Venera Dreams Read online

  “I don’t think it’ll be quite that simple to get you home. Let me ask you something: the bookstore where you met us — Lost Pages — had you ever seen it before?”

  “No, but then I do not pay much attention to the Anglo side of Montreal. So there’s nothing unusual about that.”

  “Perhaps, but there’s something unusual about Lost Pages. You were in Montreal before you stepped inside, but I was not. I was here. In Venera. But we both walked into the same bookshop.”

  “Is that what this place is called — Venera? I’ve never heard of it.”

  “And you’ve never heard of vermilion? Know this, then: even if I did get you back to Montreal, I don’t think it would be the Montreal you call home.”

  “None of what you say makes sense. All this is too absurd to be real. Eventually I’ll wake up from this frustrating dream.”

  “I wish that were true. I’m sorry. For you and for your Isabelle. I wonder what Scheherazade wants with you.”

  “Scheherazade? Is that your other friend’s name? Like the storyteller from The Arabian Nights? What an unusual name. Beautiful, though.” Slipping into English, Pierre adds: “Wait — the reading. It was for an anthology called The Darkbright Book of Scheherazade …”

  “She’ll find you again. Let her tell you everything. You wouldn’t believe me. But you’ll believe her. She knows how to tell a story …”

  Renata’s evasiveness exacerbates Pierre’s impatience with this delusion.

  The darkness lightens; dawn faintly hints its inevitable re-emergence.

  Renata says to him: “Let’s watch the sunrise. A sunrise in Venera is a magical experience.”

  They disentangle and lean against the guardrail.

  The lighter the sky becomes the more the mist enshrouds the city. Within minutes the fog is so thick that he can see nothing but the shimmering whiteness of it. Now, he thinks, when the mist lifts, so will the hallucination. I’ll be back in Montreal. I’ll be home.

  The emerging sunlight burns through the mist, and the city teasingly sheds it veils.

  Renata has left — unnoticed; without word or acknowledgement. Pierre waits alone, witnessing the revelations of dawn. Figures — not all of whom seem entirely human — ambulate through the white haze. In time, the morning mist entirely dissipates, revealing an architecture that blends lush nature and dense cityscape, with flourishes that hint at Arabic, Italian, Iberian, Scandinavian, and Chinese influences, and elements too alien for his mind to distinguish.

  At the edge of his consciousness, Pierre perceives a song. He recognizes the singer’s voice as that of the third woman, the one Renata called Scheherazade. The language is unknown to him, yet he understands Scheherazade’s words. The song tells a story. The story of Venera.

  He fears that he will never again see his Montreal, his Isabelle. He wonders how differently the night might have unfurled if he’d woken her.

  Scheherazade stands beside him now. She takes his hand — so softly, as if the moist air itself were enfolding him — and whispers the song of Venera in that eerie language of hers. Breathing in the damp and potent atmosphere of this new day, Pierre ponders the sights and sounds and aromas of the surreal city. It would be easy, so easy, to be seduced by the strange and extravagant beauty of this unlikely woman and of this even more unlikely metropolis. To surrender to Scheherazade’s song. Surprising himself, he finds that a part of him yearns to be so seduced. Yet … the emotion that suffuses him most powerfully is an unravelable tangle of grief and foreboding.

  Via pedestrian streets and ornate bridges and lush canals and bustling plazas and opulent parks and dense woods and iridescent tunnels and damp caverns, Scheherazade pulls Pierre along, his hand firmly nestled in hers. Pierre is so exhausted that he sometimes sleeps as he walks. The flickering phantasmagorical images of the city merging indistinguishably with snippets of his dreams.

  Eventually, Pierre wakes up in bed. Alone. Naked.

  There are no windows, but there is a door.

  The bed is large and too soft. On the wall opposite the bed, there’s a large table, on which rests a burning candle providing just enough illumination for him to know that the room is unfamiliar and from which wafts the now-familiar smell of cinnamon, burnt butter, and brine. The scent of that woman — Scheherazade — and of her city.

  He gets up — the marble floor is smooth on his bare feet — and tries the door. He is unsurprised to find it locked.

