Ethan Canin - A Doubter's Almanac

“I know, Knudson, I know. Thank you.”

Hay released him. “To what do I owe the pleasure, then, so soon after you’re back?”

“I came in to apologize.”

Hay clapped him on the shoulder, his eyes dropping to the can of soda. “I’m waiting for the punch line.”

“There isn’t one. I just wanted to say I’m sorry for what happened in our meeting the other day.” He stepped over and set his briefcase alongside the desk. There were no envelopes there, either. “I just wanted to apologize to you in person. And to thank you for your decision about the Hyun Chair.”

“This is the good Milo Andret?”

“As you wish.”

“Well,” said Hay. “I see that a little recognition has done you no harm at all. And to be perfectly honest, I didn’t like that lamp much anyway. It was my predecessor’s.”

Andret cleared his throat. “I really am sorry, Knudson. And I really am grateful.”

Hay reached down behind the desk. “As it happens,” he said, “I have something for you right here. A little memento from all of us, in honor of your achievement.” He opened a shopping bag and pulled out a wrapped box. “From the whole department, I mean. I think it makes sense to give it to you right now.”

Andret opened it, and his heart fell: it was an antique, leather-bound copy of Euclid’s Elements .

“The Heiberg edition,” said Hay.

“I see that. Wow. Thank you very much.”

“From all of us in Princeton mathematics — with our hearty congratulations.”

Andret felt nothing. What he understood instead was that few of his colleagues would have attended a reception in his honor. This was why the gift had been given to him in Hay’s office. “Well, good,” he said. He tried to concentrate on why he’d come; but he felt himself collapsing. The weight of the Fields was already pressing down on him. He said, “I brought you something, too, Knudson.” From his briefcase he pulled out the liter of vodka that the waitress had given him in Warsaw.

“Well, gosh,” said Hay. “That’s very kind of you.” He peered closer. “And what an interesting bottle.”

Andret smiled. “But enough of this,” he said, stepping over to the clattering pen plotter. “What are you doing these days with the computer?”

There were no envelopes in the cabinet, either. Just the same books on Fortran and Pascal and Simula that were on the shelves of Andret’s own office.

“I’m still learning to program,” said Hay. “Just trying to keep ahead of the game.” He went to the computer and proceeded to type in a logical statement that Andret pretended not to already know. Andret moved in dutifully behind him, scanning the room. There were no envelopes on any of the low shelves, either. Hay typed in another logical statement. He would input a line on the keyboard, then illustrate its application, opening the debugger to pause the program midsequence.

It was all painfully rudimentary.

After a few minutes, Andret tilted his hand forward and spilled the orange soda onto the floor. “Damn!” he said. “I’m so sorry, Knudson.”

“Damn is right,” said Hay.

The bathroom was at the other end of the floor, and Andret watched him hurry out the door and down the hall.

The envelope wasn’t in any of the desk drawers, either; nor among the stack of folders next to the computer. As it turned out, it had been stored on the far side of the room, laid flat in a wire tray under some journals. The floppy disks were inside it, held together with a pair of paper clips. Footsteps approached along the hall, and Andret quickly snapped shut his briefcase, picked up Heiberg’s Euclid, and pretended to be fascinated by the pons asinorum .

—

BACK IN HIS own office, he listened to the drive engage and then begin to read. The TI-120’s cathode tube brightened — here he drew a breath — then flickered its green letters up the screen until finally the whirring quieted and in silent benediction the machine delivered its @ prompt. He exhaled. Even with C++ loaded onto the motherboard, the 120 would have enough memory to run a crushing series of calculations. He rubbed his hands together and pushed everything off the desk onto the floor.

This was it.

He knew he could manage the programming. There was no manual yet for this new language, but enclosed with the floppies was a photocopied sheaf explaining the syntax. And the logic itself was no more obtuse than any of the training exercises he’d completed for Pascal or Fortran. And objects —that was the whole reason he’d chosen C++: they would make his task immeasurably simpler. Kopter was obviously a programmer, too. Andret realized this now from the structure of the paper he’d read. But Kopter would have to struggle with one of the older languages: for a few moments, it almost seemed unfair.

Well, fuck you, Seth Kopter.

In the weeks that followed, he stayed at the machine day and night. Whenever he paused, he tried not to ask himself what a fourteen-year-old prodigy in Palo Alto might be doing at that very moment. On his shelf was a case of Maker’s Mark and a water pitcher and a row of grocery bags filled with ramen. The flickering screen absolved him of the need for sleep. He saw Olga only a couple of times — she didn’t mind that he raced out afterward — and Annabelle not at all. He went home every two or three days for a change of clothes and a shave, and otherwise merely took naps on the lowest row of boxes beside the door. They sagged now with the outline of his body.

—

THE FIRST TIME he tried to execute the program he discovered that it was filled with bugs. It had taken him a month to complete the structure, but when he ran it, it wouldn’t even compile. The code was almost ten thousand lines long, and it took him another week just to whittle it down to something that the TI could read. When the machine finally took it, the first round of functions produced ludicrously inaccurate results.

He broke down the objects to make them more specific. This took time, too, but there was nothing else he could do. Every half hour or so, the TI would hang up in a memory leak. The quickest way to restore it was just to reach over and yank the plug from the wall. The program seemed to have its own spiteful resistance, and the printer paper, which he’d stolen from the engineering lab, tried relentlessly to roll itself back into a cylinder. His eyes were blurry. He ran a debugger for hours on end, pausing the storm of calculations that flickered upward on the screen, watching the compounding of his tactics and then the compounding of his errors that sent everything haywire, multiplying a thousandfold the misplacement of a single keystroke or the most trivial oversight in logic. This new engine of computation was brutal. It was a pitiless dungeon master, standing over him with a cudgel.

Now and then he thought of Brahe, looking out at the virgin sky from the windows of a Copenhagen attic.

—

ONE NIGHT, LATE, another knock at the door. He switched out the light and sat still. The clock ticked over to 2:35. The knock came again.

He found the C++ envelope and slipped it into a drawer.

“I saw the light go out in there, Milo.”

He was confused.

“Is someone in there with you?”

“Annabelle,” he said, rising. He switched on the lamp, and when he let her in he waved his arms over the disarray. “Sorry for all of this.”

“A lovely welcome to Castle Dracula,” she said. She stepped back to regard him. “And you must be Vlad the Impaler.”

He needed to get back to programming.

“ Dracula means devil, ” she said languidly, taking a seat on one of the sagging boxes. “In Romanian. Or some say the name came from the Greek, for dragon. You look horrible, by the way. You do look like the devil.”