Chapter Eighteen
In a musty storeroom, Mifkin held a lantern whilst Voot and Larry wedged their fingers into crevices between huge casks. The sense was that of a tomb: rows of casks and crates, dignified in their weighty immobility like overlarded burghers, columned like mute soldiers, reduplicating into the darkness. The backs of Voot and Larry were of a piece with the casks in their inescapable, overpowering brownness encompassed by anaemic lamplight. Mifkin was well aware that with a well-aimed push from his brawny forearm, a cask could be made to come crashing down upon Voot—possibly taking Larry with it—thus, in a stroke, relieving Mifkin of one of the chief banes of his existence. Did Voot not sense this?, he wondered. Was he, in fact, testing him? And which action, indicative of which quality, would net him a pass—forbearance, symptomatic of loyalty? Or murder, symptomatic of an authentic dedication to his personal muse? Would Voot, in his agonised, dying seconds, respect Mifkin more for yielding to his impulse, and thus, in the close of Voot’s own private apocalypse, the two wrathful foes might finally, between them, achieve a kind of peace?
“We were extremely well stocked,” Voot concluded, slapping the dust from his hands, having stood up and turned to Mifkin before the latter could test his theory. “But we’ve never had a snow-in like this before. We’ll need to start rationing.”
“Rationing what, monsieur?” asked Larry, as if he really cared.
“Food, and oil,” replied his master. “Staff on half-rations, and, if it comes to it, guests on three-quarter.”
So that’s it!, Mifkin thought. By depleting me of my physical strength, he hopes to overcome me!
“I’ll make an announcement this evening,” Voot went on, chiefly, Mifkin inferred, because he liked to hear his own voice, regardless of whether the actual content of his speech possessed any merit.
Voot and Larry turned to go, not wishing, apparently, to spend the rest of their lives in the storeroom, when Mifkin halted them with the following dialogue: “With all due respect, Herr Voot”—this was uttered without the slightest veneer aimed to understate the sarcasm—“might I put forward a counterproposal?”
“What is it, then?”
Mifkin looked at him, through the gloom, blankly, as if he’d just now woken from the profoundest sleep. “. . .What?”
“Did you say you had a counterproposal to make?” Voot asked him.
“Did I?”—a phrase Mifkin invested with a profusion of tonal facets, such that neither Voot nor Larry could with any degree of confidence state precisely what their crafty colleague meant to imply.
Voot, perhaps owing to the relatively meagre number of objects fit for visual appreciation in their present surroundings, looked to Larry. Larry, as politeness and professional duty required, looked back, not understanding what Voot was, silently, asking of him, necessitating Voot to explicitly ask: “Larry, did Monsieur Mifkin say he had a counterproposal?”
Larry nodded. “Yes.”
Voot looked to Larry, in triumph. “So, Monsieur Mifkin—now that it has been indisputably established that you have claimed to offer a counterproposal—what is your counterproposal?”
Gears screeching, unoiled, within him at a furious pace, Mifkin had to come up with something. He decided, first of all, that a distracting technique would buy him some time: “What was that?!” he exclaimed, his outburst exploding in their vicinity like a bomb in a bonnet, then echoing away down the rows of casks like a mis-shot firework fizzling into oblivion. Inexplicably, Voot and Larry remained staring at him, forcing him to eventually demand, with no small show of indignation: “Aren’t you going to ask what I’m talking about?!”
Voot sighed. Larry, biting, asked: “What are you talking about?”
“. . .I thought I saw a bat.” It was the best he could muster, in such a short time frame, under such anxious conditions.
Voot turned to go, but Mifkin sought to forestall him yet again: “Wait! You claimed, a moment ago, that you wished to hear my counterproposal, Herr Voot. Was that a lie?”
Voot twisted back at the waist. “It was not.”
“Very good,” Mifkin sniffed.
Voot stared at him. “Well?”
“‘Well’! ‘Well’ what, sir?!” Mifkin chortled.
“Well, what is this counterproposal we’re all awaiting with bated breath?”
Then, suddenly, Genius chose to plant her inspirational buttocks upon the encephalous cushion within the capacious confines of Mifkin’s cranium: “. . .I counterpropose—that—that—that the staff’s rations be restored to full, whilst those of the guests be halved!”
Voot, sighing, turned, with an undisguised dearth of interest, fully to Mifkin. “And what is your reasoning?” he asked.
Mifkin scoffed. “What do you mean?”