  Next to the door is a chair, on which his clothes are folded. He doesn’t bother putting them on.

  Pierre finds other candles in a basket on the floor. He lights three more with the flame of the first one.

  The brighter light reveals that the walls are decorated with line drawings depicting creatures only vaguely humanoid involved in scenes of disquieting violence and eroticism.

  Besides the bed, there’s an empty chamber pot, much too ornate considering its purpose. And in the corner a love seat also designed in an extravagantly gaudy style.

  Also on the table there’s a carafe of wine — the bouquet tells him it’s the same beverage he shared with Scheherazade at Lost Pages — and two wooden mugs. And a book — no; a notebook. Its pages are blank, a fountain pen hooked on the cover.

  Pierre knocks on the door, calling out Scheherazade’s name — but there’s no answer. Time goes by with nothing to mark it. He eventually goes back to bed and succumbs to sleep.

  When he wakes up, Scheherazade is sitting in bed next to him. Also naked.

  Pierre says: “Let me go home.” He doesn’t care what this bizarre woman wants from him. All he desires is for this strange odyssey to end so he can return to Isabelle.

  Scheherazade ignores him. Instead, she takes his hand and begins to tell him a story. A story of Venera. A fast-paced story of swashbuckling adventure and unrequited love and bloody rituals.

  Only a few scenes in and Pierre falls asleep again. In his dreams, Scheherazade’s story becomes increasingly unlikely and fantastical. When it reaches its tragic conclusion, Pierre is jolted awake. Scheherazade is still in bed with him.

  Pierre explains that he never heard her full story, that he dreamed his own continuation. Despite himself, he’s curious. Her songlike narration is addictive. He craves more, and he hates himself a little for being so easily beguiled.

  Scheherazade says: “Venera is built of stories. They are all lies; and they are all true.”

  She climbs out of bed. Pierre can’t help but notice the alluring sway of her hips and derriere, but his arousal does not lead him to desire his captor; it only reminds him of Isabelle, to whom he yearns to return.

  Scheherazade grabs the pen and notebook and comes back to Pierre. “Tell the story. Your version of the story.” She gives him the writing implements.

  “Why?”

  She answers only: “Write.”

  So he starts recording what he remembers of Scheherazade’s tale and his own dream that followed it.

  When he’s finished, he discovers that Scheherazade has left the room.

  He goes to relieve himself and notices that the chamber pot has been cleaned since he used it last.

  His stomach growls. There’s nothing to eat or drink aside from the aromatic wine, and so he pours himself a cup. It satisfies both his thirst and hunger. And it also relaxes him, sending him off to sleep, and to dreams of Venera.

  And so the cycle goes: Scheherazade slips unnoticed in and out of his prison; she sings him stories that lull him to sleep and to dream his own endings; he wakes and writes stories of Venera; he drinks more wine, and dreams more of Venera. The carafe of wine is never empty. The pen never dries.

  Occasionally, his body urges him to reach out so as to taste and savour Scheherazade herself. She would not deny him. Her gaze and her touch make that amply clear. But the bereavement he feels over his isolation from Isabelle never dissipates, and so he leaves his lust unquenched.

  Dozens of nights and days pass. Hundreds. Perhaps a thousand. Perhaps more.


  Until …

  One day, Pierre has filled every page of the notebook.

  He waits a long time, but Scheherazade never returns.

  Finally, he again takes to knocking on the door and calling out to Scheherazade. He tries to open the door … to find it unlocked.

  Quickly, he dresses. Grabbing his storybook, he leaves.

  The hot summer night air envelops him. Pierre runs, without thinking or taking careful notice of his surroundings. Electric lights punctuate the darkness. The sounds of automobiles fill the air. Dripping with sweat, Pierre slows to a more customary stride. And he notices that he’s walking along the Main in Montreal. He accelerates again. He veers off to skirt Jeanne-Mance Park and sprints up Avenue de L’Esplanade, continuing north to Mile End and zigzagging back south to the Plateau.

  He’s eager to return to Isabelle, to slip next to her in bed. But he’s been gone so long — how long exactly he has no idea — how can she possibly still be waiting for him? She must think him dead. So he prevaricates and wanders, afraid of what might be awaiting him.

