Chapter 38 — Concerning the Super Romantic Date with Santa Claus
Only once they were out of sight, and the workshop was a rainbow-lit Christmas light glow over the horizon, did the party ease off the accelerations. The ice beneath them rumbled and twanged as if there were some great creature down below splitting the earth apart.
Santa and Peter snuggled up together on the same sledge— standing upon the runners, he the large spoon, she the little spoon— wrapped in a whirling blast of snowy wind. His chin hovering above her peaked cap, he looked down at her gloved hand and how it pinned the tine to the handlebar. Hecautiously considered putting his hand over hers. How would she react? Would she swat it away, or look at him with disgust? Maybe he shouldn’t. But it was just a hand. It wasn’t anything inappropriate. In a moment of courage, he rested his hand down upon hers, and Santa turned around to look at him. She smiled a big smile, laughed, then slipped her hand out and planted it down on top of Peter’s. He mimicked her and weighed his hand down on top of hers. This endless game of who was holding whose hand went on until Peter ended it, and he gripped her hand tightly with both of his own. Congratulations, Peter, your relationship with Santa has progressed to kindergarten levels of intimacy.
Peter grinned and looked off. Yuzuka caught his eye. She was watching them, and her eyes were tinged with hurt. He felt as though he had done something awful. Like he was an asshole for enjoying this moment with Santa. Then Yuzuka whisked the tine in the air and sent her sledge off ahead.
The monotony of flat ice was interrupted by glaciers. They rose up from the snow like jagged mountains of translucent quartz. As they approached these eerie frozen behemoths, wildlife appeared out of the dark. A polar bear spotted them, charged at a sledge, and shortly thereafter gave up. The reindeer’s speed was too great for it. Further on strange giraffe like creatures stalked about. Unlike their African counterpart that Peter knew of, they were stouter, aggressive looking beasts, and their dark fur swung about like dreadlocks as they scavenged for food.
Then came the roar of the unseen arctic ocean, and the chattering of ice floes knocking together. The reindeer crew dashed atop the sea. Its black waters, teeming with penguins, appeared to go down forever, but their hooves splashed upon the surface as if it were only a centimeter deep. Before them lifted dark shores of a lonesome iceberg upon the horizon. Its frozen walls crown shaped, like a snowy isle of the dead. In its eye a single gothic spire awaited their arrival. A fantasy tower for a forgotten princess. A cold mausoleum. Inside there would be no Rapunzel, but maybe a skeleton in a pink dress with miles of blonde hair clinging to her scalp. Its many intricate niches, arches, and buttresses all climbed higher and higher until it pierced the frosty air. A wrought iron gate protected the isolated monument. As Peter gazed up in at its enormity, they hitched the sledges and opened the gate.
“Yuzuka,” Santa said. “Will you please do the honors?”
“Hey!” Yuzuka’s voice made Peter jump. She had shouted into the open door of the gothic tower. “You’ve got ten seconds to get out of there, you son of a Scrooge! One! Two! Ten!”
Yuzuka yanked the ripcord on her chainsaw sword and its rusty engine screamed into the hollow dark. She then marched into the monument alone, her mechanical sword echoing from chamber to chamber. A penguin came waddling out, fell to its belly, and slipped off into the water. Yuzuka reappeared at the door and said, “All clear.”
Santa thanked her and took an oil lantern from the sledge.
“Peter and I will go in alone,” she announced.
As Peter ascended the icy steps, a secret dread whispered into his ear. It hissed that he must embrace whatever fate lay within this ancient and forgotten tower. This uneasy premonition settled in his heart like a cold mist— a mist to blot out the sharp outline of pine trees until they become one with darkened skies. All the Christmas cheer, crackling fires, and coziness of life in the North Pole collapsed here and Peter found himself within a terrifying bleakness. Whatever door the tower of ice and shadow once had was gone, and the great iron hinges now held onto nothing. They entered, and Santa’s lantern light reached out into the darkness. Inside ice crystals clung to stony walls. They echoed back the lantern light like glittering clusters of thorns. The place dripped with cold condensation. Otherwise it was barren.
