Chamomile?
That’s not my name.
What is your name?
Severin.
Severin?
Yes?
I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.
Severin started. She gave him a strange, searching expression. Her voice sharpened, grew older. Why did you say that?
I don’t know. It seemed like a good thing to say.
You said it like you were quoting something. What’s Kansas? Is it a planet?
Doctor Callow suddenly felt confused. He forgot how to swim in the Sea of Every Colour and dropped abruptly to the sand beside Severin. I think so? Maybe? It sounds nice.
Maybe it’s one of the other places.
What other places?
Mr Bergamot lives everywhere.
What are you talking about?
She gestured to the callowhales overhead, as massive as suns, and circling, circling forever. Mr Bergamot loves teatime. At teatime he eats worlds. And egg salad.
I’m lonely, whispered Doctor Callow.
Don’t be. There’s a million million worlds to play with.
I’m lonely, he whispered again, because he didn’t know what else to say.
That’s okay, Severin Unck answered. She put her small hand on his. The colours of the Sea-which-wasn’t-really-a-Sea got so bright Severin and Doctor Callow had to shut their eyes, which were not really their eyes. Doctor Callow looked up through the waves-which-were-not-really-waves and saw a callowhale—thousands of callowhales—soaring through the surf. They looked back at him as one creature, their infinite faces-which-were-not-really-faces as radiant as the spasms of stars, as the first frame of a film that is perfect, that is impossible, that is complete.
That’s okay, Severin said. I’m here. There’s no place like Home.
PART FOUR
THE GOLD PAGES
Goddess, as soon as I saw you with my own eyes
I knew your divinity—but you gave me no truth.
Yet by aegis-wielding Zeus I beg thee—
do not make me live on, impotent, among men.
Have mercy on me, for well I know
the man who lies with immortal goddesses
is never left unharmed.
—Homer, “Hymn to Aphrodite”
A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you, the less you know.
—Diane Arbus
There lived an old woman
Under a hill
And if she’s not gone
She lives there still
—Mother Goose
The Radiant Car Thy Sparrows Drew
(Oxblood Films, dir. Severin Unck)
SC4 EXT. ADONIS, VILLAGE GREEN—DAY 16 TWILIGHT POST PLANETFALL 08:49 [3 DECEMBER, 1944]
[EXT. SEVERIN UNCK swims through the murky water, holding one of ERASMO ST. JOHN’S callow-lanterns out before her. ERASMO follows behind with her secondary camera, encased in a crystal canister. The film is badly stained and burned through several frames. She swims upward, dropping lead weights from her shimmering counter-pressure mesh as she rises. The grille of her diving bell gleams faintly in the shadows. Above her, slowly, the belly of a callowhale comes into view. It is impossibly massive, the size of a sky. SEVERIN strains towards it, extending her fingers to touch it, just once, as if to verify it for herself, that such a thing could be real.
The audience will always and forever see it before SEVERIN does. A slit in the side of the great whale, like a door opening. As the documentarian stretches towards it, with an instinctual blocking that is nothing short of spectacular—the suddenly tiny figure of a young woman frozen forever in this pose of surprise, of yearning, in the centre of the shot—the eye of the callowhale, so huge as to encompass the whole screen, opens around her.]
Production Meeting
And If She’s Not Gone, She Lives There Still
(Tranquillity Studios, 1961, dir. Percival Unck)
Audio Recorded for Reference by Vincenza Mako
PERCIVAL UNCK: I don’t know how to end it. All this time and I still don’t know. I can’t change Rin’s story. But I thought…I thought I could give him a better story. One where he had the means to search and find his fate, the way heroes do. One where he got saved. But answers are all that saves anyone, and I don’t have any. I set the place for the ending, turned down the bed, lit the candles, and the bitch stayed out in the cold to spite me.
MAKO: But it wasn’t ever going to be a real ending. Remember? It was going to be better than the real world. That was the whole point. That was the gift we wanted to make for her. It was going to have weight. It was going to rhyme with the beginning in some ineffable way that real endings never do. We never set out to tell a true story, only a mostly true one. The ending we planned is elegant, if you follow the logic, and “elegant” is more important than “real.” That’s always been our motto, really.
UNCK: The fairy tale thing was never going to work. It’s beautiful, but it can only come at the story obliquely. It can only tell how it felt. It can’t say anything like: “Severin Unck died by electrocution.” It can’t say she didn’t. The language is all wrong. We have all the ambiguity we can eat already; we don’t need more. And anyway, it’s not a child’s story. Or an adult’s. It’s not Anchises or Severin or anyone else, but all of them together, stuck in a room with no idea how to get out.
MAKO: There’s a thought. A locked-room mystery?
UNCK: Huh. Maybe. We started him off as a detective. Maybe we can end it that way, too. Let him detect a little. But what room? We’d need a cell, a vault, perhaps a ship? We tried the grand estate already.
MAKO: Don’t be so literal. Venus is the locked room.
UNCK: Things do tend to come out when there’s nowhere to go.
MAKO: Let the mystery stay, but take the angry noir brooder out. Give it a bit of the old Victorian dash. A lashing of lace and leather. A room full of suspects, a brilliant genius with a flair for the dramatic. And why stick to people who really lived? Give it the shine of magic, a surreal spit-and-polish. Not too much—everyone hates the avant-garde, deep down. But enough to go out with a bang.
UNCK: But, Vince…I’ve got experience with this one. I know the song too well. It’s been sung at me at top volume. I don’t know if I can go through it again, even at the typewriter. That ghastly, desperate night, Mary staring at me like I’d become a hellhound before her eyes…
MAKO: Let’s not talk about that right now. It’s long over.