Aurorarama (26 page)

He pressed his eyes, suddenly exhausted, and went back to the bedroom. He wondered what the magician had seen in the mirror, and moved closer to it.

As he looked inside, he saw the Ghost Lady behind him, wearing an elegant black dress. Smiling. He started and turned around. Of course no one was there. And no one was in the mirror either as he looked into it again, except a tired Brentford
in a burgundy smoking jacket holding a gun that had not been loaded, just a waxed pencil moustache short of looking like a second-rate actor in a bad crime phantascopy.

I must be really tired, he thought, an unpleasant shudder tickling and chilling his spine.

But tired as he was, he did not sleep that night.

S
ybil was finally restored the day before the wedding. A party of ice-cutters working off Symmes Spit found her lying unconscious on a small drifting floe, wearing only a fur coat over her party dress. Dropping jaws and saws, they raced her on their sled to their cabin, from whence they sent a flashing balloon message to their headquarters, which immediately called a propelled sled ambulance.

Alerted by pneumatic post a few hours later, Brentford jumped on his Albany cutter sleigh and met her at the Kane Clinic. According to Doctor Playfair she was perfectly safe and healthy. She had obviously been given boiler pills and
stokers when she had been abandoned, and this barely a few minutes before her discovery. She showed no signs of frostbite or even hypothermia and could resume a normal life after a simple check-up. Much of Sybil’s disappearence and rescue, then, had been staged, and Brentford had not been surprised to hear that journalists from the
Illustrated Arctic News
, notorious propagandists for the Council of Seven, had been on the spot under the pretext of taking notes and pictures for a coming series on the ice-cutting industry, “the cutting edge of our economy.” Meanwhile, of course, Lilian Lenton had dropped out of the headlines.

Sybil did not seem to remember anything from the previous days, and, though a bit absent-minded at times, tried to get interested in the wedding plans as if nothing had happened. However, there was actually nothing much left to do in terms of preparation, as Brentford’s mother had taken charge of things in the no-nonsense way that ran in the family. Curiously, the complications this was bound to create did not spin out of control, and except for a little nitpicking, Sybil took in the situation with a surprising coolness that bordered on indifference, and she did not even react when she heard that Handyside’s performance would have to be cancelled.

She had, it soon appeared, other things on her mind. When the Cub-Clubbers came by to discuss the musical program for the wedding, most of the talk revolved instead around their next recording, and the sessions, it appeared, were already booked at the Smith Sound Studio for the day after the ceremony (“I’m soooo sorry, honey”). If Brentford had overheard correctly, the idea was simply to record a copycat of a Lenton song, talk-over and all, with the subversive edges blunted and a few typical Cub-Clubbers jazzy gimmicks thrown in. If this were some sort of commission from above, he would of course never know, but
he suspected it strongly. The Council’s way of doing poletics was as inventive as it was pervasive.

Brentford had to admit to himself that the Handyside episode had somewhat marred their relationship. If she seemed oddly detached, maybe as an aftereffect of the hypnosis that she had gone through, Brentford, on his part, found himself feeling a bit estranged as well, as if unsure of the part she had actually played in the whole affair: the eagerness with which she had run toward the magician at the Trilby Temple had left Brentford with a bitter aftertaste. There was no doubt he would still marry her, but he found that a certain sense of duty was now buttressing his desire to do so. He also found himself equally, if not more, worried by the fits of Arctic Hysteria that were seizing the city. If he had ever in his youth dreamed of being that New Venetian Doge who would throw a golden ring into the Lincoln Sea and pronounce “We wed thee, O Sea, in token of our true and eternal dominion over thee,” he was now aware that the ring would only rebound on the ice with a ridiculous
cling
of rejection. No ocean in its sound mind would marry a city so totally
pillortoq
as New Venice now seemed to be.

The very morning when he had been driving Sybil back to the Greenhouse, the streets—already barely passable after the snowstorm—had been blocked because of an incident involving the native employees of the Inuit People’s Ice Palace. Dressed in furs and installed on a platform decorated with mock-igloos in front of the Nothwestern Administration for Native Affairs, in order to give speeches promoting the official opening in two days’ time, they had done quite the contrary, slandering the Palace and distributing leaflets that had a distinct autonomist flavour to them. “Gentlemen” from the crowd had of course “volunteered” to “protect” the Inuit from the angry crowd and “sheltered” them until things cooled off. All of which could
of course have been predicted, given the recent events, and in Brentford’s opinion
had been predicted
by the Council, who had not only let it happen but had
wanted it to happen
, because it served their obscure plan to stoke up racial tensions.

The last straw had been the astounding accusation that the snowstorm had taken such proportions in so little time because the Air Architecture had been sabotaged. Though in normal times the Council would have been only too happy to blame the Arctic Administration for such supposed shortcomings in their protection of the city, they had this time designated as culprits
four
Inuit from Flagler Fjord, who had been jailed and released for petty theft the very same day and had, allegedly, wanted revenge upon New Venice.

This injustice made Brentford want to spew vomit like a fulmar under attack. He knew the Air Architecture very well, as his father, who had designed and run it, had taken him many times for walks along the impressive rows of Astor vibratory disintegrators that heated and relentlessly pumped the methanegas hydrates out of the permafrost. There was no way whatsoever that four Inuit with knives made of “starshit” meteor stone could ever damage that shiny, greasy underground beast. Now the February Freeze Four, as the press was calling them, were on the run, and that was the only news Brentford could mildly rejoice about.

Even the fact that Arkansky had kept his promise to restore Sybil and had left him alone so far was not especially reassuring. As Brentford had yet to reciprocate by disclosing the ghost’s identity, he knew something wicked would sooner or later come his way, and he feared it was going to be during the wedding.

Speaking of which, his best man, Gabriel, seemed to have disappeared. Bah. His friend was right not to care, after all. Brentford felt ashamed and stupid to be getting married when everything, public and private, seemed to be going to the dogs.
And then a pneumatic dispatch arrived, informing him that his mother had slipped on the ice and broken her leg.

Gabriel’s nerves had snapped one after the other, like so many strings on a Loar guitar.

Waiting on Stella’s doorstep until three o’clock in the morning in the snowstorm had not helped his health. It was not so much the common cold he’d come away with as the way he had treated it in the following days. A steady diet of opiate pills, Freezeland Fags, Wormwood Star Absinthe, bad coffee, and almost no food had turned his body into a thin, taut, anatomical
écorché
, with no muscles and all the nerves showing, the whole offering little or no protection against the outer world.

That world now consisted almost entirely of Stella’s place, a collective apartment at the edge of Novo-Arkhangelsk. The Apostles’, as the demure-looking building was called, was the former site of the offices and warehouses of the now defunct Mirrilies & Muir department store. There, artists, bohemians, and dropouts had installed studios and Spartan rooms, where they shared costs, bottles, beds, and just about anything else.

Not that Gabriel—his mind open like a ruin where draughts circulate through banging doors or unhinged windows—either cared for or condemned the lifestyle in itself. After all, as someone trustworthy had once said, “the whole business of man is the arts and all things common.” It was even, in a way, what he had been looking for. But, a bourgeois among bohemians, he would sooner have considered sharing his girlfriend (as long as she wasn’t Stella) than a bathroom with strangers. The promiscuity made him secretly unhappy and bothered him more than he admitted, for he did not want to criticize, let alone lose, Stella’s hospitality.

Among the Apostles, he was surprised to come across Mugrabin, lurking in the shadow and busy plotting with an Inuk who looked a lot like the one who had defended the Eskimos at the Inuit People’s Ice Palace. On seeing Gabriel, Mugrabin flashed a knowing false-toothed smile and winked a glass-eyed wink. “Ah!!! Did not I tell you that you would join us?” he sputtered in Gabriel’s face. Shaking his hands violently, he then informed him that “great things are on their way.” The idea of Mugrabin living a few yards away from him and probably fiddling about with homemade incendiary bombs had not quite helped Gabriel to relax. He later interrogated Stella about the man, but she had just tapped her forehead in an unambiguous estimation of the man’s sanity.

But what Gabriel could not forget about Mugrabin were the insinuations he had made about Stella and Free Love during his visit to Gabriel’s apartment. Another aspect of the local communism that did not sit very well with him was that every time he met a party of people somewhere within the Apostles, one of them turned out to be one of Stella’s former lovers. His efforts to forget everything about the Ingersarvik would be blown to smithereens, and sharp pangs of jealousy pierced him through and through, as if he were an unfortunate assistant in a failed sword-box illusion. Though Stella did her meagre best to reassure and soothe him, he often felt anguished and shameful, a laughingstock for people who probably could not care less.

He found he loved Stella too much, not in regard to what she deserved—for he wished everyone to be loved madly—but in regard to how much he could handle. Of course, she was cute, curious, quick-witted, deliciously debauched, and clownish as a kitten, but his obsession went far beyond her objective qualities. Every trifle from her was quatrefoil to him. Any word she said or move she made provoked instant salivation, like an electrode in a dog’s severed head. The way she danced with
her fists clenched and biting her lips with her perfectly aligned little teeth, the way she put both of her small hands around a hot mug to drink the worst coffee he’d ever tasted, the way she, well … She was like the girl you fall in love with when you’re three years old and never quite recover from, the little child whose features you catch by surprise in the prettiest of your girlfriends. The sight of her receding buttocks as she got up from the bed in his St-Anthony-Pateyville Polars hockey top (which had, sewn on its back, a number that was, curiously, an exact count of the girls he had known before her), or, as she sat on her heels, the vision of her toes that were like little orphans huddling together, filled his heart with a curious blend of bliss and distress. When she fell asleep at his side, either he would prowl around her nude, half-covered body like an old hungry wolf, or he would simply bend over her and cry with what could equally be the tenderness of a father or the loneliness of an abandoned child.

He was, in a word, ridiculous.

It had even got to the point where he’d acquired a new tattoo from a nearby shop, as a token of commitment and complicity. He’d got the idea from a bizarre book that said that the scions of old families from the Bourbonnais (where the Alliers allegedly originated) used to have needles stuck in their napes to indicate the initials of the fixed star under which they had been born. The book further affirmed, even less credibly, that this was how the magnetic attraction of needles toward the North Pole had been discovered. Gabriel, his lucidity in tatters, had found the tradition worthy to be revived.