Aurorarama

by Jean-Christophe Valtat

  The Kaffee itself was supposed to be reminiscent of the barocco ice city that the wintering crew of the Tegethoff had built out of boredom on the floe that had imprisoned them. But the result was nothing if not slightly pretentious. The walls and ceiling seemed to be made out of whipped cream, the furniture to be glazed with dark chocolate. The room was decorated, on the rare moulded panels that were not hung with engravings of the Hansa or the Payer-Weyprecht expedition, with extracts of the famous Nordlicht poetic cycle by Theodor Daübler, most of them about Venice. Gabriel’s command of German was rather shaky, and all he knew was this: It had been at a masked ball in Venice that the adolescent Daübler had experienced his revelation, his “aurora of the soul.” For him, the Northern Lights were the proof that the Earth “longed to be a shining star again,” and would one day become “the spark of freedom in the universe.” The Seven Sleepers may have thought about this when—well, according to the local pronunciation—they put the ice back in Venice and Venice back on the ice. Or maybe they were pillortoq, simply stark raving mad.

  Brentford was sitting on a curved plush sofa just against the window, basking in a slanting sunray in front of a light breakfast of coffee and croissants, a mooring post of sanity to Gabriel’s loose gondola. It was a strange place and time to see him, but then it was also a strange place and time for Gabriel to be there. His own excuse, however, was this: on “sick leave” from Doges College, he had spent the night, as he had every night since he had met her five days earlier, roaming through the city with Stella, pausing in their ramblings only for strong drinks and endless kisses, and he was now heading home to sleep through the few hours of remaining daylight. To speak frankly, it showed a bit. Brentford was not long in noticing, as he shook his friend’s hand, that he had sagging, ashen cheeks and haloes around his eyes that looked like pools of oil. But what he could not perceive was that Gabriel used this exhaustion to cover up his anxiety about a meeting whose outcome he feared for both their sakes.

  “What are you doing here?” asked Gabriel, falling into more than sitting on the sofa in front of Brentford, and huffing a breath that carried the bitter whiff of absinthe.

  “I quarrelled with Sybil,” admitted Brentford, with a wry smile to show it was nothing too worrying. “About the guest list. I discovered she had added Surville at the last moment. I certainly do not want to see him.”

  It took Gabriel a migrainous while to understand the fuss was about Brentford’s former sweetheart.

  “Seraphine’s husband?”

  “Ex-husband, yes. But nevertheless. And the spokesman of the Council. Go figure.”

  “Why would Sybil invite him?”

  “I do not know, really. Sybil has an address book the size of Moby Dick. I think he is a kind of sponsor to the Cub-Clubbers, or something.”

  Gabriel refrained from wincing at the name of the band, which was everything he detested. Though he had to admit that Sybil was, well, attractive.

  “It infuriated me all the more,” continued Brentford, after Gabriel had ordered a double coffee with the vague, but visible, hope that he would not have to pay for it himself, “because I have an appointment with the Council this afternoon. I’ll spare you the details. Having to cope with them twice a day is beyond my patience, these days.”

  Gabriel started at the mention of the appointment. He hoped that it had nothing to do with the book Brentford was, not without reason, suspected of having written. But he also realized that if they were seen together now, on display in the window, it would only mean to them that Gabriel was warning Brentford of the danger, which would point to his friend as the culprit and himself as his accomplice. The noose tightened around his throat. Since his failed attempt to send poor Phoebe with a message, he had decided to stay away from Brentford, hoping it would benefit both of them. What a brilliant success, he thought, not withholding the wince this time.

  “Nothing serious, I hope,” he managed to grumble. He had decided not to add to Brentford’s trouble and said nothing of his own interview with the Gentlemen of Night.

  “Well, they do not exactly invite you over every day, so I guess they want to convey the idea that it is serious. The reason is rather technical, a little litigation over hunting quotas between the army and the Inuit. But I expect they will take advantage of it to embarrass me some way or other.”

