Authors: Jean-Christophe Valtat
Aurorarama (12 page)
Sybil was waiting for him in the bedroom, and jumped out of bed in her rather transparent nightgown as soon as he walked through the door, looking very much like the
White Sybil of Polarion
, a painting of questionable taste that she had modelled for and which now was hanging in the room. In spite of the late hour, she was her dazzling, sparkling, kaleidoscopic self, a radiant sprite made out of glinting eyes, frothy silk, and luminous skin, who even in her negligee looked as if she were wearing jewels. Even her curls, which were exactly of the famous Venetian blond hue, had something fizzy about them. But, when you came a bit closer, her lightness and luminosity had nothing airy about them, but were rather the polished, gleaming surface of a lean muscular frame that executed nothing but high-precision movements: she was, above all, a dancer. As to her capacity as a singer, Brentford was, well, in love and would rather not comment on that (though it is safe to say he was not too fond of her band, the Clicquot Cub-Clubbers, nor of their bland, innocuous brand of jazz), but he reckoned that her main talent, maybe, was different: that of commanding undivided visual attention wherever she happened to be, as lit fountains and fireworks are usually wont to do. She was, in a word,
moving
.
“Sweetie,” she moaned, hanging her arms around him like a necklace of white gold, “I thought you had left me for good.”
“You did get my pneu, didn’t you?”
“Oh! Very late! Oh my, that’s for me?” she asked, pinching the mirror from Brentford’s hands. Before he could react, she
had wiped it clean with a swift brush of her gown. “It’s so nice. Thank you, honey. Smack, smack.”
Brentford sighed, then scowled, but what could he do now?
“You were nice with the Eskimos? You didn’t offer your future wife to them, did you?” she asked, while looking for a spot to hang the mirror.
“Oh, darn, I knew I had forgotten something,” smirked Brentford, sitting on the bed. “Hope you’re not mad at me.”
“I am
so
mad at you, my dear. I wished you had been here with me this afternoon. I was at the Ringnes Skating Rink with the band, didn’t I tell you that, for the Clicquot Club Caucus.”
Brentford was trying to undo his tie, easier said than done with fingers numb from the cold. He was in Sybil-listening mode, letting himself be pleasantly lulled. Even when she was close to him, she had that kind of from-the-bathing-room voice: it flew from her body, and fluttered all around, so that she and her words never seemed to be in the same place at the same time.
“I had to do a demonstration for the new Ice-cycle,” she said, as she unhooked a small drawing from the wall to put the mirror in its place. “You know what they are, don’t you? The front wheel is replaced by a little skate. I wished you had seen me. It was so much fun.”
“What a shame,” said Brentford, who regarded all these social and promotional events with what could pass as condescension. The recent occasion on which she and the Cub-Clubbers had entertained Bipolar Bears in garbage-rehab cages to celebrate the release of their cover of “You should a-hear Olaf laugh,” he had found, to say the truth, a tad ridiculous.
“Here. It looks fine, doesn’t it? And oh, I saw the strangest thing today when I came back. A girl just fainted in front of the Greenhouse. She must have been waiting for God knows what. A man passed in front of her, maybe he brushed against her,
and whoosh, down she went. They had to call an ambulance to fetch her.”
Brentford almost told Sybil of the ambulances he had seen in front of the Toadstool, but Sybil was now looking at him with a movie actress’s expression of deep concern. He was used to these mood swings, and braced himself for what was to come.
“And then, there’s some bad news” she said, with the pout of a spoiled child, which was, Brentford had to admit against his better judgement, more irresistible than exasperating. “Did you read the newspaper?”
“I did not have time,” sighed Brentford.
Sybil took a folded copy of the
New Venice News
, John Blank’s paper (“Ice-breaking the news since 1927 AB”) from the bedside table and handed it to Brentford.
“Look who’s back,” she said.
Brentford took the paper and read:
MS. LAKE, BACK, PROMISES UPHEAVAL BY JOHN LINKO
The Nethergate Psychomotive Transaerian Terminal, under yesternight skies.
Where has she been, what has she done? It was supposed to be a homecoming. It turned into a theophany. Psychomotive coloured steam had not finished hissing when the shrill of the crowd took over. Cutting her way through the panting pink and green puffs, Ms. Sandy Lake appeared to us simple mortals as an omen.
Do we have to recall to the neo-New who she is? Listen to the venerable stairs of Grönland Gardens, prick up your ears in the glasshouses in Glass Town, keep silent in New Boree Crescent, and you will know. New Venice is still humming with everlasting echoes of her heady “Yesterday’s Skies.”
The highbrow or hurried reader will be content with knowing that her “As White As …” was said to have caught the very marrow of the icy city. But that is of little use to really measure the remanence of her name to the olde-New. For the eye- and ear-witnesses are still in awe of her charismatic performance during the Blue Wild Thing.
Her lifestyle was indeed typical of the New Venetian golden age scene. Substances, unending live music parties—those were the days of roses, wine, and polar pop, of overbrimming dance cards … But in many more ways than one, reminiscences of Ms. Lake actually embody reminiscences of New Venice ‘in illo tempore’: open and fleeting, frail and fearless, the vanishing point of love and life.
Where has she been, what has she done: I shook myself from my reverie as Ms. Lake passed me by on the terminal berth. Cheerful applause lasted long enough to stir a hunting Inuk from his hideout. But there was more to the group than a goodwill reunion. The clatter sounded organized, as if all were chanting slogans. The little crowd was exclusively feminine, and dressed as suffragettes, which somehow did not fit with Ms Lake’s tumultuous past.
I was thinking of how information slipped unto me, when Ms Lake shouted out:
—You must be the journalist.
—Journalists are not supposed to get involved.
—You are not asked to.
—Where have you been, Ms. Lake?
—My name is now Lenton, Lillian Lenton.
—When did you cease to be Ms. Lake?
—I’ve been to wondrous places down the Austral parallels. So many places, so different from one another. On the one hand, you are shattered by despair: no thing ever resembles the next, and the world looks like a roller coaster. On the other hand, you end up finding your way, and when you get to that point, it’s like you get to another level of consciousness.
—What have you been doing?
—Wah—baking doughnuts, of course, what kind of journalist are you? I’m talking of another level of consciousness.
—There are a lot of people here tonight. Most of them are ex-fans of the Sandmovers?
—I have been away for such a long time, I don’t think anyone here could sing a Sandmovers’ tune. Including me.
—Did you give up music?
—Precisely, no. It’s just that music has grown up in me. In my opinion, it hasn’t much to do with entertainment or partying anymore. There’s a kind of responsibility for those who are listened to by the people.
—Do you have a new group?
—Yes. The Lodestones. We release our new single in five
days, in North Venustown. Look, it’s written on this bill.
—Are you planning to stay a long time in New Venice?
—Listen. This city … this city is a gift. But it’s a gift wasted on spoiled children. I did not come back to act as if nothing happened. The Blue Wild happened, the city was more or less destroyed, I’ve traveled a lot since then. The city is back in place, as far as I can see. But during my long southern journey, there are a few things that sprouted in my New Venetian heart, and it can no longer be silent.
—Concerning the city?
—Concerning
our
lives in
our
city.
Two vigourous women came up to Ms. Lake, now Ms. Lenton, and helped her away from our conversation. I was left, alone on the steamer berth, with most of my questions. Where has she been, what has she done. And, above all, why is she coming back now?
“Who does she thinks she is?” asked Sybil, sitting down next to Brentford. “She’s been away for years and she imagines she has just to snap her fingers to have all the audience at her feet? People have been working hard while she was away.”
