Free The Abundance of the Infinite by Christopher Canniff Page A

and mass protests, this government only having been in power for a few months of a four-year term, armoured military vehicles bouncing down the roadways looking for aggressive protestors and perhaps hoping they find none.
    We had to beat these protests, and get away before they began, I said....
    We pass through the mountains, our ears plugging and then crackling clear as we go up and up, past the side of cliffs again, past their sheer edges. We suddenly stop. We are stuck in mud. The wet season is not here, just the weather leading up to it, the remnants of another storm that must have brought gusting winds and torrents of rain.
    After the bus driver’s lengthy struggle through the saturated earth, we are moving again. We pass by mountains of mud, sheer cliffs of it, and drive beside homes buried by landslides. We see children and their parents with buckets, emptying the dirty water from their once-proud residences. The roof of a home and the top of a palm tree protrude out of a small lake. This place has been hit hard. Someone aboard the bus says the words “ El Niño .”
    We move toward the mountains. We walk from the muddy bus station, both of us cold, and Karen dons a sweater. Removing my wrinkled and dusty rain jacket which is stuffed into my backpack, I put the jacket on and watch as the mountains fade into the evening.
    The sounds of celebration, perhaps made by conspiring protestors, keep me awake throughout the night.…

18

    We move from the streets on the town’s west side, to the countryside, by bus. We pass by a bank with people lined up outside who, as I read in this morning’s newspaper, must be the patrons attempting to withdraw their savings from a bankrupt bank. The newspaper reported this to be the first in a series of events which might lead to the president being ousted. A military coup, a popular uprising, or both.
    We pass by Papallacta, said to contain natural hot springs with the unique characteristic that they do not smell of sulphur. We drive throughout the night. Again, I am unable to sleep. The loud music on the bus and the occasional howling of children keep me awake during the day, and at night we are stuck in mud, either in actuality or in my dreams, which now seem so closely linked as to be the same.
    Your memory is now becoming insipid and worthless , I say to myself. I barely remember the bus stopping, the planks placed beneath the wheels, the bus struggling forward on two wheels while the other tires spin in the mud. I can only recollect the flashlights, and then the heat increasing as the rising sun escalated the temperature inside the bus, which had only a few opening windows for ventilation.
    Karen, still sleeping, abruptly awakens in the heat of the mid-morning air.
    We drive through the sumptuous greenery of a jungle town. Abandoned muddy streets with two lampposts carry electrical power cables to the few grey buildings that need it. Tin-roofed huts are in the distance, huts with signs indicating they are for rent. There are other signs, not written in English, advertising kayaks for rent and jungle guides. I am falling into and out of sleep as, from my half-open, drowsy eyes, I see Karen rushing to the front of the bus and speaking with the driver, who slows the vehicle in the middle of this tiny town.
    â€œWe’re getting off, here,” she says to me after returning to her seat.
    â€œWhere is here?” I ask, sleepily.
    The driver turns back toward us. “ Aqu í ? ”
    â€œHere. Aqu í ,” she says to the driver, gathering up our bags.
    Yelena did this same thing once before, years ago, on our trip to Spain. We were in Girona, north of Barcelona along the Mediterranean coast, when she told the driver to stop. At that time, Yelena had a specific destination in mind. It was the one time I saw that she could be impulsive and adventurous, and I thought for a moment that this might be the start of a change in her. But later, after we