Ethan Canin - A Doubter's Almanac

He took her hand. It was someone else’s hand.

“You think I care, Andret? I don’t. I don’t give a damn about her.”

“I don’t either. I’m begging you.”

“Look at me, Andret. Only mortals beg. You’re not to do it.” She reached and pulled his face close, held it there. “Not you, Andret. Stop following other people’s rules. You’re beyond them.”

—

THAT NIGHT, ANOTHER party: Biettermann again. Alligator smile. A girl beside him and a bumping crowd.

Biettermann said, “China White.”

The girl lifted her fist. A blue dragon, twisting across her knuckles.

“China what ?” said Milo.

Biettermann laughed. The girl, too. Biettermann grabbed her mouth and kissed the full lips. The girl looked at Milo. Kissed Biettermann and looked at Milo. He turned away. When he turned back, she was still looking. Her mouth still on Biettermann’s. She nodded, tilted her hand toward him and opened it. The dragon’s fire curling into her palm.

Then, stepping from behind her: Cle.

Biettermann kissed her, then, too, right in front of him. His arm around both of them. Cle closed her eyes.

Milo stared.

All three of them looked at him now.

“White,” said Biettermann. “China White .”

They all laughed.

Then Biettermann opened his palm: a syringe. “You ready to travel, my friend?”

—

LATER, HE WONDERED why he’d refused. He could have at least stayed near her. Instead, he’d gone off by himself, walked home, and spent the rest of the evening in the bar near his apartment.

A month and two weeks. That’s how long it was before he saw her again. On his calendar he checked off the days.

THERE WERE AT least two ways to solve any problem: from the beginning, which was the usual approach; and from the end, which was not. Likewise, every theorem could be proved either directly, using incremental logic, or indirectly, by conjecturing the negative of the hypothesis and demonstrating a contradiction. Thus there were at least four permutations to choose from.

This was how he began.

A pad. A room. A tiny view. Not numbers but geometry. One couldn’t draw a fourth dimension. This was a mathematical dictum, and of course he challenged it, but after days of trying to negate it he at last accepted its truth. Yet one could extrapolate.

At night he experimented. With his eyes closed he built a one-dimensional world and imprisoned himself within it. From there he imagined the second dimension — the unfathomable impingement of a greater universe. Then, after days of this, he imprisoned himself in two dimensions and imagined a third. The fracturing of experiential knowledge. It was forceful work. It was physical work. It required him to bind his thinking. He could maintain the fiction for only minutes at a time. The effort left him hungry.

In a way it was akin to idiocy — Cle was right. But he understood at the same time the radical difficulty of what he was attempting. The weight of discipline required to unlearn the world and refabricate it from principles.

Intuition mattered, too. There was no going forward without intuition.

At last he relented in his experiments and took to the problem itself, attacking first from the ordinary dimensions. This was merely underwork to confirm his approach. It was work that Akira Kobayashi was obviously embarked upon, too, in Kyoto. A month later, he was aware — though unsuccessful in articulating the particulars — that this route would lead nowhere. At the bottom of his own labyrinth of reasoning he glimpsed an infinite loop, a multibranched chain closed only by its own first tenets. A logical dead end. The realization flooded him with relief. Kobayashi was not a threat.

Marat Timofeyev, on the other hand, in Kiev, seemed to be attempting the problem from the negation of the hypothesis, working apagogically — the path that Andret now turned to. Timofeyev’s steady papers on complex manifolds, his meticulous proofs of mid-lying conjectures: this was a man laying a foundation. But soon Andret grew sanguine about Timofeyev, too. Unless his rival’s papers were diversionary, he was creeping forward by inches on a journey that was many miles long. A careerist, he realized one night in Evans Library as he unwrapped a new set of journals. A man interested only in a professorship.

At the realization, he allowed himself a weekend’s rest. A bottle of bourbon. In his apartment he sipped it from a coffee cup.

He didn’t call Cle. He didn’t want to go over a cliff.

Then he went back to work. His first task was to leapfrog what Timofeyev had done. He began by assuming the result, by starting from the proven conjecture and filling backward. If this was true, then so must have been that; for that to have been true, then so must have been this. The individual steps were simple, each requiring the smallest of conclusions. But the complexity of them all together was exhausting. It was as though in the morning he built a house of 1,000 cards, all in his mind, and in the afternoon he chose a single one to remove. Then the next morning, he would build a house of 999 cards. This was what Timofeyev had been doing, but in reverse. One morning, he realized that in this manner it would take years to reach a proof.

He also realized that his own stumbling had disappeared. The blink-outs. He hadn’t had one in weeks.

He bought another bottle of bourbon and set it on the desk. A sip or two seemed to align his thinking. During one stretch of mental projection, he fleetingly envisioned a course all the way to the finish — it laid itself out before him like a rock skipping across a pond. Then was gone.

He was able to reconstruct the particulars only long enough to realize that such a route, momentarily discernible as it was, would soon be overwhelmed by calculation. With growing confidence, he moved to his original insight — that the higher dimensions, despite their unseeable complexity, would yield the answer.

This was the correct path, he sensed with finality one night as he walked again on the Emeryville flats, where before him on the dark bay the ships cast their crawling illumination against the night. This was the path on which he would stake his future.

—

HE’D FOUND HIS approach now. He was quite aware of it.

But he could no longer work in the library, the quiet there speeding up his thoughts to where they raced beyond him. He’d taken to working in the coffeehouses instead and even a sandwich shop near his apartment, where the noise buffered his thinking. The brain needed to work at a certain speed. And alone. The parts of him that were Milo Andret needed to go away.

One rainy night, waiting for sleep, he was startled by the phone. 1:23 a.m. He sat up in bed.

“Andret—”

It was Cle. This was ruination.

He couldn’t make out the words. He didn’t want to say anything, but he couldn’t hang up. He set the receiver on the sheet. Now she said nothing at all. The only sound he heard was music. More voices. He forced his own silence. A clock leaf flipped down.

Finally, he said, “What did you want?”

No answer. Behind her, brief voices again through the noise: a party.

“I’m going to hang up now,” he said. “I don’t want to. But I’m going to hang up.”

That he didn’t — that he didn’t set the phone back in the cradle, that he laid it on the pillow instead, beside his ear, where it kept up its whispering — that he didn’t hang it up because he’d had an intuition became a point of comfort to him that would buoy him many years later, when he was stricken all the time with doubt.

Five clock-flips later, she said, clearly enough, “Help.”

—

SHE WAS LIGHT. No weight at all. Running. Her body limp across his chest. A crowd. Voices.