Radiance by Catherynne M. Valente Read Free Book Online Page A

the middle of her forehead like the mark of Cain and film scratches all down her cheeks doesn’t even know that Self-Portrait will be a hit. Better than a hit. It’ll make her name. Her name. Not her old man’s.
    These’re things I know about her. These’re things everyone knows about her. It’s not fair that I should know as much as anyone who cares to pick up a magazine. I should know more. I should know it all. But you begin where you begin, and hope—even if hope is a pickpocket with both fists full—to go, somehow, further and higher.
    Well, I began with her. And she began on-screen.
    I hunt for likenesses between us. For places where, laid over one another, our topographies would match. Capital to capital. River to river. There aren’t many. I try to make more, but she’s done, finished, finite, and I am not.
    And what about me? I don’t remember a damn thing before the age of ten. A man is nothing but memory, and by that count I was born on a burnt grass shore with a woman grabbing my wrist so hard she bruised me, a neat line of her four fingers on my skin, over my pulse, over my heart. A flash of light: fiat fucking lux . The smoky, acidic smell of the sea. Hot, pollen-drunk wind. A whirr and a clatter. I’ve been recorded since I was born. So has she. That great black eye got us good. I was born the minute I was noticed.
    Before that there’s just a calm pre-credits wipe of darkness, nothing into nothing. There’s footage of my entrance; there’s footage of her exit. We’re each missing the other half. I only know my parents’ names because people who oughta know wrote them down for me. Her father sat astride her life. His name is her name. What luxury.
    The fifty-foot woman winks. To no one. To me. To the hatless man and his orally-fixated buddy. To the Astor and Te Deum and the mermaids with their miniature Titans. But really to a solemn goatee’d bellhop in a blue cap who dutifully dropped the needle on an old phonograph so that we could all hear her deep yet somehow nasal voice echo loudly—too loud, too loud—in the theatre.
    It hurt our ears. Everyone winced, straightened up. Hatless got his jollies interruptus . We all hated it. We all squirmed.
    Nobody makes talkies anymore.
    I could stand her face, but her voice did me to pieces. I heard her say the first words of her first movie and her first words to me all at once; and I’ve taken punches, I’ve taken gut stabs, but I couldn’t take that.
    I used to look up at night and dream of the solar system.
    Hey, little guy. It’s good now. It’s fine now. I’m here. My name’s Severin. You can call me Rinny if you like that better.
    I stumbled out of the Astor and onto Caroline Street, into the blue fog and the smell and the wet, snowed-in trash. Into the bells bonging out my missed midnight appointment. Coughing, crying like a damned widow, wiping sour, half-digested port wine slime from my mouth. The glowglass alley pulsed grape to apricot. Juliet and Titania, coupla old crescent hags, judged me from the heavens. Umbriel sloshed up slowly under the girls, the lights of Wunda coming on across its blasted moonface. All those moons. The sky over Uranus always looked like a bloody traffic jam to me. Venus doesn’t have any moons. The sky is unbroken. Perfect. A sky that can’t look back.
    Tears froze on my face. Very unmanly. But of the things I’ve lost, manliness left first and easiest.
    Radiant Car ’s a horror flick, is what it is. An old Gothic screamer with tits just barely kept in check by veils and corsets and the rating system. A girl went into the dark and met a monster there. So simple. So easy to fill the seats with that kind of thing.
    So easy to empty them with the truth.
    I wasn’t even allowed to enjoy my misery. Caroline Street gagged on the mobs getting riled up for All-Clear. Nothing but elbows and eyeshadow. A car pulled