The Abundance of the Infinite

by Christopher Canniff

  “I don’t know,” Karen says.

  “That is what Jonathan told me also,” the Señora says. “He, too, does not know why.”

  “You were all just talking about me?”

  I work quickly to finish my lunch, and then I rise to leave.

  “Sit down,” Karen says, pulling me back into my seat. Looking at me, she adds: “Did you start all this?”

  “I was wondering,” the Señora continues, glancing over at Karen, “if you miss your home.”

  Karen continues eating, and Inés places a glass of juice in front of her. Karen picks up the glass, takes a drink and gazes at the Señora.

  “There’s nothing for me there,” Karen says. “That’s all. It’s just too sad to think about—my childhood of physical and mental abuse, my parents who fought all the time—so really, I don’t. But despite all that, yes, I still miss it, just as I think anyone misses their home when they move away from it. Even so, I’ll never go back.”

  Everyone is silent. The dishes clang together as they are placed in cupboards with no doors. The dog barks one last time, and then becomes quiet.

  Karen waits for a moment, and finishes her juice before continuing: “You should ask Jonathan that same question. He has a wife and baby on the way back home.”

  “He is not here for long,” the Señora says. “But you are.”

  “I have a feeling he will be here longer than I will,” Karen says, looking at me before turning her attention back to her plate. “Just a feeling.”

  The Señora directs her attention toward me now. She asks about my family.

  “I have a wife, who is a librarian at a local university, and we have a child on the way,” I reply, without offering to show the only picture I brought of Yelena, or the ultrasound, certain that the Señora would not know what an ultrasound is, and certain that she would not understand what Yelena has contemplated in talking about ending the baby’s life due to its supposed imperfections. “My mother raised me, and I never knew my father very well, apart from my few visits here. My mother is rather conservative, albeit an alcoholic as a result of my father’s departure, set in her job as a teacher and as a patron at a local tavern with no plans to retire from either. My father, as you probably know, idolized Kerouac and his lifestyle. I read all of Kerouac’s books as a result, even his obscure, rambling diaries and poems that really should’ve been left in obscurity or in the realm of discarded thought. I read a book written by the South American Kerouac, Che Guevara, who travelled all around this continent with a friend on a motorcycle.”

  The Señora, confused, turns toward Karen, who translates all of what I have just said, which I now realize was communicated in a mixture of English and bad Spanish, into the Señora’s native tongue.

  “Ah, ya,” the Señora says, continuing to speak, this time in a rapid Spanish interspersed with local expressions, none of which I can understand.

  When she finally finishes, I ask Karen: “What did she say?”

  “She says your father used to play the bagpipes on the spot overlooking the ocean, where he was buried, all the time, whenever he wanted to forget. She said they must have been able to hear him all the way over in China. And she said that he, like you, ran away from his family. She says, not in so many words, that something tormented him about being here, away from his family, and she sees that same anguish and suffering in you. She thinks it was his family back in Canada, you and your mother, that made him resentful when she half-jokingly talked of marriage with him. It was as though the word marriage, when repeated, infused him with a tremendous guilt, just as, whenever he saw a child on the street, it must have reminded him of you … she says he had a touch of hubris, which is why he never went back, and why he died here.”

  “Hubris?”

  “Well, she said it as arrogancia. Arrogance, excessive pride, it’s all the same. After he left you and your mother, his ego would never let him reverse his decision, which became somehow more resolute over time, and so the years and the decades simply passed with him here, and you and your mother there. Quite sad, actually.”

  As I listen only peripherally for the sound of my name while they continue their conversation, the meaning of my recurring dream of a closed closet door, with the sense that Yelena is inside, suddenly becomes somewhat more clear when I combine the Señora’s statement with one of Jung’s contentions. Jung asserted—when discussing the mother and the womb, the body and the physiological, that which creates and symbolizes the fundamentals of consciousness—that confinement suggests the nocturnal and a condition of nervous apprehension.

  The panic and anxiety I experience at night, sometimes with that dream and sometimes without, might be ended through reaching out in my dream to expand beyond the simple confines of the one closet door, where I might encounter my mother in the darkness, and another closet door, beyond which I would sense my father, who I am told always fought bitterly with my mother whenever they were together, perhaps staring at an endless series of closet doors with my same sense of remorse and shame, undertaking no actions to reconcile with the source of his sorrow, apart from the unwitting sensation of having experienced such sentiments.

  ∞

  “You know, the Señora’s daughters have applied for a visa to go to New York to be with their father,” Karen says to me later, as we step away from the apartment and walk barefoot toward the beach. “The Señora applied for one too, but I can’t see her ever going there. It’s obvious to me that she has never left Manta. At least, never for long.”

  “Maybe she’s trying to understand what might happen if she does,” I say.

  13

  I write a letter asking Yelena to come here, not simply to visit after Annabelle is born, as I wrote in the previous letter, but now, to live. Here, Annabelle would not be judged, I write, but accepted. Her life would be better here. After living here for a time, we would all travel the earth together, working as much as we needed to in order to obtain money for further travel.

