The Abundance of the Infinite (7 page)

19

I awaken that morning with the immediate sense that I alone am responsible for my daughter's death, and no one else. She is not dead, I reply to myself, over and over again. I quickly write down every detail and aspect of my dream, in a frenzied state that must have approached that of Coleridge as he struggled to transcribe every element he could remember. In my transcription, I leave nothing out.

While I begin contemplating the meaning of my dream, we spend our days white water rafting alone. No other tourists are here, and there are still no buses coming through. The restaurant owner says the government protestors are blocking the main highway to the nearest city, the airport city of Quito, which is four hours northwest by bus through the jungle and farther up into the mountains.

Kayaking beneath a wide-spanning bridge I not only discover that there is much of my dream which I may never analyze due to its complexity, but suddenly understand that I, in fact, was the King in my dream who had killed his own daughter.

Sitting in a restaurant without walls, just wooden poles supporting a thatch roof, barely speaking, the conversation having dwindled to that of necessity, mundane details of what we will eat, again eating muddy-tasting fish with grit that crunches in the teeth at the same restaurant, the only restaurant in the town, I realize that the liberation I felt here by covered torch lights as I participated in the native ceremonies at night—smoking unfiltered tobacco like that prepared by shamans for their rituals while drinking
chicha
,
the natives dancing around us in the warm rain—was the same feeling that the King in my dream must have experienced when he burned the Queen's father beside covered torch light to conceal his own guilt.

We hike in close proximity to the hut, and then hire a jungle guide to take us to a local animal hospital,
Amazoonica,
situated on a nearby island. There we watch all but the most dangerous animals on the islands roaming free, held captive only by the water surrounding them, the spider monkeys, jungle cats and boa constrictors held in cages to prevent them from destroying the other animals.

We stand looking at an enlarged and colourful parrot with a mended wing, and I begin to comprehend that the King's daughter was killed for the sake of appearances. She was destroyed in the interests of what other people would think and of the life he had lived, and would continue to have to live, because of their talk and their gossip. I am no better than the King, who was sentenced to death. All of my own reasons for unconsciously wanting to terminate Yelena's pregnancy—the baby wasn't developing properly, the doctor said, showing us the hands and feet that were only stubs when they should have been fully developed; her heart and mind would never be right; she'll die anyway—were just meaningless justifications, the same as the public infuriation of the King where he had suspected and denounced so many when he knew himself that he was to blame. And in the end, the King was punished and died as a penalty for his crime—so, as my dream was telling me, shouldn't I suffer the same fate?

But the King was unrepentant and malicious, and I am not. That is the difference, I conclude, holding a boa constrictor, the animal nurse instructing me not to squeeze the snake when I put pressure on the animal out of fear and thoughts of my own death, shunning the realization that the King is my own unconscious self, animalistic, brutish, instinctive, visceral, without integrity and morality, the boa constrictor beginning to encapsulate and squeeze the life out of my arm as I have done.

We travel away from the island hospital in a thin and disproportionately long motored canoe, our guide accidentally letting his hand slip from the motor steering controls before quickly recovering his grip, making the boat lurch to the left. I recall screeching black monkeys and spider monkeys with immense reaches, parrots and sleek black jungle cats resembling a muscular house cat slinking through the bushes beside immense rodents the size of large dogs. Karen, facing my back in the canoe, suddenly says: “I want you to go to Venezuela with me.”

“You do?” I reply. “Why? I told you I'm going back to Canada.”

“It's complicated. But I really want you there with me.”

I turn my head out from beneath the hood of my yellow poncho so I can better hear her voice over the sound of the motor, the light raindrops cascading onto my head and quickly wetting my hair and face as I do, and she continues.

“You didn't stay here in this country to learn more about your father, did you?”

“I suppose that, perhaps subconsciously, I did come here to share some of his same experiences, and to relive a part of my youth,” I reply. “And a part of me would have wanted to come here to the rainforest, to see this place my father seemed to love so much. But it seems this was a further regression away from society for him, as it is for me. If you ask me, my father was a lot like myself, like a Gauguin without the artistic side. And even Manta wasn't remote enough for him. I'd like to have a conversation with him now, to see the state of his mind. My mother thought he was schizophrenic, one side of him wanting a social life and interaction with people, the other side wanting complete isolation, perhaps to escape from his guilt. She said that's why he came here in the first place. I'm beginning to see, from being here, that maybe she was right.”

