Finite Infinity

by Kevin McNamara

“Everything is trauma.”
Timothy Morton interview

Tunov was sitting at the kitchen table sipping coffee from a Garfield mug when Hannah staggered in after waking. She was still not sure if Tunov was real. They looked real but she had her doubts.

Today Tunov was a man who greatly resembled her Uncle Carson, her mother’s brother, a Baltimore cop who had moved to a beach house in North Carolina after he had retired and then dropped dead of a stroke at the tender age of sixty. Tunov/Carson’s voice sounded just like Uncle Carson’s throat-raspy growl, due to his life-long love of cigarettes and vodka tonics. They were also dressed in standard Uncle Carson gear: mirrored sunglasses, red flannel shirt over a bulging gut, saggy old man jeans, and an old-fashioned pair of suspenders that were deep purple but color-blind Carson always swore were blue. A Winston cigarette smoldered from the corner of their mouth.

Yesterday Tunov had looked like Mrs. Abernathy, Hannah’s kindergarten teacher, whose strabismus had been so severe you couldn’t tell if she was looking at you or over your shoulder.

They said, “It is still out there. You need to take care of it.”

Hannah grunted. No talking to visitors from outer space before her first cup of coffee was the rule. She poured herself a cup and sat down across from them. The window above the old-fashioned linoleum-topped table allowed a view of the grim dead grass of her late winter backyard, as well as the neighboring house peeking through a scraggle of trees beyond. A rank of plastic prescription bottles stood in anticipation next to the sink waiting for her to dip into them. As always, she could hear the hum of passing traffic on the road out front, a sound she’d never gotten used to even though she’d been living here for close to ten years.

“Did you hear me?” Uncle Carson puffed.

“I did. I am aware it is still out there.”

The coffee tasted good. Tunov always made it better than she did; she was unsure how they did it. Something alien added to the beans, perhaps. Some super-advanced blend that only a highly developed civilization was capable of brewing.

Tunov had arrived one day last month shortly after she had sunk into the Violet Void. She had been putting in some laundry down in the basement and Tunov had walked out from the corner where her mother’s stuff sat piled up long after the funeral. Hannah had been expecting them – signals from Capricorn Prime had been sent to her phone and email for months, cleverly disguised as wrong numbers and work messages. They weren’t an ambassador or anything as official as that. They had no formal title but Tunov liked to refer to themselves as an ‘advisor.’ C-Primers travelled via hidden pathways in the rumpled fabric of space-time, was how they described the process of crossing about sixty thousand light years of galactic space. The massive black hole at the center of the galaxy had something to do with facilitating this method but none of it was clear to Hannah, who used to teach English and whose grasp of science was limited to what she could glean from TV and movies. Anyway, no spaceships were involved. A C-Primer found a crack in reality, slipped through it, and wound up in another spot somewhere in the galaxy. Tunov said there was a hairline fracture in the foundation wall behind her mother’s old armoire that they had employed and when she had asked if she could travel to C- Prime in this way she was told that she couldn’t, as humans had not yet evolved the sensitivity to ride the fissures as C-Primers had. She wondered if this was a lie; when Tunov wasn’t around, she would sometimes sneak down into her basement and over to the crack in the foundation and run her fingers up and down the split in the concrete, searching for a way in. Or out.

“You are afraid,” said Tunov/Carson, evaluating her over the rim of their Garfield mug in a very law-enforcement manner.

“I don’t like to be seen. You know that.”

“There are ways to be seen and not seen.”

Hannah sighed. “Disguises.”

“Armor.” Tunov shook their head, sending a whirl of cigarette smoke drifting off over the table.

“I don’t want to talk about it anymore,” Hannah said. She stood and took a few steps into her living room, where she drew aside the drapes covering the front window just enough to confirm that it was still out there.

It was. On the far side of Vestal Avenue, along the edge of the bluff overlooking the shallow, placid Susquehanna River, ran a rusty chain-link fence half-buried in last year’s leaves, at the base of which lurked the source of her worry: a black plastic garbage bag someone had thrown from a passing vehicle, in the process creating a tear and allowing the contents to spill out like it was some poor gutted animal.

