Aurorarama - Jean-Christophe Valtat [36]
“… 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.”
CHAPTER X
A Starmap Tattoo
“Skate together! Can that be possible?”
Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
What 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.