Ethan Canin - A Doubter's Almanac

“What?”

“To the car. In the dark. The way he can.”

“Great.”

“Well, can you?”

I looked around. There was no moon. To the east lay black sky; to the west, the distant glow from town. Around us, the faint light attached itself to the silver docks and the tall white cattails but slid off everything else. “It’s night, Paulie. We were walking a long time. There’s no way I can do it. