Aurorarama - Jean-Christophe Valtat [122]
This was probably more of a daydream than an actual scheme, until there arrived on the island, by accident, a young man named Jeremy Salmon. Jeremy, a promising steam engineer, had attempted, in what probably was a last desperate bid for funding through a publicity stunt, to drive his “pyschomotive” to the North Pole. But he lost his way and wandered through the frozen waste until he found himself, exhausted, finally reaching a mirage island he had been pursuing for hours. The islanders, of course, rescued him, and brought him to the castle. There he accepted, probably out of love, and unaware of her true intentions, the beautiful yellow-eyed Myrtle’s proposal that they elope together to New Venice. Depleted as he was by the return trip, he died on arrival, leaving Myrtle to her own dark devices.
A resourceful girl in spite of her inexperience, she soon found employment in the Circus of Carnal Knowledge, a theatrical institution that specialized in pornoperas, a then fashionable genre in the dissolute Pearl of the Arctic. It happened that this cornerstone of the local entertainment scene was rehearsing its own risqué adaptation of Snowdrift & Reliance. Myrtle, through her thorough knowledge of the text and her eerie familiarity with the main character, had little trouble convincing the director that she was the part. But, in spite of the efforts of all those involved, Myrtle’s virginity remained unyielding, and the play flopped miserably at the premiere. It was by a twist of fate that on the very same evening that had seen her failure to avenge herself on New Venice, her fantasy almost came true when the mad painter Edouard de Couard, as part of the “Blue Wild” event he had organized, destroyed most of the city by placing tons of toxic blue pigment in the Air Architecture ventilation shafts.
In the devastating aftermath of the “Blue Wild,” strange things had happened to Myrtle. Driven mad by her unfulfilled desires, she drifted through the city in search of relief, offering herself to the hurrying shadows of strangers, who relentlessly passed her by. Amidst the general panic, however, one man did not resist her, as his state did not allow him to: Igor Plastisine, an empty-eyed muscular hunk in blue boxer shorts and a tartan plaid who under the enthralling influence of a powerful psychoactive principle known as Pineapples and Plums recited in a trance an endless series of letters and numbers. Their tryst took place, it is said, on the very soil of the Greenhouse, near which she had met him. But, whether from an explosion caused by the poisonous cobalt emanations or sparked by the uncertain consummation of their feverish act, the Greenhouse burst into flames, and crumbled in a chaos of red-hot iron girders and torch-like palm trees. One of those fell right onto the back of poor Igor, who quickly succumbed on top of Myrtle’s unconscious body, saving her life by his death.
But Myrtle had another lover who had been searching for her everywhere in that pale Pompeii of the Pole. This man was known to most people as Eddie Endlessex, the larger-than-life male star of the Circus of Carnal Knowledge, but to a few he was known as Edmund Elphinstone, the heir of a family of brilliant, if slightly oddball, New Venetian artists (his grandfather Samuel had engraved a map of New Venice renowned for being exact down to the very last stone, and his father, Ebenezer, had completed a mammoth-sized myriorama of the Frozen Ocean