Chapter Thirty-Five
Gilda, meanwhile, marched down corridor after corridor, arms outspread, eyes shut in all-seeing rapture, singing hymns traditional and extemporised, as expression of the ineffable, in devotion to the divine, for the salvation of her fellow sinners.
Curtis/Thaddeus, encountering her, unhesitatingly brayed: “Aw, shut yer trap, ya windbag! No one wants to hear that shit!”
Ignoring him, she passed by, glissandoing with dignity, but he would not relent:
“You ain’t fooling nobody, ya tramp! You got about as much religious fervour in ya as my collie back home—and she’s dead and in the ground!” he railed from behind her. “Take off yer dress! Go on! Take off yer dress! Take off yer dress! Show us yer arse, ya bleedin’ whore!” he chanted whilst following in her wake.
They approached Gangakanta’s room, where he was discussing the case with Enid. Their conversation paused, while the competing, muffled world views passed outside, then resumed.
“Aren’t,” Gangakanta wondered, “almost all the guests and staff—present company excepted—murderers, for what was done to Inspector Pluck?”
“Hm? Oh yes.”
He narrowed his eyes, but not without amusement. “You act as if that incident had somewhat slipped from your memory.”
She had been meditating, you and I, Reader, know, on, of course, the kiss. “I suppose it had, rather. I don’t know. So much has changed, it seems. For everyone! It’s almost as if none of it is real—that it’s just a stupid dream, dreamt by a stupid dreamer, who may or may not be me. Do you ever feel like that?”
“Every moment of every day,” he answered seriously. “But, if we want to pursue the investigation, since it does, one must argue, exist within the dream, then we must act in accordance with the rules of the dream, even whilst we’re not, in our heart of hearts, taking them seriously.”
“I suppose you’re right.”
“Unless you would rather we abandoned the whole thing.”
“No. . .”
“It’s all the same to me.”
“No, no, that wouldn’t be right.”
“You mean—within the parameters of the dream.”
“I’m sure I don’t know what I mean. Maybe there’s no point to any of it. Maybe it’s a case that can’t be solved. Maybe, even if it were solved, it wouldn’t really, truly matter. Oh, Aadi, you tell me—you tell me what we should do!”
He chuckled, turned his head, noticed a piece of lint, and flicked it off the back of his chair. “If it’s answers you want, I fear you’ve come to the wrong fellow. I’ve always been much better at putting unanswerable questions than concocting untenable and unverifiable answers. I have, however, stumbled upon one possible approach to this problem.”
“‘Stumbled’? How?”
He shrugged. “Meditation. And my toilet. Come, please—I will show you.”
She followed him into his bathroom.
“Immaculate,” she observed with admiration.
“Thank you. But that wasn’t what I’d intended to exhibit.” He took a hand mirror off the washbasin and held it up, a distance away from the wall mirror. The effect, as the reader has no doubt experienced him- or her-self, was an unending reduplication of their weary faces. “Picture,” he said now, “our hotel—our beloved, one-of-a-kind hotel—between these mirrors.”
“An infinite collection of Aadi Gangakantas and Enid Trojczakowskis musing on their counterparts,” she affirmed.
“Would the murderer, or murderers, in one hotel necessarily be the same as in all the others?” he quizzed her.
“I suppose not.” She stopped to think. “Or would they?”
He put down the mirror, and led her back into the sitting room. “I can’t claim to know. Only this: this possibility—that if all of the hotels are exactly the same, and, well—linked—like the strands of a spider’s web—and we were to, let’s say—I don’t know—jump to our deaths off a cliff, or burn the place down, or plant a bomb in the centre of the earth that would blow every atom to bits—. . .”
“Yes?” Enid stood before him, watching his eyes dart from one end of the wallpaper to the other, as if he could view each of these possibilities projected before him.
“. . .Then all of them would also be—blown to bits.”
“. . .But if not?”
“If not?” he repeated. “If there are variations in the images? If subtle alterations by a shaky forger’s hand left hidden clues amongst the counterfeits, undetected even by the most obsessive art scholars in all the museums across all the worlds?”
“Yes—what then?”
He cleared his throat. He looked still at the wallpaper, as if reluctant, or afraid, to meet her eye. “Well. Then I guess that. . .in regretful refutation of aeons of religion. . .we may assume that the moderns have hit upon it: that we are alone in the universe, after all.”