The Abundance of the Infinite

by Christopher Canniff

  I continue to analyze, in great detail and at great length, the last dream I had.

  I spend endless hours writing and rewriting my own eulogy, knowing that no such eulogy was likely ever delivered, or would be.

  Samuel Johnson climbed down the edge of the rocks at the riverbank and entered the strong currents of the brown Amazon River, sinking into liquid that was not quite water but a dense fluid ooze with a sickly smell ... he immersed himself up to his knees, with music nearby—loud, oppressive music that would never allow one a decent night’s rest—and he descended into the river, slowly, up to his waist, before immersing himself quickly; the harsh, muddy stream hitting against his face the same as the ocean water on the beach in Manta, this water also emancipating, and he could hear the sound of muted bagpipes playing as he fell into its depths. Samuel never emerged from that river, the current drawing him in toward a school of piranhas with red eyes on the hunt for flesh, their needle teeth set between frowning mouths quickly tainting the water with his blood....

  (Afterword: as he was dying he thought incessantly of the daughter he had lost, and of a hotel in Madrid where he had been with Yelena ... There, on the second floor in the morning, after a long night of boozing with no sleep, he had envisioned himself jumping over the balcony and down onto the street below. He had seen his body lying there, the crowds gathering around, the hotel guests appearing at their windows, the news stories, the speculation as to possible motives, the brief instant of notoriety before the memory of his life dwindled away....)

  ∞

  I wake up screaming into the silence and the darkness, not by virtue of a nightmare, but from a panic attack. A moment later, as a result of my scream, there are voices outside. There is pounding on my door which seems as frantic and as hurried as the beating of my heart. I long to shrivel up small enough to slip out through one of the cracks in the floorboards, to run and run away from this place and this pounding, but then I remember again where I am and what has happened. I recognize Karen’s voice at the door and I tell her to go away, saying that I am well, again fully aware that I am not, claiming I need more time. She refuses to leave, saying that I should not be alone, but I am insistent, and eventually, after what might be hours, my resolve sends her and the voices away. I am again left with the sound of mosquitoes and other insects attempting to enter the netting above my bed.

  The next days and evenings are spent virtually without sleep. Any amount of slumber seems to be interrupted and I rise out of bed in terror, my chest tight and my vision blurry, the room seemingly smaller than when I fell asleep. I perceive a vitriolic loss of any force or control I have when glancing over at the closed door to my hut from which I cannot escape.

  One evening I awaken with a profound sense of my own powerlessness. Staring at the door in darkness as the hours pass by, I look around the room with my flashlight at the paintings and drawings I have done not only on paper but which are splayed all over the floors, the walls and the furniture, depictions of my beloved Annabelle, dozens of portrayals painted everywhere, all of the same girl with clubbed feet and shortened fingers and a diminutive head and flat face, a short neck, slanting eyes, a heart in her chest with holes exposed as if to a surgeon’s knife, a rigorous compilation of images only slightly dissimilar. Thinking that her death is not her fault but due to the injustice of society, it irks and unnerves me now to see these images.

  I try to breathe deeply, to relax, staring at the straw ceiling of the hut that has become so familiar to me, then looking over to the closed door, feeling the onset of panic again, looking away and trying to imagine the door open, sweating now, conceiving that Annabelle might still be alive if it was open, imagining myself knocking louder and louder on that door, pounding on the surface with my fist, my hands numb under the weight of the incessant hammering, my heart pulsating to the same rhythm as the beating, dizzy and nauseous, cursing and detesting that door for being closed and locked, longing to do anything to get to the other side of its dilapidated wooden planks, to bring Annabelle back to life.

  I have the sudden, immediate and intense need to flee from this place, to wander outside, to call out for Annabelle, to run away from here with the same urgency as if it were about to be overrun by wild jungle beasts.

  In an instant I grab my backpack, still packed to leave, and run outside leaving the door open behind me. Spraying on some insect repellent as I run, then producing my flashlight, I stop just long enough to put on my heaviest clothes. In the darkness, I walk near a lit area with loud, fast merengue music and take a long drink of chicha, my head suddenly cloudy with the alcohol, two additional bottles of which clink together in my backpack. Slinking off to the side to avoid a couple exiting the restaurant, where there is dancing taking place on a dirt floor, I sit down on the large rocks on the shore, in a darkened area where I cannot be seen. Stepping down further, closer to the water, I sit there and smoke one cigarette, then another, and another, while quickly and with great difficulty draining my bottle of harsh-tasting, warm chicha.

  I sit for an hour, maybe more, watching the grey water barely visible under the moonless sky. I smoke another cigarette and descend to the level of the water. I imagine that there are piranhas here. Attacks on humans are most frequent in areas where fish are normally discarded. This is what the owner of the restaurant told me, giving me a perplexed look, when I asked.

  But instead of my feet slipping beneath the surface of the river, I find they have landed on wood. I step again, and my feet both descend onto a timber surface that sloshes back and forth under my weight. A step to the left would have immersed me in water, but instead, I have landed on a boat.

  I crawl into the craft and quickly discern that this was the same long, motorized canoe in which Karen and I went to Amazoonica, but now, the motor has been removed.

