Aurorarama - Jean-Christophe Valtat [20]
Shisha pipes were available on nearby shelves, on the back wall beside the bar, and to the right, in front of a fresco depicting a toad swallowing the sun under the eyes of an old black-clad king, stood the “Bufetonine Buffet” and the automated distributor of sand packets.
Bob, Kelvin, and Gabriel huddled around a table that was almost free, while from the diminutive stage the Fox Fires spun around the place a web of barbed, electrified sounds, part crackling static, part ripped silk, that somehow ended, with the welcome help of a flute, by forming melancholy melodical patterns, or as they called them, “inscapes.” They were pretty much all student types, this lot, all in woollen sweaters, velvety breeches, and mountain shoes, putting much effort into ripping interesting noises apart from those Electro String Frying Pan guitars that had been introduced years before by Ekto Liouven V and other bands in his wake.
Once again fashion had completed its meaningless but pleasant cycle and come back to its starting point. Well, not quite: the new vacuum-tube amplifiers were now much more powerful, and the new Nipi bands, as this batch were called, liked to slash and rip their cabinets to obtain sounds that would have been simply not tolerated by outmoded models of ears. This tolerance might well be due, Gabriel reflected, to the new drugs that were circulating, and that were themselves more violent and demanding than earlier ones, as if new thresholds had to be crossed every year, and as if music were both the seismograph and training ground of these sensory displacements. For him, who had spent the winter recording low-frequency drones on his electromagnetic keyboards under his Air-Loom Gang moniker (and had even managed to sell some of them to the Dunne Institute, where they had proved a good aid to all sorts of sticky, stifling nightmares), this new twist of local trendiness would mean that he would have to adapt, think of another idea, of another name, not only to follow but also to anticipate, and, with luck, to launch the next movement, if only to help the winter months pass away more quickly.
While the Fox Fires were explaining that their last song was about the sensations and reflections that occur at night between bedroom and bathroom, Gabriel slithered toward the toilets himself: circular cabinets decorated with exhilarated Santas in flayed-deerskin clothes dangling from the ceiling. On his way back to the table, he decided that the snowcaine had worn off and that it was time to sand up. He inserted some boreal crowns in the slot to get packets of his personal favourite, the black Flying Fantasia Flint, which gave one a sensation, typical of dreams, of levitating and walking a few inches above the ground, with a sweet feeling of muscular effort and of resistance from the air. It would, Gabriel thought, enlighten his return home, and maybe even make him actually want to go home, provided he would not go alone. He hoped that Phoebe, who was already late to the rendezvous he had given her, would not be too long. He was curious to know how her mission had turned out, and perhaps, though he was not ready to admit it, he was also eager to see her again and bring her back to his nest, both of them on the winged shoes that he had just purchased.
But as the Fox Fires finished their set, no Phoebe was to be seen, and the only well-known face at the bar was that of the owner, Nicholas Sandmann. As one of the models for the “Goodnight Kids” cartoon, he had enchanted Gabriel’s rather dreary Newfoundland childhood, but these days, he was more famous as the man who had brought the sand craze to the city and as the perennial