  Over the next few days, I think of freedom and the myriad of possibilities before me. I imagine that I can see all of the immensity of life through the anticipation of travel along with Yelena and Annabelle, and through the windows of this apartment and the ocean it overlooks.

  I have the intuition as I mail the letter that all of the burdens of my previous existence have been lifted and that emancipation has been granted to me through this place.

  I no longer need to go anywhere in the mornings. I paint endlessly. I don’t teach the Señora’s daughters until late in the afternoon, after they have returned home from the university. The Señora tells me that they do not have to pay to attend the university, only for books, and that they do not have to pay for my tutoring services except by tolerating my presence in their house, which she says is no payment at all.

  ∞

  This evening is unique in my own personal history. I have only experienced insomnia infrequently, with increased stress, and I have never simply wandered about aimlessly at night. Despite my recently apparent euphoria, I cannot sleep. Wondering what Yelena is doing at this moment, thinking she would be reading late into the night with her endless cups of tea, I am relegated to roaming the streets, feeling as though I am in a lucid dream—the beaches, the stores and businesses are caged with retracting metal guards for the night, and the strange-looking women and tired-looking men seem too distracted by whatever it is they are looking for to notice me roving about. It is a strange world, that of the insomniac. It is a different view of humanity here, not one I would ever imagine myself proud to be a part of. It is a world that evolves after the curtains have been closed along the streets, long after the families have fallen into sleep. The families are secure with the broken bottle shards extending over their concrete fences, and with the guard dogs on their roofs. They are protected by these defenses against unwanted entry. They are sheltered
in their fortifications against an immoral land of drug users and pushers, sexual gluttony and lust, and alcohol and tobacco. They are locked away against this land of excess and against this unseen city, which has now been unveiled before my eyes.

  There is the sound of music in the distance. As I walk toward it, a familiar figure appears from between dozens of abandoned buckets and elongated poles belonging to shrimp fishermen. I recognize the shape as Karen. She is dressed entirely in black. Her hair is pinned back. She is very attractive in this light.

  “Jonathan,” she says, hugging me. She dangles a lit cigarette in one hand and a large glass smelling like sweetened turpentine, likely Caña Manabita sugarcane alcohol, in the other. She releases me after a moment.

  “Venga,” she says, walking away and extending her hand for me to follow. “Come here. Come and have a drink with me.”

  “This explains why I never see you during the day,” I say.

  “This doesn’t explain anything. We’re having a drink, that’s all.”

  “I don’t drink.”

  “No explanations.”

  I grasp her hand as she lifts the glass to my lips to give me a long drink. She leads me somberly into a small group of people, all of them engaged in conversations in the rapid-speak and localized expressions of Ecuadorian coastal Spanish. They all extend their hands toward mine, in the proper sequence according to Karen’s introductions. Afterward she hands me her drink again, and as I down some more she tells me that they are mostly students and some professors.

  “I thought you weren’t going to explain anything,” I say.

  “Well, that was the only one tonight,” she replies. “Apart from this: if you weren’t married, if I wasn’t—involved—I might be tempted to kiss you right now. Softly, on the lips.” She smiles.

  There is a fire beside us, a spitting grill sputtering the venom of fishy lime juice. There is a much larger fire nearby, students and faculty dancing barefoot around it, eating the flesh of freshly caught fish beneath the moonlight as if in some pagan ritual. There are several beautiful women standing beside the fire from whom I can’t seem to turn my attention away. Inés and Yolanda are among these women, and the sisters smile in my direction. Karen notices my distraction and, turning my head toward her, she hands me her drink. Feeling the effects now, I take another mouthful.

  “I’m flying out of Guayaquil,” she announces as she casts her shoes away. “In two days.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Well if you must know, and I assume you must because you asked: Caracas, Venezuela. There’s a small island off the coast. My friend who goes to school there, I’m going to see him.”

  “Why?”

  She pauses, and then sighs. “Well, I haven’t told you, and I don’t want you to tell the Señora. When I’m ready to, I’ll tell her myself.”

  “Tell her what?”

  “More explanations,” she says, sighing again. “Tell her that I’m pregnant.”

  I am silent for a moment, thinking of her smoking, her drunkenness, wondering about possible damage to the fetus, and I immediately think of harm coming to my own daughter. I have the impulsive urge, thinking of this, to go home, to protect my daughter from those who would do her harm. I have not received any letters from Yelena recently, although I have been writing to her now more than ever before, trying to entice her to come here. I could only know her state of mind through those letters, in which she wrote nothing about our child, and now I have no recourse to know anything about either of them.

  I return to the conversation, reflecting that I’ve never seen Karen with a man.

  “You’re pregnant by whom?” I ask.

  “The man I’m going to see in Venezuela,” she replies.

  “Oh. So you won’t be back?”