The bag had been there for a week, often looking faintly purplish in the late afternoon sunlight. None of her neighbors had done anything about it, most likely because it lay directly across from her house and did not ruin what view they enjoyed from their front windows.

Maybe they even assumed that it was her garbage. She shuddered.

“You need to deal with it,” said Tunov at her ear, startling her in a way that their sudden appearance in her basement had failed to do. That had been a moment of inevitability, when this alien (who looked exactly like Geordi from Star Trek, complete with high-tech visor that completely obscured their eyes) walked out of the shadows while she had an armful of clothes clutched to her chest. It was as if she had been waiting for them her whole life. And maybe she had, as her life had been marked by a distinct absence of others in it and a yearning, only faintly acknowledged by herself, for that to change.

She had never been able to tolerate for long the gaze of another human.

There was something about a pair of human eyes, she believed, that kept her from properly existing, as if being seen somehow altered her ability to be at all.

That she could teach in front of a classroom of staring eyes for over a decade was something of a miracle. She had learned how to overcome the unbearable sense of being seen by pretending that her students were just an audience watching a TV show, that she was behind a giant glass screen on a set designed to look exactly like a classroom. This fantasy had kept her from running in terror out of the classroom most days. But there had been days when the weight of all those eyes became too much, when the reality of their slick ocular selves threatened to send her screaming out of the room; it was then that she assigned silent reading and the moment all those probing eyes shifted down to the page was akin to slipping into a warm bath.

She said to Tunov, “You know it’s difficult for me. To go out there.”

Tunov sat on her sofa and stared at the pile of books on her coffee table. “What about Devon?” they asked. They reached for a book, grunting in effort (Uncle Carson’s gut had been substantial).

Devon had called yesterday, asking how she was. Devon taught senior English across the hall from her. He was ten years older, paunchy, alcoholic, and given to long disquisitions about the current state of the world. He was popular with the students because of his pronounced indifference to grades. If Hannah had had a friend during her tenure, before the Violet Void, it had been Devon. Devon intuited quickly her aversion to being seen and whenever he talked to her he made sure to look at anything other than her – the floor, the wall, the desks, quite often his own hands. He probably assumed that she was on the spectrum, maybe had a touch of Asperger’s or some other diagnosis that would explain her aversion. It was not an avenue of inquiry she had ever dared travel to completion. She’d had her fill of doctors.

The day the Void had appeared it was Devon who had saved her, not from being fired for that was impossible but from the Void itself.

It had struck after she finished reading aloud one of her favorite Dickinson poems to her sixth period class.

There is a solitude of space,
A solitude of sea,
A solitude of death, but these
Society shall be,
Compared with that profounder site,
That polar privacy,
A Soul admitted to Itself:
Finite Infinity.

She looked up, expecting the usual blank stares that she could briefly tolerate like the searing rays of a July sun; instead, the children were gone, the classroom was gone, and a giant dome of purple nothing began to descend over her, as her cell phone pinged from her purse with another missive from the emissaries of C-Prime, informing her that her prescription was ready and long overdue for pickup (code, she knew, for the impending visit). The Violet Void ate all it touched and she was disappearing into a well of silence without an ounce of fear, as if she had expected such a thing all her life. Down it came, over the walls and floor, up her legs. Her ears were stuffed with cotton and a dreamy peacefulness left her feeling as if she were floating in interstellar space.

Later, after she’d been taken to the hospital and evaluated, after the stories of her disrobing in front of the class and assuming a lotus position atop her desk, her eyes squeezed shut and her breathing profoundly slow and deep, she found out that it had been Devon who was the first adult to discover her and it had been Devon who quickly got the kids (now in a state of tumultuous rapture, part amazement, part horror, their phones out recording everything, her naked self quickly sent into the electronic ether and turned into a meme) out of there and gathered her clothes from where she had discarded them and draped them over her as best he could. He didn’t leave her side until the staff in the emergency room at Wilson Hospital told him that he needed to let go of her hand.

The Void disappeared in the hospital. Unresponsive for hours, she suddenly sat up in bed and looked around at the nurses and doctors and said, “I feel the depths of my soul aren’t quite as deep as infinity allows. Tunov is coming.” Then she passed out again and slept for twelve hours; upon waking she recalled nothing, and was shocked to discover herself in a hospital attached to various wires and equipment.

