Aurorarama (28 page)

By and by the evening turned into hypnagogic sequences of related and slightly absurd events he had little control over, beyond a faint, unconvinced hope that he would eventually black out. He went to Brentford’s table to carry a toast that embarrassed everybody for a reason he could not quite understand, for all he’d done was salute the bride’s universal appeal. A few reels later in the phantascopy, after Brentford and Sybil had opened the ball with a rather stiff waltz, Gabriel found himself in the ballroom signalling to the drummer of the Cub-Clubbers that he was going to cut his throat, which made the drummer miss a beat and complain to Brentford at the first opportunity. The next scene found Gabriel, much to his sorry surprise, pulling down rabidly the bodice of a squealing blonde girl who was seven inches or so taller than he was (she did not exist). This could have been what caused Hasan Rumi, Brentford’s friend and occasional right arm, to tow Gabriel away from the crowd and toward the winter garden swimming pool, coaxing him into doing some laps while making sure that he did not drown. As a true New Venetian, Gabriel did not miss that chance to get rid of all his clothes. “Party Naked for a Sign,” he kept muttering to himself, as some sort of automated motto.

Such is the power of the mind once it is freed from the body, that Gabriel’s malevolent spirit, hovering over the place, seemed to have contaminated the whole wedding night. As he woke up from some short coma, with pixie dust of dried puke on his purple lapel (thus giving him an excuse to strip bare again) he could perceive Brentford’s stepfather trying to strangle the official photographer. One of the Cub-Clubbers, wearing long johns, his bare, wet feet on a lit spotlight, bragged that he was about to jump into the pool. Someone in underwear carried
someone else on his back and dropped him on the piano with a thundering crash. The manager of the hotel complained to everyone he encountered that he had never seen such a shocking mess, and threatened to close the place, leaving everyone out in the cold.

Gabriel himself, meanwhile, had found another occupation. Standing on the rather barbaric pavilion of the winter garden and still in the nude, he yelled unambiguous advances at Sybil’s mother, who had ventured into the semi-darkness to smell the arctic flowers. His argument was that she would lose nothing by her surrender, as she did not exist. She fled, apparently shocked by some aspect of his reasoning, even if Gabriel wasn’t sure which part.

This last exploit eventually attracted Brentford to the pavilion. He looked hunched and weary, very much like a man stoically watching his world crumbling in slow motion. One of the guests had just confided to him that his son had dated Sybil in the past, and two minutes later, one of Brentford’s closest friends had avowed that he himself had had an affair with Seraphine after her breakup with Brentford. It all made him stagger like a man with stilettos in his back. That he was staggering toward the guillotine, he did not know yet.

“Step back,” said Gabriel threateningly. “I’ve had enough trouble because of you.”

Brentford, taken aback, stopped in his tracks.

Scorpio pretty much rising, Gabriel went on, his voice nervously venomous.

“I’ve been spied on, defamed, arrested, hypnotized, burglarized, cuckolded … Talk about a
blast.”

Brentford tried to speak as calmly as he could, so as to better bottle up this noble gas, which he felt was highly volatile.

“I do not know what you’re talking about. Don’t you think you should sleep on all this? It would help me to get things back in order.”

Gabriel sneered. He narrowed his eyes nastily, as if to take better aim.

“Yes. His Highness the Duke Brentford Orsini. The man who puts things back in order, while his fiancée is being poked by some ugly quack in the Ingersarvik, while Baron Brainveil is watching.”

Brentford said nothing, only turned his back and went away.

Isaiah’s ludicrous threat about scoffers who discover that the bed is shorter than that a man can stretch himself on, and the covering narrower than that he can wrap himself in, had stopped amusing Brentford. For tonight, at the Splendide-Hôtel, he was that man and he was in that bed, barely breathing so as not to disturb Sybil, trying to endure in silence his bitter restlessness. He would have gladly exchanged for a nightmare the memories of that night. The failure of the feast humbled and humiliated him. Here he was, lecturing people on how to run a city when he could not even throw a decent party. The blend of boring arcticocrats and careless scenesters had made an especially disgusting cream cake, with the world’s worst best man as a poisoned cherry on top of it all. Talk about the
True Community
. As to what Gabriel had said … had Gabriel said anything? Brentford must have dreamed it. He did not want to think about it. A sentence circled in his head, lulling him until he fell asleep:
There are only a few days left; if I want to go the Pole, I should go tomorrow, or it will be too late, too late, too late …

Then he found himself
there:
he knew because “North Pole” was written on the record label that he stood upon, with some inscriptions that were either the song duration or some spatial bearings. The record spun, and he spun with it, very fast. Sleigh tracks around the pole moved as he turned and somehow formed the grooves of the record, and at every round
he made, Brentford could see the needle approaching in the shape of an icebreaker stem, pointing toward him, closer each time it passed.

And then he suddenly woke up. A shadow had shifted on the wall, as if someone were crawling or kneeling alongside the bed, not breathing but making some imperceptible buzzing and clicking. Brentford did not move, but followed the shadow out of the corners of his eyes, mentally detailing the muscles he could still count upon. All of a sudden the shadow made a wider move. Brentford rolled away as the awl struck the pillow, and then back over again, catching and blocking the arm before it could pull the point back. The arm cracked like a dry branch as Brentford twisted it. He felt teeth sinking into his thigh. He howled, and let himself fall from the bed, crushing the aggressor under his weight. The teeth released their pressure and Brentford pivoted quickly, seizing the struggling feet below him and trying to get up in spite of the pain. He grasped the ankles, and now held Little Tommy Twaddle at arm’s length, dodging the fist that aimed at his knees and the teeth snapping at his groin. He started turning on himself, more and more quickly, knocking the dummy’s head into everything that met its trajectory, bedpost, mantel, commode. He couldn’t see very well, but he could hear the head splinter and crack and burst, shards of wood and scraps of metal flying everywhere, and the croaking screams of the automaton. Brentford soon felt dizzy and had to stop before falling down, but kept on bashing the dummy down against the floor, sending cogs rolling everywhere, until the croaking stopped and the legs he held did not twitch anymore and were just two useless logs he threw across the room. Almost tripping over an eye that looked at him in a moon ray, he kicked it under the bed in anger and disgust. It rebounded against the wall, rolled a little, like a marble, or a ball in a slowing
roulette wheel, and then everything went still. He turned toward Sybil, surprised that she did not wake up. As he approached the nebulous whiteness atop the bed, he saw that it was her wedding dress.

And the wedding dress was empty.

Book Three

No Earthly Pole

T
hat was it. Gabriel had gone
pillortoq
, now he was going
qivigtoq
.

He had seen it all and done it all. He had lost his love and forsaken his friend. Stella, he would love forever (especially now that forever was simply the next couple of hours), but his love for her had drained him of his will to live. By going crazy at Brentford’s wedding, he had severed the last tie that had linked him to a city where in the past week he had seen nothing anyway but hypocrisy, violence, and injustice. His friend’s efforts to
ameliorate it now made him snigger at his well-meaning naivety. Gabriel would never come across a better allegory of society, he thought, than the one he had been privy to at the Ingersarvik: orgy under hypnosis for the benefit of old vicious vampires.