  Finally, Pierre gets his bearings and plots a course that will take him through the neighbourhood and eventually back home to Isabelle. If home and Isabelle are still there waiting for him.

  His key still fits the lock. He walks up the stairs as quietly as he can.

  In the bedroom, Isabelle is asleep.

  He should wake her. Talk to her. Do whatever he can to lessen the alarm he will cause her. But all he can bear to do is to take off his clothes and slip into bed next to her. As he spoons her, Isabelle mumbles Pierre’s name without emerging from her dreams.

  The next morning Isabelle wakes him. “Where were you all day yesterday? I was worried.”

  “All day? I was gone so much longer …”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Did he hallucinate the entire experience? That wine at the bookstore must have been drugged. He fell in a stupor somewhere and dreamt the whole thing up. There’s no such place as Venera; that woman wasn’t the legendary Scheherazade — his subconscious picked up the name because of the title of the anthology that was being launched.

  But his eyes fall on the notebook, lying on the floor next to his clothes.

  He grabs it. “Can I read you a story?”

  “You’re weird today. What happened to you?”

  “Humour me.”

  “Okay. Of course. Always. Read me a story.”

  She rests her head in his lap and closes her eyes. He’s overwhelmed by her trust, her love.

  Pierre opens the notebook, eager to share with Isabelle … whatever it was that he experienced. Every page is filled with handwriting, but … the words are nonsense, incomprehensible. Hundreds of pages of gibberish, uncontestably in his script. He digs through his memory, but he can’t recall any precise details from Scheherazade’s songs or from his Venera dreams beyond blurry images of adventure, sex, romance, blood, danger, fantasy, and myth.

  Isabelle says: “I’m waiting.”

  PART 1

  STRANGE ROMANCES

  THE CITY OF UNREQUITED DREAMS

  On my seventeenth birthday, I finally heard from Vittorio. He sent me a box of chocolates, accompanied by a picture of himself on a rooftop, with a spectacular view of a colourful city easily recognizable as the fabled island-state Venera and, beyond, the Mediterranean. In the four years since I’d last seen him, my best friend had hardly changed. Or at least he looked the way I still imagined him. On the back of the picture, he’d scrawled “Buon compleanno!” — nothing else.

  Had Vittorio been in Venera all this time? Was he there now? Alas, the return address on the package was too smudged to decipher.

  The list of ingredients had been peeled off. It was easy to guess why. In the privacy of my bedroom, I opened the box and bit into one of the sweet and spicy delicacies. That first taste of vermilion — the Veneran export was barely available in Canada, and then only at tremendous cost — was so intense that I experienced a tactile hallucination of Vittorio kissing me, of his hands fondling my erection. Not the first time I’d had such a fantasy, but it had never so consumed all my senses, surprising me with a sudden ejaculation. I was still dressed, but my cock had wormed out of my underwear. My jeans were sticky and uncomfortable. The orgasm had been bittersweet — as was the memory it had awakened: my first kiss, that time Vittorio’s mouth had tasted mine, so briefly, in the school library, two days before his abrupt departure.

  One morning, a mere three months after Vittorio and his parents had immigrated to Canada, Mrs. Dorchester, our sixth-grade teacher, announced that Vittorio would no longer be in our class, as his family had moved away. How could that be true? Vittorio would never leave — never leave me — without at least saying goodbye.

  I went to his house. There was a For Rent sign on the front lawn. I rang, but there was no answer. I broke the basement window and went in, hoping to find some clue, some reason why my friend had abandoned me, some way to contact him. But the place was empty, as if no-one had ever lived there; so bare and lifeless that I could no longer visualize the hours we’d spent sequestered in Vittorio’s room, conspiring against the monotonous conformity that constantly threatened to extinguish the fire that we, and no-one else, saw in each other’s eyes.

  I graduated high school, although I forgot each day as it was over. Several of my university applications were successful, but I never bothered replying to any of them. My father threatened to throw me out unless I either went to school or paid rent. My mother stopped talking to me entirely.