  Without a thought, I retrieve a paddle left in the boat and untie the ropes that lash the vessel to shore. I begin to drift slowly into the river, contorting my body as I methodically rotate the paddle, gradually at first, and then with a more hurried, almost frantic pace into the darkness illuminated only by phosphorescent insects. With the exception of the music, I can hear only the sound of bugs buzzing around my head. I light a cigarette and they dissipate. I can feel myself sliding along the river’s surface, my head murky, bewildered, my thoughts muddled, drifting with the current. Hours seem to pass, the water sloshing against the boat, the current swaying and carrying me haphazardly, the stillness accompanied by muffled music lingering like the long, drawn-out wailing of my father’s bagpipes. In a moment I fall into a trance in the hurried rhythm of the merengue and that of the waves splashing, lapping against the shore and against the face of my impotent paddle.

  As I drift further, the music begins to resonate into subdued bass tones, and as the noise fades into the distance a different music prominently emerges, one dense and replete with a thousand voices, chirrups, trills and songs, bird and animal warbles, insect calls, the Spanish voices and music now speaking indistinguishably and far off into the void as the sound of my paddle-stroking repeats. Surrounding me is an array of sounds unlike any I’ve ever heard, and with my flashlight I can see dense swarms of insects, thick pockets of leafy plants, a peach-coloured tree snake sitting among the branches and leaves, and I paddle farther and farther into the dense overgrowth, land and cliffs nearly indistinguishable except by the outlines on each side, my reflection in the water invisible, and darkness all around.

  After an hour I remove my sweater and blanket myself with it, allowing the boat to flow with the current, trying desperately to fall into sleep; and soon, after bathing myself in bug repellant, I succumb to my exhaustion....

  I dream of an empty village and huts devoid of people, and I feel that there is nothing but myself and wild beasts surrounding me. I run to find the huts are overgrown with foliage and all empty, their floors made of mud and dirt and the rocks and the forests surround
ing them are devoid of life, all of the homes and the forest abandoned, and for miles around and everywhere I look I see barren emptiness with only foliage and trees, dirt and dust as my constant companions.…

  The next morning, I awaken to a renewed song: an overabundance of different voices, a crimson, yellow and apricot sunrise over flattened, low-hanging clouds, a tapestry above and an oil painting below in distorted, wavering reflection. A dark outline of trees separates the sunrise and its reflection, the replicated image completed in faded brushstrokes, the water rippling subtly. I am flowing backward as mosquitoes buzz about my head accompanied by the repeated, high-pitched twitter of a bird, the low, resonating call of another, the squealing and the guffaws of another, and then another, and another, all to the backdrop of the clatter of countless insects. A tree branch floats lazily by, and the mosquitoes, despite my repellant, will not let me be.

  I wonder what I am doing here, floating aimlessly, and I paddle for a time as if to provide an occupation for my hands, seeing no one else except for a woman immersed in the river up to her waist, beating clothes against a rock as children play on the shore nearby. None of them notice me. I remove most of my clothing, warm in the sun now, and descend quietly into the water, slowly, tipping the canoe over on its side enough to slip into the river ... I slide in and swim, close to the canoe at first and then farther away, until the canoe is an elongated matchstick that is almost out of sight. Afraid, I quickly return and climb out of the water and back into the safety of its confines.

  The day flows into night, rain beating down and then subsiding, and I experience a painful and distinct hunger. I drink from the bottles of chicha, from the muddy river water that grits on the teeth, and from a bucket of rainwater, in my thirst.

  I become cold, my clothes damp, and the air lights up with dots of luminescence flashing in and out of vision, their radiance growing and then quickly withering away. There is a sensation of profound emptiness, the night inviting a chorus of pests and animals. I suffer through the dull ache of hunger and frequent chills. Drinking chicha continually for warmth, I begin to fall asleep until I notice a light on the horizon.

  There is a fire up ahead, in the distance.

  I immediately begin paddling toward the light, anticipating heat and warmth, and as I get closer, the noise of the bugs fades away and the fire begins to swell until, at close proximity, it consumes my view. A row of huts is ablaze, and there is a line of men passing empty and full buckets along, the men dunking the buckets into the river at one end and passing them down full, retrieving empty ones and refilling them again. At the other end, the men splash water on the huts that are quickly being consumed. It is a fruitless effort, and I am inclined to reach out and tell them.

  Because I have not been sleeping well, I wonder if all of this is an illusion induced through a combination of alcohol and sleep deprivation from a lack of REM sleep, knowing that when deprived of sleep, one starts to hallucinate as though somehow dreaming by day. But this image, I convince myself, is too intense, too real.

  Looking into the wavering and crackling flames, the fire producing torrents of smoke in areas where it has touched down near the wet ground, I see that on one side of the huts is a small boy, five or six years of age. He stands there, staring back at me. He has dark skin, wears plain brown clothing and has unwavering dark eyes that gaze at me as if in disbelief that I am there; as though I am some incorporeal reflection of the fire upon the surface of the water, or a vision brought on by the heat.

