Aurorarama

by Jean-Christophe Valtat

  —Do you have a new group?

  —Yes. The Lodestones. We release our new single in five days, in North Venustown. Look, it’s written on this bill.

  —Are you planning to stay a long time in New Venice?

  —Listen. This city … this city is a gift. But it’s a gift wasted on spoiled children. I did not come back to act as if nothing happened. The Blue Wild happened, the city was more or less destroyed, I’ve traveled a lot since then. The city is back in place, as far as I can see. But during my long southern journey, there are a few things that sprouted in my New Venetian heart, and it can no longer be silent.

  —Concerning the city?

  —Concerning our lives in our city.

  Two vigourous women came up to Ms. Lake, now Ms. Lenton, and helped her away from our conversation. I was left, alone on the steamer berth, with most of my questions. Where has she been, what has she done. And, above all, why is she coming back now?

  “Who does she thinks she is?” asked Sybil, sitting down next to Brentford. “She’s been away for years and she imagines she has just to snap her fingers to have all the audience at her feet? People have been working hard while she was away.”

  For it was indeed one of Sybil’s pet ideas that she was a hardworking girl. But what Brentford retained of the article, apart from the eerie reminiscences it triggered of his own youth as a scenester, was its strange “poletical” undercurrent, as if Ms. Lenton promised or hoped for more than simply a musical revolution. One more agitator, then. Great. This was just what the city needed right now. He sighed, and lay down, suddenly feeling against his spine the frame of the picture Sybil had discarded. He discreetly looked at it, noting that it was a drawing in which the North Pole rose up a like ghost under a sheet, its head shaped like a grinning skull. In a flash, he thought of Helen.

  “… and anyway,” Sybil was saying, as she leaned over him, trapping two copies of him inside her gold-speckled eyes. “One more thing I want to ask you before I rape the living daylights out of you. Are you free on Friday night?”

  He watched himself floating in the double bubble and found that he looked happy to be there.

  “Free as a floe,” he answered.

  “Because,” she explained while undoing his shirt with her slender fingers, “I have received two invitations from the magician we’ll have at our wedding party. He does a show at Trilby’s Temple. I would like it so much if you could come along.”

  “Why not,” said Brentford, looking at Sybil through half-closed eyes, until she was golden and filmy, like the flame of a candle. “I could do with some magic, I guess.”

  CHAPTER X

  A Starmap Tattoo

  “Skate together! Can that be possible?”

  Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

  What Gabriel did in the Kane Clinic was try to find Phoebe. He went up the first flight of stairs that he found and set about looking for someone who could inform him. In spite of all the agitation in the outpatient ward, the rest of the clinic had gone dim and silent into night watch. It was not long before he heard coming down the darkened corridor the typical clap-clap and clatter of a nurse pushing a cart.

  “Hello, there,” he said, with a bow.

  “What are you doing here?” said the nurse, in a whispered vociferation that was not quite as impressive as she intended. As she turned toward him, she revealed, pinned on her white apron, a badge on which the name Vera could be made out. Gabriel believed in names. He felt he could trust her to be sincere.

  “Listen,” he murmured, “nothing that deserves much publicity. I am looking for a girl who has been brought here this afternoon, probably by the Gentlemen of the Night.”

  “Are you one of them?” asked the nurse.

  “God forbid,” said Gabriel.

  Vera leaned toward him, conspiratorially.

  “She has not regained consciousness, poor thing. I wonder what they have done to her.”

  “Can I see her?”

  “There is nothing much to see. But I suppose that holding her hand and kissing her forehead won’t do her any harm. To the left, to the right, seventh door on the right. Do not be long. And if you’re caught, you have never seen me.”

  “Thank you very much,” said Gabriel, as Vera swerved to the left and clap-clattered away. Once out of her field of vision, Gabriel opened his fist and looked at the small phial of Letheon he had just stolen from the cart. This was a poor way to thank Vera but he deserved some comfort after a day that had mostly consisted of persecutions and humiliations.

  He uncorked it and, blocking one nostril, inhaled deeply till the fumes hit the back of his skull, and then repeated the operation on the other side. He knew he should stop there. His brain was already buzzing with white noise and more of that sharp stuff would impair his motor skills, turning him into one of those colourful clowns whose limbs are made of little felt rings. Not to mention the fits of erotomania he was bound to suffer from, which would assume the form of an exacerbated but rather illusory sense of possibility that more often than not resulted in pitiful enterprises, such as pornographic pneus to past loves and vaguely known women. So, he told himself, just a little one for the road and that’ll be all. Then he took two more whiffs, for he was not a man to be dictated to, not even by himself, and he found himself moving in a world that was, already, made of a lighter more billowy fabric but still thought it funny to play at being a clinic.

  If Gabriel’s calculations were right, he should have been close to Phoebe’s room when something stopped him in his tracks: through an open door, a girl on all fours on the floor and wearing only a hitched up hospital gown was displaying, in a ray of light coming from the corridor, the most heart-wrenching bottom he had ever seen in his entire life. Phoebe was instantly spirited away from his mind. It was love at first sight.

  “Nice little icecap you got there,” he said in a hoarse voice, unable to believe that he had just said this: but there’s nothing like Letheon to turn a decent fellow into a hopelessly depraved cad. “Gives some perspective on the Hollow Earth theory,” he added, wishing he were dead.

  The girl turned toward him, and he could make out a small pale face and two eyes like black holes that sucked out his spinning planet of a heart.

  “If you want to plant your flagpole,” said the brunette with a lighthearted, musical vulgarity that was the sweetest melody Gabriel had ever heard, “you’d better help me first.”

  She plunged back under the bed and soon dragged out a pair of high-cut, thick-soled boots that made Gabriel’s heart leap even higher. He approached and knelt down beside her.

  “Those bastards took my clothes away. They must be under the bed,” she whispered.

  Thrilling from this intimacy, he groped around and quickly felt a soft bundle under his fingers. The girl was rather small and her arms were not long enough to reach it.

  “I think I got them,” he said, triumphally.

  “Okay, just be on the lookout and we leave as soon as I’m ready.”

  Gabriel did as he was told, very happy to do so, almost not noticing that he was pulling at the cork again and pushing the phial back up his nose.

  “You know a way out?” asked the girl as she stepped into the hallway, slipping on a kind of black hooded cloak.

  “You’re the little black riding hood, aren’t you?”

  “You’re an old satyr, aren’t you?” she answered playfully.

  She was, he was almost sure of it, the girl he had glimpsed earlier at the Toadstool. He could now see her features. They had nothing frail or delicate about them, but even the baby fat was alive with currents of sparking astuteness that put the cute back in electrocute.

  “You care for some?” asked Gabriel, handing her his phial. “It’s on the house.”

  “I’m going to know your thoughts,” she said.

  She took it and sniffed quickly.

  “You should be ashamed,” she smiled, her eyes boring straight into his as she gave him back the phial. “So, how do
we scram?”

  “Hmm …” said Gabriel, his head whirling slightly. “The doors are rather busy. We should try the window. It’s only the first floor, after all.”

  The girl went straight back into the room, and Gabriel heard her opening the double window. Before he could react she had jumped through it, and he followed her, as he would have anywhere. There was a little cornice that made the whole affair easier, and with bones made out of Letheon draughts, he felt there was little chance that he would sprain or break anything. He landed on the stone ledge and took another spring that sent him onto a welcome and welcoming layer of powdery snow. From there, there were a few yards to cross and iron railings that were not much of a challenge. She laughed as she saw Gabriel overplay his ease in climbing them and then somehow get tangled in their unexpected reality.

  “I’m Stella, by the way.”

  “I’m Gabriel. I hope I’m not seeing you shining from a too distant past,” Gabriel said, panting a little.

  “You’re funnier when you talk dirty,” she said with a flattered smile.

  “Ah. Dimple,” he noticed, pointing accusingly at her right cheek. “And just on one side. You have decided to kill me, haven’t you?”

  “Not yet,” she said. “Would you care for a drink of something strong before I do?”

  Compared to the Toadstool, the John Dee was a notch lower in the underground. Owned by the now retired members of the amplified Elizabethan cult band Lord Strange’s Men, it was a rather dark place, lit with a few braziers around which huddled a more sombre and possibly more dangerous species of Boreal Bohemian. Under this wavering, uncertain light, the cabalistic figures that decorated the walls were glimpsed more than really seen, which only made them more evocative. The Sun Dogs had started their career here and the band now on the stage was the Mock Moons, who obviously followed their traces, though their music was more upbeat and grating. The song that they played could not have been better attuned to Gabriel’s feelings:

  Did you look at the stars last night

  because I was up there

  and was looking at you

  I kept blinking with all my might

  But you had a lover

  By the time I got to you.

  Music knows more about you than any humbug hypnotizer, thought Gabriel.

  He had gone to the toilets for that “very last” sniff of Letheon, and as he came back he could see that some sort of huge black-coated, Viking-looking hunk was pestering Miss Stella Black. He walked up, his uncertain legs pedalling over the evasive ground toward the cask that served as a table, and as soon as he sat down, Stella sprang to her feet and glued her mouth to his. It was as fresh a draught as if someone had opened a door in the back of his skull. The Viking, who seemed more than a bit inebriated, frowned and tried to accommodate the scene to his disobedient eyeballs, and finally retired with slurred apologies.

  Stella stepped back.

  “Whoa,” she said. “One could get high on your breath.”

  “That’s the best definition of love I have ever heard,” Gabriel said to the girl, who receded, wavering like Northern lights. He thought he might have preferred a different first kiss, but then he decided that no, everything was good, and would be from now on. Just because it had happened, it was good. That was his second-best definition of love.

  They had ordered two Wormwood Star absinthes, and had just a few sips to go. Absinthe and Letheon were a daring blend that reduced everything to bi-dimensional pictures, which floated here and there to the point where it became uncomfortable.

  “I think I’d like to get some fresh air,” Gabriel said.

  “We could go skyskating,” Stella suggested casually.

  The part of Gabriel that could discuss the pertinence of this idea had long been dead, buried, and forgotten. He did not miss it at all.

  “And then we’ll test your Hollow Earth theory,” she added, dimpling like the devil.

  “I promise we’ll use that little pot of butter,” said Gabriel, always a gentleman.

  They walked for a long time along a deeply embanked small canal that often disappeared under smelly bridges, and during these eclipses, they kissed slobberingly and caressed each other, as far as their thick clothes allowed. And after another clumsy stunt from Gabriel climbing over a fence, they eventually looked down on the Ringnes Speed Skating Rink.

  The moon that hung overhead looked strange, as if a quarter of it had been neatly cut and thrown away. The ice spread below, dark grey and scratched with entangled traces no angel could unravel. It was like life itself, thought Gabriel, a born allegorician: bodies had come and gone, met or avoided each other, retraced their steps or someone else’s, been found by and lost one another.

  Stella took a pillbox from her pocket and gave him some purple heart-shaped “boilers,” before taking some herself. The glycine-and-ephedrine blend made one feel warm, caused one’s heart to beat faster, and pumped blood to the body’s extremities, three things Gabriel did not feel he needed more of. His good education, however, forbade him to refuse a drug.

  Then Stella went down the slope and started to take her clothes off over her head, quickly, keeping on only her boots, whose skates she liberated with a little gesture that was a bit of a ballet, or bullet, to Gabriel’s heart. Coming closer, he watched her ecstatically, as if he had never seen a young woman before. He had more or less the same reaction every time (he believed that nude girls came from the same realm or region as dreams, from the same eternal inexhaustible fountain at the spring of time and yet out of time), but a girl like this one—no, he had never seen and never would see again. It was not only, as some bad poem put it, the “dimpled fullness of her form,” nor “the midnight blackness of her plentiful hair,” and neither was it—he could be as bad a poet as anyone else—the opal teardrops of her breasts. What held him mesmerized was the circular starmap tattoo that ran all around her shoulders and which, as she started gliding on the moonlit ice, was the music of the spheres made visible to his eye. He stared at the dark inky stars and figures on her pale skin and how they reflected, as a negative print, the sparkles that sprinkled the Heavens. Rapture and Terror seized his heart and tears welled up in his eyes.

