Aurorarama

by Jean-Christophe Valtat

  The presence that had been “talking” to him he dismissed as an hallucination, born from his tiredness and the extreme conditions surrounding him. Still under the influence of his subterranean trip, he had just allowed some dim memory of Isabelle d’Ussonville, or of some photograph of her seen in his youth, to shape an intuition about Stella that was maybe just another illusion. This he would be checking soon.

  But why he had had that intuition was still unclear to him. If he tried to reconstruct it, he had to admit it amounted to some inborn distrust of Stella’s faithfulness, though she had given him no particular cause for alarm in that respect. It was true that she disappeared all day long to rehearse and perform at the Trilby Temple. But she had explained to him that it was high-precision work, with no mistakes allowed, and so required painstaking practice, and he had no reason not to believe her.

  He had not gone to see the show, though she had invited him, because he simply did not want to. From what he imagined, a magician’s assistant was a half-clad doll, offered to foreign, inquisitive looks and subjected to all kinds of sadistic outrages. She would be paraded, manipulated, locked up in tight boxes, sawed in half, decapitated, and the Devil knew what else. He simply did not wish to see his love treated that way in public.

  However, something nagged at him: the fact that he had met her in the hospital the day of the Drug’n’Drone Dragnet, as it was now called in the local lore, and precisely when he’d been on his way to find Phoebe, so that, in a sense, Stella had prevented him from seeing and possibly rescuing the damsel in distress. The way she had presented herself could have been spontaneous, but could also have been calculated. After all, as a trap, it would have been a rather simple and infallible one.

  The fact that she was employed precisely where Phoebe was now exploited and under the command of a magician who was also a hypnotist—like the one, if not the same one, whom he had faced in the hospital (and who had voiced, if he remembered correctly, his interest in Phoebe)—did little to dispel his doubts. He hated himself for suspecting her, but as a man whose past week had been nothing but set-ups and persecutions, he could be excused for a tendency to see patterns and plots in mere coincidences. As to why the Ingersarvik had sprung to his mind, he could not really tell. Maybe it was his way of bracing himself for the worst.

  The taxsleigh had given up shortly before Boreas Bridge, as weather conditions permitted no further advance. Gabriel regretfully paid the sumptuous fare he had himself promised and trudged for the rest of the way, sometimes sinking up to his calves in the fresh powder snow.

  The blizzard seemed to be dying down, and it was now possible to enjoy the sight of the buildings and embankments and bridges smothered in the diamond-dusted whiteness. There’s always something soothing in the snow, thought Gabriel, a promise of happiness and absolution, of a new start on a clean sheet. Snow redesigned the streets with hints of another architecture, even more magnificent, more fanciful than it already was, all spires and pinnacles on pale palaces of pearl and opal. All that New Venice should have been reappeared through its partial disappearance. It was as if the city were dreaming about itself and crystallizing both that dream and the ethereal unreality of it. He wallowed in the impression, badly needing it right now, knowing it would not last as he hobbled nearer to his destination.

  Only second to the Bower of Bliss, that miragenous bordello on the Ladies’ Mile, the Ingersarvik (the word meant something like “Humping Spot”) was one of the most famous places in Venustown, where “famous” mostly meant “infamous.” For the layman, however, it was impossible to find, as no signs indicated it. But Gabriel knew where it was and even knew it too well: down an almost invisible steep flight of stairs, in a chink between two buildings. A heavy door with a ringing bell opened, after too long a while, on a ticket booth staffed by a rather sulky Inuk girl. For singles, the entrance fee was expensive. Gabriel’s money was melting faster than the snow promised to do, and what was worse, he expected little pleasure in exchange as he entered, ducking his head to pass down the low, narrow tunnel to the main “igloo.”

