Chapter Nineteen
Aloysius, meanwhile, having no reason to suspect that his manager, deputy manager and colleague were floating through outer space, stood bemused at the front desk, fielding complaints about several guests’ toilets: specifically, that their personal possessions had appeared bobbing inside them (inside the toilets, not inside the guests). Some reprobate, it transpired, had been breaking into rooms while their occupants were out and dropping things into the receptacles in question—sometimes articles of clothing, such as the guests’ undergarments, fished out of their drawers and now clogging the works, sometimes sentimental family photographs, still in their frames, torn off the mantelpiece, or the like. Aloysius, doing his best to pay attention, was obviously distracted. He happened to have a large stock of liquid lust bottled up within him, a circumstance which was wont to impair his ability to think straight. Instead of handling the complaints with sympathy, delicacy and competence, he found himself fantasising about the disgraceful acts he desired to perform upon the persons of various female guests who now only very occasionally appeared in public in his vicinity. In puncturing their pride, stripping them of their airs, and debasing them, he reasoned, he would debase himself, and, wallowing, soiled, in the cesspool of mutual debasement, they would jointly find peace, and purpose. This noble ambition, however, hardly helped clean the guests’ toilets, and so he dispatched as best he could Annette, Modeste and Janice to retrieve the guests’ treasured effects and, in so doing, free the passages through which the insalubrious processed material of guests’ corporal forms—material the reader will understand their narrator is far too demure to name—might discreetly proceed, and, thereby, restore order to chaos.