Radiance by Catherynne M. Valente Read Free Book Online

myself.
    Here’s the short of it: A handful of people survived Unck’s Venus expedition, and I’m one of them. I don’t remember everything, and not everything I remember is important. My life, my life proper, began when a woman with short black hair and a leather aviator’s cap and coat crouched down in front of me and asked my name. The lost boy, the turning boy. I came back, and she didn’t.
    Don’t think I’ve forgiven myself for that.
    Now I watch. I’ve watched everything. I can’t stop watching. Waiting for the docs to show me just a little of her face; show her laughing; show her when she was a child, her arms stretched up, asking her father to lift her onto his shoulders, away from the chaos of adult feet and canes and slippers dancing to Mickey Hull’s latest ’dustrial-Charleston rag. Show me anything of hers. I’m as bad as any of them, begging to stare at her corpse for just one more moment—or, if not her corpse, the places where she once stood and stands no more. Tell me, invisible voice-over, voice of god and memory, tell me everything I already know. Tell me my life.
    But her face was a slow poison to me. I knew it, I knew it, and I tucked in anyway, starving for her narrow, monkish, poreless cheeks, her eyes huge and sly and as black as her hair.
    I can’t even say her name. She doesn’t have a name. She is she . She is her . She possesses the pronoun so completely that no one else can touch it. There is only one her in the great stinking gas giant of my heart, fifty feet high. She is a giantess. I am no one. Well, not “no one.” I am Anchises St. John. But I am no one’s him .
    Do you know what she does first in Self-Portrait ? She smiles. She fucking smiles . And then she laughs. A sweet, wry little self-deprecating laugh. Like she’s embarrassed to be taking up so much space in the shot. Like she has stage fright. But she wasn’t. She didn’t. Nothing embarrassed her. Maybe she had stage fright when her ma first put a tit in her mouth, but never a day since. Off stage fright, maybe. She never knew what to do with herself if the camera wasn’t running. But the laugh says she’s embarrassed. The smile tells us she has butterflies. Oh, isn’t it a funny damn racket, to be in the flickies? Who, me ? This old thing? I’m so nervous! Who needs a drink?
    I haven’t earned anything yet.
    Come find me in two years.
    Her smile yawns up over me, black and white and enormous—and I knew, as only a man who’s stared at it until he ralphed into his own lap can know—entirely fake. It’s a good one, though. One of my favourites of hers. Full of the feral thrill that surrounded All Things Venus back then. People couldn’t get enough of that shitty little burg—the one world that made all the others possible. But it’s their smile, not hers. Look at her, look at her, don’t you see? She’s going to Venus. She smiles like people smile when they’re obsessed with Venus. It’s a smile like a trailer for the real thing.
    But no, it’s too soon for that. I was drunk. I hadn’t slept in three days. When I think of her I see all her movies, all her faces, at the same time. Stacked up into orbit. But you can’t see what I see. I see the Venus smile, but it’s not there yet. This one’s a baby version of that nine-thousand-watt grin. It’s Face #212: Intrepid Girl Reporter. She hadn’t been to Venus yet. Venus always felt so obvious , she told me under the hot, wet stars of Adonis, when she didn’t think I could hear her. In Self-Portrait with Saturn , Venus was four movies and nine years away. Up there, she’s just a kid. Twenty-one. Sleeps like a dragonfly so she never misses a thing. Lovers like a revolving door. Drinks like she’s allergic to water. She’s barely a person yet. The girl in that decrepit print with a cigarette burn in