The cannon practically throbs with light: a late-model Wernyhora design, filigreed, etched with forest motifs that curl and leaf like spring ice breaking. The brilliant, massive nose of the Venusian capsule Clamshell rests snugly in the cannon’s silvery mouth. The metal beast towers over Saint Basil’s, casting a monstrous shadow. Most of its size is devoted to propulsion. The living space within is surprisingly small. That etched silver forest will be jettisoned halfway to Venus, destined to drift alone into the endless black. But for now, the Clamshell dwarfs any earthly palace built for the glory of man or god.
They are a small circus: the strongmen, the clowns, the lion tamer, the magician, and the trapeze artist poised on her platform, arm crooked in an evocative half-moon, toes pointed into the void.
CUT TO: INT. Clamshell cantina, NIGHT 21:00 ERASMO ST. JOHN and MAXIMO VARELA pour vodka for the CREW and laugh uproariously:::FILM DAMAGED, FOOTAGE UNAVAILABLE SKIP DAMAGED AREA SKIPPING SKIPPING ERROR SEE ARCHIVIST FOR ASSISTANCE]
From the Personal Reels of
Percival Alfred Unck
[A camera is on. The screen is black, for the camera is skewed toward the wall, a clandestine attempt to capture the child without her knowing she is being recorded. Occasionally, flickers of silver interrupt the darkness—echoes from a screen showing more lively activity somewhere behind the device that picks up the following quiet conversation.]
PERCIVAL UNCK
Now, in any film it is important that you know who is telling the story, and to whom they are telling it. Even if no one on-screen talks about it, the director must know, and the writer, too. Now, who is telling this story?
SEVERIN UNCK
Daddy is telling the story!
PERCIVAL
[laughing] Well, Daddy made the movie, but Daddy is not telling the story. Look at the characters and how they speak to each other. Look at how the film begins, how the very first scenes shape everything else. Now, who is telling the story?
[There is a long silence.]
SEVERIN
The camera is telling the story. It’s watching everything, and you can’t lie to it, or it will know.
PERCIVAL
My girl is so clever! No, the camera witnesses the story and records it, but it is outside the story. Like a very tiny god with one big, dark eye. Baby girl, look at the lovers, and the villain, and the doting father, and the soldiers, and the ghosts. Which one of them is the authority? Who controls how the story is told? And who is the audience, for whom all these wonderful things are meant?
[Another long silence follows. There is a rustling, as of a little girl twisting her lace skirts while she tries to work out an answer.]
SEVERIN
They are all telling the story to me.
Preproduction Meeting,
The Deep Blue Devil [working title]
(Tranquillity Studios, 1959, dir. Percival Unck)
Audio recorded for reference by Vincenza Mako, screenwriter
PERCIVAL UNCK: If you want to know about the beginnings of things, you have to talk to the dead.
I know how that sounds. The dead should do endings. Surely that’s their squat. In the space after the story, they’re kings and queens, ruling with bony hands, pulling epilogues, last acts, climaxes, pulling finality from declining action like spinsters at black wheels.
I wouldn’t know. I’ve always been aces at endings. At the Fin I’m like a ball player, balanced hips over knees, brandishing my bat, pointing to the outfield, pointing like I’ve been doing from the first word spoken, the first frame shot, at the revelation I intended to hit all along. Lean into the last scene; you can hear the whiff and the crack of my swing. If anything, I’ve always been too eager to get to the ending. I’ll throw the haunted, wild-eyed gamine from her tower too soon, slaughter a soliloquizing retinue complete with bicyclists and bears five minutes in. Endings are lush and lascivious, Vince; they call to me. All spread out on satin inevitabilities, waiting, beckoning, promising impossibly, obscenely elegant solutions—if you’ve been a good lad and dressed the house just so, for its comfort, for its arousal. All the rest of the nonsense a story requires is just a long seduction of the ending. You throw out murders and reversals and heroes and detectives and spies, juggle love affairs and near escapes and standoffs with marvellous guns, kidnappings and sorcery and comic relief and gravediggers and princesses and albino dragons, and it’s all just to lure an ending into your bed. The right ending can’t resist a spread like that. She sidles up like she’s lived there all along, sleepy-eyed, hair a fright, asking the antihero for coffee and be quick about it, wouldn’t you? There’s a love.
But I’m rubbish at beginnings. Listen to that mess. My metaphors all rumpled about my ankles. So I talk to the dead. They’re the only ones who can see the whole story. All they’ve got is story. Look, say the ghosts, she was doomed all along because of how it began. You watched her to death. She started disappearing as soon as she was born. Just to get away from you. No one could have gotten out of this thing alive. Not with Acts I-V stacked against them like that. If Hamlet couldn’t swing it, what hope did she ever have?
Anyway, nobody bothers with real beginnings anymore. We stopped making up stories about the creation of the world ages ago. But the deadest of the dead—the ancient, toga-tugging, sheep-fucking, olive-gobbling, laurel-spangled dead—they rattled on about nothing else. Gardens and clay and the Sky slinging back a nebula or two for courage then slicking back his hair to make nice with the Earth. They had it right. It’s downright dishonest to begin with anything but the Creation of the Known Universe, and a tale that ends before the destruction of all and sundry is a damnable lie. By fire? Well, that’s too obvious. And floods always look amateurish. Maybe it just winks out. Cut. Print.
Point is, the Greeks had their heads on straight: If you’re going to bother beginning at all, you have to throw up a believable theory of origin or it’s got no anchor. No root. Why four seasons? Why seasons at all? Why just the one moon? Why green trees and red roses and not the other way round? Why death and time and is there such a thing as fate, and what, percentage-wise, is the efficacy of human sacrifice? You have to answer those questions before anyone comes on stage, you know. In even the littlest story about a…let’s say a housewife in an aqua-blue print dress and matching apron making a roast, only she’s planning to kill herself later, obviously, or maybe her husband—otherwise why should we care one soggy whit about the vagaries of beef at temperature? At any rate, someone’s got to die. That’s why she’s wearing aqua. Blue invariably means death. Even in poor lost Millicent’s kitchen—yes, Vince, her name is clearly Millicent, do try to keep up! Before she even pricks the meat to slide the garlic in, it’s all been arranged for her. Does death do its thing, in this universe? Yes. Time, in Millicent World? Progressing one second per second, twenty-four and seven and three hundred-odd. Seasons: four. The moon: intact, in orbit, in phase. Green elm, red peony. Seventeen per cent sacrificial success rate under ideal conditions, results not peer reviewed. And of course in stories there is always fate. It goes by the name of foreshadowing and it is the emperor of everybody. Given all these parameters, husband Humphrey should be dead by dessert. See? It’s only that the answers in most stories are boring because they are supplied by the real world rather than—well, something better. Something more stimulating. Sit down with the Greeks and the Romans, and the boring answers get more interesting. Seasons because a girl and a crocus. Death because a girl and an apple. The moon because a girl keeps driving her daft chariot into the sea.