Ethan Canin - A Doubter's Almanac

“It’s Kopter,” Hay said, holding out the envelope. “He appears to have found a proof.”

—

THE MATRONLY OLD bartender at Clip’s stopped in front of him. “Safe to say,” she said, wiping at the counter, “that you’re the only one in here reading a math article.”

He’d asked her to leave his empties before him. The cut edges of the glasses were projecting stellate tessellations across the mahogany. He tilted one, and its rays shifted errorlessly along the matrix of prisms. Nature never broke its own laws. Every piece of code was encyclopedized within every atom of creation. And all of it was merely waiting. A pretty girl tapping her boot on the barstool while the cripple plans his heartfelt words. That was what he was — the cripple, deluded by a single kindly glance. A life devoted to an anachronistic dream of glory. A long-rotten version of the hunt. Even after the lamp at the cash register had warped in his eyes to a hazy oblong of yellow — this, too, was exactly explicable — he was unable to drive from his mind the fact that he’d taken a public beating at the hands of a fourteen-year-old boy.

Seth Kopter had used an entirely different method. He’d probably not even known about Andret’s papers. And he’d made much better use of the computer.

“Keep my tab open, would you?” He slid off the stool toward the men’s room.

“Of course, sweetheart.”

He himself had probably been no more than a month away.

IN CHICAGO, THE long winter’s chain of filthy ice still crowded the lakefront. A crazed castle moat of gray-white flotsam stretching east a quarter mile from shore, heaving steadily in the wind. The waves lifted and settled the fractured sheet in slow rhythm, like a housemaid endlessly shaking out a tablecloth. He’d been waiting at O’Hare for his connection to Cheboygan but had taken a cab to the lake instead. What did it matter what he did now?

He walked from the pier to the waterline and set his foot on one of the slabs of ice. It was as long as a tennis court and rested half on the sand and half in the shallows, its surface pocked with sooty flecks from the traffic roaring behind him. When he stepped up onto the mass of it, it didn’t even acknowledge his weight. And why should it? He moved out a few strides. Through his wing tips he could feel the knock of the current. When the wedges farther out on the lake struck one another, his feet vibrated. He walked forward until he reached the seam — a zigzag of black, bobbing with cigarette butts and seaweed. The north wind was frigid, and with all the buildings to the rear of him the screeches from the deeper floes seemed to be trumpeting out from the shore.

When he looked up finally, there was a woman sitting on the pier. He pulled his coat tighter and leaped across the break onto the next floe, where he turned to wave. She made no response. But he could see her watching him. So he went farther, jumping the next break and then the next until he was a good part of the pier’s length out from shore. The block he stood on now wasn’t half as big as the first but still hunkered below him like a driveway. He tried to smile at her, but in the cold he wasn’t sure if his lips had moved. She was too far away to see, anyway. He would have liked to begin a conversation. A conversation with a woman.

She turned away.

He was irrelevant.

The Abendroth was irrelevant.

Even the Malosz was irrelevant.

There was nothing, in fact, that was not irrelevant.

The truth of all of this could easily have brought him to his knees but instead produced a laugh — a short, low eruption that escaped his mouth and went to the ice like a wrench slipping from his frozen fingers. Out he went, deeper. Nothing he could ever do would elucidate even the most negligible force within a single atom. Let alone alter it. God was not the explanation of these things but merely a gripe with the puzzle of them.

The block that he was standing on now was pitched at greater depth but still touched the bottom, its prow parting the water like a boat anchored against the tide. At its front edge, the current made a hiss. But when he crossed to the next piece, his footing suddenly tilted: he was afloat now. His weight rocked, a gentle rhythm that he countered with his hips as he watched it occur in staggered delay over the whole field of jigsawed white. A molecule in the sea. An iota. That’s all he was. He’d spent the good part of his life angling for a single glance at nature’s scriptural code and yet was at every moment nothing more than an abject slave to its billions of unnamed postulates. That was the joke.

It was in his nature to get jokes late.

A long-remembered sensation came back then: the pleasure of his cold breath. The whole calm of winter. The traffic behind him was bellowing, but out here the sound was swallowed by the ice. This was a world that had existed alongside him all the time. He’d been the one to forsake it.

He turned to the pier and saw the woman still sitting there. She was watching him warily now, her expression a warning.

It’s tragic how one can be saved. That’s what he would think, many years later, when his only son asked him for advice. He waved at the woman, but again she made no response. Now, at least, he was in on the joke. When she rose and walked toward the street, he crossed back to shore himself, attempting to whistle but in fact making no sound at all that was discernible over the rush of cars.

—

THE NEXT DAY, a Greyhound took him the rest of the way to Cheboygan. Two stops and a change of buses. By the time he arrived, the sun was a good way down over the water. Across the street from the depot, the general store still displayed its tilting stack of sale wares — brightly colored garbage cans and the same repainted row of forest-green Adirondacks that had been advertising themselves on the day he’d boarded the bus for East Lansing, twenty years before. Hardly a detail had changed. Fertilizer bags. Shovels and trowels. A rope-tied pile of three-colored swim buoys. He stepped down and looked around. The cast of light off the lake. The sun’s late-afternoon habit of seeming to shine up from the water rather than down from the sky. A tinge of iron on the breeze.

Mrs. Fredericks still drove the Brown’s Cab.

At the door of his childhood house, he knocked.

Nothing. He realized he hadn’t spoken to either of his parents since the Fields Medal. He knocked again.

Finally, the familiar dot-dash shuffle of his mother’s slippers from the hallway near the kitchen.

“Lord,” she said, scratching her head. “Look who’s home.”

—

WHEN HE ENTERED the back study, his father looked up from his reading chair, waved cheerfully, and returned to reading. From the door behind him, his mother said, “See?”

Back in the kitchen, Milo said, “That’s how he’s always been.” He took his place at the table while she refilled her martini from a shaker.

“Are you kidding? I’m not even sure he knows you left.”

“I left two decades ago, Mom.”

“Well, go ask him if he remembers.” She sniffed. “Top’s come a little loose on the screws jar.”

She set the shaker on the table and took a seat. Then she directed her gaze to the newspaper for a moment and pretended to be reading. Her tears were like the condensation on a glass of water. He looked away.

He poured a martini for himself. “My compliments on the recipe,” he said.

“Thank you.” She sipped. “While pouring the gin, dear, I thought briefly of the vermouth.”

They sat there. The sun went behind the trees, dousing the kitchen in a last spray of northern light that made his eyes feel sharp.

After a time, he said, “Do you think I can ever love anyone?”