“So, without the aim of discovering more about your father, your continued presence here was from something you won't admit to, maybe not to me, or to anyone else, maybe not even to yourself.... It's not for me to say, maybe, but I think you've chosen to stay here in Ecuador for longer than you needed to as an escape from contemplating your own actions and their consequences, just as your father probably did, like a repeating pattern, or—”

“Where is all this coming from?” I interrupt, annoyed.

“I have to tell you something.”

“What?”

She pauses before continuing.

“I was at the Señora's, having lunch just the other day. The phone rang and she handed me the receiver. It was your wife Yelena.”

At the mention of her name, a name I have never heard Karen utter, my throat suddenly becomes dry.

“I gave her the number, in a letter, a while ago,” I say. “I thought she didn't have it any more.”

“Well, she does.”

“And what did she say?”

“Well, she said she was somewhat relieved that you weren't there at the Señora's, actually, so she didn't have to tell you—” she pauses.

“Tell me what?” I ask, growing more impatient.

“That her baby, your baby—”

“What?”

“That it died. In a procedure. How they normally terminate a pregnancy when the mother wants—I had the feeling that she has had this procedure done before. She didn't seem as upset as perhaps she should have been, as I certainly would have been. The only explanation she offered was that she couldn't wait any more. But then again, she might have still been in shock at the realization of what she had done—”

She pauses again. I could feel my face twitching as she spoke and now I feel dizzy looking down into the muddy waters beneath our boat, the raindrops falling onto the surface and splaying out in all directions, my chest tightening with the thought that one can never lose their memory or experience, that no matter how much one tries to forget, or to run, one can never be far enough away to escape their own mind. And having read Yelena's letters over and over, which contained no talk of our child, I think now that I could have stopped her. I could have prevented this, and it would not have been difficult. Now, her actions, my actions, are irrevocable.

Karen waits for me to say something, but the wind and the unsteady hum of the motor provide the only response. We travel by large cliffs extending fifty feet out of the water and vertically upward at steep angles to end at forested rooftops with a flock of green parrots scattering overhead.

“Why did you let me come here?” I ask, turning back to face her, my tears blending in with, and washing away in, the intensifying rain. “Why didn't you tell me this before?”

“The Señora thought—actually, she voiced her opinion, as you know she has a strong opinion on everything, but really, it was me, I thought it would be better for you to come with me, not only here but to Venezuela ... so you wouldn't be alone … and to help you to forget.”

As we continue on, I recall the King in my dream, and his sentence of death. The entire kingdom was after him, including a sleek black cat with menacing yellow eyes, unnatural and not of this world, like the small jungle cat we just saw on the island, and reminiscent of the black-faced monkey we saw in the overgrown town square in Archidona. It has been prophesied, in my dream, that I shall die—

“No,” I say loudly, after an indeterminate amount of time.

Karen asks if I am feeling well. I reply that I am as well as I can be, which is a blatant lie that she probably recognizes.

“My thoughts and my dreams here are too intense,” I say. “I'll go back to Manta.”

“No,” she says, adding: “You can't escape from this. Not now. You've done enough running away alone. Stay with me. Coming with me is best.”

There is a long period of silence before we arrive back on shore and then back at the huts, and I pack up all of my belongings and prepare to leave without her.

20

“The protests are not over,” the restaurant owner, jungle guide and hut owner tells me in Spanish, noticing the full backpack at my feet while he delivers a plate of fish with rice and beans. “Not yet. Still, there are no buses in or out of here, the main highway to Quito is blocked by protestors.” I tell him that I have already left my rented hut, without intending to return.

“Go back to your hut,” he instructs me. “There is no place else here to rent, and you have nowhere to go.” He says that, as of now, there are no longer any tours available by motorized boats either, because of a lack of gasoline. Ours was the last.