For it was indeed one of Sybil’s pet ideas that she was a hardworking girl. But what Brentford retained of the article, apart from the eerie reminiscences it triggered of his own youth as a scenester, was its strange “poletical” undercurrent, as if Ms. Lenton promised or hoped for more than simply a musical revolution. One more agitator, then. Great. This was just what the city needed right now. He sighed, and lay down, suddenly feeling against his spine the frame of the picture Sybil had discarded. He discreetly looked at it, noting that it was a drawing in which the North Pole rose up a like ghost under a sheet, its head shaped like a grinning skull. In a flash, he thought of Helen.
“… and anyway,” Sybil was saying, as she leaned over him, trapping two copies of him inside her gold-speckled eyes. “One more thing I want to ask you before I rape the living daylights out of you. Are you free on Friday night?”
He watched himself floating in the double bubble and found that he looked happy to be there.
“Free as a floe,” he answered.
“Because,” she explained while undoing his shirt with her slender fingers, “I have received two invitations from the magician we’ll have at our wedding party. He does a show at Trilby’s Temple. I would like it
so much
if you could come along.”
“Why not,” said Brentford, looking at Sybil through half-closed eyes, until she was golden and filmy, like the flame of a candle. “I could do with some magic, I guess.”
A Starmap Tattoo
“Skate together! Can that be possible?”
Tolstoy,
Anna Karenina
W
hat Gabriel did in the Kane Clinic was try to find Phoebe. He went up the first flight of stairs that he found and set about looking for someone who could inform him. In spite of all the agitation in the outpatient ward, the rest of the clinic had gone dim and silent into night watch. It was not long before he heard coming down the darkened corridor the typical clap-clap and clatter of a nurse pushing a cart.
“Hello, there,” he said, with a bow.
“What are you doing here?” said the nurse, in a whispered vociferation that was not quite as impressive as she intended. As she turned toward him, she revealed, pinned on her white apron, a badge on which the name Vera could be made out. Gabriel believed in names. He felt he could trust her to be sincere.
“Listen,” he murmured, “nothing that deserves much publicity. I am looking for a girl who has been brought here this afternoon, probably by the Gentlemen of the Night.”
“Are you one of them?” asked the nurse.
“God forbid,” said Gabriel.
Vera leaned toward him, conspiratorially.
“She has not regained consciousness, poor thing. I wonder what they have done to her.”
“Can I see her?”
“There is nothing much to see. But I suppose that holding her hand and kissing her forehead won’t do her any harm. To the left, to the right, seventh door on the right. Do not be long. And if you’re caught, you have never seen me.”
“Thank you very much,” said Gabriel, as Vera swerved to the left and clap-clattered away. Once out of her field of vision, Gabriel opened his fist and looked at the small phial of Letheon he had just stolen from the cart. This was a poor way to thank Vera but he deserved some comfort after a day that had mostly consisted of persecutions and humiliations.
He uncorked it and, blocking one nostril, inhaled deeply till the fumes hit the back of his skull, and then repeated the operation on the other side. He knew he should stop there. His brain was already buzzing with white noise and more of that sharp stuff would impair his motor skills, turning him into one of those colourful clowns whose limbs are made of little felt rings. Not to mention the fits of erotomania he was bound to suffer from, which would assume the form of an exacerbated but rather illusory sense of possibility that more often than not resulted in pitiful enterprises, such as pornographic pneus to past loves and vaguely known women. So, he told himself, just a little one for the road and that’ll be all. Then he took two more whiffs, for he was not a man to be dictated to, not even by himself, and he found himself moving in a world that was, already, made of a lighter more billowy fabric but still thought it funny to play at being a clinic.
If Gabriel’s calculations were right, he should have been close to Phoebe’s room when something stopped him in his tracks: through an open door, a girl on all fours on the floor and wearing only a hitched up hospital gown was displaying, in a ray of light coming from the corridor, the most heart-wrenching bottom he had ever seen in his entire life. Phoebe was instantly spirited away from his mind. It was love at first sight.