  If there ever was something about Eskimo culture that had left a strong impression on the Whites, it must have been the wife-swapping, orgiastic part. New Venice’s most notorious swingers’ haunt had drawn its inspiration, or its excuse, from that obsessive fantasy. In a sense, Gabriel thought, as he entered the first room dressed only in a complimentary natik, it was a kind of blueprint for the Inuit People’s Ice Palace, a monument of perverse, projective anthropology. On one hand, if the truth be told, it was one of the rare places in the city where there was a modicum of mixity between Inuit and qallunaat, but on the other hand, it had a rather limited take on racial relationships and, as an unspoken rule, you saw more white men with Inuit girls than Eskimos with white women. Gabriel, who had sometimes been there in the days when he’d had an Igloolik maid, was, however, not in the best position to pass judgement on this.

  Modelled on igloo architecture, the Ingersarvik was actually a labyrinth of little dome-shaped rooms of different sizes connected by small tunnels. It was hot, probably around 100°F, and some steam that smelled of laundry made the place rather smoky. The walls were made of glazed ice, and the rooms were lit by a sparsity of wick lamps, so that most people one came across were little more than faceless silhouettes. The light grew less and less intense as the maze went on, and the last lamps could even be blown out to simulate the Eskimo ritual, more a game, actually, known as “snuffing the candles,” that preceded the Inuits’ too-famous orgies. (Gabriel recalled from his studies that these were less a permanent feature of Eskimo life than a diversion in times of hardship and food shortages.) Niches were carved inside some of the walls, allowing people to have a drink or to lounge on fur blankets. A block of ice, or iglerk, covered with furs and skins, was placed in the middle or inserted in the wall of each igloo. This was where people got busy, “laughing under the skins,” as the Inuit said, though as a matter of fact you hardly ever heard anyone laughing.

  Gabriel scoured the rooms, in a curious predicament, afraid of finding what he could not help looking for. A woman with a stick and a masked man with a penis made of stuffed intestines fooled around the rooms chanting in a hypnotic tone, adding a touch of couleur locale that seemed rather tiresome to Gabriel, while meatbergs of indistinct people could be seen in a distant room, piling up like walruses on top of one another. He was rather indifferent to the spectacle—once he had made sure, as well as he could, that the participants were not known to him.

  He had been there and done that, and not been impressed. Had he been inclined—God forbid—toward metaphysics, what he would have concluded from these experiments is that Sex is in Man an ancient, different, parasitic soul that can operate on its own and for motives obscure even to itself. What he had lived through here had been, in a way, happening to Sex more than it had been happening to him. Gabriel had watched himself doing things, or things being done to him, with a kind of detached curiosity that had perplexed more than enlightened him. He had been hoping for a trip to the terrae incognitae of life, for revelations that would flay the world alive, but instead had found scary savages huddling together in a cave around the feeble fire of a female body.

  Tonight, as he passed among those silhouettes in the smoke, little locker keys dangling and jangling from their wrists or ankles as if they were lost sheep in the fog, he even felt he had descended to Hades, among fading shadows who loitered at loose ends between two stages of Death, barely realizing they were not alive anymore. But then, he had to admit he had seen better days himself.

  Still, something was making him feel alive. It was less his beating heart—even though that was pounding fast and loud enough—than his constantly nagging, tugging, gnawing stomach, which, since the day he had met Stella, seemed to be the very location of his soul. It now acted as a compass, pointing him toward a drawn skin curtain and warning him he should not go over there and open it.

  But there he went, and there they
were.

  What he saw at first was not her but a large, muscular back that in the flickering light of the flame above displayed on its entire surface a tattoo inspired by a Dürer Apocalypse, The Seven Trumpets are Given to the Angels. It was only as the back moved a little aside, its muscles rippling like those of some reptile, that Gabriel could perceive—and how could he be wrong—Stella’s own star sign, the Scorpio on her left shoulder. The back, he suddenly realized, was Sealtiel Wynne’s. He had recognized his bulk back there in the alley but had blocked the fact out as long as he had been able to, and this was exactly the kind of tattoo that the Gentlemen of the Night were rumoured to have. If he’d wanted a Revelation, now he had one. A shudder took hold of him, which was both hot and cold, the burn of cold water falling on colder skin. He fainted and woke up in simultaneous waves, as if passing through ascending hoops made of darkness and light, of ice and fire.

