Aurorarama - Jean-Christophe Valtat [19]
There was even, on the upper floor, a large, warehouse-like, brick-walled exhibition space for local artists, called The Musheum. Gabriel d’Allier was up there, leaning on a steel pillar, quite dandy in his black double-breasted frock coat, floppy cravat, and Regency collar, which reached to his sideburns. He was talking to a gigantic man with a metallic hand, his friend and occasional band mate, Bob “Cape” Dorset, who also happened to be an artist in an avant-garde group exquisitely called Explorers’ Skeletons. It was the launch night of the last E.S. event housed by Musheum, “Chasing the Chimera: Circumpolar Cryptozoology,” a sculptural display of spirits, strange mammals, and other mythical creatures from the local lore. Bob was showing Gabriel the piece he had just built for the exhibition, a seven-foot effigy of the locally famous Polar Kangaroo, or Kiggertarpok, as this mysterious being is sometimes known to the Inuit. Gabriel and Brentford had collaborated on the work by offering Bob a little tune that was presently cranked out by a miniature phonograph hidden inside the innards of the beast and amplified by speakers located in its paws.
To Gabriel the impression this made was uncanny. Even if it had been an indirect, purely mental encounter, he was one of the rare persons to have come in contact with that creature, which redefined reality in spectacular ways, even by extensive local standards. He could almost feel, looking at Bob’s expressionist, muscular, dynamic rendition of his subject, that the Polar Kangaroo was an inch away from coming alive, were it only in the telepathic, dream-inducing way that was its usual mode of self-manifestation. It was as if its wolf head was about to start breathing and as if this breath would translate in Gabriel’s brain to mysterious whispers and eerie pictures.
“This would look fine in the Inuit People’s Ice Palace,” said another artist, Kelvin Budd-Jones, who had presented a Burning Inuksuk to the show.
“How are things going there, by the way?” asked Bob.
“The usual trouble,” admitted Budd-Jones. “Lots of pressure in every shape and direction. We are quite behind schedule. I should even go back and work there tonight,” he added, looking at his fob watch in sorry, White Rabbity disbelief. It was already late in the evening.
“I hear the Inuit are none too happy with the idea,” Gabriel said. “It looks like a human zoo to them, and not quite cryptically.”
Budd-Jones shrugged his shoulders, signifying that he had not come up with the idea in the first place. It was the North Wasteland Administration for Native Affairs that had commissioned that “permanent exhibition” of the Eskimo lifestyle, as a way to “bridge cultures” and “promote a better understanding between them.” Another frozen-over hell paved with slippery good intentions, thought Gabriel.
“We are doing our best to present their culture in the most satisfactory way. But it’s the living in there part that doesn’t agree with them.” He paused awhile, then said, “You should come over sometime and judge for yourself.”
“That would give me pleasure,” Gabriel answered.
“We will be busy every night until the opening. Don’t hesitate to call and ask for me,” said Budd-Jones.
“Hey! It seems the Fox Fires are on,” said Bob, as some noise crept upstairs on long grating nails.
They all descended to the main room by a metal spiral staircase to meet an already considerable crowd, dressed with the calculated neglect and sense of detail of those “in the know,” wearing mostly Victorian clothes completed with Inuit accessories made of narwhal bones and fur. These scenesters, whose metabolisms had borne the continuous impact of both the harsh polar winter and various compensating substances such as boilers, stokers, sand packets, snowcaine, zeroïne, nemoïne, phantastica, and opiates of all kinds, had started to assume a somewhat ghastly appearance, with waxen complexions and stares instead of looks.
Distance drinkers, as they had been known since