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Chapter 6
The doctors room was as esoteric as ever, the kurios that adorned his shelves, the forged tribal shields merging with the savannah yellow walls created the illusion of predictability. The barometer hung listless as the two men greeted each other with indifference that prescribed socialising accrues. “So, this will be our two hundredth meeting Galileo, there has been talk of re-purposing the hotel. Some agencies believe it will make a perfect place for incarceration.” The doctor had been one of the researchers who wished to use the hotel as a psychological experimentation again. Prisoners would make adequate subjects. The public, as all publics are, were convinced or disillusioned into meaningless controversy in the most ineffectual medium possible. Hundreds of blurbs bartered for clicks by exposing a number of things the public had never known before, esoterica-mania. What little truth of the studies that left the hotel would be inundated with the all too spreadable emulsions of fake news, ‘good for everyone’ unilaterally.
“For incarceration?” Galileo questioned the situation without much reaction.
“Yes, it will serve as a quod for upwards of ten inmates at a time.” A momentary confusion passed the butler before he was lost in a moments reverie.
Retrieving, from the side of the leather bound bronze stapled chair, a well-presented dossier, the doctor extracted certain pages depicting a basic proposal for the hotel to participate in a psychological re-adjustment therapy. The candidates were spared their isolation in the hole, and instead, served it at the Paradoxia.
Galileo looked over the pages focusing briefly on the numbers, dates and pictures. The rest was meaningless to him because he had no inclination to read it. “I’m not sure that’s a great idea.”
“It’s beyond my ability to change it Galileo. Your role in the hotel will change to that of a warden. We have discussed this thoroughly with the agencies involved and they are in agreement that there will be an armed presence at all time external to the hotel but the inside is a domain best left to you.” Galileo’s alexithymia was pronounced, Lok and the others on the panel had become more convinced that it was his distressed state that gave him immunity to the hotel’s nightmares. The inability to understand emotions, to not feel, affectless.
“Do I need training?” Galileo twisted his head canine-ishly to the right.
The scope of the experiment was much more limited than Lok had wished. A full society ran in that madhouse. Incalculable, advancements that could be made there if only we could figure out how to make it habitable. “You only need to serve the inmates food”
“Will they be allowed out of their rooms at all?” The situation seemed like a bad plot twist in a crappy written book. Put prisoners in the murder hotel, what rational government would allow that? The gravity of this irony dawned on Galileo suddenly.
“No, they will be monitored by the in-built cameras and any medical or tactical responses will be handled outside the hotel. You literally just have to deliver food to the rooms. Of course, it means that the system will be down for refurbishment for a few weeks and I was hoping you would take the time to enjoy a holiday away from the hotel.”
Galileo had become more internalised, responding only in words. “Why would I need a holiday?”
Lok moved in friendly-like to tap Galileo’s kneecap with an open palmed hand, twice, before awkwardly returning to comfort in his chair. “Because it has been decided that you do.”
Deflatedly shrugging, “okay, I guess.”
“How does this make you feel Galileo?”
“Anxious, you just told me I’d be in charge of up to ten inmates in a hotel where the imagination creates the décor. It’s hardly going to be great now is it?”
“I suppose not.” They sat in silence for a minute.
“Galileo do you still believe the Grande is your home?”
“It’s not my house if that’s what you mean but it is my home.”
“And your project?”
“It’s going okay but I’ve had to slow down recently because I’ve been stuck replaying their deaths over and over again. It’s awful the lack of details, I can only see them as I remember them. And it doesn’t make a difference how much I look at the picture of the place it always turns out to be somewhere else. It looks different.”
“It is not healthy to keep imagining how they died. Somethings are better left to history” Let’s just leave that particular thing locked up in there, a return to normality of mind would be catastrophic for mankind. Already Galileo was a folk hero, some oddity of humanity. But, what humanity requires of him is his suffering. The traditional hero, doomed to burden himself to save others, innocent and guilty simultaneously. A modern-day Hercules.
Appalled by the abhorrent ideology, Galileo squinted, “Nothing is better not known.”
“There are things better not known and the Grande was the perfect example of that.” Lok irritated his composure with a brisk movement in the chair.
