Aurorarama - Jean-Christophe Valtat [90]
Well, he had to admit he wasn’t nowhere yet. He thought of the explorers who had been there before, on a death wish more unconscious than his own, and had left behind them a whole archaeology of dirty, desperate picnics. He knew that if it were daylight, he’d have been able to spot some of their half-crumbled cairns and disembowelled depots, rusty cans of bully beef, empty rifle shells shot at mirages, those illegible scraps of papers with mistaken bearings that are the epic poems of the place. In the least prophetic act of all human exploration, someone had even planted not far from here the flag of a temperance society. Gabriel wished he had a glass of frozen whisky to raise to this seer. But he was turning to glass himself and the alcohol left in his blood would have to do for the toast, too little as it was. Oh God, he thought, don’t let me sober up now.
What these people had done here, and what he was doing now, was a rather dark business, even to those involved, Gabriel ranted on in the wine-fuelled boiler room of his brain. He remembered that in Venus in Furs—a best-seller in New Venice—Severin, the main character, has a dream in which he finds himself stranded on ice. An Eskimo arrives on a sled (absurdly “harnessed with reindeer” as if he were Santa Claus) and informs him casually that he is at the North Pole. Then Wanda, Severin’s love, skates toward him wearing a rather inspiring—at least to Gabriel’s taste—ermine jacket and cap. They clasp and kiss, only for the foolish Severin to discover “horror-stricken” that Wanda is now a she-bear and is tearing him to shreds. This is how wet dreams freeze below 32°F, and it’s about all one needs to know about North Pole psychology. And, oh yes, beware of girls on skates.
He could hear the ice shelf on his right snap, crack, gnash and growl, a perpetual slow-motion apocalypse, making him start every time. Gabriel did not buy any of the Earth-as-living-organism theory, but the Arctic, she-bear or not, had much of the beast about her. A man called Tremblay had once gone around Igloolik Island shooting at it with a gun to tame it a little and punish it for all the explorers it had rejected or killed. Gabriel realized he liked that story a lot and wondered how many people knew it—tens, hundreds, thousands?—hoping that he was not the only or the last one to remember it. It was too good for the grave.
But the grave, it seemed, was creeping up on him. A metamorphosis was overcoming him as if his blood were being drained drop by drop and replaced by an equal quantity of liquid nitrogen. Numb as he felt, the notion of a skin that separated outside from inside seemed like a good idea, but now downright unreal. In spite of his boots and skin socks, his feet almost hurt as he walked. His tingling hands, too, protested against going numb. It struck him as vaguely ludicrous that the fight taking place inside him was for the pain to be allowed to remain. As long as he suffered, he would be alive, and vice versa.
An Aurora Borealis was now breaking over him, slowly pulsing and wavering, like a reversed flame on gently tossed water. The February Lights were the most beautiful, and it would be great to die watching them, he thought, while lightning strikes of shivering hit and dislocated the icy rod of his spine. He had always had a liking for the crackpot theory that said the Northern Lights were emanations