The Infinities Read Online Free PDF Page B

somewhere, in a waterside villa or hotel room in some southern sea port, where he lay love-sated and let his gaze bathe in bundles of mould-grey shadow above a bed—where? when? with what woman? So much he has forgotten because it meant nothing at the time or if not nothing then not nearly enough. This it is that torments him now, among his many torments, the thought of all that he had and did not prize as he should have when he had it. A trove of experience spurned as it was happening because it was simply that, something that was happening and not a thing anticipated or recollected. Now: that is a word he never appreciated the meaning of, until now.
    Inside his head the numbers swarm in a vast grid, a matrix without limit, flickering, in stellar silence.
    For diversion he sets himself to thinking of his daughter-in-law, slumbering somewhere in the house, like Mélisande, if that is who he means. In the night he heard them arriving, she and his son, heard their voices down on the landing, urgent-sounding because hushed, and imagined he was dreaming. But he knows it was no dream, and now at morning Helen is in that room down there, he senses her, yes; his senses extend their feelers and feel her sensate presence. Is she sleeping? He tries to grasp with his mind the reality of her, asleep or waking, being there where he is not. Before the autonomous existence of others he shares his son’s doubt and wonderment—shares? shares? it is his doubt, his wonder, passed on second-hand to the next and lesser generation. He asks, how can people go on being fully real when they are elsewhere, out of his ken? He is not such a solipsist—he is a solipsist but not such a one—that he imagines it is proximity to him that confers their essential realness on people. Of course others exist beyond his presence, billions of others, but they are not part of the mystery proper since he knows nothing of them, cares nothing for them. The truly mysterious ones are the ones who are most familiar to him, his sad wife, his neglected offspring, his desired daughter-in-law. That they should have an existence independent of him, and, indeed, of each other, too, is an affront to the laws of—of what? He speculates sometimes if his early espousal of the theory that posits our existing in the midst of multiple, intertwined worlds was prompted by nothing more than the necessity for somewhere for people to be when they are not with him—I said he was a solipsist—but even there, shoved in sideways with their noses pressed against the glass of those countless crystalline fissures, what would there be to prevent them getting up to things that he cannot imagine or, if he can imagine them, cannot be certain of? Look at him now, unable even to know if his daughter-in-law, like Schrösteinberg’s anxiously anticipant cat, is conscious or not, down there in her sealed chamber. He pictures her naked under a single sheet, the linen, softly aglow in the morning light, moulded to the shape of her lovely limbs. Aah. I wonder if his loins are any longer capable of stirring. Something could have come up down there the size and rigidity of an indian club and he would not know it. In younger days his scrotum was as firm and tightly furred as a tennis ball, but by now the testes have probably shrunk back up into wherever it is they dropped from all those years ago. Maybe there is nothing much there at all any longer, since he seems to have bypassed his second childhood and re-entered the embryonic state. Yes, that is how it seems to him, that he is being born in reverse, so that this garrulous dying he is doing will bring him not to the next world but back to a state of suspended pre-existence, ready to start all over again from before the beginning. It is a nice conceit, is it not? I shall let him entertain it for the nonce.
    Down in the kitchen Petra in mid-rant pauses for breath and her mother seizes the moment to say on a falling sigh, “Oh, I have such a headache