Galileo, “to you maybe”
Up, Galileo moved to the door, Lok spoke a little louder “To everyone who ever went there Galileo.” The doctor shifted the weight from one leg to another expressing a desire to keep Galileo engaged. “And Cynthia?”
“What about her?”
“Are you still….?”
“Am I still having sex with my memories? Although technically they are fantasies of dead people.” Why this was important always eluded Galileo. The psychiatry of sex was no place for light-hearted conversation. It’s too value laden with taboo to be something to enjoy being ostentatiously analysed.
“Well?”
A frank anger descended on the butler in an unusual way, though Lok was accustomed to this turn. “I don’t pry into the workings of your fantasies. It just happens, unfortunately for me, that the woman I loved, and found attractive, died.” Galileo irritably fidgeted his hands and looked threateningly at the wall and the shields that stared back at him.
“But using the hotel’s intimate facilities. That is still something you regularly do, with the fantasy of your wife?”
“Would you prefer I fantasise about your wife?” The conversation turned increasingly stichomythic as Galileo’s discomfort grew on the acutely difficult topic.
“Galileo.”
“What do you want me to say, this is a really awkward conversation to be having. If it’s any help Cynthia and I have come to an accord that we’ll appropriate models when needed. Their images of course. Legally mind you, the hotel did buy the rights to their likeness.”
“I am not here to judge your tastes, but it is not healthy to be so obsessed with the creations you make.”
“Guess that’s what they told God.”
“Are you God Galileo?”
“In the hotel I am.”
“The hotel isn’t reality”
“It can be though.”
“No, it never can.”
“Is reality a delusion anyway? I mean you’re smart. Surely you know that the world is all a jumble of made up things.”
“Are you still reading?”
“Often enough, but I tend to have Cynthia read to me whilst I am trying to go to sleep.”
“I think the time away will do you good. Why not try Amsterdam, they have services you can make use of?”
“Are you sending me to a hooker?”
“I am advising you to re-acquaint yourself with reality.”
“In Amsterdam? Of all places.”
“You need to re-establish yourself as a person separate from the man in the hotel. It is not you.”
“It is more me than I have ever been. I love it.”
“You love being alone there?”
“I’m never alone there.”
“You are almost always alone there Galileo.”
“You are only ever alone when you feel lonely,”
“And you don’t feel lonely there?”
“I never spend the time thinking about it.”
“What do you think about Galileo when you are there alone.”
“At the moment? It’s all about plastic marble-like surfaces and just how often there are bumps in them, how far away from each other, how those bumps feel, and what are the general dimensions of the bumps. Are they uniform? Should there be some kind of chaos to it? How, as a man, can I create something chaotic when I’m naturally inclined to order things?” Thoughts congealed in his head, breaking and conjoining, attaching and detaching particles of light dancing like the sound waves of a song.
“And that takes up a lot of your time does it?”
“All of my time at the moment.” The particles spread thinly across an uneven three-dimensional frame preferring the X Y dimensions over the Z.
“I see. So, you don’t feel lonely because you are occupied. Am I correct?”. The Z began compensating until all that was left was time and stretch marks.
…
“Galileo”
“You’re the doctor. I tend to be bored when I’m not occupied, I feel like I’m wasting my own time.” The fatigue of these conversations hung over him.
“When you’ve finished, what is it you hope to have achieved?”
“You ask me every week doc.”
“Humour me.”
“A man walks into a bar. He yells to the bar-keep what about the radio? The radio says the bar-keep we don’t have one. The bar-keep looks confused and so does the man. There’s no radio the man enquires. Yes, says the bar-keep there’s no radio. The man walks out of the bar waits a minute and comes back in. Are you sure there’s no radio? The man says. Yes, the bar-keep replies, one hundred percent sure. Then what is it I keep hearing outside? The man asks. The bar-keep moves round the bar and walks outside and sure enough he can hear music playing. He walks back in to the bar and says it must be the melody. The melody? Asks the man. Yes, the melody. Replies the bar-keep”
“You’re wasting my time”
“Humour me.”
