Into the 21st Century most people still believed that a transcendental God thrived above
the foundations of postmodern fabrications; living between birth and death, memory and fantasy,
threshold and destination, having failed to perform an essential ritual, Tubiakou lost a patient and gave up
shamanizing. Believing that his helping spirits had deserted him, he sold his unique costume to a government museum.
"But a shaman cannot simply walk away from the spirits of his shaman ancestors. Eventually, my eyes sink into a book on the North
like my boots sink into the mud, lift and move to the next puddle. There is no end until the next season, a different course. Chilly but happy, sweating from the thought that I may not have the stamina to make it through this journey that tests one to the marrow, my worst fear is that I’ll die and not be found, a voice not apart from billions of others who howl across the wireless tundra, avatars with proxied names, he realized that he must take up his profession again and asked for the return of his magical clothing. Museum curators prized it as a priceless ethnographic rarity, however, and refused to give it back. Only after
a sympathetic ethnographer interceded did the Russian Ministry of Culture finally agree" to lift faith from its crystalline depths, launching a flight of metaphors toward celestial perfection.