I am forced back to my hut and I spend the next dreamless days and nights in solitude, sitting inside drinking
chicha
and smoking unfiltered cigarettes, eating only a single bowl of
ceviche
every day, delivered, along with cigarettes and
chicha
, by agreement with the restaurant owner, who says, when I ask, that he knew my father very well, and that, in my seclusion, I spend my time, inexplicably so in his brazenly-stated opinion, in much the same way as my father. I finish
The Decameron
. Karen knocks on my door, day after day, and I send her away, telling her that I need more time. Days turn into a week, and then two. Hearing no buses coming through town, and with no English books available here, I descend into a constant bevy of my own thoughts. I begin to paint pictures of Annabelle with some supplies I brought from Manta, and I write in a notebook that I have brought with me. All of the thoughts I transcribe are morbid. In between drawing and painting various depictions of Annabelle on the pages of the notebook, I reread some of Yelena's letters. Her voice coming through in the letters seems to have altered somehow; she seems to be speaking to me more forcibly, and with more vehemence, than ever before. All of her words now seem to be hateful accusations.

Y
elena speaks about the confessions of the English Opium-Eater and how, before his addiction to drugs, he describes Ann, the first woman he had feelings for, with compassion; and how he mentions the dismal state of her life, saying how none of it is her fault, attributing her situation to the injustice of society. And when Ann disappears, an opera singer and the opium enter. The opera singer wants to introduce him to pleasures greater than the drug. The pleasures of Italian music. Rossini … Verdi.

Looking at the ultrasound picture of Annabelle, its roughly triangular shape, the baby's outline similar to any other baby's ultrasound except to the eyes of a trained professional to whom the signs are obvious and could be, and were, explained at great length and in great detail, enough to invoke my severe nausea and which I feel sick even thinking about now, I am as
Rigoletto, misled, deceived, betrayed and bent over
the sack which he thinks contains the dead body of the Duke, hearing the Duke singing “La
Dona
e
mobile” in the distance and opening the sack to find his daughter who has been stabbed and who quickly dies as Yelena joins the Duke in song.… The opera singer disappears and the next woman of interest is a servant in the house where the writer stayed. Next to enter is wine. Wine is seen as an indulgence causing him to slip into a different state of ‘reality.' He is made drunk by reality and sober by the wine. The drug invigorates his self-possession whereas the wine robs him of it. Yelena elucidates the side-effects of quitting the drug and the associated nightmares, beautifully described.…

Yelena tells me of her nightmares. One is recurring and involves her parents, both of them Russian Jews who are always fighting, sometimes acting stubborn and prideful like little children, traits she says she inherited. They scream at her, and she awakens shaking, with sweat and tears all over her face, but still feeling as though a terrible burden has been lifted. They were not apt to change; both of them were in their sixties and her father was having psychological and memory problems, and was lying too much, even going so far as to say he has been dying for the past several months and acknowledging that neither Yelena, nor her mother, think that is true; instead dismissing his claims by saying that everyone in the world is slowly dying.
How's your father?
I recall asking now, to which she'd reply,
Apparently, he's dying faster than the rest of us, but you would not know that if you saw him
.

One recurring nightmare she had was related to the big scars on her left leg, which extended all the way from her ankle to her thigh, scars from having been burned in a house fire when she was two years old. The nightmare took place atop a building with a lit white top, but in the dream the white top had been replaced by a huge cage with fire in it. For Laing, renowned psychoanalyst and psychiatrist, fire represented a flickering soul, I told her, a flickering sense of self. But she didn't want to hear about that, or to relive any of her nightmares through my analysis of them. She only wanted to recount them to me, to perhaps relieve herself of the encumbrance associated with keeping their memory to herself. In the dream, she went up from the ground floor in an elevator, and while she knew she was running away from someone, she didn't know who. She recalled confronting him once, though she could not identify him apart from having recognized him from other dreams. After her act of defiance she compared the sense of awe and relief upon awakening to fresh snow in the forest right after someone had skied there, those two straight lines so seamless and precise. That was how her dream was recorded in her mind, perfectly.

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....