“No I understand why you said it, I just don’t understand why it is a joke.” The doctor was more than used to the absence of culture behind the man’s actions. Inevitably, Galileo sought to antagonise, to try and stir some kind of emotion in his dialogue. Not capable of truly expressing his grief or his sadness, the piteous butler was vampiric in his exploitation of other’s emotions. The easiest was annoyance, it was his fast-food. A mind fascinated with being human ever since he was a child, Galileo was always displaced of his humanity. The complexity of this disassociation would always be the dragon chased by the doctor.
“I never said it was a joke.”
“Then what did it have to do with anything?” The doctor baited.
“It achieved a goal.” Galileo was noticeably bored of his own story.
“In what sense?”
“It served no purpose” The doctor knew pressing this line of questioning would turn Galileo’s game against him, it would irritate Galileo that his remark would attract more attention than he had wanted. He despises himself for being himself.
“And that is a good thing?”
“Not all things are either good or bad, some we do just because it feels right.”
“And so, when you have finished your work?”
“I’ll go outside and hear the world”
“And then”
“And then I’ll bring the melody inside.” It is a continuance of irrelevance that irks.
“Let’s talk more about this joke, what did it accomplish? Do you feel as though you won some imagined duel with me, that you proved yourself somehow? What satisfaction did it give you?” Lok provoked.
“Alright, alright. It was stupid, I get it. It sounded like I was trying to be profound but it was just something dumb, okay.” The game was over, ending with the doctor’s transient victory.
“And how do you feel now?”
“I’m angry at myself now, I don’t know why I said it. C’mon doc, change the subject please?” Lok earnestly felt for him.
“I fear you divulge a lot less than you should.” The predominant mode of discourse during these sessions was the systematic recounting of his day, not of his thoughts. When his thoughts did come, Galileo was always ashamed of them. His opinion, his interpretation of events all that he did, he regretted in hindsight. Everything was something shameful, something to feel guilty about. Galileo endured the suffering of the hotel, he may have a limited capacity to understand it, but he knew he was suffering and he remained vigilant in his mortifications.
“The mind does not know why it flows and creates. We learned that mistake the hard way didn’t we doc. Humanity needs its secrets.” Galileo smiled whilst tapping his brow. He returned to the hotel admonishing his last gesture, he looked foolish, it was stupid, had he forgotten what a nightmare the melody was, and the sex talk? God, everything about that conversation was awful, stomach turning. Galileo felt a crash of something unpleasant in his body. Just as soon as it came it dissipated, he felt cathartic and tired.
“For incarceration?” Galileo questioned the situation without much reaction.
“Yes, it will serve as a quod for upwards of ten inmates at a time.” A momentary confusion passed the butler before he was lost in a moments reverie.
Retrieving, from the side of the leather bound bronze stapled chair, a well-presented dossier, the doctor extracted certain pages depicting a basic proposal for the hotel to participate in a psychological re-adjustment therapy. The candidates were spared their isolation in the hole, and instead, served it at the Paradoxia.
Galileo looked over the pages focusing briefly on the numbers, dates and pictures. The rest was meaningless to him because he had no inclination to read it. “I’m not sure that’s a great idea.”
“It’s beyond my ability to change it Galileo. Your role in the hotel will change to that of a warden. We have discussed this thoroughly with the agencies involved and they are in agreement that there will be an armed presence at all time external to the hotel but the inside is a domain best left to you.” Galileo’s alexithymia was pronounced, Lok and the others on the panel had become more convinced that it was his distressed state that gave him immunity to the hotel’s nightmares. The inability to understand emotions, to not feel, affectless.
“Do I need training?” Galileo twisted his head canine-ishly to the right.
The scope of the experiment was much more limited than Lok had wished. A full society ran in that madhouse. Incalculable, advancements that could be made there if only we could figure out how to make it habitable. “You only need to serve the inmates food”
“Will they be allowed out of their rooms at all?” The situation seemed like a bad plot twist in a crappy written book. Put prisoners in the murder hotel, what rational government would allow that? The gravity of this irony dawned on Galileo suddenly.
“No, they will be monitored by the in-built cameras and any medical or tactical responses will be handled outside the hotel. You literally just have to deliver food to the rooms. Of course, it means that the system will be down for refurbishment for a few weeks and I was hoping you would take the time to enjoy a holiday away from the hotel.”
Galileo had become more internalised, responding only in words. “Why would I need a holiday?”
Lok moved in friendly-like to tap Galileo’s kneecap with an open palmed hand, twice, before awkwardly returning to comfort in his chair. “Because it has been decided that you do.”
Deflatedly shrugging, “okay, I guess.”
“How does this make you feel Galileo?”
“Anxious, you just told me I’d be in charge of up to ten inmates in a hotel where the imagination creates the décor. It’s hardly going to be great now is it?”
“I suppose not.” They sat in silence for a minute.
“Galileo do you still believe the Grande is your home?”
“It’s not my house if that’s what you mean but it is my home.”
“And your project?”
“It’s going okay but I’ve had to slow down recently because I’ve been stuck replaying their deaths over and over again. It’s awful the lack of details, I can only see them as I remember them. And it doesn’t make a difference how much I look at the picture of the place it always turns out to be somewhere else. It looks different.”
“It is not healthy to keep imagining how they died. Somethings are better left to history” Let’s just leave that particular thing locked up in there, a return to normality of mind would be catastrophic for mankind. Already Galileo was a folk hero, some oddity of humanity. But, what humanity requires of him is his suffering. The traditional hero, doomed to burden himself to save others, innocent and guilty simultaneously. A modern-day Hercules.
Appalled by the abhorrent ideology, Galileo squinted, “Nothing is better not known.”
“There are things better not known and the Grande was the perfect example of that.” Lok irritated his composure with a brisk movement in the chair.
Galileo, “to you maybe”
Up, Galileo moved to the door, Lok spoke a little louder “To everyone who ever went there Galileo.” The doctor shifted the weight from one leg to another expressing a desire to keep Galileo engaged. “And Cynthia?”
“What about her?”
“Are you still….?”
“Am I still having sex with my memories? Although technically they are fantasies of dead people.” Why this was important always eluded Galileo. The psychiatry of sex was no place for light-hearted conversation. It’s too value laden with taboo to be something to enjoy being ostentatiously analysed.
“Well?”
A frank anger descended on the butler in an unusual way, though Lok was accustomed to this turn. “I don’t pry into the workings of your fantasies. It just happens, unfortunately for me, that the woman I loved, and found attractive, died.” Galileo irritably fidgeted his hands and looked threateningly at the wall and the shields that stared back at him.
“But using the hotel’s intimate facilities. That is still something you regularly do, with the fantasy of your wife?”
“Would you prefer I fantasise about your wife?” The conversation turned increasingly stichomythic as Galileo’s discomfort grew on the acutely difficult topic.
“Galileo.”
“What do you want me to say, this is a really awkward conversation to be having. If it’s any help Cynthia and I have come to an accord that we’ll appropriate models when needed. Their images of course. Legally mind you, the hotel did buy the rights to their likeness.”
“I am not here to judge your tastes, but it is not healthy to be so obsessed with the creations you make.”
“Guess that’s what they told God.”
“Are you God Galileo?”
“In the hotel I am.”
“The hotel isn’t reality”
“It can be though.”
“No, it never can.”
“Is reality a delusion anyway? I mean you’re smart. Surely you know that the world is all a jumble of made up things.”
“Are you still reading?”
“Often enough, but I tend to have Cynthia read to me whilst I am trying to go to sleep.”
“I think the time away will do you good. Why not try Amsterdam, they have services you can make use of?”
“Are you sending me to a hooker?”
“I am advising you to re-acquaint yourself with reality.”
“In Amsterdam? Of all places.”
“You need to re-establish yourself as a person separate from the man in the hotel. It is not you.”
“It is more me than I have ever been. I love it.”
“You love being alone there?”
“I’m never alone there.”
“You are almost always alone there Galileo.”
“You are only ever alone when you feel lonely,”
“And you don’t feel lonely there?”
“I never spend the time thinking about it.”
“What do you think about Galileo when you are there alone.”