  Gabriel nodded, but he was not in a state in which technicalities were of any interest to him. It would give too much credit to his mind to say that it was racing to find an excuse to get out, but, at last, it tried to.

  “You seem a bit tired,” said Brentford, not wishing to dwell on his own problems.

  “I met a girl.”

  “You look like you met two or three.”

  “Sort of, yes. She’s very energetic. She’s called Stella, but she should be called Tesla, really. High-voltage girl.”

  “The Earl of Real versus Stella Tesla. It sounds good,” said Brentford, who wondered how long this latest fling, or his friend’s nerves, would last. “What does she do?”

  “Pretty much everything.”

  “For a living, I mean.”

  Gabriel smiled at the motherly tone of the question.

  “Oh. She’s a vaudeville artist, I guess. Relatively new to the city. She is now working for a magician.”

  “Handyside?”

  “What?”

  “The name of the magician is Handyside?”

  “I don’t know. She works at the Trilby Temple.”

  “That’s the one. Sybil wanted a magician for our wedding and I’m supposed to see him perform there tonight. I guess I will see your Stella.”

  “You won’t see anything but her,” said Gabriel, with a streak of pride that did not linger too long. The coffee had arrived and he lost himself in the smoke, eyes half closed, not exactly liking what he saw reflected through a cup, darkly.

  “Speaking of coincidences,” said Brentford, “the Scavengers have found a dead woman in a sled in Niflheim. She held a mirror with Lancelot written on it.”

  “Cracked from side to side?”

  “Not yet. Maybe next time I quarrel with Sybil, who now owns the thing. Why do you ask?”

  “For no reason. It reminded me of a poem. But then everything does.”

  “I wondered if you might have a clue or simply feel concerned.”

  “I do not date dead women as a rule.”

  Oops, thought Gabriel, hoping he had not offended Brentford, whose longing for Helen, concealed as it was, nonetheless was well known to him. However, this time Brentford easily read his friend’s mind, as if in a comic book: the arched eyebrows, the pursed lips. He decided not to take offence, but discovered that, indeed, he wanted to speak about Helen. Gabriel was perhaps among the few persons who would not consider such talk as pertaining to alienism—and the only one among them whom Brentford himself would not regard as a lunatic.

  “I think I have news from Helen, by the way.”

  “Dream incubation?”

  “Yes. She has given me an appointment on the North Pole for March the first. Geographical, that is.”

  Gabriel nodded appreciatively.

  “You’re going there?” he asked, a bit jealous.

  “Well, I’m of two minds. I do not think I will risk it, but still I am getting the Kinngait ready.”

  “Nice honeymoon trip.”

  “Yes, you’re right. I do not think Sybil would be too happy with me going there right after the wedding.”

  “By the way, this North Pole thing reminds me of something,” said Gabriel, who felt a sudden relief at having found a reason not to stay that was nobler than simply going to bed. “I have to go visit the Inuit People’s Ice Palace. I met a friend of Bob’s who is helping with the staging of it all. He invited me to visit it before the opening.”

  “I do not think this palace is the best idea,” said Brentford with a frown.

  “I recited the lesson you taught me about it. But you know how it is: curiosity got the be
tter of me. I am actually late,” he added, standing up, searching for a wallet which he knew was empty. Brentford waved his hand appeasingly, to signify that he would gladly pay the bill.

  “Don’t forget you’re supposed to be my best man on Saturday,” he added, as he shook hands with Gabriel. “Don’t forget to make up with the bride, then.”

  Through the window, Brentford watched Gabriel go away, and felt vaguely worried. Since he had first met him twenty years before, watching in disbelief as “the hurling earl” crawled uninvited on all fours into his Doges’ College dorm room to vomit in the washbasin, Brentford had acquired a rather large spectrum of expectations about what could be regarded as right or normal for his friend. Now Gabriel was undoubtedly tired and could have his moody spells, but knowing him as he did, Brentford sensed there was something else. Gabriel had seemed nervous, elusive, pulling relentlessly on his sideburns while casting quick glances at the street. This “Lancelot” story would normally have goaded him into inventing thousand hypotheses and he would have given more thought to the North Pole trip than he had, as it was a longtime fascination of his. Was this Stella to blame? Or something else? He reverted to his own already numerous problems and found with a sigh that Gabriel’s eerie behaviour had been added to them.

  CHAPTER XII

  Eskimo Thieves!!!

  His filthy habits unsubdu’d

  His manners gross, his gestures rude

  No friendly hand assists to teach

  Instruction comes not in his reach;

  And scarcely knowing good from ill

  Being untaught, he’s blameless still.

  “A Peep at The Esquimaux,” By A Lady, 1825

  Hiding the truth from Brentford was something Gabriel could consider doing, but, as a gentleman as well as a friend, lying to him was beyond the pale of the possible. Once he had told him that he was going to the Inuit People’s Ice Palace, he had little choice but to actually go there, however exhausted he was. Wondering why he had not simply admitted that he needed some sleep, he staggered toward the Marco Polo Midway.

  Though it was early in the day, and not exactly warm, the Midway was already busy, people taking advantage of the few hours of decent daylight to stroll about and linger in front of the shops, cafés, and attractions that lined the long avenue. A refuge against the most dreaded Hyperboredom of the Wintering Weeks, the Midway was a poetic hodgepodge of architectural styles, but with an overall cheapness that made it more Fairground than Fairyland. Through dreary days or dazzling nights, it catered almost nonstop to all kinds of questionable tastes in mass entertainment. Panoramas, dioramas, oloramas, cycloramas, mareoramas, myrioramas, and panopticons took the spectators through all kinds of famous monuments and places, exotic lands, ferocious battles, and natural catastrophes, unless they preferred a “Trip to the Moon” or a good update on the “War of the Worlds,” or even, if one believed the bold letters above the gigantic archways guarded by angels and devils, a replay of the “Creation of the World” or a peek through the formidable “Hellgate.” Gabriel had patronized, in more senses than one, each of these many times and though he professionally professed to see their naïve vulgarity, he had always tremendously enjoyed them, precisely because the imperfection and mechanical frailty of these industrial visions reminded him, more than anything else, of his own stuttering fantasies, the do-it-yourself of his dreams.

  Nevertheless, the very idea of building the Ice Palace right there, a few steps from the pyramid-shaped Palace of Palmistry or the Trilby Temple, said a lot about the seriousness of its planners’ alleged anthropological concerns. The building itself, whose outside was now completed, was shaped, rather ridiculously to Gabriel’s mind, as a rough mountain or an iceberg of huge proportions, as if the Eskimos were some kind of troglodytes living in caves of ice. He walked up to a man in a sort of zookeeper’s uniform whom he supposed was a guard, and having explained his case had only a few minutes to wait—his heavy lids closing by themselves—before Kelvin Budd-Jones came to meet him at the door.

  “Nice to see you. I do not have much time, however. We’re under considerable pressure, here.”

  “I hope I won’t detain you too long,” said Gabriel, who was sincerely in a hurry to get between sheets that would not be made of ice. “It’s really kind of you, anyway.”

  The entrance hall and the darkened corridor that curved toward the main rotunda were a dusty mess indeed, carpeted with crumpled blankets and tarpaulins, littered with dismantled iron scaffolding and boxes of greasy nuts and bolts.

  “You’ve heard about Bob?” asked Kelvin, to strike up a little conversation, as they made their way through the obstacles.

  “No,” Gabriel answered, realizing that since he had met Stella, he’d felt no interest or curiosity about anything or anyone else.

  “His Polar Kangaroo has been stolen. Well, it has disappeared, while we were at the Kane Clinic. He’s not the happiest boy in New Venice, as you can imagine.”

  “Oh,” said Gabriel, trying to look surprised. But when you started fiddling about with the Polar Kangaroo, no surprise would be the real surprise. He could well imagine the statue hopping away on its powerful hind legs. Generally, any manifestation of that wonder or freak of Nature, fictitious, real, or anything in between or beyond, was an omen of trouble threatening the city. Gabriel had a hunch he would hear about it again.

