Chapter 8, section 3: dinner, dancing and les petits morts

Once drinks with the magnificent view had given way to supper at the stone and exposed brick Modavie at the bottom of Boulevard St.-Laurent overlooking the St. Lawrence Seaway, he forgot about revealing hints of nervousness and became fully engrossed in fascination. For a mortal with less than thirty years under her crushed silk off-the-shoulder burgundy dress, she had lived a life unusually rich with experience. After listening to a few stories, he even started believing that she really did come from a mixed Spanish-Yakutian heritage. Her honey skin tone, shining black hair and statuesque build could have come from either of those two gene pools. Her aquiline nose was very Mediterranean, and her broad cheekbones and lack of epicanthic folds around her eyes whispered of northern Siberia.

She claimed that her father descended from the Spanish conquistadors, and she grew up in a privileged part of Cuernavaca, the City of Eternal Spring. She told him stories of childhood exploits both there and in Mexico City that made him howl with laughter. Her mother was the daughter of an ancient shamanic lineage from a small settlement near the seaport Tiksi on the Laptev Sea. She had come to Mexico from Yakutia by way of Alaska at the height of the cold war. When asked why Mexico, she would answer evasively. She did spend a lot of time with the Huichol Indians, which Lizereli thought was a clue, given their strong shamanic tradition and peyote-based religion. After the Soviet Union crumbled into many pieces and it was safe for her to return, that was all she wanted to do. It was tough on Lizereli and her younger sister, but the land of the ancestors was important to both parents. Both were stubborn, he in a firebrand Latin way and she with an arctic chill. In the end, the daughters spent their teenage years traveling back and forth between a dusty Mexican silver town and a seaport overlooking the North Pole.

She had come to Montréal to study, and stayed. Work in dance was hard to come by, but she scored a job with Compagnie Marie Choinard. She loved the renowned choreographer, but wondered why morning class was always Graham Technique when the work they performed was somewhere between the raw movement of Arctic creatures and the nervous ticks of deskbound geeks.

Any doubts that may have crept into his lust-addled brain about the beauty’s credentials were put to rest not only by the fact that the outrageous stories he allowed himself to tell her were all true (even if names and dates were sometimes fudged to protect the innocent), but by the way she danced when they arrived at Jingxi club sometime ‘round midnight. Only someone with a lot of formal contemporary dance training could move that sinuously wonderful animal way. Every muscle in her body rippled through smooth articulations, as if she gave every beat to a joint and let them all dance together. Her continuously changing movements challenged him to put on his dancing wings to match her tiger-sleek sensuality.

By the time they left Jinxi his hormones were on overdrive, and hers seemed to match quite nicely. The rest of the night was spent in the most pleasant kind of blur of flesh and little deaths. They drifted off as the sky lightened, still tangled up in each other.

Make that tangled up in each other again. She had gotten up and poured them some juice before falling asleep.

Subtle.

That would explain how he could be transported to this unknown place and tied up without his waking up.

Her smell still filled his nose. Her smell, and the tang of orange juice.