Ethan Canin - A Doubter's Almanac

—

THE CIGARETTE CASE was still in the refrigerator, and inside it were the instructions. From the compartment behind the cigarettes, I pulled out two syringes. They were already filled.

That afternoon, I gave Dad the first one. Then I sat down and watched. I, Hans Euler Andret, fellow mathematician, fellow addict, fellow lonely and yet ever-hopeful soul, gave him Earl Biettermann’s dose and then lowered myself onto the floor beside him. His face grew quiet. The writhing ceased. The black, withered hand came up and rested in a loose fist along his belly, which in a small bit of mercy had finally shrunk tight. He was at last being allowed to immaterialize.

I could see that behind his eyes he had gone somewhere worthy of his interest. The lids fluttered. They were closed, but he wasn’t asleep. He was resting calmly.

I wondered if it was mathematics.

I wondered if that’s what he was doing. I hoped, as I sat on the floor beside him, that what he was witnessing behind those lids was the great unbaring of his clue. The way Kekulé, dreaming, had chanced upon his Ouroboros; or Howe, the spears of his cannibals; or Einstein, moving swiftly down the mountain, his transformation of the stars.

On and on he traveled. For the afternoon and into the evening.

Near dusk, clouds moved in, and the wind grew stronger through the screens. My mother and Paulie and Audra came and went. I laid another blanket across him.

At the poles of the earth, time ceases to exist. Or rather, time becomes meaningless because it exists in every form at once. It is always dawn and always dusk. Always noon and always midnight. The reason for this is that, at the poles, every time zone coincides. At those two points — at those singularities, as Forsyth would have called them — our construction of the familiar fails.

All through the evening, he lay beneath the blankets, a faint tremor on his face, his bruised fist opening and closing. My mother took long turns with him. Paulie did, too.

Not long after nightfall, his lids opened, and he drew a harsh breath. His back arched and he cried out. My mother took his hand.

After a time, she rose and left the room. When she returned, she was holding all the other vials from upstairs. “This will be enough,” she said.

I looked up at her.

“It’s okay, sweetheart,” she said. “It really is. We’re just going to help him now.”

—

WHEN SHE EMERGED later into the living room, she took hold of Paulie’s hand. We all walked together onto the porch and sat down beside him. We stayed there like that, the three of us arranged around him.

I hope he went back to the woods. Back to the great leafy woods of his childhood, where he’d first known solace.

“I SHALL NEVER give up!” I shouted from the bow. “I shall never give up!”

“That’s the stuff!” roared my father. “That’s my boy!” I saw his glance move to Paulie, who’d turned away at his words.

“That’s my girl!”

Now she looked back at him.

We were moored in a muddy cove a quarter mile to the north of the cabin. On their maiden voyage, the Victory and the Royal Sovereign had proved seaworthy, and now Paulie and I had parked the Victory beneath the shade of a weeping willow that arched over the shallows. At the deep end of a rotting dock twenty yards to the east bobbed the Royal Sovereign .

“Long live Her Majesty’s Navy!” shouted my father.

“Long live Pascal!” I shouted back. “Long live the hydraulic principle!”

“The fate of England rests upon this battle,” called my mother. “Every man and woman to their duty. Dei sub numine viget! ”

Then, from their deck, Dad took aim. His long arm descended, and from the thick barrel of the pipe-cannon came a lopsided yellowish missile, wobbling into view. It arched weakly, tumbling end over end and throwing a halo of drops before it landed with a slap on the water.

I was on the downward slope of a dose: I understood that the misfired potato had been a representation of his care.

“Fire, Hans!” yelled my sister. “Fire!”

“Fuck Princeton University!” shouted Dad. He bent to reload.

My mother glanced back at him. “Well, I don’t know—”

“Yes!” I shouted back. “Fuck the Tigers!” I reached into our own supply of potatoes and, with apology, selected the most perfectly spherical. “We shall return!” I called.

“Wrong battle,” hissed Paulie.

“I know that, Smallette.”

“Wrong century.” She looked at me suspiciously.

I dropped the smoothly carved missile into the barrel, fixed my eyes on the target, and thrust my arm down against the piston. Dad, of course, had drilled relief holes to reduce the force of the hydraulics, but somehow my chosen potato had found a way to defeat them. The recoil knocked me sideways. To my astonishment, a pale, buzzing projectile whizzed across the inlet and smacked like a croquet mallet against the stern of their craft. A bottle jumped sideways out of the hull like a fish leaping back into the sea.

“Oh my God!” shouted Paulie. “You did it, Hans! A direct hit! You wounded him!”

“Dear Lord,” came my father’s shaky voice. “We’ve been breached.”

I reloaded. The next potato had grown a strange curling bud at one end, like the handle of a Klein bottle — it lacked only the connecting dimple — but its central radius seemed, like its predecessor’s, to have been grown expressly for the bore of our cannon. Ah, wonders. When I fired, I saw that my bullet had been hurled by God. From the top of the Royal Sovereign ’s stern came another echoing wallop, this one like a boot kicking a car door, followed by a gurgling dunk as the ordnance careened onward into the channel. My father looked up, frightened now.

“Jesus,” he said in a hushed voice. “Two in a row.”

“God save the queen!” shouted Paulie.

“We give up!” called my mother from the rear of their boat, laughing and raising her sun-hat on a stick.

“Nonsense,” came Dad’s measured reply. “One early triumph means nothing. We’ve just gotten started. We shall never give up!”

“Neither shall we!” yelled Paulie.

“Never give up,” I whispered at the sky.

“But we do !” called my mother. “We do give up!”

“Jesus,” I heard my father say. “We’re taking on water.”

They were. I bent to the potato pail, and when I stood again, I saw that Dad had somehow caught his foot inside the gash in their stern. I slipped the next potato into the barrel — it made a dull poof like a dropped sack of flour — and at that moment Dad fell over comically onto his back, his arms shooting up behind him and one leg stabbing through to the other side of the hull, where it kicked lamely at the water. I was aware, briefly, of a rent in time: my shot, though still in the barrel, had already felled him.

A dizzying revelation.

I looked up for a moment at the painted sky, and when I refocused I saw his flailing arms, reaching alternately for one gunwale and then the other. My poor father. The Royal Sovereign ’s bow jiggered back and forth as though a manatee were bumping past it underwater. He tried to wedge himself up by grabbing the handle of one of the keel jugs. There was a swallowing sound, a row of bottles came out in his hand, and the long deck accordioned around him as though the pins had been pulled from a folding chair.

From the high point of the transom, my mother began crying with laughter.

Dad struggled to his feet. Then he fell again. He pulled himself up and slid back the other way.

That’s when I realized it: he was drunk.