Ethan Canin - A Doubter's Almanac

“No, sir, I don’t.”

“Suffice it to say—” Now he removed his glasses. “Suffice it to say, I see a great deal of potential in you.” He looked up. “This is a name, gentlemen — Milo Andret — that you’ll all be wise to remember.”

There was some coughing. Then silence. Milo could discern little meaning from it. Almost a decade before, as a freshman at Michigan State, he’d earned a perfect score in linear algebra, better than all of the graduate students in the class, without doing a single evening of homework. But for the five years since his degree, he’d been working at a Gulf station in Lansing.

“Young man,” said Dr. Borland, “your qualification exam was remarkable.” He removed his glasses and peered down at him. “Truly remarkable.”

Milo was silent. He’d had a smattering of Cs in the humanities and one D, in sociology.

“And you spent your twenties working in a filling station?”

“It was a service station, really. I did plenty of engine work. I wanted to get a little experience.” His father had suggested he might be asked such a question.

“Well, you’ve had an exceptional, if not a bit erratic, record in college,” Professor Borland said. “Let us hope the experience has matured you.” He quieted the murmuring. “Let us also hope that we haven’t wasted too much time in finding you. I’m sure you’ll fit in very well with the mathematics program at the University of California, Berkeley. Which we consider, by the way”—here he snapped away his gaze—“to be the best on the planet.”

IN GRADUATE SCHOOL, Dr. Borland was assigned as his adviser. At the time, Hans Borland was the most famous mathematician in the country. His office was the size of a living room, its walls cut by a band of California sunlight that flamed the plaster and jeweled the long, floral-patterned Persian carpet on the floor, as though real flower petals had been sewn into the wool. Milo had never seen colonial furniture. Nor glass-fronted bookshelves with beveled panes. Against the spines of the professor’s books, the light fanned itself into straight-sided rainbows. A long window framed the perfect green grass below the bell tower, and in the distance, under high clouds, the bay shimmered like a sheet of mercury.

The man himself was distinguished in every way. A pressed shirt striped in contrary nap and a thrust-knotted tie. The stately trifocals. He seemed to have aged since the interview, though, and he wandered tensely about the room as he spoke — table to window, window back to table — as if trying to dispel a physical urge. In a carved bow-backed chair in the center of the rug, Milo sat warily.

“I could do the same thing myself, you know,” Borland was saying, lowering himself finally into the chair behind the desk. “Once could, at least. I recognized you immediately.”

“You recognized me ?”

“As myself, you know. You —a young Hans Borland.”

“Well — thank you, Professor.”

“The way we both have of locating ourselves in the world. It’s a rare thing to witness.” Once he was seated, his movements seemed to liquefy. “And two lefties, on top of it all.” He lifted that hand, and with the other one reached across the desk to proffer a stoppered decanter. “Dry sherry?”

“No, no. No thank you.”

The professor poured a glass for himself, then pulled a sheaf of folders from a drawer and waved them over the blotter. “We turned down several hundred applicants with better records than yours, I should add. From far-better departments, too, obviously.” He tilted the sherry to his lips, closing his eyes. “Why? Because I had the feeling we should take a gamble on you, Mr. Andret.” The eyes opened and found their way over the lip of the crystal. “I’ll lay it on the line, young man: your exam was remarkable. Probably the best I’ve ever seen. No, certainly the best. I glimpse the possibility of greatness in you, Andret. My father was a chemistry teacher, too, you know, just like yours. Were you aware of that? East Scranton High School. What do you know about topology?”

Milo felt heat on his cheeks. “Professor?”

“What do you know about the field of topology?”

“I’ve read some Fréchet. And maybe some Euler. And a little Hausdorff.”

Borland stared at him. “That’s like an English Ph.D. saying he’s read some Shakespeare and a little Melville, and maybe a bit of Tolstoy.”

Milo flushed.

“And what did you learn from your little bit of Hausdorff?”

“I suppose I haven’t read it carefully enough, Professor.”

“That’s right, you haven’t.” The old man swept the folders back across his desk. “But let me tell you something — topology is your future, young man. I’ll have my secretary put a reading list in your box. Go home and study it.”

—

CALIFORNIA. IT SWEPT him in. The drums in the parks. The racks of clothes for sale on the street corners. The ocean light billowing all the time in the sky like a sheet snapping on a line.

In North Oakland he found an apartment. A basement flat lit by two windows high apart on the wall, through which the constant milling commerce of Grove Street cast its shadows. A clicking stampede of pants and skirts and boots and heels that jettisoned cigarettes and coffee cups and sandwich wrappers at all hours of the day and night. Every morning he lifted the glass and cleared away what had gathered in the wells. The caretaker of a filthy, fishless aquarium. Yet at the same time there was an aspect to the outlook that was akin to the maple and beech forest of his childhood. The sense of a constrained world that nonetheless suggested a borderless one. His first weeks, he spent hours staring through the high frames of glass. Constant sameness. Constant newness. The swift legs of pedestrians scissoring a wobbling flame of sun.

It was a way to think.

He’d had a rocky start in the department. He was still drawn to numbers, of course. This part was unwavering. Number theory. The charismatic singularity of primes and semi-primes. The inevitability of numeric functions and their astounding analytic capture of the world — the V-shaped cadres of flying geese he’d watched as a boy, the fragmenting clouds yielding to disorder high above the two glass-paned graphs through which he now gazed hour upon hour. It was as though the numerals had been expressly fabricated, like more-perfect words, to elucidate the details of creation. He wanted to say this to someone. Instead, he sat in his thrift-store chair and watched the passing legs: steps, random crossings, the probability of flows. Mathematics not only described it all but could in large terms predict it. In his bed sometimes he wondered absently if it could be developed to alter it.

He was interested in other fields besides topology. Commutative algebra, for one: the work of Gauss and Cayley and Lasker. But whenever he spoke with Hans Borland about it, the old man seemed irritated.

“Topology’s the one for you, Andret,” the professor said brusquely, the next time they met. “I guarantee it. Forget algebra. Forget Gauss. Lasker was just a chess player with airs. Topology’s a perfect suit to your gifts, man. That sense we both have of the world. The rest’s a waste of your time.” He exhaled tiredly. “And talent.” A glass of sherry stood on the polished desk. He raised his left hand again, dramatically, as though it affirmed his conclusion. “Should have been a topologist myself.”

“You still can be, Professor.”

“A wasted thought.” He sipped from the narrow glass, then set it down carefully, as if balancing an egg. “Have you read Bott and Kuratowski and the rest on the list?”