  “I can’t give up on that apartment. One day soon, I’ll be back.”

  I pause for a moment before stating emphatically, while thinking of my daughter again: “I’m going with you.”

  “To Venezuela?” she asks incredulously.

  “No. To the airport.”

  “So am I. But where are you going?”

  “I’m going home. To Canada.”

  “Really? Interesting ...”

  Among the students and professors, we move in rhythm to the salsa and merengue music in a ritual dance to our trip, to our safety, to a glamorous freedom I have never known. I have never known insomnia to be anything but terrifying, but now it is sensuality, uninhibited. Now it is spirituality. It is a faded opera soprano that comes from the sea. It is the voice of Annabelle, soft and sweet, fluttering like the wind through the leaves of the palm trees. It is anything but logical, this feeling.

  Seven years of abundance, seven years of drought for you Pharaoh, God said in His infinite wisdom.

  Dreams, one of God’s instruments for speaking to the individual.

  Did He intend for psychologists to interpret dreams?

  Prophets, God’s Dream interpreters, recipients of a divine word helping form the basis of faith.

  Jacob’s ladder, extending to heaven.

  God, the Compassionate, the Merciful.

  The Warrior. The Father. The Creator. The Destroyer.

  Without dream images, would there be any religion?

  Without God, life is meaningless.

  Without my dreams, without my visions by day and night, what would I have?

  14

  The next morning, I awaken with the memory of what was certainly one of the worst nocturnal panic attacks I’ve ever experienced. Sunlight beams through the windows and I am tired, thinking that, instead of contemplating what I endured the night before, desperately attempting to forget my dread as my heart pounded rhythmically to the pulse of the waves lapping onto the beach, I must focus on other thoughts.

  I contemplate how to make “legitimate” art.… First, choose a worthy subject: Karen … not falling, or sweating, but standing upright, unaffected by any form of physical exertion ... choose an incomprehensible message: that her dreams are like chilled wine, dry or sweet, white or red, rich in tannins, intense and spicy, complex in flavour … her dreams do not fill her with terror without the accompanying nightmares ... try to forget … choose a background: her departure … the time has come to make “legitimate” art.

  I sketch her as she sleeps for the first time, at her request made the previous evening, in my apartment, on my couch. It is mid-morning. From her spasmodic movements I am aware that she is dreaming some awful dream, which she may not remember upon awakening—unless, of course she awakens quickly and has time to recall the events before her conscious mind suppresses and overpowers her unconscious thoughts … she shifts one way, then another … then suddenly, she opens her eyes. She tells me she remembers a bus … there were cliffs, too … the university above, the sky below … the bus fell over the cliff’s edge, and into the red sky. She was falling, endlessly falling.…

  I work to somehow capture the essence of fright in her face.

  This is a way to remember, I say as she watches me. I am sketching a crude picture of her dream images now. This is a dream diary of sorts, I explain. A mnemonic trigger to recollect some of the events of the dream.

  She dismisses her dream. It was ridiculous, she says. What colour was the bus? I ask her as I begin to paint. Red, she says, the same as the students and the sky. Were you on it? I don’t know. I think so. What about the cliff, what shape was it? More rounded than any cliff should be. The university? The same as it is in normal life. You don’t see the meaning, then? No. The one constant is your work, the students and the bus the same colour as the sky, the students all merging together into one memory, the rounded cliffs early Freud would say are your breasts and I would say it is your inability to attach yourself to any one person or place. Falling in dreams has to do with
a lack of control. The myth that you will die in your sleep if you hit the bottom is just that, a myth. I’ve had many patients who have hit the bottom and still, they have woken up. Still, I hope I never hit the bottom.

  As I paint, I recall how I have recently dreamed of falling. Sometimes Annabelle is there falling along with me, her tiny body wrapped in the same cloth as my father’s shroud. We have never met earth. The land below is always black, the same as the darkness that surrounds us, but somehow I know it is there. Despite my knowledge that my death would not come as I hit it, the subliminal realization that it was there always prompted me into consciousness.

  Are you psychoanalyzing me? Karen asks.

  Perhaps, I say, adding after a moment: well, actually, yes.

  A while later, with a look of patent disgust on her face as her eyes move from what she says to be one disturbing image to another, from the picture of her dream to other pencil sketches and paintings scattered about, she suddenly and resolutely declares: You are no artist. No artist at all.

  15

  There are times when I am convinced that I see someone from Canada who I know, walking on the streets of Manta, and I realize afterward that all those around me must be strangers. The notion of their assumed identity defies my sense of logic. Still, I have seen past patients and family members in the crowds, and friends from my childhood walking on the streets alone or staring back at me from a corner bar.

  This is one of those moments when I believe I see someone I have thought about but have not seen in over a month. She is across the street, contemplating whether to purchase a sweatshirt, a sudadera. Something to keep warm in.

  I think for a moment that perhaps I am mistaken, that this woman is Karen, until I look again.