Radiance

Look at Her Face

Look at her face. It is your face. She is the mask you wear. Look, and you can see the film she wants to make being born across her features. Across your features. It has not happened yet; it doesn’t even have a title. It is less than a full idea. But it is there in her set chin and her narrowed eyes. She frowns sourly in black and white, and her disapproval of such fancies—her father’s fancies: disappeared heroines and eldritch locations where something terrible has surely occurred—shows in the wrinkle of her brow, the tapping of her fingernails against the atomizer as bubbling storms lap their glass cupola and armoured penance-fish nose the flotation arrays, their jaw-lanterns flashing.

Where there is milk, there is mating, isn’t there? There are children. The ghost-voice of Amandine comes over the phonograph as the final shot of And the Sea Remembered, Suddenly flickers silver-dark and the floating Neptunian pleasure domes recede. Everyone knew where Severin was bound next, long before principal photography ever began. You could see it on her face. To Venus, and Adonis; to the little village rich in milk and children that vanished two decades after its founding, while the callowhales watched offshore, impassive, unperturbed. You would have gone, too. You would have yearned to go. Chasing after an ending to a story already in progress. An ending means there is order in the universe, there is a purpose to events. There is a reason to do things, an answer to be found, a solution key at the back of the book that maps to the problems posed. Find one ending, a real ending, and the universe is redeemed, ransomed from death—but death can never be that ending. It is a cheat, a quick shock, but no story truly ends with a death. A death only begs more questions, more tales.

Across your ribs her ship speeds over the ice road as fast as it can go. You almost want to cheer it on—but it speeds toward cessation, toward negation, toward sound and darkness and a final, awful image flickering in the depths.

But you can see her thinking, see her new film, her last film, taking shape behind her eyes.

They are documentaries, yes. They are also confessional poems. She is her father’s girl, though she would rather no one guess.

Severin asked the great question: Where did Adonis go in death? The old tales know an answer. But it can never be her answer. We offer it anyway.

Adonis returned to his mother: the Queen of the Dark, the Queen of the Otherworld, the Queen of the Final Cut.