  “Hey!” she cried, “move or you’ll freeze.”

  Once he was stark naked but for gloves, boots, and Elsinore cap, he switched on his skates and, shod with steel, launched himself on the tinkling ice, dizzy and weak as he was, happy not to have taken the Fly Fantasia Flint he had bought earlier at the Toadstool. He scraped his warm body against the coldness of the night and it felt like a rash all over his skin.

  He tried—his legs barely responsive—to skid toward her but tripped and fell forward, hearing her laughter and feeling the burn of the ice through his gloves as he caught himself just in time. He stood up and looked around in panic, as if afraid he had lost her. But there she was, whirling round him, a comely comet whose hand he tried to grasp: she always took it back at the last moment, her laughter echoing in his head like crumbling crystal stalactites.

  He launched himself again. With the hiss of a giant hand, the wind slapped him about, forcing a crown of cold steel around his burning head. He strove to move toward her, the lodestar of desire, going faster and faster, cutting across her ellipses, but as soon as he came closer, she would take a sharp turn and speed up again, gleaming on the glassy plain, tattooed stars tangled in her hair, her bubbly buttocks a Milky Way in the moonlight. He realized that to hold her naked brilliance, he would be willing to give all.

  After a dreamlike while, as he was still pursuing her in vain, she suddenly turned toward him and waited for him to bump against her, which he tried to do as softly as he could. They clasped each other and almost fell over, but eventually stood firmly on the ground, his head spinning still as the world wheeled by them. He kissed her, his hands full of constellations, for a long time, or so it seemed, until the universe came to a standstill around them. Slowly, he took her back to the slope, where their clothes were
waiting, and he laid upon them her heavenly body. She laughed and overthrew him, went on top, a cascade of steamy black hair erasing the night; then the stars fell down on him and covered him, so close now, as if he had died and been turned into one.

  Much to Gabriel’s surprise, this led to a ghost station of the disused Pneumatic subway line.

  Book Two

  Magic & Mayhem

  The combined effect upon the spectator of the spoken word and the eyes together is generally irresistible.

  David P. Abbott, Fraudulent Spiritualism Unveiled, 1907

  CHAPTER XI

  Nordlicht

  “Das Fest im Geist! Des Urlichts Ausbruch aus der Natur kann uns, auf der nordwärts gerichteten Heimreise, zum Ruhepol in uns, zu einer überraschenden Feiertag werden. Pfingsten erfüllt und erwartet den Nordwärts-schreitenden. Den Nordwärtsdenkenden. Den, der den Norden erleidet.”

  Theodor Daübler, Das Nordlicht, 1910

  Holy Cod!” thought Gabriel, as he saw Brentford waving to him through the large window of the Nordlicht Kaffee. Their eyes had met and it was too late to pretend that he had not noticed him. There was no other choice but to go into the Kaffee and pray that no Gentleman of the Night or affiliated spy was witnessing the scene. However, the past few days had convinced Gabriel that this was a rather idle hope.

  The Nordlicht Kaffee was an über-chic spot located off Koldewey Canal in an area of gabled, finely sculpted Gothic houses known as Neu-Vineta. This quarter, which specialized in luxuries, drew its name from a Baltic harbour that according to some German legend had been doomed and drowned because of its riches. It emerged, said the tale, for a single day once in a century, and plunged back into the depths if the merchants failed to sell their splendid goods to some unsuspecting stranger. Needless to say, prices tended to drop dramatically as the day advanced. But though the mythical source of the Sales Period could be traced back to this Anti-Venice, it had become in the New Venetian Neu-Vineta but a distant, irony-tinged memory, and Gabriel hoped no one was counting on him to break a similar curse these days, for the prices here were now well beyond his grasp.