Brain scans, blood work, and various specialists all failed to locate the nexus of her problem. A resident psychiatrist called it a transient break, possibly brought on by a short acting virus. This was pure speculation, as every test they could throw at her came back normal.

The school district put her on ‘unpaid leave,’ which really meant that she was going to be fired. She thought she should feel angry about this, or resentful, or something. Instead, she felt relief. She would not have to go into that classroom and face all those terrible eyes, constantly scanning and evaluating and plotting and seeing, eyes that now had seen her naked, that had lingered over her body along with millions of others around the world, studying her in intimate detail.

She’d make do with disability for now, as well as a savings account swollen with unspent vacation funds. The teacher’s union gamely argued with the school brass that she had had a legitimate medical issue and even wanted to prosecute the kids who had posted videos of her naked on the desk but Hannah wasn’t interested in pursuing any legal action and stopped replying to the union lawyer’s fervent emails.

It was soon after Tunov had crawled out of the crack in the basement and into her life.

Tunov’s question hung unanswered in the living room air: What about Devon? Implying that Devon could be prevailed upon to help her once again, this time with the bag of garbage sitting across the road from her house. And he would do it, too. He’d drive the ten miles from his house and happily gather up the garbage and dispose of it properly. Because he was her friend and friends did such things for one another.

Tunov, not being her friend, would not do the same. The garbage could sit there for the rest of eternity for all they cared. Interfacing with Earth beyond her immediate vicinity was not something that Tunov was interested in.

“I did not travel sixty thousand light years to pick up your garbage,” they informed her.

“It isn’t my garbage.”

“Yet you are concerned about it.”

Hannah huffed. “Of course! I don’t know what’s in that bag. What if it attracts animals? What if it begins to stink? What if it holds something even worse? Like the remains of a murder victim? Maybe there’s a human head in that bag!”

Tunov was unimpressed. “Or perhaps it is just a normal bag of garbage.”

“Why are you here if not to help me?” she demanded.

It was not the first time she had asked this question. If Tunov wasn’t anyone official, then certainly neither was Hannah. She had about as much sway with the eight billion other inhabitants of Earth as a fly. Why come to her?

“You’ve been in the Violet Void,” said Tunov. “The Void is a sign that you are further along the evolutionary pathway. I am here to guide you along the pathway. I am not here to help you pick up a bag of garbage.”

“I’ll call Devon,” she said. She didn’t mean it. He, like the rest of the world, had seen her naked. As kind as he had been, she was unsure if she could ever be in his presence again, knowing that he had seen her completely. Prior to all this, she could barely tolerate doctors, gynecologists, and dentists. Now she didn’t dare leave the house, utterly sure that the instant she did someone would look at her and smirk – that smirk of knowledge was devastation itself.

But neither did she want to completely disappear. Her requirement not to be seen did not equate to being invisible. Or dead. No. She did not want to be like one of those poor, house-bound Japanese she’d seen on TV, who die alone and are not discovered until the stink overwhelms the neighbors. Worse, there was the case of a co-worker named Ann, who had taught math for over thirty years. Hannah had not been all that familiar with her (or any other faculty member aside from Devon for that matter), but Ann seemed to be one of those teachers who were as firmly part of the school as the ancient trophies in the dusty case in the entrance hall. Everyone knew her, and no one could imagine the school without her. One February Friday afternoon, Ann sat in her classroom for about an hour or so after the final bell, catching up on some grading. She then headed out to her eggplant-colored Honda, parked where she always parked it, got behind the wheel and even before she could put the key into the ignition her heart decided that sixty-two years was enough and she promptly died. And there she sat all weekend. An overnight storm covered her car in three inches of snow. Weekend maintenance workers saw the car sitting alone under its white blanket and recognized it as Ann’s but did not investigate, figuring that Ms. Shaw had had car trouble Friday and gotten a ride home. Ann Shaw, like Hannah, lived alone – there was no one who missed her presence until Monday, when her first period students were greeted by her dark, locked classroom. The grim discovery was soon made in the parking lot and school was dismissed for the rest of the day.