  It was when he summoned the strength to turn away that he saw, or thought he saw, something else, on the next block of ice: the hospital hypnotist was here, the little wick flame prickling shadows on his pock-marked face, a curious sprouting quiff on his head as if he were himself turning to smoke. The goldilocks girl on her hands and knees before him, her empty eyes turned toward Gabriel but looking right through him, as if he weren’t there, was Sybil Springfield.

  Gabriel suddenly felt a cold, flaky hand crawling under his natik. He jumped and saw a thin, eye-masked old man he had not noticed before, who had also been watching the couples. Recoiling in disgust, he slapped the hand away. The man jolted back, his bald head lit for an instant, his eyes angry. Gabriel knew this face, in spite of the eye mask, knew the thin lips and the pointy teeth. He could not believe what he saw.

  How he found himself outside, standing in the middle of the Boreas Bridge, he did not know. What woke him up was the wind, freezing his own cold sweat through his unbuttoned greatcoat. He did not care to button it up. He shrugged it off instead, opened his jacket, put it down, stripped off his wool sweater, his shirt, his undershirt, to feel the cold better, as if it would cleanse him from what he had seen. He stood there for a while, waiting for his heart to stop or his mind to go blank.

  Neither had happened, he realized after a while.

  It was barely one o’clock. The only thing that resembled an idea in his head was how much he missed and needed Stella. No matter what she was up to with the Gentlemen of the Night, he would win her back. He would wait for her, but not here. He would wait in front of her place, for hours if need be, ask her for explanations, and he would listen to them, eager to grant forgiveness. Or maybe he would say nothing at all about what had happened tonight, and just hold her tight in his arms.

  He dressed quickly, before he could catch his death.

  CHAPTER XIX

  The Magician’s Menace

  “I wish it to be distinctly understood that I shall do my best to deceive you, and upon the extent to which I am able to do so will depend my success.”

  Stanyon Ellis, Conjuring for Amateurs, 1901

  Brentford stood at the large picture window of his apartment, a bandage around his hand, less admiring the sight of the frostwork on the sleeping city than sombrely meditating on past events and those about to come. He could still feel the burn of the red-hot-iron-letter-day. He had been punched by a cadet and bitten by a puppet. He had been implicated in the kidnappings of two local celebrities—Lilian’s, successfully enough, and Sybil’s, which was maybe a payback for the first. A snowstorm had swallowed a good half of the city and the Council was ruining the rest. And as two o’clock struck on the Art Nouveau mantel clock, Sybil had not reverted back from a few specks of pixie dust to a woman he could marry in two days.

  A cough behind him made him jump. He turned back, his heart racing, to find Handyside sitting with his legs crossed in the Majorelle armchair behind him. “Where’s Sybil?” and “How did you get in?” elbowed each other in Brentford’s brain to gain access to his tongue.

  “How did you get in?” won.

  “Rather easily,” answered the magician with a little gesture, dismissing the question as having very little interest.

  “Where’s Sybil?” said Brentford, advancing toward him.

  “Ms. Springfield, you mean? Not here, apparently. But I do not think the message you read ever said she would be.”

  Brentford had to admit that, literally speaking, this was true.

  “Were we here to talk about magic, I’d say that’s lesson number one,” said Handyside. “Most of the trick is founded on what the spectator infers.”

  “Thanks for the lesson. When will I get to see her?”

  “You missed a good chance in my dressing room, actually.”

  “You were still there?”

  “Of course. In the trunks. Rather cramped, if I may say so. And I had to stifle my laughter when Tommy bit you.” Handyside smiled, pointing at Brentford’s bandaged hand.

  “That damned puppet.”

  Handyside chuckled.

  “This is what happens when you assume things are what they seem to be. Tommy is indeed a very mischievous contraption,” he added, almost tenderly.

  Brentford had once again been misdirected, and tried to retrace his tracks.

