Ethan Canin - A Doubter's Almanac

—

IN THE MORNING, he let himself out early. The sun hadn’t even risen as he closed the apartment door and stepped into his shoes in the hallway. Though he knew nobody else in the town of Princeton, New Jersey, he hurried home with the hat pulled low over his face. At the edge of her neighborhood, he turned and made for the woods. He shouldn’t have taken the crucifix, but it was in his hand now. In the cool shade of the first stand of trees, as dawn was coming through the boughs, he leaned down quickly and dropped it into the mat of rotting leaves.

AT THE FIRST meeting of the faculty that year, Knudson Hay, the chairman of the department, introduced all the incoming assistant professors, who were seated in a line of folding chairs across the front wall of his sizable office. Milo’s chair stood in the middle of the group. When his name was called, he nodded briefly, as had everyone before him. But then, from somewhere in the rear, a voice called out, “Congratulations, Andret.”

When he looked up, he couldn’t discern the speaker. But he noticed that a few of his first-year colleagues had reddened.

—

THERE WAS A pause, then in the background the clearing of a throat. The phone had rung while he was fixing dinner. It was six in the evening. He recognized the formality of the old man’s tone.

“Listen, Andret,” Hans Borland said neatly, “I was calling to inform you of something. First, how’s that friend of yours?”

“I don’t know who you mean.”

“The Wells girl. Jim Wells’s daughter. Cleopatra.”

“Oh, that — well, that’s over, Professor.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.” Through the window, he watched a girl walk past in shorts. “I’ve moved on.”

“I’m sorry to hear it, all the same.” He paused. “Listen, Andret, I recommended you for this position, you know that, right?”

“I know, Professor. I’m grateful.”

“Comport yourself with dignity there, will you? Do what you’re capable of. It will reflect nicely on both of us.”

“I will.”

“Are you carrying the briefcase?”

Down the hall he could see it, overturned beside his bed, a sheaf of student assignments spilling from the pocket. “I have it right next to me,” he said.

“And you’re managing your affairs as we discussed?”

“Yes.”

“You’re a professor, now. Not a graduate student. People notice.”

“I’m an assistant professor.”

“Well, yes. For the time being.”

Borland coughed then, rather harshly, and covered the mouthpiece. When he came back on, he cleared his throat again. “The Malosz theorem,” he began. “If I’m not mistaken, Andret, you believe it was a fluke. You consider yourself undeserving.”

Andret felt the truth of the words.

“Perhaps you feel like a fraud,” the old man went on. “This is entirely natural. Believe me, I’ve seen it plenty of times before. Lars Hongren was a fraud.” He paused. “You, Milo Andret, are not a fraud.”

Outside the window, the girl in the shorts disappeared around the corner, and at that moment exactly, the evening turned into night. Andret became aware of his own figure in the glass, of the twisted white catenary of the phone cord bridging the darkness from his cluttered desk, crossing the bookshelves, and arriving at the pale moon of his face.

“Yes, I see,” said Borland. “Well, listen now, Andret. You have a limited amount of time. That’s what I called to tell you. To warn you about. I’d hazard ten years, on the odds. Then things will begin to cloud over. I was at the doctor’s yesterday. I’m sixty-two years old now, did you know that? I guess one can’t expect a clean slate forever.”

Milo heard the clink of a glass.

“Is everything all right, Professor?”

“Well — thankfully — yes, it is. But I did have a scare. I jog five kilometers every day, you know. Have for more than twenty years.”

“You’ve nearly run around the world, then.”

The old man laughed. “At the equator, that’s correct. At Berkeley’s latitude, I’m actually on my second lap. But I mention it because it’s set me to thinking. How old are you now, Andret? May I ask?”

“Thirty-two.”

“Well, you have five or ten years then, in all probability, and then perhaps a standard deviation. Two at the outside.”

“Yes, sir.”

“To finish your work.”

“I understand.”

“Your life’s work, Andret. You need to start something new. Something as great as what you’ve already done. Preferably, greater. ”

Andret paused. “I’m already working on something.”

He could hear the old man breathing.

“What I’m trying to tell you,” Borland said, “is that the Malosz theorem was merely the beginning of what Milo Andret can do. Of what he will do.”

Andret couldn’t speak.

“Just the beginning,” Borland repeated.

“Yes, I heard you.”

He hadn’t intended to sound so sharp.

“I see,” said the professor. After a time, he added, rather clumsily, “Well, that’s all I wanted to say. Goodbye then, Milo.”

—

AT THE OFFICE now, he had difficulty facing Helena Pierce. He quickly discovered that she had the same difficulty facing him.

By the end of his first month, they hadn’t even spoken again. Was she angry? He didn’t know. Wounded? Was it a triviality to her? He had no idea. Could it have been the crucifix? No — if that was what was bothering her, she would have mentioned something. It could have been that she was merely shy. Certainly she was inexperienced, and more than likely she’d been drunk. They’d both been.

Whenever he appeared in the mathematics offices now, she was there at her desk, but always at the rear, her head lowered over her typewriter. It was as though she could sense him through the two concrete walls, the carpeted anteroom, and the pair of frosted-glass doors that led from the hallway. When he entered, the blonde secretaries in front continued their noisy laughter and their cheeky asides, but Helena Pierce no longer rose to defend him.

—

HE COULD WORK on something related to the Malosz, as plenty of other mathematicians would have done in his situation. But Hans Borland was right: there would need to be something greater.

That winter, as he perused the journals, his attention landed on the work of a man named Ulrich Abendroth, a midcentury Austrian who at nineteen had proposed an eminent problem. Abendroth’s precociousness itself had been the stuff of legend: at sixteen he’d been appointed to the faculty of both Cambridge and the École Polytechnique; at eighteen he’d fathered two sets of twins with two different women on two sides of the English Channel; and at twenty, a month after he’d proposed his conjecture, he’d been found dead in a coffeehouse. His problem had entered the canon with a flourish of intrigue. In fact, if mathematicians had believed in any sort of superstition, they might even have considered it cursed. It was famously difficult — very likely as difficult as the Malosz — and in the years since its appearance it had resisted every advance.

All of this sat fine with Andret. He was, in fact, superstitious — but in reverse: what was supposed to be cursed attracted him.

The central puzzle of the Abendroth conjecture concerned a subset of Whitehead’s CW-complexes that were infinite yet finite-dimensional. Clear enough. Though it was considered part of algebraic topology, Andret had a feeling that its solution — if it was going to be solved at all — would come not through equation but through the ability to visualize strange and unearthly shapes.

At this he was quite adept.