In abandoned buildings one can understand the purpose of rooms and see the moldy furniture that was once slept in and sat on, but here there were no such hints. Nothing was left behind to signify that anyone had ever lived here. Peter felt the mystery of this place further deepening. No ceiling protected them from the night sky. Up above, at that lofty point where the gothic architecture ended, an oculus gaped down upon them. Beyond that iris shaped hole the clouds shifted darkly, offering a dull, flat light. Peter felt as though a part of himself would slip out through that aperture and become lost forever.
Santa’s face, deep in shadow, met his gaze, and the lantern light flickering in her pupils was like a prelude to a tragedy. Her beauty contained omens that filled his heart with hopeless yearning. There was no way this girl loved him, he thought. Had she not just held his hand Peter might have believed she brought him here to dump his ass. That kiss the Ghost of Christmas Past imposter showed him, which Santa flatly denied committing, and Peter couldn’t even remember, must have been a dream.
Santa wiped her gloved hand across an icy wall. She gave it a good knock, and a slab of frost came loose and crumbled apart. Carved into the walls, and inlay with gold and silver, there reflected a crude and blocky silhouette of a boy. Faceless and generic— it could have been anyone. It was more like a rune of a boy than a portrait of an individual. Completely and utterly alone he stood lost in a glittering silver forest. Santa and Peter walked, uncovering more and more of the metallic illustrations. It was like discovering some bizarre archaeological site where Vikings had tried to recreate the stations of the cross, except none of them could remember the characters, the setting, or the plot. So the whole thing was wrong. All wrong! Reimagined in their own style and embellished with their own cultural influences. Did Jesus ride atop reindeer? Did he take big Viking chomps out of lamb legs? Probably! Why wouldn’t he?
But these were not silver-stuffed carvings of Jesus. Peter recognized a flat and perspectiveless depiction of Santa’s workshop— its whimsical mixture of cozy Victorian architecture and brutalist industrialism— and he thought to himself that he had been there. Slowly he realized that he had been to every location depicted here— the vast field of penguins among oblong glaciers, the Christmas tree forest, the elvish bathhouse. And then he saw the boy with the same rifle he had, sledging into the same tree stump he had, befriending a reindeer girl, a mouse girl, getting abducted by a snow switch as an elf burst a flamethrower into the sky, the Bible accurate angels in their horrible tangle of wings and eyeballs.
“He’s me,” Peter whispered.
These words, like an incantation, unlocked something deep within his chest. Maybe it was his heart, or maybe it was some other vestigial organ full of warm, gooey emotion. Such as the cheese fondue bladder— right between the heart and the appendix. It had burst and now Peter bled internally with a viscous gruyère of hope and purpose.
Peter ran back to the first image and then tore down the wall of frost to see if Santa had really started this tour at the beginning. She had not. There was another pagan engraving of the boy atop a Volvo doing an insane Irish jig. Below his furious Riverdance the driver and passengers helplessly panicked.
“It is me!”
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Forward through the timeline of prophecies Santa guided him until they reached the largest of the stations. The image towered over them and Peter knew immediately what it depicted. It was like someone had looked into his cheese bladder and illustrated his very soul into stone. It was what he had been working towards and failing at achieving every day for years. There he stood, tightly hugging a girl in his arms. Her face buried into his chest. A perfect moment of love fulfilled. He was so touch starved that the serenity depicted here felt impossible. Like it was never meant for him. But now he saw that it was his fate.
Who was she? He wondered. Santa? Squee? An elf?
Around the two lovers the Christmas Apocalypse rained down— a black sun, burning candy canes filling the sky, and four moosemen of the apocalypse galloping across the workshop. A maelström of war. This was his future. It had always been set in stone. It was always waiting for him. He had been moving towards it all his life and never knew it.
“This is the prophecy,” Santa said. “These glyphs were made hundreds of years before you were born. I can’t tell you how long I’ve looked for the boy depicted here. I can’t tell you how happy I was when I finally found you.”
“I never thought I was destined for anything,” Peter said. “I always thought I was just going on ahead in life… into nothing.”
“This is what you were born for. My chevalier of the North Pole.”
Santa lowered the lantern and hugged him. Peter rested his chin on her shoulder and stared deep into her black hair. He looked up into the ruined spire, its gothic alcoves and vaulted ceiling, and wondered if this was his home, in this kingdom of ice. It felt as if he had spent his entire life in the wrong country, fretting over pointless bullshit that never should have concerned him.