Ethan Canin - A Doubter's Almanac

What I’ve often believed about people like my father — and like me, and my sister, and my daughter, and quite possibly my son — is that we’ll always be in chase. In chase of the next question, which we’re usually familiar with because it was the answer to the previous one. Everything builds. Increment upon increment. There’s no proof in mathematics that can’t be broken down into steps basic enough for a child of reasoning age to follow. The trick is accumulating the steps, each one so trivial that it can be comprehended by the crippled thing we call the mind. Concentration, if you will. This is all we have. Desire creates the concentration.

I’ve often thought that the remarkable thing about problems like Fermat’s or Poincaré’s — or even Malosz’s — is not that they were eventually solved but that for so long they were not. Really, each one is nothing but grains of sand. The length of time it took to solve them was in good part dependent on probability: there are so many more wrong ways to stack the grains than there are right ways.

Under our old mulberry tree, when my father was first showing me differential calculus, he once said that the discovery that shapes can be described with incrementally smaller shapes, that anything at all could be approximated in such a simple manner, had guided him in much of his thinking.

The thought comes back to me now.

Does one grow wise in increments? By fractioning a life and then summing it? By stacking sand? An infant, in his first sleepiness, must let go of the world; a man must learn to die. What comes between are the grains of sand. Ambition. Loss. Envy. Desire. Hatred. Love. Tenderness. Joy. Shame. Loneliness. Ecstasy. Ache. Surrender.

Live long enough and you will solve them all.

But how to solve the grief I felt for my father in those last days? We think that our sorrow, like the planes we know in this world, has borders. But does it? When he came home from the hospital that evening, he sat back on the leather couch, his expression dull, his one undamaged hand set loosely around a glass. He was the same man I’d always known. The same shadowed eyes. The same slightly bent features. Yet I also knew that in some frame of time that already existed and had almost been reached he was already gone. So what? If you go out along another dimension, you can come back at any other point in time. For a long while by then, when I looked at him on the couch, I’d been seeing him no longer there, seeing not my father but the empty space in which he’d once lived as though I were looking into the future. Well, was I? Does the soul, like the plane, have only a truncated representation in our world? Do we give it edges and dimension only so that we may say we understand it?

As soon as we conform anything to language, we’ve changed it. Use a word and you’ve altered the world. The poets know this. It’s what they try so hard to avoid.

I don’t have much patience with religion, or even with what at Stillwater they liked to call the spiritual life; but nonetheless, it is part of a mathematician’s job to not rule out a possibility until it’s disproven. Could the thing I felt when I thought about living on this earth without my father merely have been the first scald that one feels when at long last one lays one’s hand upon the infinite? Not the bounded thing whose edges we see but the other thing, the thing whose truth can only be approached if we ignore what we think we know?

Would my father have laughed at such an idea? I actually don’t think so. He thought as much about life’s verities as any other man; it was simply that he was loath to speak of any of them until he understood.

I myself had realized long ago that he was dying. I’d realized it on the day I found out he wasn’t coming back from the cabin to live with us in Tapington. It was a cool afternoon in September, only a couple of weeks before I went off to college myself, and out the window of our house the leaves of the mulberry were already beginning to wither. I was upstairs in my bedroom, looking at a yellow pill in my fingers, when the phone rang in the kitchen. A few minutes later, I heard my mother’s slow step on the stairs, and in memory I suddenly saw my father’s face, grayed at its edges, newly marked — unmistakably so, in my mind’s eye — as it looked up at me from the desk in his shed. It seems strange to say that I knew then that he was lost to us. But I did. I hadn’t seen my way to the end of any proof, but for a moment, before it vanished, I’d glimpsed a path.

The day he came back from the hospital in his cast and took his place on the cabin’s new leather couch, I walked down to the water, then along the beach to the cluster of rocks at the end of the cove. Those rocks are bigger than most of the others on that shore, and there’s a remnant of order in their arrangement that reveals to me some figure out of the past, patiently digging them from the fields or wedging them up from the lake bottom for a long-forgotten reason of custom or beauty. I sat down on one and looked out at the water.

It was evening, and before long a pair of minks emerged. The minks appreciate those rocks because they’re a good place to hunt for the crayfish and ducklings that they feed on, but also because they’re big enough to play on. Minks are alert animals, and they seem to like to play. A mink’s face is vigilant — short ears canted forward and dark, attentive eyes — and a mink always seems to look at the world with an expression of surprise. There’s something about this that speaks to me of intelligence.

The pair of them chased each other through the riprap, both of them looping madly up and down in the crags, like a pair of dark-furred Slinkys bouncing along the shore. The sun had already set, but the western sky still showed color, and in the quieting cove I sat watching the two of them play in the boulders. When they realized I was there, one of them hid, but the other stepped to the top of a rock and looked straight at me. I don’t know why I saw sympathy in that face, but I did; and it was then, as the wind calmed and the sky darkened gradually from deep violet to indigo, that I finally wept.

—

DAD WOULD HAVE to eat early — a piece of toast just after dawn — or he’d throw up the first pill. A little past midday, I’d give him the second, with a cup of soup. The third came between dinner and bedtime. Once he’d been asleep, he couldn’t keep anything down, so for the nighttime dose I learned to inject him. Dr. Gandapur showed me how. I set the alarm for 2:00 a.m. and in the dark made my way down the hall to the bathroom. The sudden light and the silvery bubbles crowding the syringe — their weirdly jubilant chaos: it was a powerful feeling, knowing I could ease his pain.

Even at that hour, the air on the porch was warm, and he’d have kicked away the blankets. I’d lift the sheets, moving as quietly as I could, but his eyes always opened. He’d roll over, sighing, onto his back.

“Night nurse.”

“Leave me alone.”

The thin meat of the hip. The brief resistance, then the slip of the needle, as though through silk. When I pulled it out he’d grunt and roll back onto his side. That dose would take him through to breakfast. From then until nightfall, he could manage with the pills.

Sometimes they wore off early, but I learned to recognize the signs. If he was standing, he’d press his hand to the cast and lean back to breathe. Speaking, the words would begin to space themselves. Sitting, he’d shift his neck and rub his hand along the plaster, as though petting a cat that lay in the crook of it.

Now and then, as he sat on the couch, he’d wince.

Still, he was on his feet every day. To the kitchen for bourbon or coffee. To the edge of the cove for air. He didn’t eat much at meals, but Paulie was making a custard for him in the evenings that he took to bed and spooned extravagantly into his mouth.