“How can you justify your comment?”
“Which one?”
“Your counterproposal.”
“Again, sir, I ask you—which one?”
“Have you made more than one counterproposal?”
Mifkin twitched. “I don’t know what you mean.”
Voot turned to go. “Then we will proceed with my original decision.”
“But you haven’t sought to even dignify my counterproposal with a rebuttal!” Mifkin protested.
Voot turned back to Mifkin. He worried that the lamp might go out, and they would be stuck down here, debating inanities till history finally wheezed to a close. “I am waiting for you to explain your reasoning,” he said, slowly, patiently.
“But you’ve neglected to explain what you mean by such a statement!” Mifkin touchéd.
“I’m asking you to explain why more rations should be distributed to each member of staff than to each guest.”
“But I’m waiting for you to explain it to me!” Mifkin countered.
“I haven’t the time for this.” Voot turned and started walking away. “Feel free to remain down here, cogitating on this matter, monsieur, if you see fit.”
Mifkin shouted after him: “Because I’m hungry! I need to eat! I am a man!”
Larry followed Voot out. If Larry were impressed with Mifkin’s reasoning, he chose, for reasons of his own, not to show it.
Mifkin could no longer see them, but heard them suddenly stop, in the darkness. Then a grumble, and a sigh. Then came Voot’s voice, melodiously out of the void: “We’ll need that lantern, Mifkin.”
“What’s that?”
“We can’t see.”
Mifkin nodded, revelling in his irrefutable vindication. “Then I suppose you’ll just have to come back over here, to this dim-lit agora, and continue our debate.”
Voot and Larry reappeared in the arc of lamplight, the former now visibly annoyed. “Give me that lantern,” he requested.
“Go fuck yourself,” Mifkin demurred. “Now, tell me: how do you respond to my argument?”
“What argument?! Give me the lantern!”
“My argument,” Mifkin continued coolly, “that I am hungry?”
Voot made a lunge for the lantern, but Mifkin soft-shoed sprightlily to the side, causing his superior to crash headfirst into a cask.
“Ow!”
“And why should the hunger of a stranger,” Mifkin pursued, “trump the hunger of the person whose consciousness is, after all, making the deliberation?”
“Larry!” Voot spat. “Take the lantern from him!”
“He knows I will kill him if he tries,” Mifkin calmly explained. Larry made no move; his eyes were closed; he was imagining a butterfly-permeated sky o’er a flower-strewn field. “I demand you cut the guests’ rations by half,” Mifkin insisted.
“Don’t be an idiot! How do you predict they would react to such an announcement?!”
Mifkin shrugged. “You may tell them that your staff, to a man, are noble members of the human race, built of the same stuff as God and His angels.”
“And you expect them to hear that without mockery?”
“I expect my dignity as a human being to be respected, yes.”
“So I suppose I should tell them that Monsieur Mifkin is hungry, and for that reason, they, the paying guests, should go without food?!”
“I pay the guests the compliment of assuming they will understand raw reason, yes.”
“And do you anticipate such a strategy will endear our guests to our establishment?!”
“They’re not likely to be going anywhere else. Not in this snowstorm, at any rate.”
“And do you predict the reputation of the hotel will be bolstered?”
Mifkin shrugged, again. “Not my concern. I just want my belly to be fed, you see.”
“Larry! Take the lantern from Monsieur Mifkin!”
But Larry was dancing, naked, in his field. Amongst the butterflies (also naked), and a coy bluebird who just might have been a fairy in disguise.
“Considering the problem psychologically,” Mifkin mused, Voot having little choice but to listen, “the scrawnier and more malnourished they get, and the beefier and more virile we become, the more respect will be redistributed from them—to us.”
“And you don’t feel we have a duty to maintain our guests, to the best of our ability, in the comfort for which they’ve handsomely paid this establishment?”
Mifkin closed his eyes and repeated: “I want my belly to be fed.”
“Speaking ontologically,” Larry suddenly put in—his field having evidently dematerialised—“if all the staff starved to death, the hotel would cease to exist along with us. But if all the guests starved to death, the hotel, through us, would live on.”
“Yes!” Mifkin exclaimed. “And, as Herr Voot has always hammered into us, the welfare of the hotel must come first!”
As if in punctuation, the lamp blinked out. The three friends felt, as one, that they, too, had blinked out of existence, or else were fated to float, the three of them, through starless space, insolubly conjoined, for all time.