Free The Infinities by John Banville

middle of a glistening, blue-black sky and small as if shrunken by the cold. His mother stood at the table with her sleeves rolled, mixing in a brown bowl the dry ingredients he had weighed out for her. Her head was bent and he did not realise she was crying until he saw the tears fall into the bowl, first one and then quickly two more, making three tiny grey craters in the white mixture. Without a word she handed him the wooden spoon and went and sat down by the fireplace with her face turned away from him, making no sound. He held the bowl by the rim, encircling it with his forearm in the way that he had seen her do. When he swirled the spoon in the flour mixture the tears became three grey pellets but they were quickly absorbed. He did not think he had ever seen his mother cry before—even beside his father’s grave she had stood dry-eyed—and now he felt embarrassed and uneasy and wished she would stop. Neither spoke. They were alone in the house. He wondered how long it would take before everything in the bowl was completely mixed. But what did that mean, completely mixed? Every grain of the ingredients would have to be distributed perfectly, the particles of salt and baking soda spaced just so throughout the flour, each one a fixed distance from all the rest. He tried to picture it, a solid, three-dimensional white field supporting a dense and uniform lattice of particles of other shades of white. And what about the flour itself, no two grains of which were alike—how could that be completely mixed , even if there were no other ingredients present in it, making their own pattern? And how would he know when that moment of perfect distribution had been achieved?—how would he know the instant to stop mixing in order not to upsetthe equilibrium and throw everything back into disorder? He watched the spoon going round and round, making troughs and peaks and crumbling cliffs in the soft pale powdery mixture. Where were those three tears now? How well into the mixture were they mixed? Was everything in the world so intricately linked and yet resistantly disparate? His mother stood up and blew her nose on her apron and without a word took back the bowl and the wooden spoon and began mixing again.
    His aunt came down from the city for the funeral and stayed on for Christmas. She took over the house, directed the putting up of the decorations and the trimming of the tree, ordered in a crate of stout and bottles of port-wine and whiskey, oversaw the distribution of presents, even carved the turkey, while his mother hung back, tight-lipped and watchful, saying nothing. His aunt was not married, and worked in the city for a solicitor. She wore a dove-grey coat with a fox-fur collar and fox-fur trim on the hem, and a black toque with a pearl pin and a piece of stiff black veil at the front, and big shoes with chunky high heels. She had an air about her always of angry sorrow. She was lavishly ugly, with a long horse-face and a mouthful of outsized teeth the front ones of which were always flecked with lipstick. Her Christmas present to him was a box of puzzles made from lengths of shiny steel bent into intricate shapes and linked together seemingly inextricably, though it took him only a moment of motionless concentration to see the trick of each pair and to separate them, which caused his aunt to sniff and frown and make a humming sound. It was voluptuously satisfying the way the two gleaming skeins of metal slid apart so smoothly, with what seemed an oiled ease, and his mind would become fora moment a limitless blue space, calmly radiant, through which transparent forms moved and met and locked and unlocked and passed on through each other in a vast silence, endlessly.
    His mother, not to be outdone by his aunt, gave him a little clothbound book of curious and amusing facts about numbers. Here he first encountered the magic square. How strange it was, to add up the numbers in the boxes along each side and down each diagonal