Aurorarama - Jean-Christophe Valtat [85]
Neither did he touch the scallion-crusted arctic char. The wine was secreting a time of its own, curiously dissociated, accelerated on the outside (courses came and went more quickly than he could react), yet suspended inside him. He registered everything around him down to the most trivial detail—cutlery tings, stains on starched shirts and napkins, whispers at nearby tables, discarded fishbone with skin attached on filigreed fine bone china—but it all slid over his black-ice indifference. This was, he thought, the way God saw the world. His brain was levitating an inch behind his head, in a curious blend of Olympian detachment and mischievous curiosity about how badly the rest of him was behaving. He had relinquished all responsibility for his conduct, as if it were someone else’s unruly child whom he could not stomach but had no business chastising. The girl babbled on somewhere in the vicinity of his left ear, about what Circeto could possibly have meant. He turned toward her and gave her a big, slobbering kiss, which silenced her, and the whole planet, for a while.
By and by the evening turned into hypnagogic sequences of related and slightly absurd events he had little control over, beyond a faint, unconvinced hope that he would eventually black out. He went to Brentford’s table to carry a toast that embarrassed everybody for a reason he could not quite understand, for all he’d done was salute the bride’s universal appeal. A few reels later in the phantascopy, after Brentford and Sybil had opened the ball with a rather stiff waltz, Gabriel found himself in the ballroom signalling to the drummer of the Cub-Clubbers that he was going to cut his throat, which made the drummer miss a beat and complain to Brentford at the first opportunity. The next scene found Gabriel, much to his sorry surprise, pulling down rabidly the bodice of a squealing blonde girl who was seven inches or so taller than he was (she did not exist). This could have been what caused Hasan Rumi, Brentford’s friend and occasional right arm, to tow Gabriel away from the crowd and toward the winter garden swimming pool, coaxing him into doing some laps while making sure that he did not drown. As a true New Venetian, Gabriel did not miss that chance to get rid of all his clothes. “Party Naked for a Sign,” he kept muttering to himself, as some sort of automated motto.
Such is the power of the mind once it is freed from the body, that Gabriel’s malevolent spirit, hovering over the place, seemed to have contaminated the whole wedding night. As he woke up from some short coma, with pixie dust of dried puke on his purple lapel (thus giving him an excuse to strip bare again) he could perceive Brentford’s stepfather trying to strangle the official photographer. One of the Cub-Clubbers, wearing long johns, his bare, wet feet on a lit spotlight, bragged that he was about to jump into the pool. Someone in underwear carried someone else on his back and dropped him on the piano with a thundering crash. The manager of the hotel complained to everyone he encountered that he had never seen such a shocking mess, and threatened to close the place, leaving everyone out in the cold.
Gabriel himself, meanwhile, had found another occupation. Standing on the rather barbaric pavilion of the winter garden and still in the nude, he yelled unambiguous advances at Sybil’s mother, who had ventured into the semi-darkness to smell the arctic flowers. His argument was that she would lose nothing by her surrender, as she did not exist. She fled, apparently shocked by some aspect of his reasoning, even if Gabriel wasn’t sure which part.
This last exploit eventually attracted Brentford to the pavilion. He looked hunched and weary, very much like a man stoically watching his world crumbling in slow motion. One of the guests had just confided to him that his son had dated Sybil in the past, and two minutes later, one of Brentford’s closest friends had avowed that he himself had had an affair with Seraphine after