Chapter Ninety-One
A knock on La Paiva’s door, and he didn’t have to ask who it was.
“Thank you for seeing me.” Gangakanta looked wretched, his traditionally pristine grooming abandoned in favour of a torn, sullied suit, a face which, with the exception of his own tears, hadn’t seen water for days, and encrustation of his own semen over his fingers. “I don’t know where else to turn.”
“You might turn into the nearest bathroom,” La Paiva suggested, with perhaps less sagacious grandeur than Gangakanta might have hoped for. Although the all-seeing one had countless ideas available to him of how to dispose of this nuisance, he chose, for reasons only he knew, not to make use of them. “Take a seat.”
Gangakanta sat, ember-eyed, clawing at his hair and generally making a display of himself. “I feel like I’m going to die! I feel like I’ve wasted my whole life, which has led, in any event, only up to now—to my imminent death! The path of rationality, don’t you see?! It’s led me, all right, straight, and true, to here! Whereas the slightest instinctive deviation therefrom would have saved me! Do you hear?! Saved me! And another! Who knows how many others I was destined to save?! Every minute handed me, from the finite bag of my allotment, I spent on numbers! Ha! Numbers! Can you believe it?! As if I could touch them, kiss them, fornicate with them! As if my penis could penetrate either of the loops of an eight, like a wanton woman arse-up offering both her nether holes, and through intimate relations with a Platonic form discover meaning! As if every failed attempt to use numbers to sift to the pith of truth—to calculate the formula for happiness—to decode the construction of our species—to journey to the boundary of the universe—to assess the probability of the existence of, and solve the equation which would reveal the Mind of, God—as if it weren’t dragging me further and further away from that very essence to which I’d been so close the day before I learnt to count! It’s a sham! The whole thing! A sham!”
La Paiva shrugged. “What of it?” Although he knew the answer to his own question, just as he knew that Gangakanta did not.
Gangakanta collapsed to the floor. He twisted and flipped like a fish being fried in a pan; he screamed, like a fish being fried in a pan whom they’d forgot to kill first and who’d been whimsically endowed by his Creator with an eleventh-hour aptitude for speech.
La Paiva rolled his eyes.
“I’ve lost all hope!” Gangakanta finally concluded.
“That is a rational conclusion to make.”
Gangakanta knelt on the floor, almost spent of life. “So what. . .do I do. . ?”
“You start again. Right now. This very moment. Go on—start.”