Aurorarama (32 page)

There was a shock and, coming toward the head at full speed, a light so strong it blinded the brain, piercing and melting it as it passed through. The burn peaked and receded slowly. Gabriel opened his eyes. He was now lying on the ice at the bottom of the crevasse, his head back on his shoulders. He tried and found he could move his limbs. They hurt in a diffuse way, but nothing, unbelievable as it seemed, had been broken by the fall. There was a God for suicides, he thought. He turned over and saw, ten yards above him, a dark streak of starry night between the narrow ice walls, and, from time and time, the muzzle of a whining wolf. No traces of the white shape remained visible, but Gabriel could feel its presence somewhere close by.

He got up, wondering, with less concern than he would have expected, if he were alive or dead, or both, or neither. He
noticed that he now stood totally naked and freezing, though he remained rather indifferent about it, as if his body, after what it had gone through, would not bother him over so little. Maybe he was simply agonizing somewhere, as he had planned, and hallucinating in his agony.

A bluish light seemed to emanate from within the ice walls, and he could see that the crevasse went on, in front of him and behind, in a nearly straight line whose ends were invisible. He decided to follow it northward, hoping for some exit at the base of the cliff side, or for the moment when he would wake up, or forever black out.

The path sloped downward, and at some point he noticed that the opening above had disappeared and been replaced by a glazed roof of ice. He was now, by his own reckoning, somewhere under the sea. Then he saw them: bodies inside the walls—hundreds, thousands of them, standing frozen at different depths, like dummies in thick frosted-glass shop windows. They were not lined up in a row, but seemed occupied with everyday activities or maybe, Gabriel thought, arranged to mimic their last moments. He remembered who they were: the Qimiujarmiut, if that was the correct name, the People of the Narrow Land. Those who, according to some Inuit beliefs, had died a peaceful death and were therefore not allowed in the auroras. The sight was gruesome, but after having seen himself mutilated by wolves, he found their still, blurry silhouettes almost soothing. Except that, as he kept on walking along the walls, the corpses seemed to be observing him with some curiosity, wondering why this newcomer could walk around freely. He now hurried past them, without looking back if he could help it. He had no idea what he was doing here. This was not the kind of afterlife he had wanted. His first choice would have been the good materialist Nothingness, with Heaven a close second. Even the kickball games in the northern lights would have
appealed to him. But the Narrow Land had never been an option. Hell, he had certainly died violently, hadn’t he? He would have to talk to the manager.

Then, it dawned on him that perhaps he wasn’t dead. Not quite yet. Not to the point where he would be kept in that translucent freezer he was passing through. He wouldn’t be shaking this way if he weren’t made of quivering flesh and rattling bone. This was good news, after all. A body is not unlike a pet—stupid and dirty as it is, one becomes attached to it.

He walked on, until a smooth slab of snow blocked the ice corridor. Some voice inside Gabriel told him he would have to go through it, but he had no pick or shovel to clear the way. He took a few steps backward and then ran toward the snow slab, but this did nothing but print his own silhouette in the snow. His face flushed from the cold, he had to charge again, and this time he crashed all the way through, as if he’d burst through a paper hoop. On the other side, the crash woke up a dog with red insomniac eyes, which growled at Gabriel as he got up. He was now standing under a dome completely filled up with frozen bodies, which he could perceive through the thick ice and which were all looking back at him. An igloo stood beneath the middle of the dome, with a low narrow entry, but the dog prevented all his attempts to come closer.

Once again, Gabriel had an inspiration. He noticed a corpse lying near him—his own, in fact, as he had seen it devoured by the wolves. Wincing with disgust, he bent to tear off a piece of his own forearm—the flesh resisted a bit, and Gabriel even thought he heard a moan—and threw it as far away as he could. The dog ran off to fetch it, stupidly wagging its tail. Barely holding back his nausea, Gabriel ran to the entrance of the igloo and advanced on all fours through the narrow corridor, as if he had always known that this was the way to behave in such a situation.

The tunnel seemed to go on forever but eventually opened onto the inside of the igloo, which was much wider that it had seemed from the outside. Its roof, in a way Gabriel could not comprehend, was transparent, and from where he was he could see not only the starry skies but also a wide expanse of land. New Venice was on his left, not so far away, its lights visible from below, as if the ground it stood upon were made out of dark ice or glass. It made his head dizzy. Then he saw her.

A long-haired woman. Sitting near a huge circular well.
Saana
, thought Gabriel. The Inuk Goddess of the Sea.

“Oh. You can call me Helen,” said the woman, turning toward him, her face half-lit by the flame that danced from a lamp in the ceiling. It was Helen Kartagener all right, but in the trembling chiaroscuro light, Gabriel thought she also looked a little like Lilian Lenton. He stood up, and noticing her amused downward glimpse, he covered with his hands his penis, which the cold had shrivelled into a shrimp.

“How are you, Mr. d’Allier?” asked Helen, the amusement now in her voice.

Gabriel tried not to look impressed.

“Very well. Thank you. I’ve just fallen down a crevasse and been devoured by wolves.”

“Rather classical part of the initiation. How do you feel right
now?”

He thought about it for a moment.

“To speak frankly, like I’ve fallen asleep during my anthropology class.”

Helen chuckled gently and indicated the surroundings.

“It’s not so bad, though. I’ll give you an A for this project. And a diploma for the crash course in shamanism. The underground trip toward me wasn’t bad either. You may have confused or conflated one or two things, but after all, it has to remain an individual experience, your own version of it.”

“As an
angakoq
, I may disappoint you when it comes to ventriloquism and sleight-of-hand. I may not be very entertaining during the long winter nights.”

“I know. Things have been rushed a bit. But you already have the modesty of a true Inuk and you also have a
very
powerful helping spirit.”

