Calliope gets her punch bowl last.
Anchises presses on. “Now that we’ve had our intermission, if we can all remember to keep our heads? I know we all have great personal stakes here, but do let us try not to all talk at once.”
Mary Pellam tosses off her third Bellini. “I do believe I’ve spotted a hole in your theory, kid,” she says.
“Oooh, I’ve got one, too!” squeals Marvin the Mongoose. He scampers over to Mary and climbs her like a tree, roosting on the crown of her golden head with his ruddy animated tail round her neck. “You first, you first!”
“Let’s have it, Mary,” says Anchises with a smile. He claps his hands and rubs them together.
Mary pushes Marvin’s fur out of her face and points a long finger at the boy from Venus. “You are not a callowhale.”
“Oh, well done, darling!” cries Madame Mortimer.
“Should I be?” Anchises quirks his eyebrow knowingly.
“Well, it stands to reason, doesn’t it? If that little hickey on your hand is a baby callowhale, and all this happened because they came looking for their wee one, shouldn’t you look a smidge more like Mrs Cousteau over there and a skosh less like Percy’s next leading man? No offense, Calliope.”
“None taken, I’m sure.” The Carefree Callowhale glowers.
“What’s your objection, Marvin?” Anchises inquires.
“Oh, I didn’t have one.” The mongoose giggles. “I just wanted to be one of the gang!”
“You are quite right, Mary. I am not a callowhale.” Anchises begins to walk around the Myrtle Lounge. He thinks better on the move. “Indeed, that pesky detail first alerted me to the presence of a second solution to our communal puzzle. I am either thirty or forty years old, depending on whether one counts the time I spent in limbo in Adonis, and I can assure you I have suffered no ill health, no unusual physiological developments—beyond the obvious, which I will come to in a moment—and only the expected mental disturbances of any traumatized child who has lost his parents, excepting those I inflicted upon myself with a bottle or an atomizer or a film projector. There were times when I wished for all those things. I think I would have known some peace if my fingers had become gas bladders filled with milk, if my mouth had closed over with clammy flesh and I’d grown a blowhole. My life would have begun to make sense. But the truth is quite the opposite. In fact, in recent years—” Here Anchises removes his buttery leather glove and reveals his open palm like a rabbit pulled from a hat. A great gasp goes up from the crowd. The hand is healed. A rough, hardscrabble scar runs across the skin, puckered like a bullet wound. But that is all. Mariana looks down at her own hands, crawling with feathery fronds, their fiddleheads curling and uncurling. “Even this last reminder of that morning so long ago when I found that dying callowhale limb lying, so forlorn, on the beach and…” He trails off, his voice thick. “Forgive me. Even that reminder has gone. So, as they say, what gives? Thus I come to my second solution: I am not a callowhale—but someone else in this room is!”
“Don’t look at me!” cries Mr Bergamot, retracting his tentacles into his body in terror.
“I just played one on the radio!” Violet El-Hashem holds up her hands.
“Oh, all right, it’s me.” Severin Unck grins sidelong, putting one hand on her hip.
“Hi, baby,” says Calliope, waving her blue fin.
“Hi, Mama.” Severin wiggles her fingers.
“What happened to you down there?” Percival Unck pleads. “I have to know.”
“Please, Rinny.” Erasmo looks up at her, hurt and lost and full of an ache like a bullet lodged in a bone.
“The lights went out,” whispers Severin. “The dark tasted like milk. My heart turned into a photograph of a heart.”
“I don’t understand you, darling,” Erasmo says.
Anchises sits down at the gleaming grand piano in the corner of the Myrtle Lounge. He plays a flourish on the keys. Severin walks across the room. She shrugs off her aviator jacket, musses her hair. She slides up to the top of the black grand and lies across it. As she does so, her flickering black-and-white skin flushes into colour, her dress turns a throbbing shade of deep green, her shoes bright gold, her lips redder than Mars.
“How’s your night going, Miss S?” Anchises asks, sliding into the old, comforting patter of a lounge act, his fingers coaxing the keys.
“Oh, not too bad, Mr A,” Severin croons. “I was dead for a little while, but I got over it.”
“Glad to hear it. You got a song for all these lonelyhearts?”
“I just might. It’s called ‘The Quantum Stability Axis Blues.’ You wanna hear it?”
“I’m dying to hear it.”
And so Severin Unck begins to sing, in a thick, low voice like bourbon pouring into a wooden cup.
I met my honey way down under the sea
Where the sun never goes so nobody can see
What my honey,
Oh, what my honey
does to me
Severin rolls onto her back, green sequins pulsing with light.
My honey put the moon on my finger
My honey put the stars on my plate
My papa told me good girls don’t linger
When a honey comes
Oh, when a honey comes
a-rattlin’ her gate
“I never said such a thing,” Percy grumbles.
“I know, Daddy, it’s a song,” whispers Severin, putting her finger over her red lips. Shhh.
My honey he was dyin’ without me
His heart was all locked up but I was the key
I said I should go,
but my honey said no,
Oh, no, no, no,
Let me show you what a good girl can be
Severin slides gracefully off the piano and walks through the lounge. Her green dress fades back to black, her skin to silver. She sits down on Erasmo’s lap; she runs her fingers through his hair. The key changes, and Calliope begins to hum a plaintive counterpoint. Mr Bergamot joins in.
My honey and me floated out on the foam
Still I sighed: I miss my baby back home
How can I leave him so lonesome and blue?
Don’t seem the kind of thing a good girl should do.
Severin snaps her fingers. She presses her knuckle under Erasmo’s chin.
But with honey, ain’t no such thing as leavin’
Anyone I want I can find just like that
So baby, don’t you get lost in grievin’
Wherever you go, that’s where I’m at.
“Because I am a nexus point connecting all possible realities and unrealities,” Severin purrs seductively. “I exist in innumerable forms throughout the liquid structure of space/time, and neither self nor causality have any meaning for me.” She kisses Erasmo as the song ends. Tears slide off his cheeks, onto his chin, and onto her film-shivering fingers, where they burn. “I love you right in the face.”
Severin stands and bows. Marvin the Mongoose throws gardenias at her feet. She holds her hand out to her father, who takes it, and holds it to his breast. He’s sobbing, a big ugly cry, but there’s no shame. In point of fact, there’s not a dry eye in the house.
“I’m okay, Daddy. It’s okay now.”
PART FIVE
THE RED PAGES
The radiant car your sparrows drew
You gave the word and swift they flew,
Through liquid air they wing’d their way,
I saw their quivering pinions play;
To my plain roof they bore their queen,
Of aspect mild, and look serene.
—Sappho, “Hymn to Aphrodite”