Ethan Canin - A Doubter's Almanac

I understood, even at the age I was then, and even in my newly altered condition, that the work was to be hallowed.

I would come upon this revelation again, just a few years later, when I was a graduate student myself in mathematics and making my own initial forays into a dissertation. (No, I never finished.) The dissertation I’d embarked upon involved Shores-Durban partial differential equations, which — at the time, at least — were still a relatively ignored branch of probability theory. They were ignored, I quickly discovered, because they were so goddamn baffling, even for a mathematician. And yet at sixteen years old, which was the age I was when I began my research, I set out to master them. Not only to master what was already known about them, but to develop their conclusions further than they’d ever been developed, by some of the most prominent mathematicians of the century. I was standing on the shoulders — really, I was attempting to jump off the shoulders — of Bachelier, Osborne, Black and Scholes, and the great Benoit Mandelbrot.

By then, I was living full-time in Columbus, in a moldy-smelling, subterranean two-bedroom apartment that I shared with a couple of OSU undergraduates majoring in sports communication and sports psychology. The place was as clean as you’d expect such a place to be. My bedroom doubled as the living room, which opened through a front door into the public hall of the building. Although everything else in my quarters, from my sleeping bag on the floor to my clothing tossed in either the clean pile or the dirty pile, reflected the adolescent disarray of my life, I nonetheless kept my desk elegantly bare — just the cup, the paper, and the bowl of wrapped caramels — in order to focus my thinking. And I kept the three boxes near at hand, in order to archive it. Of course, I kept them closed.

I can’t say whether this arrangement was an imitation of my father or simply the exact piece inside my own brain of whatever was exactly inside his. Every night of my graduate-school career, I would gather up my notes and calculations, date them, and lay them neatly in either the RIGHT box, the WRONG box, or the ??box, just as I’d watched Dad do. The tops fit snugly. Closing them was like putting my children to sleep for the night.

Before long, my roommates had begun referring to them as “the bank vaults.”

Whenever my roommates returned to the apartment on a Friday or Saturday night, in fact — usually accompanied by a pair of girls who smelled of the sugary margarita mix that was dispensed in sixteen-ounce cups all across the campus — they had to pass behind my desk to get to their bedrooms. They’d find me at my seat, of course, headphones over my ears, working away on my Shores-Durbans (or on the undergraduate math homework that I corrected for my official university job and also completed — locum tenens — for Sigma Chi and the Phi Delts). With good-natured shrugs they’d say hello to me and introduce me to the girls they’d talked into coming home with them. I wasn’t a complete dork: I knew what they were doing. I knew that I was an oddity, a conversation piece that subtly aided their cause. I watched them maneuver their prey toward the next set of doors, which were the all-important ones. While doing so, they invariably interrupted my mathematics, at which point they’d slap me on the shoulder and pretend to stumble toward the boxes or to accidentally knock off one of the tops as they walked past. My roommates were decent guys, but they were in their twenties already, and though I was a long way ahead of them in my studies, I was still, socially, their public ward. For my own part, I generally enjoyed the arrangement. In answer to their questions, I’d offer something without irony about my day’s work, using a term like group cohomology or a name like de la Vallée Poussin, as though they’d understand the inferences. They’d nod. The two of them wanted the girls to see them as protective, kind to the lame, and, although it might not have been apparent an hour before at the margarita bowl, wickedly smart.

“Hans, my man,” one of them might say, ruffling my hair or flipping through an equation-filled tract on my desk. “What’d you put into the bank vaults today?”

Their dates would smile — even when intoxicated, OSU girls could be counted upon to pet a dog or greet a child — and after the bedroom doors closed I would hear their gentle, muffled giggles, like kittens inside a box.

—

I DIDN’T KNOW what my father was working on. I assumed it was something new. His field — birthed in the eighteenth century by my namesake Leonhard Euler and his epochal curiosity about the Bridges of Königsberg — saw many advances in those years, from holomorphic dynamics to directed algebraic topology. My father liked to draw, and he liked to reason with pictures. From various clues, I believe he was working on the analogies between noncommutative algebras and knots.

One Sunday not long after he’d set up his desk, I wandered upstairs in the early afternoon and found the door open and Dad already sitting in his chair. When I saw him hunched there, I was seized with a particular hunger to know exactly what he was thinking. I’d already spent an hour with my friends at the Ford plant; but we’d been doing yop that week — the powder form instead of tablets — and the dose hadn’t exactly been clear. In those days, I was in the throes of a particularly gargantuan run, and as I entered the upstairs study I found myself on a rope that had been winched to a quivering tension. If I moved to one end of it, I could see a number of colors in the room that hadn’t yet been named. If I moved to the other, I could sense the tangled, adhesive lines of attachment that ran from me to every other human on the globe, Dad included. If I stayed at the midpoint, I could see into his heart. This small room with a desk and three boxes in it became the world. I’d probably taken more than I meant to, judging from the effects, and yet I was aware that my high still hadn’t peaked. When it did, I wanted to be in the spot where I could see the things he’d hidden from me.

He sat leaning forward over a pad, his toes pointed down at the floor. His knees were pulled up, and one fist was bent under his chin, just like the sculpture of Rodin’s Thinker that stood in front of the steps at the Cleveland Museum of Art. (This sculpture, by the way, had been bombed off its pedestal by the Weathermen long before I was born but put right back up by the museum staff without being repaired. As a child, every time I saw the shredded bronze wounds where the explosion had torn the feet from the legs, I thought instantly of my father, for no reason I could then explain.)

He jotted something, then lifted his pencil and continued thinking. I knew not to interrupt. Next to his chair was a tiny sheet of paper that had fallen to the rug. I was pulled toward it.

Without turning, he said, “Hello there, Hans.”

His words pulled me back. Then the lengthening silence pulled me toward the paper again. He was pulling me in and pushing me back with the antipodal magnets of his thoughts.

“What are you thinking about?” he said.

“Not much.”

He reached forward and made a few strokes on the pad. “Then why are you grinding your teeth like that?”

“Am I?”

Without answering, he returned to his calculations. I was forced to relinquish my desire to know him. My attention was stolen once again by the paper, which had begun now to emanate a pale blue light, as though a piece of the sky had fallen through the ceiling into the room. I swung my head until parallax was achieved. Now I was at the near end of the rope again, where the lines on the paper according to their slant and shading emanated the precise meanings of words. The drawing was of a rotating tesseract with thick strokes that showed the anger-riddled affection that my father sometimes expressed toward my mother. It was a cantellated tesseract, and it had been divided scrupulously by the paper itself, which had been folded into eighths and then unfolded before being drawn upon, each octant equally.