dream (rufus wainwright's point of view)
The first time he goes to the Arctic Circle a femme fatale comes with him, some Norse daughter dragging her curled eyelashes and her raven mane around with her like she drags her furry coat. She has a trick of turning her pale blue stare on him when they're all sticking their hands as close to the campfire as they can, and there's a world of concern in them, but he needs it less than he needs another person telling him he's a moron for being there.
The rest of his trip is a blur of crunching ice and overexcited anthropologists babbling over macabre bone whittlings and spiky-looking furniture.
Then they unroll the skin.
Someone drops it on the ground a few meters away from him but he goes on facing the mountains with an admirably brooding gaze, figuring the loud wet slap is their dinner being dumped unceremoniously and awaiting gutting. It's probably his turn, but it sounds unpleasantly like a seal and he still has qualms about eating those.
No use delaying destiny, though, he figures.
He turns around and he sees a foot first, a shriveled star-shaped claw like a mole's only ten or twenty times larger. Then his eyes travel up the sable-colored fur, stretched out on the snow in a frozen shriek. There are black patches where it looks almost burnt. No one seems to want to go near it.
He falls to the ground in front of it.
He thinks he knows what it is and he wants to giggle or hiccup or cry and he can hear those dry and mystical Discovery Channel voices swimming over the scene like a block of watercolor text, over his jacket, over the snow, over the sky.
Stick it, anthropology, he thinks, ripping his gloves off and touching the fur with indelicate fingers. The hairs are sparser than he would have imagined, frozen into strange shapes like beds of knives and writhing forests. He wraps his other hand around the grotesque claw and then they're waltzing, his destiny and he, if only in his head. His hands are getting colder and colder but he doesn't care, he's pressed against the snow and his heart is echoing like thundering hooves eight feet away and he doesn't even notice the inevitable stages, first the loss of dexterity and then the loss of feeling and then a blinding pain exploding in his ribs and, wait, what?
When his eyes open, he's lying on a makeshift hospital bed and her treacherous face is blotting out the sun.
He tries to sit up but a shiny vinyl swathe stretched tight as a drum across his chest won't let him.
She gives him an ugly look as he prods his side, feeling the thick layered gauze underneath and looking up at her in a wordless question.
"You were mauled by a bull, you prat," she says.
Her face softens and she reaches out for his hand but he looks away from the melting clump of human snow and outside the open flaps of the medical tent to the real ones on the ground, only they're not melting but hardening over their secrets from here to the edge of the sky and he can only conclude that the Arctic Circle hates him.