“The Polar Kangaroo, you mean?”

“We know him as Kiggertarpok here,” she said. “You could not have chosen, or been chosen by, a better ally. He protects the city much better than I could do. Now, if you will …”

She showed him a comb made of narwhal tusk at the edge of the well. “I suppose you did not sleep through that part of the class.”

Gabriel advanced and took the comb. The well was so deep the eyes could not fathom it. It was full of seals and walruses gliding around in a complicated choreography, and it stank atrociously, he thought. As he drew closer to Helen, he could see that she looked tired and sick, her skin waxen and wrinkled, the hands on her lap awfully maimed, with all the upper phalanxes neatly cut away, as if devoured by some wild animal. But for someone he had seen dead a few months before, she was not so bad.

As the ritual demanded, he started unravelling and combing her long tangled hair, slowly, carefully, hoping she would not notice that his penis was slowly metamorphosing back into some bigger, harder-shelled crustacean. For a man who thought a few hours (years? centuries?) earlier that Stella would be the very last woman he would ever desire, this was nothing short of a miracle. Such was the power of the Sea Goddess.

She sighed with pleasure, her eyes half-closed.

“So what brings you here?” she eventually asked.

“I supposed it was you.”

“No.
You
brought
me
here. If I can be of any use.”

“I have no idea. People usually come to find you about food, don’t they? But that would be Brentford’s business, not mine.”

“Yes. I have heard, through the grapevine, so to speak, that he’s been running the Greenhouse. I’d be curious to see the kind of crooked vegetables he grows. It’s not my line, however. As you know, I specialize in animals. I was quite a huntress in my youth.”

“I seem to remember Brentford was having a problem about hunting quotas. But I could not tell you what the problem was, exactly.”

“I know and I’m taking care of it. Just pass the message along, if you will.”

“You’ll have more chances to speak to him than I will. He also told me you had given him some kind of rendezvous. At the North Pole.”

Helen stood silent, for a while.

“To be quite exact I sent a messenger. Brentford is on his way, I think. And, as you see, I’m not,” she conceded.

Gabriel tried not to sound reproachful.

“You have sent him to his death, then.”

“I sent him
away
from his death. You did not approve of his marriage any more than I did, did you? He’s worth much better than that … What’s her name? Sybil. She was the last girl who should have been allowed to be called by such a noble first name. Very much the girl-next-stage door, isn’t she?”

Gabriel could not believe it.
Women
, he thought, nodding his head as if he had hit the mother lode of philosophical truth.

“I hope he will pull it off, though.” said Helen, as if to herself, with an accent of real concern.

“It is not too late to help him.”

“I’ll help him by not helping him. He can do more by himself than he thinks. He only has to find out how much. You, I can help. Or, at least, I can help some people who want to meet you.”

“And who would that be?” asked Gabriel.

She sighed and turned toward him.

“You talk a lot … Maybe you should quit shamanism and become a hairdresser instead,” she said. “In any case, thanks for the combing. I badly needed it. I see fewer and fewer shamans these days. But you seem to have appreciated it as well,” she added in a teasing tone. Goddesses, thought Gabriel, move in mischievous ways.

“Isn’t there a part where my clothes come flying back to me?” he asked, her downward glance reminding him he was naked.

But the voice that answered wasn’t Helen’s.

I
t was the cold that woke Brentford: a sudden revolt of all his shaking flesh. His head hurt from some blow that had knocked him out, but passing his gloved hand over his cropped hair, he felt only a swollen knot at the back of his head, probably from a clomp against the stove. Thank God he’d had his hood on to protect him. Things could have been worse. They were merely catastrophic.

He was lying, he realized, on the ceiling of his ship. The
Kinngait
was almost upside down, tilting slightly to the side,
sustained in that position by the stump of its broken mast. It was dark, as all the lamps had been broken, and freezing, because the stove had gone out. This was better than its having started a fire, but there was little chance, if any, that he could make it work again.

Brentford had no idea of what time it was, or of his bearings. He was lost in the middle of the closest earthly definition of nowhere. Walking back the hundred-odd miles to New Venice in the February night would be nothing short of suicidal, but waiting for help in the overturned ship this far from the city did not make much sense, either, especially as the ice, which he could hear grumbling around him like an empty stomach, could very well crush him at any moment now. Both options seemed equally bleak, but they were still options … Which also meant that a mistake could be made. As the clenched-jaw survivor he was supposed to change into, he would almost have preferred to have no choice at all and instead go for broke without further soul-searching. Being dead was one thing, dead and wrong another.

There were priorities, though. Light and warmth had to be found, or the weather conditions would decide for him. He did not want to end up like the captain of the fabled ship
Octavius
, found frozen, brittle quill in hand, in front of his logbook after thirteen years of drifting and wintering around the Arctic seas.

He got up and dizzily raised his hands toward the deck hold, struggling to open the latch, his arm across his face to protect it from the tumbling contents. A manna of material crumbled down to what used to be the ceiling. His limbs quivering from the cold, Brentford groped about in the heap, hoping to locate a spare flashlight and the primus stove, which he hoped hadn’t suffered from its fall. He found the time excruciatingly long before he could place his hand on the Ever Ready lamp. And then there was light, revealing the disheartening chaos of the topsy-turvy cabin, the instruments broken, the maps scattered
everywhere as if a storm had blown inside the ship. By chance, the solid glass windshields had been spared. He rummaged for the extra batteries, and for the primus stove that would save his life—whatever it would be saved for. From time to time a loud crack from outside made him start, but he controlled himself, remembering that he was going to suffer more from loneliness than from intruders. The stove was there, and it seemed in working order. It would not be enough to heat the cabin, but he would have warm meals for a while, and maybe reach Heaven with a full stomach, something many dead explorers would have envied him for.