No thank you. Hannah could not be seen but neither did she was to be as invisible as that. It was a puzzle that seemed to have no solution, much like her current quandary with the wayward bag of garbage sitting across the street – how to deal with it without drawing attention to what she was doing?

Devon would help but she could not ask him.

Tunov was no help, slouched now on the sofa idly flipping through her copy of The Left Hand of Darkness while preening their now hummingbird-like plumage, all resemblance to Uncle Carson gone.

She realized that she needed some sort of disguise. Not a mask but armor, as Tunov had suggested.

The idea struck her as so obvious as to be ludicrous. If she could appear to be someone else, then she could appear. Did that make any sort of sense?

It did. She knew it. But how?

Tunov chirped, “There’s all your mother’s stuff in the basement.”

Her mother. Hannah had not intentionally thought of that woman in the four years that had elapsed since Mrs. Benjamin finally succumbed to the cancer that had been worming its way through her for almost a decade. She was not exactly glad that her mother was dead but neither was she all that upset, for Rachel Benjamin was a demanding woman and one of the things she demanded was that her needs and feelings always took precedence. If Hannah was having a bad day, then Rachel’s day had to be ten times worse. If Hannah struggled to make friends, then Rachel’s friends were all worthless creatures. If Hannah was worried about a mole on her shoulder, then Rachel booked a dermatologist appointment for the fifty-year-old skin-tag on her chin. Rachel was as stingy with empathy as a miser was with money. Or perhaps completely incapable of it.

Hannah’s older brother Gary had wisely moved to San Francisco in his early twenties and never looked back. She got a Christmas card and a phone call from him once a year. He couldn’t be bothered to come to Rachel’s funeral. And their father had passed around the same time as Carson. For years, Hannah had to deal with her mother alone, choosing to stay in Binghamton as Rachel aged instead of fleeing like Gary, guilted into taking care of a woman who had rarely taken care of her own children.

It had been up to Hannah to empty the family home on Oswald Road south of the city, a house she hadn’t been in for sometime, even as her mother’s health declined and she needed a visiting nurse to come by. Hannah, like Bartleby, simply refused at a certain point. It was one thing to suffer her mother’s comments over the phone, and quite another to drive six miles up into the hills to visit a woman who only became meaner and more self-involved the moment she laid eyes on the disappointing daughter stepping regretfully from her car.

She discovered that her mother had rid herself of any sign that she had ever had a family. All of Hannah’s father’s belongings were gone: his clothes, his model airplanes, the tools he kept in the garage, his golf clubs. Gary’s stuff, gone: his old bedroom stripped bare, even the rug pulled up and discarded. And Hannah? Everything but her telephone number, scrawled onto a small piece of paper and taped to the refrigerator because Rachel couldn’t be bothered to remember it.

Not a single photo remained in the house and every room had at least one mirror in it. The place was a perfect shrine to someone enmeshed in the web of their own self-regard. Hannah toyed with the idea of burning the house down but after wandering through the sterile rooms she decided that it would be like burning down a department store. Instead, she took everything her mother prized in life. A gold-trimmed jewelry box. Two small volumes of poetry she’d had privately published when she was in her twenties. Twenty-four bottles of expensive perfume. And various items of clothing, as well as the mahogany armoire. She lugged it all home over the course of a week and stuck it all in the corner of her basement and didn’t look at any of it until the idea now dawned on her that she could dress as her mother and become her mother and that would be her armor.

“Ridiculous,” said the feathered Tunov on her sofa. As they spoke, an ornately colored feather drifted to the floor, aswirl with lavender and saffron patterns that seemed to shimmer as she watched. She wondered if Tunov was going to turn into some sort of Kafkaesque insect next. These transformations were never explained. The one time she had asked them about it, Tunov had said that they had no idea what she was talking about.

“Why is it ridiculous?” Hannah asked. “You said it yourself. I need armor.”

“You’re treating it as a disguise. There’s a difference.”

“Is there?”

But she had already convinced herself that it was the right course of action. She headed down to the basement and over to the dark corner where her mother’s stuff was indifferently piled. The armoire did not want to open at first, the basement damp having warped the wood, but with a yank it finally yielded and she knew immediately what to do. Among the old designer dresses and overcoats hung a full-length sable fur coat that must have cost a small fortune. She put it on.