  And in this surreal image, the sky overflowing with flame and smoke, the resonance of the boy’s outline quivering in the warmth and hazy effluvium as he watches me, I have the sense that it is I who am the boy, standing there, peering back into the eyes of my father. And in that realization I can see that my father might have, in fact, been here, with his undiagnosed agoraphobia, his fear of inescapable situations the same as my own, cast out into the night alone and of his own accord as I am, as drunk as I am feeling now; and just as I have made the decision to escape from and to flee the memory of my daughter, I have already, if only subconsciously, chosen to forsake the love of the wife I can no longer love, and can no longer see or interact with, because of the life she has taken.

  I watch the boy’s eyes wander away from me, darting over to one side as though he has abruptly remembered another place he ought to be, or as though he is unexpectedly ashamed for having stared languidly back at this unknown stranger in the darkness, at an image that may or may not be real. As he darts away into the shadows, toward an isolated row of huts seemingly unaffected by the fire but still consumed by smoke, I am inundated by the overwhelming urge to follow. I grab my paddle and row swiftly to shore, rise out of the boat and, pulling the distended maw of the long, thin beast up onto the rocks, I run after him.

  The area he had started toward, away from the men who are occupied in futilely attempting to extinguish the raging and increasing fire with small buckets of water which might as well be thimbles filled to the brim and passed daintily along, is vacant. The boy has disappeared. Looking through each of the huts that is engulfed in smoke I quickly find him inside one of them. He looks up at me and I look into his eyes again, closer this time, seeing in the shadows and fog that they are dark brown, and that he has retrieved what he came into this room, filled with diaphanous smoke, to obtain: a doll made of straw and old rags. I am barring his exit, my arms on either side of the opening, his only way out beneath my arms, and he looks at those areas of escape longingly, as though anticipating that he can dash out, scurrying away from this nonsensical man before him.

  If I were to stay here for a time, continuing to block the way out in a fit of malevolence and wickedness, enough to smite the life out of this boy, my actions would not be any different from what I have done, and in fact what I have subconsciously wanted to do. I am no different from my father, or from the King in my Boccaccio dream. In the boy’s gaze I see that I am again this boy looking up at my father, who chose to view me, for the purposes of his own life, as deceased; and I have the horrifying realization that I wanted my child dead, as I have just contemplated my power over this helpless child in pondering his death, the one who looks up at me now with the appearance of dread. I made it easier to end Annabelle’s life by escaping my responsibilities and running away from my unborn child, I explain to this boy’s stare, either in my thoughts or verbally. I made Yelena’s decision easier because my absence did not preclude her actions except through a verbalized agreement, a contract that perhaps became less important and more easily justifiable to disregard over time. My father chose to have me out of his life, and as such, to have my existence relegated only to a distant and faded memory, just as Annabelle’s will now irrevocably become, my father’s remembrance of me interspersed with random snapshots of a boy’s periodic visits, a boy left to raise himself outside of these visits in light of a mother who was never there, whose alcoholism and desire for the outward appearance of a flawless home and a perfect life seemed not only contradictory but counterintuitive. My father’s kind and gentle treatment of me on my visits to Manta was a ruse of paternal compassion that I now recognize I saw him extend to any and all children he came across. And now, this boy is coughing, slumped on the floor, his eyes closing. I feel that perhaps his fear has overcome him, that he feels he cannot escape, and that he is therefore not even trying; and I see myself as following his example, lying down among these straw walls and allowing the smoke to consume my lungs and thereby extinguish my ability to breathe, giving way to what will become my end.…

  I feel the onset of a panic attack and I am light-headed, my feet beginning to give out beneath me, the boy perhaps beyond my ability to save him now, and in my dizziness I have a sensation of weightlessness, a slackening of tension akin to when I was floating hopelessly down the Amazon, and I am inclined to the notion that this attack will be my last, the one that will render me powerless to prevent my own imminent dea
th. This recognition terrifies me, and I wonder if throwing myself on the blazing huts nearby, to be burned up in that fire, might be preferable; or whether slipping quietly into the water to be consumed by the river and its gluttonous piranhas would be better; and in this realization I see that I, too, have agoraphobia now and an inescapable sensation of guilt, a substitute emotion for what I am really feeling, a relentless grief and wretchedness, a lonely dejection at having run away from my unprotected and unborn child who hadn’t lived, from subconsciously wanting an end to its life for which I merit an end to my own, and from having misjudged not only Yelena, but myself, so severely.

  I am present here on this river, I now understand, as a consequence of my belief that I needed to suffer in order to atone for my past actions. But I must agonize in a different way by regretting such reticence and lethargy, since I can do nothing else, eventually forgiving myself and reconciling with having known that Yelena would end the life of our child, that I in fact was the King that wanted our child killed, that I was no better than my father for the pain he had inflicted upon me over the years, and that Yelena was in a closet in my recurring dream because she was hiding that my absence would give her the means by which to not only conceal her intentions, but to carry them out uncontested.

  Glaring back at this boy with his now tenuous grip on my stare, as he begins to slump more and more toward the dirt floor, I have the instinctual necessity to escape from this place, to row back and to find the place called Archidona, and then Manta, from which I came.