“At the moment? It’s all about plastic marble-like surfaces and just how often there are bumps in them, how far away from each other, how those bumps feel, and what are the general dimensions of the bumps. Are they uniform? Should there be some kind of chaos to it? How, as a man, can I create something chaotic when I’m naturally inclined to order things?” Thoughts congealed in his head, breaking and conjoining, attaching and detaching particles of light dancing like the sound waves of a song.
“And that takes up a lot of your time does it?”
“All of my time at the moment.” The particles spread thinly across an uneven three-dimensional frame preferring the X Y dimensions over the Z.
“I see. So, you don’t feel lonely because you are occupied. Am I correct?”. The Z began compensating until all that was left was time and stretch marks.
…
“Galileo”
“You’re the doctor. I tend to be bored when I’m not occupied, I feel like I’m wasting my own time.” The fatigue of these conversations hung over him.
“When you’ve finished, what is it you hope to have achieved?”
“You ask me every week doc.”
“Humour me.”
“A man walks into a bar. He yells to the bar-keep what about the radio? The radio says the bar-keep we don’t have one. The bar-keep looks confused and so does the man. There’s no radio the man enquires. Yes, says the bar-keep there’s no radio. The man walks out of the bar waits a minute and comes back in. Are you sure there’s no radio? The man says. Yes, the bar-keep replies, one hundred percent sure. Then what is it I keep hearing outside? The man asks. The bar-keep moves round the bar and walks outside and sure enough he can hear music playing. He walks back in to the bar and says it must be the melody. The melody? Asks the man. Yes, the melody. Replies the bar-keep”
“You’re wasting my time”
“Humour me.”
“No I understand why you said it, I just don’t understand why it is a joke.” The doctor was more than used to the absence of culture behind the man’s actions. Inevitably, Galileo sought to antagonise, to try and stir some kind of emotion in his dialogue. Not capable of truly expressing his grief or his sadness, the piteous butler was vampiric in his exploitation of other’s emotions. The easiest was annoyance, it was his fast-food. A mind fascinated with being human ever since he was a child, Galileo was always displaced of his humanity. The complexity of this disassociation would always be the dragon chased by the doctor.
“I never said it was a joke.”
“Then what did it have to do with anything?” The doctor baited.
“It achieved a goal.” Galileo was noticeably bored of his own story.
“In what sense?”
“It served no purpose” The doctor knew pressing this line of questioning would turn Galileo’s game against him, it would irritate Galileo that his remark would attract more attention than he had wanted. He despises himself for being himself.
“And that is a good thing?”
“Not all things are either good or bad, some we do just because it feels right.”
“And so, when you have finished your work?”
“I’ll go outside and hear the world”
“And then”
“And then I’ll bring the melody inside.” It is a continuance of irrelevance that irks.
“Let’s talk more about this joke, what did it accomplish? Do you feel as though you won some imagined duel with me, that you proved yourself somehow? What satisfaction did it give you?” Lok provoked.
“Alright, alright. It was stupid, I get it. It sounded like I was trying to be profound but it was just something dumb, okay.” The game was over, ending with the doctor’s transient victory.
“And how do you feel now?”
“I’m angry at myself now, I don’t know why I said it. C’mon doc, change the subject please?” Lok earnestly felt for him.
“I fear you divulge a lot less than you should.” The predominant mode of discourse during these sessions was the systematic recounting of his day, not of his thoughts. When his thoughts did come, Galileo was always ashamed of them. His opinion, his interpretation of events all that he did, he regretted in hindsight. Everything was something shameful, something to feel guilty about. Galileo endured the suffering of the hotel, he may have a limited capacity to understand it, but he knew he was suffering and he remained vigilant in his mortifications.
“The mind does not know why it flows and creates. We learned that mistake the hard way didn’t we doc. Humanity needs its secrets.” Galileo smiled whilst tapping his brow. He returned to the hotel admonishing his last gesture, he looked foolish, it was stupid, had he forgotten what a nightmare the melody was, and the sex talk? God, everything about that conversation was awful, stomach turning. Galileo felt a crash of something unpleasant in his body. Just as soon as it came it dissipated, he felt cathartic and tired.