Chapter Sixty-Eight
Eli La Paiva, who the reader will remember was omniscient—decidedly more so even than your trusty narrator (me)—wandered through the corridors of the hotel, as he wandered through the corridors of wisdom, slowly and painfully and without volition. Where there was a window to look through and contemplate the whiteness outside, he did so; where there was a scurrying rat to smile upon benevolently, he did that too. Any guest he happened to encounter he shrugged off as petty and uninteresting; now, just now, was he accosted by one, whose name he well knew, but whose personality he could not be bothered to distinguish from anyone else’s, so he looked askew at them with nothing but contemptuous pity while passing on.
This trek was a painful slog through a wisdom after which he’d never hankered, and which caused him unending suffering, although he understood, of course, the reasons for all this, and the reasons it was not otherwise. Insofar as he could still have an active will in the midst of knowing all, he wished to be rid of this gift; but knew that he never could. Even to be released from his corporal shell, he had no choice but to admit, would not lessen his consciousness by one microscopic thimble of stardust. As in “life”, where he was forced to bear his unmanageable overload of information, so in “death”, if one wished to amuse oneself by using these nominal distinctions, would his curse of fusion with all knowledge remain.
The one who called himself “Gangakanta” now stood before him. This man was begging him, shamelessly, for a conversation in which the former might skim some shallow cream of wisdom off the latter. La Paiva shoved him away, knowing, while Gangakanta did not, that such a rebuff was the kindest favour he could grant him.
Then the one who called herself “Gilda” appeared, and tried to engage him in some metaphysical debate, the pointlessness of which was unavoidably obvious to him, but entirely missed by her. He laughed her off.
La Paiva found his son Philip, and tried to talk to him, tried to share a tiny fraction of the relevant mysteries, at least those that pertained to paternal love, but Phil interrupted him with claims of being bored and not in the mood for a chat. The son having stalked off, the infinite misery of the father’s existence did something he could hardly believe possible: it deepened.
While he could have no secrets from himself, his personal memories failed to suggest themselves to his perusal. They were remembered, but judged transparent and of no admissible import. He could have no climactic vision beyond the continuous, time-o’er-leaping immersion of his consciousness into all Being; thus did the prospect of eternal torture realise itself for him.
His hands were placed on a window frame. His earthly gaze shifted from the oblivion of snow outside to his finger; in particular, his forefinger; specifically, its nail; to be absolutely exact, to the massed particles of filth beneath it. Only he could appreciate, in the same breath, the same thought, both the categorical insignificance of it, and the paramount sentience it possessed.
Whilst he was thus ruminating, Modeste ambled by, wiping a shit-caked hand upon his sleeve. La Paiva, his equilibrium shattered, cursed her wildly, and begged God, with Whom he tended to confuse himself, to damn her for all time.