Ethan Canin - A Doubter's Almanac

The night before, of course, he’d been a virgin.

“Is that the truth?” she asked later, as they lay back on the pillows, messily eating the doughnuts. “I’m the only one?”

It took him several moments to realize she was referring to being shown the quatrant.

—

LATER THAT WEEK, a house he didn’t recognize. Big rooms full of tacked-up posters. Velvet couches. He was following her in the hallways. The starry waterfall of San Francisco shivering in the glass. He was hoping to lead her into one of the bedrooms, but he was always a step behind. A dog on a chain.

She was stopping in front of every knickknack. Abalone-shell ashtrays. Incense pots. In the dark stairway he followed the swaying bangles on the bottom of her sweater. Along the back wall of the slope-roofed attic, a dozen other grad-student types were scattered on the cushions and mattresses.

Was that Earl?

It was. He was on a mat beneath the far window, his narrow head resting back. He sat that way during Milo’s section meetings — exactly that way: in the last row, his long hair against the wall behind him, his boots crossed. Sticky little smile on his lips.

When Cle walked up to him, Biettermann tried to kiss her. “Isaac Newton,” she said when she turned, gesturing with her hand. Milo moved up behind her. “I’d like you to meet Gottfried Leibniz.”

It wasn’t funny. She was nervous.

“A pleasure, Gottfried,” said Biettermann.

Milo could think of nothing to say.

Biettermann tilted his head and peered into Milo’s eyes, then offered his hand: the soul shake. He looked stoned. “Earl Biettermann,” he said. “From your calculus section, in case you forgot.”

“I didn’t forget. Is this where you write your poetry, Earl?”

—

CLE WAS THE one who gave it to him. Not ten minutes later, after Biettermann was gone. A tiny square on her palm. A little Mickey Mouse in bright blue and red. No bigger than his pinkie nail.

“Open up,” she said.

He was alone with her.

“Come on,” she said, nuzzling him. “Open the hatch.” She went up on her toes and kissed him.

The bite of smoke. The linger.

“Come on,” she said, moving it to his lips. “Open.”

—

A NORMAL DOSE for Berkeley in those days: probably 250 micrograms. Lysergic acid diethylamide. You could buy it in the public parks. Milo’s mood was expansive. His experience was nil. Cle stretched out on the mattress and pulled him down beside her. The gold-bangled sweater, the lemon soap. Biettermann was gone. Time difficult to locate. In his eye, the line of her knees and hips, a black horizon with hills. Everything he’d ever wanted.

Nothing was happening.

The ceiling: stamped tin. Victorian curlicues in repetition, repeating squares within repeating squares. Here was something now, a wave rolling across his vision — his concentration unraveling. Okay, there it was — a long, looping pull. The band downstairs rumbling the floor. Biettermann again now, at the far end of the room. Then gone. A black light vivifying the posters like a hidden sun.

Then he plunged.

At the bottom he found himself. Silence. He was inside something. A shimmering construction. It began to rumble like a buried engine. Immediately: his bearings. He was aware that his mind would burn but that it would survive the fire. All he had to do was climb. A slippery wall of flame steadily increasing its slope. Hanging on to the mattress now: he turned. She was beside him, mummified. Wrapped in gold. The gold smoldered, then began to burn. She was curling away in smoke. He gave in, dropped farther, was aware of a hovering border, stretching and respiring, billowing around him. A tent in the wind. Yellow and orange. The border now a point, now falling away. Gathering slope and velocity until he was stranded at its tip. A man on a boulder in an ocean.

He reached but couldn’t touch her. Then he knew he hadn’t even moved. There was no history to his actions. They disappeared into a maw. The surface of a dark pond that swallowed without a ripple, then grew into waves. The waves cannibalized themselves. Then grew again.

An unseen dimension prodding a boundary.

He was aware then of other shapes, floating away before he saw them. Volumeless interiors. Infolding crenellations. A circle — the two-dimensional cut of a sphere; then the sphere itself — the three-dimensional cut of its encasing sheen. It oscillated. The sheen itself encased. Unseen shapes consuming unseen shapes. Superbounded by complexities darting at the edge of his vision. Animals breathing on the far side of a wall.

He reached again for her hand.

—

“IT WAS MATHEMATICAL,” he said the next day. They were in a bar. “That was the interesting part. What I saw was mathematical.”

She laughed. “It was an acid trip, Andret.”

“No. It was the Malosz conjecture. I’m sure of it.”

“Every artist has thought that kind of thing.”

“I saw mathematical ideas.”

“That’s just what you remember.” She poured a beer. “Because of who you are. If you’d been like the rest of us, you’d be talking about the colors. That’s what I remember.”

He saw them again — the melting yellows and blue-reds.

But he also knew he’d understood something. Something geometrical. It was gone now, though. It was behind something.

—

ONE NIGHT, HE lit two candles and in their flickering light read all the quatrant’s numbers from the month. Then the ones from the previous month. His hands shook as he scanned back through the pages and pages. Something stood up inside him. There was a shape there. He imagined Brahe himself, four centuries before, in a Copenhagen attic, seeing the same shape.

He began to shun sleep and took to calculating at night, followed by classwork, so that he could record data during the day.

There was a time in history when the pattern of numbers he saw on his columned pages would have upended the world.

—

HIS APARTMENT WAS a half-hour walk from school, but even so, there were occasional knocks on the door: undergraduates asking to see the quatrant. Sometimes they’d just kneel on the sidewalk and look down through the window. He took to closing the shades. Their cheap fabric admitted a gloom of yellow light.

Cle had her own knock — three short, three long, three short. “Morse code for SOS.”

“Why SOS?” he said.

“Because you’re my savior.”

He laughed. They both knew it was the reverse.

He should have been devoting more time to the Malosz — Borland would be expecting some evidence of progress. But between classes and teaching and the quatrant and now Cle — she arrived every other afternoon with a cup of tea and a book — he had no chance. His intention was to work, but she would do something — touch one of her calves, unspool her hair from its bun — and they would move frantically to the bed, pulling at each other. They’d stay there until one of them grew hungry. Then they’d go upstairs to the Indian restaurant across the street. The spices turned her lips bright red. He almost couldn’t eat.

All the while, he could feel Borland waiting.

One afternoon she was pounding on the door. She rushed in, threw it closed behind her, and pulled down the shades. A Turkish coffee was in her hand, the blue ceramic cup shaking on its saucer. “It’s from that Middle Eastern place on the corner,” she whispered breathlessly. “I was going to bring it right back.” She lifted one of the shades and dropped it again. “But they came after me. I think he’s out there.”

“Who is?”

“The waiter.”

He regarded her. “Did you just steal a cup of coffee, Cle?”

“Screw you, Andret.” She peeked out from behind the shade again.