‘This is the Amber complex. The last item served tonight. Very few have ever tasted it.’ Seeing as long as his eyes could see, Gábor thought. He didn’t hesitate, he downed the complex without thinking.

Everything slipped away.

The experience was beyond comparison. The complex used each and every cell to unfold. It even used the minds of the others who were asleep and dreaming in the cellar; they wouldn’t know it, but their minds had become part of the Amber complex, because its formulation required a number of people.

Gábor collapsed on the floor, a pool of urine gathering around him. He lost the better part of his own consciousness, as what the complex showed him went well beyond the limits of human perception.

It was God’s point of view.

Gábor himself is the universe. All knowledge, sensation, and memory that had ever existed. The unconscious tranquility of time, the spinning of the nebulae, the self-centered orbiting of existence. The emptiness that stretches between matter, the clash of galaxies, the birth and collapse of suns and planets.

Burning metal and minerals start making love to become planets. On certain planets parasites appear, who demand more than the unconscious existence of matter. Every living creature is such a parasite, and Gábor lives through their lives. He experiences each of their cells as they mingle, divide, swallow up, and produce, not knowing of their own role in the life of a larger organism.

He experiences every grain of sand, every mountain, every drop of liquid, he becomes every storm in the universe, he pierces through nothingness as a comet, only to burn up in the atmosphere of a planet.

He also becomes every plant, each complete in itself, dreaming through life without senses, unfurling from the earth towards the light, or on certain planets from the crystallized clouds of the stratosphere, a million kilometers above the ground. He lives through the lives of all animals too, in an eternal search for food, warmth, and reproduction. He becomes every sound, every wave, every mechanism, every thought, he becomes birth and decay, he becomes every poem, novel, and idea. For him, the decomposition of a cell is equal to the deconstruction of the universe.

The only thing he can’t see is Zanó and his mountain made of the dead, with the bunch of grapes that obtain their flavor from lives. It somehow sits outside the realm of the known existence.

And just like before, now he also knows something that the universe doesn’t. He can even see that which the universe cannot see. The skin of the grape, the flesh of which is the world we live in, hanging on a stem, waiting for Zanó to come and harvest.