Ethan Canin - A Doubter's Almanac

Forty-five minutes remained, and I’d finished. When I looked up, I could see that every other kid in the room was still working, even the ones who loved math. The boy next to me in the tie was five pages back. I set down my pencil and lifted my arm. In front of me I held it out straight. Slowly, as I tensed it there, it grew heavy. Eventually, it began to shake. By concentrating, I turned the shaking into a tremor. Around the room, a few heads came up. When enough people were looking, I willed the tremor to increase, and somehow it did. For a minute or two, my hand shook as though an electric current were flowing into it. Abruptly, I stopped it. I lowered my hand, picked up my pencil, and darkened the oval next to the letter B. Then I stood, sauntered to the front of the room, and turned in my test.

—

THE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON, I left school at lunchtime and walked by myself down to the Greenway Shopping Center, where I leaned against the telephone booth in front of Buckeye Spirits. Hardly a minute had passed before a rusted old Datsun pulled up at a slant and a coughing middle-aged woman struggled out from the driver’s door with a cigarette in her mouth. She left the engine running and moved toward the entrance in the kind of forward-leaning gait that I recognized. It was 12:35 in the afternoon.

I pulled my baseball cap down over my eyes. “I’ll pay for yours, ma’am,” I said, “if you’ll buy me mine.”

—

THAT EVENING IN his room, Dad was skittish again. His eyes went from the curtains to the ceiling, from the ceiling to me, from me to the door. “How’d it go?” he said.

“How’d what go?”

His fingers worked the sheets. “The test, Hans. How was the state test? Mom told me you went to Dayton.”

“Oh, yeah. Fine. Some of the kids had flashcards.”

He smiled. “Flashcards?”

“Yeah.”

We both laughed.

My gift for him was still back in the closet of my room, hidden in a grocery bag behind a pile of shoes. I’d decided to present it to him in the morning, when his mood would be better. He always became agitated after dusk, but every morning he emerged from bed fresh and strangely buoyant. Now as I stood before him, he grew quiet. After a time, a cloud crossed his features. He looked, for some reason, terribly sad.

“Dad?”

That’s when his gaze abruptly dropped. His presence — whatever presence defines a human being — just disappeared. A moment later, the room stank of urine.

“Fuck you, Dad.”

He didn’t seem to hear me.

At the start, there was just a high-pitched grunt, then a single fierce jerk that flipped him over onto his side, as though someone had violently upended the bed. For a moment, he was still; then suddenly his arms were yanked behind him. It looked like a policeman was trying to force him into handcuffs but that Dad was resisting. His shoulders were pinned back, but he jutted his chest and then began ratcheting in a circle, driving forward his hips and wrenching himself around the mattress like a gearwheel. His teeth were clenched, and his legs caught in the sheets, then ripped through them. Now he was jerking all over. His head was at the bottom of the bed, and when it hit the footboards I reached over and cradled it in my hands. The skin was on fire. I tried to hold him steady, but his feet kicked everything off the table, then kept kicking the table until it fell over, then kicked at the air. The lamp smashed against the wall, and his shins were smeared with blood.

Then, just as suddenly, he was still. He curled up on his side, blinking.

I pushed a pillow under his head. “Dad?”

His color was returning, but still he made no sound. At last came a low gasp, then a short, ugly bark as he vomited. A moment later, I smelled the stench of his bowels.

It was only then that I shouted for my mother.

—

MOM HAD PILLS. Pills she’d kept on hand for some time, apparently. That evening, she gave him the first of them. She was a kind woman, my mother, forgiving to a fault; but she was also vexed for a good part of her life by a loyalty and a hampering self-consciousness that could seem like a prison. It was this self-consciousness, I think, that stopped her from calling the doctor. I’m fairly sure she understood what had happened, but instead of sending him for treatment, she treated him herself. With an old bottle of tranquilizers that she told me she’d found in his drawer. Before sleep that night, she gave him another.

I believe she was ashamed.

The medicine took him through until morning, and when I woke the next day I went in directly to see him. He was still alive. In fact, he appeared to have been restored almost to normal, sitting upright against the headboard reading his copy of The Nation . The agreeable smell of his cologne once again filled the room.

“Hans,” he said without looking up, “your mother tells me you helped me out yesterday.” He flipped a page. “Thank you.”

“Are you feeling better?”

“I’m fine. A little slow, maybe.” He rubbed his neck. “A little sore, too. But I’ve taken something for it.”

I stood next to the bed. I could hear my mother downstairs, speaking in a low voice with Paulette.

When I pulled the bag from behind my back and placed it on the mattress, he set aside his reading. A tentative, quivering crease appeared on his face. He touched the brown paper, and the crease spread across his features until it ran all the way from his darkly scabbed lips to the haggard-looking corners of his eyes. “Oh, God,” he whispered. “You figured it out, didn’t you?”

“I did, Dad.”

He pulled out the neck of one of the bottles and turned it to read the label. “Hennessy?” He set it back in and pulled out the next one. “All of these are Cognac ?”

“The woman at the store must have misheard me.”

A look of puzzlement, then of what I might call a thoughtfully considered determination, crossed his features. “That’s fine, Hans,” he whispered. “It’ll do.”

He shifted his features into a full-out smile then that twitched just faintly at the ends. I don’t think my father had ever looked upon me — or has looked upon me since — with such thoroughly felt gratitude. “Oh, Hans,” he said. “This is perfect. Thank you.” He took my hand and squeezed it. “I knew I could count on you to understand.”

—

WHEN I LOOK at my own children now, by the way, it would be Niels who would have understood. Niels who would have gotten me what I needed. This in itself is an intelligence, as poorly explained as any other.

What is brilliance, anyway? The great Indian autodidact Srinivasa Ramanujan derived many of the foundational theorems of mathematics while lounging on the steps of a dilapidated hut in Tamil Nadu. As a boy, he mastered Bernoulli numbers and Euler’s natural logs. Then, when he finally found his way to university, he failed miserably at every single course that wasn’t mathematics. What can one say about this? That brilliance is just an obsessive kind of love?

A man like Ramanujan looked only at what it pleased him to look at. As do most of us, I think. Einstein once said that God is subtle but not malicious, and I have to agree: success in mathematics is in good part a question of merely wanting badly enough to look. To look inside the mind, I should add — for that is where the field, like a pinhole camera, has thrown the universe, perhaps even backward and upside down. The actual sharpness of one’s vision might even be secondary to the mere love of looking. Ramanujan’s ardor, coupled with a faith in the absolute knowability of it all: those are the keys. Dawkins once said that he opposed religion mainly because it taught us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.