  I didn’t care about any of that. All I wanted was to reach Venera and find my friend. After receiving that package from Vittorio, I read countless books and articles on the mysterious city-state. The best that I could conclude from this miasma of contradictory information was that almost none of these writers had any direct experience of the decadent metropolis. And then I hit on Petra Maxim’s 1001 Days and Nights in Venera — a gorgeous coffee-table book filled with breathtaking and surreal pictures of the glamorous city. One photo depicted a party at the Velvet Bronzemine ballroom — so extreme in its gaudiness and tastelessness that it achieved an unexpected beauty. Among the partygoers, there he was: Vittorio — dancing, arms enlaced, in a trio with the massive Tito Bronze himself and a petite but voluptuous nude girl with jet-black skin and long, braided hair.

  My father was careless with his PIN numbers, keeping a list of them in his sock drawer. The day after my eighteenth birthday, I stole one of his bank cards while he slept. I took out all the cash I could — two thousand dollars — and booked the cheapest flight to Europe.

  Located on Rue de Seine, just north of Boulevard Saint-Germain, Venera’s Parisian embassy betrayed nothing of the city-state’s celebrated decadence, at least from the outside. Its facade was a dull greyish white, like most Parisian facades, and lacked any distinctive details. A metal plaque next to the door announced, in both French and Italian, what was housed in this drab building.

  A short dark-haired man with a comically large nose welcomed me in French with disconcerting warmth. After only a few days in Paris, I had already grown accustomed to the French capital’s oppressive sterility. He led me to a small office — unadorned, save for a modern ergonomic desk, a computer, and a filing cabinet. At the desk sat a taller, German-looking man who immediately picked up on my accent and switched to English.

  The embassy’s austerity shocked me. Where were all the erotic paintings? The gaudy colours? The outré architectural embellishments? Most of all I was surprised that everyone I had seen so far was male — ordinary men in dull business suits. Venera was, after all, a city ruled by women, its population reputed to be more than 75 percent female.

  I had an appointment with a Mr. Sangralia, who handled all visa and immigration requests. The receptionist asked to see my passport. He inspected it with much greater care than the customs official at Aéroport Charles de Gaulle had when I first landed in Europe. After a few minutes of s
crutiny, the receptionist was satisfied and returned it. He nodded; his gaze focused past me. I turned my head, noting the dark-skinned giant behind me; more suave than his colleagues, he wore his black business suit as comfortably as a second skin. The receptionist shook my hand. “Vincent will take you to see Mr. Sangralia.”

  Vincent led me up two flights of stairs and down a long hall. Now, this floor reflected more closely my idea of Venera. The doors and doorframes were sensual, ornate wooden sculptures opulently gilded and adorned with precious gems. On the walls hung portraits of famous Veneran women from throughout history against surrealist backdrops — the work of the notorious Errata Maximilia, whose torrid affair with the even more notorious Tito Bronze had been conducted with exhibitionist glee across all of Europe, providing juicy fodder for the rapacious paparazzi.

  We stopped at the very end of the hall; Vincent opened the door, and immediately I was hit by a cloud of smoke. The tangy fragrance was unmistakable: vermilion. Vincent gave my shoulder a gentle nudge, and I entered Mr. Sangralia’s office — although office was a misleading word.

  Sangralia, sprawled among cushions on the floor, greeted me in English, but forming each syllable as if it were in Italian. He motioned that I join him, then handed me a smoking tube. I hesitated a moment, afraid of how the spice might affect me and thus my chance for permission to enter Venera. But I also feared that refusing would guarantee my failure.

  I breathed in the aromatic smoke — and the strength of the blend, much more intense than the small dose in Vittorio’s chocolates, hit me like an orgasm. Then everything got blurry. I floated on smoke and swam in voices — Sangralia’s and my own. But I could make sense of neither his words nor mine.

  … I awoke in a plushy armchair in a nook adjacent to the embassy’s lobby, my head pounding. Vincent towered over me. His musical voice, tinged with unexpected softness, surprised me. “I am sorry to inform you that your application has been rejected.” Not so softly, he took me by the arm, raised me up, and escorted me outside.