Ethan Canin - A Doubter's Almanac

I understood suddenly that his misshapen intellect had narrowed the world to a deadened, claustrophobic slit; that it had given him a past far greater than his present or future; and that in such afflictions he was somehow already akin to this filthy one-sleeved man whose head nodded from side to side as he stared into the neck of a bottle, as though reading something in there. Through the chain-link fence at the perimeter, I watched him with concentration, the way a previous version of myself might have solved an inverse Fourier transform or a tricky contour integral. The MDA filled me with benevolence and a sort of microscopic, retrospective, emotional savantism. I might have even been feeling forgiveness — who knows? For hours on end, I could just stare.

I should add that I turned out to have a rather superhuman capacity for my chosen empathogenic amphetamine. Some of my friends were in pretty good condition themselves; they rolled two or three times a week. This took stamina.

Not knowing any better, I rolled every single day.

I suffered none of the comedown. None of the follow-on depression. None of the dried-out lethargy or achy misgiving that I’ve heard about a hundred times since. As soon as I began descending from one high, I began thinking about the next. Years later, in fact, when I chronicled my adolescent habits to a high-paid substance-abuse counselor during my intake interview at a place called Stillwater Farms, he looked up from his notepad and said, “Wow, you must have a very unusual brain chemistry.”

The problem, though, was that it was not unusual enough . Two months later, on my second-semester final exam in Fourier analysis, I got my first grade lower than an A.

It was an F.

—

IN PEOPLE LIKE us, the craving is as strong as the craving for food or water, the yearning for touch or light or love. I was looking for something — a diversion, an occupation, an unwavering force — that would elevate me, that would lift me out of the melancholy dissection of my own interior geography that otherwise would have consumed me pitilessly, as it had my father. I wanted to fly above myself — if only for a few hours — and look down in tranquillity upon my life.

I’m an addict. I’m told I always will be.

THEN, JUST AS I was ejecting myself from the flame-spewing launch of my own blazing mathematical career, my father decided to rededicate himself to the dying embers of his old and desiccated one. For as long as I’d been alive, he’d been teaching his subject and going to his dismal faculty meetings at Fabricus, recycling his hoary tests and quizzes, and perfunctorily assigning the lowly semester grades that in time would keep his students out of veterinary schools and pharmacy schools and nursing schools across the Midwest; but in all the years that I’d been even marginally aware of his life — and though I’d always been cognizant of his early renown — I’d never known my father to engage in any of his own research.

I’d gone with him many times to his office at the college. It was on the top floor of the sciences building, at the end of a short corridor that housed a single physicist and the three members of his own department. His name, typeset in white on a rectangle of brown plastic, was screwed to the door. Inside, a small steel desk stood below a faded wall calendar that read, for the whole length of my childhood, GO WOOD DUCKS! — MARCH 1984. Next to the desk was a blackboard, but in none of my visits had I ever seen anything written on it. In fact, I’d encountered absolutely no evidence in that tiny room of anyone actually thinking about the field of mathematics. There wasn’t even chalk in the chalk holder.

Somehow, the fact of this had never puzzled me.

Now, though, upstairs in our house, Dad established a work space. One afternoon not long after I’d witnessed his final drink, he pulled into the driveway with the rear door of the Country Squire propped open. He wedged out a wooden door and a pair of old metal filing cabinets, then lugged them up to the guest room, where he set the filing cabinets a few feet apart on the floor and laid the door between them. A desk. On it he placed a Tensor lamp, a coffee cup filled with pencils, a half-dozen pads of paper, and a bowl of caramels wrapped in cellophane. On the carpet below it he lined up three cardboard boxes, which closed with tight-fitting tops. On the first one he printed the word RIGHT; on the second WRONG; and on the last ??.

Then he sat down to work.

I’d never seen him do anything like this before. In all the time I’d known him, his job had been something he drove off to in the morning and returned from in the midafternoon, sucking on a cigarette and reaching for a drink (or for another drink, I realized later). But now, as soon as he got home, he went upstairs to his desk, where he sat until dinnertime. The door was usually closed, but now and then he left it open, and on those days I would stand in the hall and watch him. His back was to me, and his head was bent so low over the paper that I could see the vertebrae on his neck. Every few minutes he might straighten a little and make a mark with a pencil, or sometimes a small drawing, and every once in a while he would tear a sheet from the pad, glance at what he’d written on it, and, reaching below the desk, assign it to one of his three categories. Of course I was dreadfully curious about what he was putting into each of those boxes.

Yet, somehow, even then, I understood that I would never allow myself to open them.

Perhaps this was because, despite the turn my life had taken, I, too, was already a mathematician. Not that I would ever have claimed to be. Not even — strange as this may sound — that I had so much as thought of myself as one at any time during my short existence, despite my obvious precocity and my deep love for the subject. My life was still nothing more than the world that had presented itself to me. And what had presented itself in the recent months seemed no more significant to my future than what I had experienced for all the years before. (I realize now that I wasn’t even sufficiently curious about my own psychological nature to know that I lacked psychological curiosity.) During that time, I was rolling pretty much every weekday afternoon, and on the weekends I was doing it four or five times.

To be fair, I might have been somewhat more aware of my father than most kids my age — if only because of his inturned but nonetheless imposing personality, or perhaps because I’d twice nearly witnessed his death — but I still had not yet reached cognizance of the very basic idea that he, Milo Andret, was a human being in his own right, that he was separate from me .

That he’d pursued his own ambitions, for example. That he still harbored them, even. That he’d endured his own failings, too. That he was living a life, which included my sister and my mother and me, that might not have been the one he would have chosen.

And being almost entirely unaware of him as a person, I was almost entirely unaware of myself as well. (My wife believes this to be a marker of the Andret family line.) Yet I somehow knew enough about him — because I somehow also knew enough about myself — to understand that his uncompleted thoughts were the lifeblood of his being. This was why I stayed away from those boxes. His thoughts were the ship on whose prow he stationed himself while the ice-strewn seas leaped and dived below. They were matters of calculatedly outrageous assumption, elephantine diligence, missilelike prophecy, and an unending, unruly wager regarding their eventual worth; they were going to be attacked with branching, incremental logic, and met after months of toil — if not after years of it — by either the maniacal astonishment of discovery or by the shame-tipped dart of folly. The fact of all of this was like genetic information inside me. I knew it even as a teenager. I knew it even as a teenager on a substituted, entactogenic amphetamine. I had probably known it as a child. And I knew equally well that the risk of the toil he now began performing every day upstairs in his new office, despite the apparent risklessness of his quotidian life, might at any time overwhelm him, even more so in his fragile state. I knew that these mortal risks were hidden away each evening, that they were held at bay till the following afternoon by the cardboard tops that he placed over his boxes.