  “We were talking about Sybil.”

  “Do not worry. She’ll be restored in time. That will be my little wedding gift. Provided, of course, this conversation leaves us both satisfied.”

  Brentford sat down with a sigh in the armchair in front of Handyside.

  “You’re not one to be trusted, I would say,” he replied.

  “You’d offend me if you thought otherwise,” answered Handyside, with a bow. “Deception is my trade, as you know. But then, if I deceive people, I do not disappoint them, I hope. Look in your right pocket.”

  Brentford reached into the pocket of his smoking jacket. Much to his surprise he pulled out a crumpled scaly brown leather thing he instantly recognized: it was the pineapple-shaped mask worn by Angry Andrew, the former master of the Greenhouse, in the heyday of Pineapples and Plums. And suddenly Brentford also recognized in Spencer Molson, the Clumsy Conjuror he had seen tonight, Angry Andrew’s personal assistant and master of ceremonies.

  “My real name, you will be interested, if not pleased, to know, is Adam Arkansky. I am the son of Ananias Andrew Arkansky and I have come to claim my inheritance,” he said, putting in his own pocket the mask Brentford handed him back.

  “Your inheritance?”

  “The greenhouses my father ran.”

  “I do not own this place, Mr. Arkansky, and neither do you. A lot of things have changed since your father ran it. For one thing, it is now a branch of the Arctic Administration. Even if I were inclined to give it back, it would not be in my power to do so.”

  “I know that, of course. But were you to resign, I have reasons to think the Council of Seven would consider my application with benevolence.”

  “I do not doubt they would,” Brentford said, darkly remembering the presence of that cumbersome Gentleman of the Night in front of the backstage door. “But I am not sure you would like the job. I spend most of my time calculating ratios of sand, ashes, local soil, compost, and nitrogen, making sure steam pipes or Tesla coils warm the soil sufficiently, finding ways to fan out or recycle the heat when it’s too hot because of the long periods of daylight. It bores me as an engineer, and I doubt it would have for you the glamour of stage magic.”

  Actually, Brentford delegated most of those tasks, but he wanted to know what Handyside, well, Arkansky, was aiming at.

  “Stage magic is more math than glamour. But anyway, there’s one word you said that sums it all up for me: sand, Mr. Orsini.”

  “Sand is not that fascinating, I assure you.”

  “But imagine we replace it with local psylicates. Would not that give a certain flavour to our local production?”

  That was it, then. A return to Ananias Andrew Arkansky’s old way of using the Greenhouse as a drug factory. When af
fordable food was so damn hard to find for everyone. Brentford frowned.

  “I can see you are your father’s son. But the days of Pineapples and Plums are long dead and gone. Welcome to Scarcity City, Mr. Arkansky.”

  “My father was a great man, a visionary, but he had not the time to fully develop his plans. The Council, as becomes the living memory of New Venice, has not forgotten them, and that is why they have searched and found me. Pineapples and Plums, for all its virtues, was mainly a local resource. And psylicates are too precious to be simply wasted on those useless Boreal Bohemians. The Council seems to think that exporting is very much the future. Imagine the fortune we could make out of it. Importing more down-to-earth food would be then quite easy, I suppose.”

  “You have no notion of the costs of importing food here.”

  “I’m rather well informed on the current situation. I have for instance read an interesting book, lately, A Blast or something … You probably do not know it,” Arkansky Jr. added, with a wink that Brentford pretended not to notice. “I’m quoting from memory and I don’t imagine you would have a copy here to check the exact wording, but I seem to remember that it said that in New Venice, the real wealth was the imaginal wealth, the generosity of dreams, the ever springing fountain of the inner eye, coming from sensory deprivation in the night and in the snow, a culture of fata morgana and aurora borealis. Well, that is exactly what I am aiming for, Mr. Orsini.”

  “I never said it was for sale,” Brentford answered too quickly.

  “Oh? You did not write the book, by any chance?”

  Damn, thought Brentford, placing mental hands over his mouth.