The Abundance of the Infinite by Christopher Canniff

that are now illuminated. Bats are penetrating through the mist in search of their prey, before vanishing again into the blackness … we look up for stars, which should be the most incredible array of stars we’ve ever seen outside our dreams. The moon is absent, and the only light for miles around seems to be from these two lamps before us, yet we can see no stars.
    We step away from the lights and into a darker and more immense cloud of insects that buzz about our heads. The bugs are repulsed as we saturate our clothes and skin with a spray repellent … the stars above remain unseen, masked by invisible clouds bringing warm rain to the already moist ground.… We have rented individual huts, to which we promptly return. The familiar sight of mosquito netting, the recognizable humming of insects, and reading several of Boccaccio’s stories from The Decameron lulls me into sleep. I fall into a restless sleep, one devoid of dreams.…

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    The next nights are spent in the same huts, perched on stilts above the forest floor. I remember in these days and nights, as we await another bus that still has not come, what originally brought Yelena and me together. I remember our illogical conversations by having more of them, these ones with Karen. I revel with Karen in our absurdity, participating in native ceremonies by night, cleansing away any evil spirits by having a shaman breathe out healing properties through chicha , masticated and fermented corn juice spit at us from all angles, the shaman exhaling tobacco smoke over our aching joints and sucking and spitting out bad air, smoking unfiltered cigarettes ourselves while imagining the dark leaves to be the same tobacco as that prepared by the shaman, inventing this in our minds as we drink our own chicha , the natives dancing ritualistically around us in the warm rain and covered torch lights of the evening.
    We marvel that we have no one to answer to here. Not each other, not even ourselves.
    We are uninhibited, emancipated, free. And it is on that evening that I have the most vivid dream of my life, after I fall asleep reading The Decameron . It is a dream I transcribe for my therapist that, unlike Coleridge’s recording of his opium-induced "Kubla Khan" dream, is not interrupted and is therefore fully articulated, in its entirety, in narrative script as the Tenth Day, Eleventh Story, as told by myself, outside of Florence in the cloudy light of day. Yelena, Karen, the Señora, Inés, Yolanda and I have all come to a hillside to escape the bubonic, pneumonic and septicemic variations of the plague which have descended upon fourteenth century Florence and taken the lives of almost half the European population.
    King Gianni, ruler of Cyprus, having secretly murdered his own daughter for taking many lovers and thereby bringing shame upon him, accuses his wife’s father, among others, of having played a key role in the murder. The King sentences him to death. After his execution the Queen, discovering her husband’s culpability in the death not only of her father but also of their daughter, becomes committed to ending the King’s life. A prognosticating witch, after declaring her allegiance to the Queen, appears to the King as an unusual black cat and prophesies that he will be destroyed. His daughter’s real murderer is uncovered publicly, a war with neighbouring Armenia is lost, and the witch ensures that the prophecy comes true.

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    I awaken that morning with the immediate sense that I alone am responsible for my daughter’s death, and no one else. She is not dead, I reply to myself, over and over again. I quickly write down every detail and aspect of my dream, in a frenzied state that must have approached that of Coleridge as he struggled to transcribe every element he could remember. In my transcription, I leave nothing out.
    While I begin contemplating the meaning of my dream, we spend our days white water rafting