Ethan Canin - A Doubter's Almanac

—

THAT NIGHT, HE went downtown by himself. Old Cheboygan. The boat slips empty for winter. Hardly a car on the streets. He parked along the channel and went into a deserted bar, where he took a place at the window and watched a Coast Guard vessel push slowly up the seaway. A low-transomed stalwart with rigging like a Christmas tree. Its crew hustled around the deck as it edged to a halt across the channel and slipped sideways into berth. From the tops of the gantry cranes, the sodium lamps snapped on. More men were onshore, moving around in the sudden brightness, shouting into walkie-talkies and steering the ramps.

He could have been part of some endeavor like that. His father had spent five years in the navy and then forty in the public schools. His mother had gone off every day to her work at the county seat. Now he’d spent his own life in solitary chase of something he would never reach.

In the dark entranceway of the bar he pulled out his wallet. The old card was still folded in behind his license. He dropped a fistful of change into the phone. She recognized his voice immediately. It heartened him.

“I’m watching a ship tie up in the dark right now,” he said. “A huge one. It’s all lit up. It’s beautiful.”

She failed to understand. “Yes?”

“Like a constellation. Like the one we saw in Sioux City.”

Silence. Maybe he’d made a mistake.

“On the Missouri, Cle — don’t you remember?”

“You’ve failed at something.”

“What?”

“I can hear it, Milo. What happened? Was it the proof?”

“Yes.” Then, “I was just a few weeks away.”

“Oh — I’m sorry.”

Another silence.

“I need you,” he said.

“Of course you don’t.”

“You believed in me.”

“Everyone did. Everyone still does.”

“No. Only Borland and Hay. And you .”

“Well, Hans Borland would tell you to get right back to work, wouldn’t he?”

She was right.

“And what about that girl you brought to dinner? Where’s she?”

He didn’t answer.

“Well, I’m sorry to hear it. But I can’t help you, Milo. I’d like to, but I can’t. You have to go home and start again. I know you can do it. Life goes on.”

Across the channel, a skid loader climbed down the ramp with a pallet in its stays. Then the lights snapped off again and the ship became a gray ghost against the night. The phone clicked, but he had no more change. Just before it disconnected, he said, “What makes you think I can do it?”

—

HIS MIND WAS a paper bag that had been turned upside down and shaken.

The next day, he went out behind his parents’ house for a walk. Along the edge of the coverts, he climbed a low hill and followed the line of giant birches that ran at the top of the crest. They were dropping long curls of bark now, like old theater lobbies giving up their wallpaper. When they finally fell — in a year or two, in ten — the aspens below would shoot up, consuming their old masters in a single season, as though with teeth.

Nonetheless, his old forest had hardly changed. Not a leaf was different because of the Abendroth.

He followed the gentle rise of the hill. Due east ten steps from the tenth trunk in the tenth row, but a few inches below the level of his chest now — it was he who had grown — he found the maple. It was the same, too. The star still there, a pale keloid in the dysplastic craze of bark. He rotated the notched bung and released the dovetail. At the bottom, the cavity was dry and the sack lay closed as though it had spent all this time at the rear of a sock drawer.

He hoisted it up and carefully pulled out the chain.

Years in the dark but no apparent harm. In long armfuls he laid it out along the ground, understanding for the first time what Mr. Farragut must have felt a quarter century before when it was set on his desk by a kid in first-semester shop. He’d been that kid. He’d sanded every inch in circumference, shellacked every link in isolation. Now the whole thing chimed like a woodwind as he spread it out on the frozen bed of peat. The sheer magnitude of the undertaking stunned him. Since then, he’d done nothing to approach it. Not even the Malosz, whose solution, he sometimes thought darkly, had involved a piece of pure luck — luck that had come to him in these very same woods.

He gathered its length back into the sack, checking each link in his hands. Not a single one was flawed. His memory failed, but the intricacy of the design must have taken months. He might have thought years. This was something in his character, too. It had been there as a boy.

Now it had departed.

Why was it no longer possible to follow a thought toward anything but torment? Night suddenly closed over the trees, and he realized he’d forgotten a flashlight. An owl called out, and after a pause, its babies commenced their chatter. He pushed closed the burlap. Then he set out for home. In a gulley his foot slipped on a root and he sat heavily on the ground, the sack splaying out before him. A shout escaped. The owls quieted, and he lay back in the sudden hush. It was not unpleasant, actually, to rest there in the quiet and feel the winter earth below him, just beginning to thaw. He dug his hands into the leaves and smelled the vinegary ferment. He’d spent countless hours in these woods with no thought of anything but their welcome. He lay there quietly, waiting for the owls to resume, until he understood that tears were on his face.

It was necessary to find a way forward. But how? What would he do now?

BACK IN HIS apartment in Princeton, he shook out his briefcase and rummaged through the drawers in his study, then went to the bedroom closet and turned out the pockets of his suits, pulling out matted scraps of paper until he came to what he was looking for.

The next afternoon, Dr. William Brink leaned back in a creaking wood rocker and let the knees of his pants show above the desktop. “And how may I be of help, Dr. Andret?”

“I need something.”

“Yes? Something of which type?” The chair-front came down with a rattle. “Aid and comfort of a psychological nature?”

“No.”

“Something more rapid?”

“I’m seeing things.”

“Seeing things?”

“Things that aren’t there, Doctor. Crazy, multiplicative geometries. I’m a mathematician, you know.”

“Of course, I know that, Dr. Andret.” Dr. Brink bowed his head courteously. “I know that very well. And by any chance are you hearing things, also?”

“No.”

Brink gazed steadily across the desk at him. “And you wish to speak to me in detail about all of this? It’s a bit unusual. It must be frightening.”

“No, I don’t. I don’t want to talk about any of it. I just want something to take care of it.”

“Ah. Something quick and efficient, then?”

“That’s right.”

He could tell that Dr. Brink understood.

—

“WHAT ARE YOU swallowing there?” Olga Petrinova said, raising her head from the pillow.

Andret looked down at the bottle. “I have no idea. All I know is that it works.”

She turned lazily in the bed. After sex, she’d slipped back into the union suit, which despite its lacy bands gave her the appearance now of a Soviet factory worker rising for a night-shift. Andret was in the kitchen looking for something reasonable to wash down a pill with. On his first run through the cabinets, all he’d found was red wine. He didn’t like her watching him.

“What?” he said.

“You should be careful with that.”

“It’s nothing to be careful about.” He shook a couple of them onto his palm. “You should heat your apartment.”