  “Here, you see,” said Kelvin, indicating a blue glow running along the base of the curved corridor walls, “these are Geissler tubes full of argon. We were trying to imitate the light just as it appears over the horizon, so it’s a bit like being outside.”

  “A bit, yes. Great idea,” said Gabriel, who appreciated the effort to simulate those sensations but who could not help thinking that a -30°F temperature would have been a more efficient way to produce a real Arctic feel, if that was truly the point. Then you might get some notion of what being an Inuk was all about.

  But when the corridor ended and they entered the Hall, he was struck dumb. It was towering and vast and looked bigger than a normal panorama, perhaps because one entered it at floor level and not upon a mid-level platform. A painted roll, maybe forty-five feet in height, circled the entire rotunda, showing snowy peaks and icebergs adrift in the sea. A fjord, part paint, part real water, extended right to the middle and blended into a shore scene in the hall, where about twenty igloos were scattered on the blinding white floor. A few stuffed seals lounging on floes or peeping out of ice holes completed the picture, and Gabriel wondered if the Polar Kangaroo would not have felt indeed more at home here than in the Musheum.

  This cardboard sublimity, as it tricked his senses into accepting that inside was outside, left him rocking uneasily between belief and disbelief. The light was dim, with a Sunday afternoon heaviness to it that felt barely comfortable. A frayed film of mist, probably made from dry ice, hovered above the ground, curiously at odds with the rather warm temperature around them. The scene in its entirety produced a strange sensation of frozen movement and epileptic clarity that was, Gabriel felt, slightly oppressive.

  “It’s a panorama but also a diorama,” explained Kelvin, pointing at the painted scenery. “The canvas is actually transparent linen, with a few other layers behind. There are light rigs and filters behind the paintings and in the ceiling, over those fake clouds, so we can make the whole scene look like it’s day or night, and imitate sun dogs or mock moons. We can even do northern lights. I can’t show you now, but it’s quite something. I’m devising a trick that can synchronize them with electromagnetic sound waves. Right now, you can hear the wind, I suppose, as we’re testing the loudspeakers.”

  There was an ominous hiss, in fact, but since nothing moved, not even the mist, except a few stray workers here and there installing props in the igloos, it just worsened the feeling of uncanny stillness. It reminded Gabriel of that night when Helen died after having stopped Time for a few minutes, and how scary it all had been.

  “I’m impressed, really,” he sa
id, becoming almost dizzy when he lifted his eyes toward the vault.

  A titanic amount of work and skill had gone into this scheme, and he really wondered what was the point, beyond sheer performance. It did not look like the kind of cheap entertainment that the surroundings promised, but neither was it credible as a scientific or cultural endeavour. The idea of having real Eskimos going through the motions of hunting stuffed animals seemed especially ludicrous when everything around seemed designed for wax figures. It was enough to look at those four real Inuit in furs who came out of an igloo and blinked around, hands over their eyes, seeming as lost as Gabriel, to understand the absurdity of it all.

  The four Eskimos regrouped and walked toward the exit, coming closer to Gabriel, who could hear them laughing behind their sleeves, when a fifth one, in an employee’s uniform, darted out of the igloo and ran after them, apparently furious. He caught by the arm the last of the group, a long-haired, bowlegged, smelly fellow who seemed to be hiding something under his parka, and whispered to him something in Inuktitut that Gabriel had not enough vocabulary to grasp but that was, by the sound of it, an unequivocal reproach. The other fellow strove to free his arm, pulling faces at his aggressor, while the remaining three seemed rather amused at the scene. Suddenly, another of the uniformed guards, a white man, strode from the entrance toward the group.

  “Hey, Oosik,” he said, “what’s going on here?”

  “Nothing, nothing, sir,” said the Eskimo guard, who looked rather embarrassed, while the others now laughed openly, elbowing each other in the ribs.

  “Oosik, cousins or not, I told you to be discreet when you took them in,” said the white guard. “People are working here and have no time to fool around.”