The Abundance of the Infinite by Christopher Canniff

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.
    â€œAh, 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?”
    â€œShe 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.”
    â€œHubris?”
    â€œWell, 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.

    âˆž

    â€œYou 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.”
    â€œMaybe 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