Ethan Canin - A Doubter's Almanac

“Well, I feel like God himself. I feel ecstatic.”

“Do you?”

“Listen, Annabelle, I might be onto something. This is one of the most powerful computers in the world. I need to get it to work.”

“This one right here?” She stepped over to the desk.

“Please don’t touch.”

“ Insane might be a better word.” She fingered the belt on her coat, then pulled off her hat and ran her hand through her hair. “You do look insane, Milo. Have you gone insane since you last saw me?”

“Quite the opposite.”

“I haven’t seen you in weeks. Did you not realize that? I was getting a little lonely. I thought you might have spurned me.”

“I didn’t spurn you, Annabelle.”

“Well, I thought you might have.” She pushed out her lips. “Yev’s out of town.”

“I didn’t know.”

“I know you didn’t. That’s the point. You’re one of the vainer men on the planet — do you realize that? And believe me, there’s plenty of competition. Do you know you haven’t called me since four Tuesdays ago? Actually, tomorrow it will be five. But why should you know that?”

“I’m onto something crucial here.”

“Of course you are, and why should you know anything about my life? You’re such an egomaniac, Milo. You are the impaler. You’re Milo the Egomaniacal Impaler. ”

“You’ve had a cocktail.”

“I’m all alone in that fucking house.”

“Annabelle, I’ve been working.”

“Well, you’re still a fucking monster, do you hear me? You don’t have one single feeling in that misshapen head of yours.”

“These are highly critical days, Annabelle. I need to get back to my work.”

“You don’t even know what a feeling is, do you? It’s not the computer, it’s you. ” Her voice was rising. “You can’t love anyone. Do you understand that? You. Can’t. Love. Anyone.”

He sat down. It was going to be necessary to change strategy. “Well, it’s not something I’ve thought about.”

“Then think about it! Think about it right now!”

“There’s no reason to shout. Shhh,” he said. He rose and crossed to her, moving his finger to his lips. With one hand he picked up the bottle and with the other pulled her by the belt of her overcoat. The fabric was damp from the weather. He tilted the bourbon to her lips, then took another gulp himself. “Oh, I do, ” he whispered. “I do have feelings.”

Underneath the coat, she was wearing nothing but panties and a bra. And a scarf, which he unwound.

“Oh, my God,” she said as his lips moved beneath her jaw. “I hate you, Milo. I hate you.”

Where the collar of her coat had been closed, her skin went from cold to warm.

“But I want you,” she murmured.

“I want you just as much.”

She tilted back her neck.

A few minutes later, just after she’d climaxed, she reached for the scarf and began sniffling into it — muffled, underwater sounds that startled him with an unwelcome tenderness of feeling. He reached for her hand. But just as his fingers found hers, he realized that he’d reversed a pair of Boolean operators in the middle part of the program. By the time he’d typed in the correction at the desk, she was sobbing.

—

LATE ONE EVENING, he entered the code for another troublesome sequence, compiled the program again, and sat back to watch the calculation. He’d been working the same section for days, pushing his way through every detail but constantly finding himself stymied by oversight — he was accustomed to pausing the logic every few seconds to root out some flaw. But tonight, somehow, the execution was clean. Each time he added back another block, the little green automaton climbed up the left side of the screen and did what it had been assembled to do.

Before long, he’d ceased pausing the program altogether. He added the remainder of the blocks and simply let the whole thing run. For close to an hour, the green fire burned steadily, the drive and fan cycling irregularly — this was the sound of a successful implementation — until finally his attention returned with a start and he realized that the rhythm of the machine had changed again. The drive was whirring steadily now, without variation. This could signify only one thing: the logic board was repeating itself.

Another memory leak.

He was being tested by God.

Before he pulled the plug from the wall he took a short break to rest back in his chair. He might have dozed. When he came to, his glass was on its side and a puddle of bourbon was spreading. It hadn’t reached the computer yet, but for a moment he thought about allowing it to. At this rate, Seth Kopter would demolish him.

Leaning forward in his chair, he touched his finger to the liquid. He made the lake first: Georgian Bay; then Saginaw Bay and the North Channel. Then the crescent where Cheboygan sloped in a half-moon to the water. With the tip of his pinkie he placed a drop where his old woods ran. For a moment, he nearly dozed again.

Then he wiped what he could off the edge of the blotter into the glass and leaned down to lick up what remained.

—

IT WAS WHEN he woke sometime later in the night, his head still on the desk, that he realized what had disturbed his sleep: the TI-120 had gone quiet. He looked up. The blaze on the screen had been extinguished to a single green ember, blinking calmly at the top. Something glowed steadily alongside it. He leaned forward.

A number.

He copied it out to twenty-one places and checked it the old way.

Annabelle answered the phone in a woozy voice. “Milo,” she said. “Look at the clock on the wall. Tell me what time it is.”

He took a breath. “It worked,” he whispered.

A DAY WAS a week now. A day was a month.

The Abendroth would be solved — of this fact there was no longer doubt.

In the morning he opened the door to his office. He closed it. The light grew. Faded. He opened it. Closed it. A week. Another week. Sleep was interruption. The energy of his mind was focused parabolically by the logic board, compressed to a scalding yellow dot like the pea-sized sun that had branded the whittled trinkets of his childhood. The TI-120 incinerated everything it touched. The numbers. The multivariable plots. The curve geometry. It burned and burned.

—

“MILO,” HAY SAID. “A computer’s nothing but a tool. Without proper direction, the tool would be useless. Completely useless.”

They were in a back booth at Clip’s again. This time, the outing had been Hay’s idea. “But I’ve decided you were right about something else,” he went on. He cleared his throat. “I’m going to buy machines for everyone in the department, Milo. Good ones.” He sipped his drink. “Like the one in your office.”

“What? When were you in my office?”

“I was walking by. Where’d you get that thing, anyway? I can’t even tell what model it is.”

“What were you doing in my office?”

“Dennis was in there, Milo. I happened to look in. I was up there to see one of your colleagues. That’s a powerful-looking specimen you’ve got in there.”

“Who the hell is Dennis?”

“The janitor, Milo. Dennis Alberts. He’s been around Fine Hall longer than you have.”

“Why was the door open?”

“I already told you, Dennis was in there.”

“You came into my office when I wasn’t there?”

“The door was open. I looked in to say hello.”

“What janitor?”

“Are you kidding me, Milo? Let’s not do this, please.”

“What janitor?”

“Dennis Alberts, Milo. The Fine Hall janitor. I just told you.”