water. A huge gas bladder, drained and wrinkled and empty, was sinking slowly into the wet sand. Anchises thought he could see dim lights flickering inside it, lights like eyes opening deep beneath the skin of the balloon, if it was really skin. None of the seabirds (which are not really seabirds) or scuttling crabs (which are not really crabs) would come near it.
Anchises stared at the frond for a long time. The lights burst weakly inside it, hot green and searing blue. It was still warm. It was still wet. It smelled like a thousand things at once, so many that he could not sort the stink into its parts in order to say later what it had been like. Its shadow stretched deep and wide.
“Hello,” said Doctor Callow, and in that moment he truly could not recall any other name anyone might have called him in the history of the world. “Hi.”
The frond did not reply. The lights, if there were lights, did not grow brighter or dimmer. The sea-stench of the thing did not grow less or more powerful. Was its callowhale still alive? Was it sick? Was it in pain? The boy had never heard of a beached frond. Fronds did not come off like hair in a brush. Divers who accidentally touched one came home bruised, as though they had boxed a train. Or with missing hands. Or missing eyes. Or crisscrossed with scars from wounds they had never suffered. Or not at all.
Doctor Callow put out his hand hesitantly. His bare hand—he did not have divers’ gloves or a mesh suit, only his pink, fleshy fingers. He held them above the skin of the great frond. He felt nothing but the warmth rising from it like tea-steam. He took his hand away and smelled it; it smelled like him, nothing more. He tried again, going a bit closer to that copper-coloured callowflesh. Nothing—and so he drew closer still, inching forward, the rest of his body eager, impatient. When he finally allowed his fingers to fall just above the body of the frond-flesh, Doctor Callow gasped. A sort of rusty, electric, half-sour crackling blossomed between him and it. It pushed up weakly against him, invisibly. It made colours in his mind, colours without names. His whole body felt it, firing off whatever involuntary reactions it could think of: goose bumps, shivers, sweat, stomach fluttering, heart racing, pupils dilating to great black holes in his face, hair standing erect, and other parts of him erect, too. But it didn’t hurt. He still had both hands, both eyes. No bruises or scars. It felt good, even, though it felt like something that shouldn’t, like putting his fingertips in the wax of his father’s candles. Maybe because it was dying. Maybe because it didn’t have its whale anymore.
Doctor Callow closed his eyes. He was not quite brave enough to actually touch it. So he just let his arm go slack.
It fell onto the flesh of the callowhale frond with a soft wet smack.
Doctor Callow felt as though he were swimming in the rusty-sour electric crackle, in the nameless colours. He felt as though he had never really been warm in his whole life, even though the Land of Milk and Desire is a hot and wet and heavy place. He laughed and he cried a little. He petted it like a dog. He was so shivery and prickly and hard and short of breath his everything ached. But he would have traded every ease he’d known for that ache and called it a bargain. The boy who loved callowhales stroked the severed arm of his beloved. He whispered to it. And, after a long while, little Doctor Callow curled up in a coppery curve of the frond; pulled the fine, soft hairs over him; and fell asleep in its dying embrace. The last of the ghostlights flashed on his dreaming skin.
“I wish,” he whispered as he drifted toward the cliff edge of sleep, “I wish that I’ll never see your face, that I’ll never look you in the eye, that I’ll never know you at all.”
Every night after that, while the callowhale frond rotted, he slept in its great sagging coils and told no one. The rot, as it relaxed and bloomed, smelled to him like his mother’s callowmilk bisque; and Hesiod’s cigarettes; and the tops of the twins’ heads when they were first born; and thick, good paper that had been drawn on over and over and over so that it was all black from corner to corner.
When a notice went up in the town square calling Adonites of all ages to audition for a secret Festival scheme specially prepared by the elders, Anchises scrupulously avoided wanting it too much. He told everyone it was silly and he didn’t want a part even a little bit. He reported at the correct hour with a mask of uncaring plastered to his face; and thus, when the schoolteacher in charge of the whole mysterious business chose him, along with three other children, a nice lady diver with extremely straight hair, and a tall, rangy-looking milkman, he could not suppress his shock. Doctor Callow ran around in a circle, his little heart unable to stand in one place when so much was happening.
And so Doctor Callow got to see the movie early. They all walked down the beach for several miles until they could be sure that no one back home could see the lights. Then, huddled together, they watched The Girl Who Made Fate Laugh so that they could play parts from it at the Festival. It was the third movie in the Mr Bergamot franchise, and suddenly the children in the cast became consumed with speculation as to what might have happened in the other films. But Doctor Callow didn’t care about that. He watched in a rictus of wonder as people who were not actually there at all moved and danced silently in silver. He shushed the seals when they barked so as to hear the silence better—and to better see the face of the girl who made Fate laugh.