Chapter One Hundred and Three
In the middle of the night, Enid was woken by a noise. Her first impression was that it was coming from an alien who had bored into her brain, but, upon further reflection, she concluded that a more likely explanation was that someone was blubbering like a fucking baby outside their front door.
Sure enough, after disentangling herself from her lovers’ limbs and investigating, she found Gangakanta snivelling on the carpet in the corridor, whining like a maltreated dog. Pity warred with contempt in her heart, pity won, and she took him to her old room to try and calm him down.
Dust had settled over everything like snow. The loneliness which had once been the musical motif of her existence hovered still, here, in her footsteps across the sitting room, in the depression in the chair cushion as she sat, in the silence from the bedroom, but distantly, and, she hoped, soon to be forgotten.
Shrivelled up on the desk, buried in dust amongst the other scraps of her former life, was a small piece of paper, autographed Insp. T. Pluck. She glanced at it. For all its personal resonance, and pertinence to her present life, it might have been an ancient document, under glass, lying airless, unread and inert, buried alive in the British Museum. Was this my life?, she asked herself. It did not seem so.
Gangakanta sat in silence, his head in his hands. Enid flitted between the epochs in her life, and came down on the side of this one. Thus, she concentrated all her attention on how to most efficiently eject her co-investigator from her room without openly insulting him, and return to the paradisical embrace of her four favourite bosoms on this earth (not including her own).
“What is it?” she asked, in reference to his irritating depression, for she was still too tired to craft a better way to begin.
“It’s all hopeless,” he replied.
“What is?”
“Life.” He looked at her as if she’d asked a stupid question. “My life, in particular.”
“Oh.” She observed him. The skin stretched thinly across his skull like a broken man upon the rack; like the skull was wearing the thinnest gossamer garment only out of an outmoded sense of decency. “Have you been eating?”
He shook his head.
“Don’t you think you’d ought to?”
“Ought to what?”
“Eat?”
“What—food?”
“That would make a nice start, yes. Shall I get you some biscuits? I think there’s a box of them somewhere.”
He shook his head and waved the idea away. He held up his hand before his eyes and looked at it with curiosity, as if the bony thing were someone else’s hand, perhaps a strange fossil unearthed in a dig, but whose evolutionary link to man could shed some light on his own, excruciatingly modern tragedy.
“I pursued logic, to the end, you see. And I left romance—I left chaos—to the barbarians I pitied. And what have I got to show for it?”
Enid considered the notion that she was herself a romantic barbarian, flailingly trying to tread water in a sea of chaos. The idea did not repel her.
“Where will it lead me?” he persisted.
“To death?” she suggested.
“To death,” he agreed.
“Won’t all our paths lead there?” she asked.
“I’m not so sure,” he moaned. “A month ago, I would have declared the suggestion that any of us won’t die to be the pinnacle of irrationality. But right now, I have no evidence that I’ll ever die. That I’ll ever be rid of myself. Why must we die, after all, and not be entombed in this hotel, frozen in a bubble of time floating through the universe, for eternity?”
“Do you ever feel like you’ve already lived and died, and that your every conscious moment is simply your older self thinking back over what you’ve done? Perhaps on your deathbed?”
He shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe somebody else, remembering, or inventing, what you’ve done.”
“I feel no connection to the Enid Trojczakowski who carried her bags into this hotel. I bear love for her in my heart—a sad, pitying love—but she’s as if a child I’ve disowned. Or a mother who’s passed away. Or a sister who’s turned out a fraud. Or an identical twin I’d never much cared for. Or a role I once played every night in a show since closed.”
He waited. “Any other similes?” he finally asked.
She smiled. “No, I think that’s all.”
He nodded. “My biggest failure is that I am still the man I’ve always been. I cannot evolve. All my life, I’ve fought to conquer my emotions and find peace. And, in a way, I have. But now I see that peace as a sad, soundproofed, isolated cell around which the living dance, as round a maypole, singing glorious ridicule toward the poor prisoner oblivious of his own incarceration.”
“I’m not sure I’ve ever known peace,” she said. “Have I found it now? I don’t know.” A membranous sheen of wavery introspection glazed across her eyes, which darted to and fro like two befuddled fish trapped inside a plastic bag at a carnival. “I’m feeling something, all right, unlike anything I used to know. And it’s not something I’ve always been searching for, like a home I’ve instinctively suspected lies somewhere in a dark forest, forever out of reach, of which I’ve never caught a glimpse. Rather, it’s a new kind of place, of a nature I could never have conceived, and would have been terrified, had I known, of passing within sight of; a house which would appear lopsided, incapable of standing, grotesquely deformed to anyone with eyes uncalibrated to see it truly. And yet, it feels right. It’s too contrary to everything I was before not to feel right—only a ‘right’ which can only be so if everything I’ve ever been taught, by chastising look or by example, since girlhood, is inverted. But is it peace? No, it’s too exciting to be peace. Too active, a continuous eddy of every-yielding, ever-renewing meaning to dub ‘peace’, such that any state of stasis would pale. But then afterwards, in the stillness of the bedroom, when all thought is superfluous—if that’s not peace, what could peace be?”
He would not look at her. “I spent some years in London. I was mathematical advisor to the National Geographic Society. Cartography, new methods of navigation, that sort of thing. Well, my life was lonely, as you can imagine, not just because of the reluctance of my colleagues to socialise with someone hailing from another continent, which was ironical enough, but because I am, naturally, by all accounts, a boring man.” Enid made a move to protest this—it would have been rather rude to have said nothing, or to have enthusiastically agreed—but he ignored her and went on: “But then, over the space of a week, through a series of, in retrospect, unbelievable coincidences, I met Peter. . . .He was a civil servant. Anglo-Saxon. Ruddy-headed. Skin like polished piano keys. Eyes like you’re looking through the wrong end of a telescope. And so on. We became great friends. I acted the eccentric Indian mathematician, to a T. He unbosomed himself of his great unrequited love for a waitress in the cheap lunchroom we frequented. We had great fun, and not a word I ever said to him was true; not in the sense of what I felt.”
“He never knew?”
“When my time in London was done, we had a merry goodbye, and I sailed back to India and loneliness. I’d wished him the best of luck with the waitress. I still read The Times, back home, cover to cover, and sure enough, a couple of months later, in a tiny report towards the back, his name was mentioned: arrested for soliciting sodomy, sent for a year in prison. When I was back in London the next year, I found the waitress, at the same place. She told me she’d always fancied Peter, and sat down with him once, after her shift, but found he clearly didn’t go for girls. From what she said, Peter had, once I’d left, taken to opium. I could never picture that, but I’d no reason to suspect she was wrong. When she saw him some while later, he was straggling, in a daze, starved, deaf to the shouts of coachmen rearing their horses so as not to trample this soul-deadened angel in the street. Anyway, I never heard from him again.”
Enid, teary-eyed, had by this time moved closer and taken his hand. “You should go back! To London! Once we leave here! You can find him! I’m sure of it!”
He shook his head. “That was many years ago, now. I’m certain he’s dead. Just as I’m certain that, if I’d told him the truth, I could have saved him. Even if he didn’t love me, I could have cared for him, kept him from the opium, kept him from prison. I could have done something. I could have saved him, and me.”