It wasn’t enough. She needed a full ensemble to complete the effect. She hunted through the rest of her mother’s clothes and found a purple dress from the eighties that surprisingly fit her slim frame and a pair of mauve heels that didn’t but were close enough to walk around in. From a drawer at the bottom of the armoire she withdrew a pair of rhinestone studded sunglasses.

Had Rachel Benjamin ever actually worn any of these items? None of them showed any sign of use. It was as if they had just been purchased yesterday. Maybe her mother had worn these things once and once only, because wearing them had never been the point of owning them – the having had been the point. And that was enough.

Upstairs, Tunov was now Tony Caminiti, Rachel’s post-husband boyfriend who had sold Jacuzzis. They were dressed as if time had stopped in 1979. They stood by the window gazing out at the street and the trees and the bag of garbage.

“Well, hello, Mrs. Robinson,” they said, turning from the window as Hannah strolled into the room. Their eyes shone in glimmering green as they watched her strut to the sofa and settle elegantly onto it.

Hannah purred, “Fix me a martini, darling.” She sounded exactly like her mother. Her fingers even itched for a Virginia Slim that Rachel had near-continually smoked.

Raw power surged through her, the sense of its possibilities, the promise of its use. Never before had she felt such invulnerability. This wasn’t merely armor she was wearing. It was Rachel Benjamin herself.

Tony said, “You look stunning, my dear.”

“Of course. This outfit alone cost what my poor daughter makes in three months.” Hannah flared the hem of the coat. “I never understood why she chose to grovel before a classroom full of teenagers when she could have been writing poetry as I did at her age. She had talent and she squandered it. It’s no wonder she cannot stand being looked at. It was never about her looks, you know. She’s a rather pretty girl, if a bit too thin.”

She barked a Rachel laugh: smoke-tinged and somewhat obscene.

Tony chuckled as well. They held a tray of martinis, one of which they handed to her. They then lit her cigarette (where had that come from?) and said, “What was it, then?”

“Oh, it’s perfectly simple. She was ashamed of simply being. An existential sort of situation. Rather silly, actually.”

She puffed on her cigarette and sipped at her vodka martini. Everything tasted deliciously sharp, in focus, correct.

“And what led to that shame?” asked Tony, settling back onto the far-end of the sofa and putting their Italian loafers up on the coffee table. Their stainless-steel belt buckle gleamed in the morning sunlight.

“Who knows, darling?” Rachel shrugged. “I could never understand it. She was always happiest within herself, even as a child. Did you know that she used to go into the woods up behind the house for hours at a time and do all sorts of things by herself? She’d sit and read or she’d walk along old deer trails or she’d puzzle over the bones of small animals she found. All by herself. Content. Happy. She didn’t need anyone, you see.”

“Everybody needs somebody to love,” crooned Tony.

“Not our Hannah,” said Rachel into her drink, stirring it with her speared olive. “But then the world has ways of sinking its claws into you. Even though you do your best to conceal. Even though you do your best to stay out of sight. Being seen, really seen, then becomes a form of torture, because then you know for sure that there is no escape.”

“Are you still going out there?” asked Tony, frowning. “You don’t have to, you know. It’s just a bag of garbage. It’s not even yours, for Christ’s sake.”

Rachel placed her martini glass carefully down upon the coffee table and drew on the cigarette until her lungs were bursting with smoke. The butt she dropped into the dregs of her drink, where it sizzled for a second before drowning.

“Why, it’s certainly my garbage,” she sighed. “Who else would it belong to?”

She drew the fur coat around her and cleared her throat.

Tunov, back to being Carson, sat up and pulled their service pistol from their holster. “Will you need this?” they asked, offering her the black lump of metal.

Rachel barked a brief laugh. “No, thank you, darling. It’s just a bag of garbage. I’ll be right back.”

She stood, crossed the room, and opened the front door.

THE END

 

About the Author

Kevin McNamara is a graduate of the University of Pittsburgh and Binghamton University. His short story “Well Water” appeared in the spring 2024 issue of Coneflower Café.