The Infinities Read Online Free PDF Page A

Adam—especially Adam—with that babyishly fat overlip that trembles so when he is excited or upset. She notices the bowls the two of them have been eating from. Why does it irritate her that they are unmatched? Latterly so many things irritate her. She tries not to feel resentful of her son for so far not having set foot in the room where his father lies dying. She supposes it is simply the fear of death, its awful presence, that prevents him. But after all he is not a child, however he may seem. She crosses to the sink and looks out through the big, many-paned window above it at the sunlit day, a hand lifted vaguely to her face.
    She thinks of Adam growing up in the humid conspiracy that was his Granny Godley. The old woman had seized on him early, a hostage against all the slights she imagined herself the victim of. Then Petra was born and her brother was at once usurped. A blundering, blond fellow he was, with a huge, round head, baffled at being so unceremoniously thrust aside in favour of this tiny, watchful creature clasped jealously in his grandmother’s bony embrace. For the coming of Petra had brought on a grisly transformation in the old woman: she turned tender and clumsily solicitous, reminding Ursula of those shaggy clambering rust-coloured primates in the zoo, all hooped arms and peeled-back lips and baleful starings, that her husband was so fascinated by and would make her come with him to see on Sunday afternoons when Adam was a baby. Granny Godley was dying of a damaged heart and grimly turned over each new day like a playing card from a steadily diminishing deck, anticipating of each one that it would be the ace of spades, while what had come instead was this solemn-eyed coat card, this miniature queen of diamonds, swaddled and uncannily still and always looking at something off to the side that only she it seemed could see, clutching in her white-knuckled fist the wilting flower of the future.
    “And and and,” Petra is saying now, her voice ashake on the sliding crest of its arc, “and and and and—”
    —And I it is who have contrived these things: this house, the train, the boy at the train window, that slanting blackbird, the dawn itself, and this mother musing on love and her losses, and her troubled daughter at the table gabbling out her woe, and the wife asleep in her husband’s boyhood bed, and her husband, young Adam here, who presently will make up his mind and rise reluctantly from the table and ascend those three short steps and be borne upwards on my invisible wings into the presence of his earthly father.
     
    And look, here he is, old Adam, the dying progenitor himself. Dying, yet he cannot conceive of a world from which he will have departed. No, that is not right. He could conceive of it. He can conceive of anything. Conception of impossible things is what he does best. He was ever pregnable by the world. I note the shifting of tenses. What I should have said is that he does not wish to conceive of a world from which, et cetera. Of course, he knows that after him everything will continue on much as before, except that there will be a minuscule absence, a barely detectable gap in the so-called grand scheme, one unit fewer now. Or not even that, not even an empty space where he once was, for all will rush immediately to fill that vacuum. Pft. Gone. Recollections of him will remain in the minds of others for a while, but presently those others too will die and his few relics with them. And then all will be dark.
    What of his work? What of his work. He cares nothing for their so-called immortality if he is not to be here to savour its vaunted consolations.
    Me. Me.
    Me.
    As to his immediate condition, he has been pronounced vegetate. And so he is, if we take this word in the old, not to say archaic, sense of being endowed with vegetable life. His heart beats, his blood circulates, his lymph courses, even his digestive system goes on mumbling and munching, making the best of the insipid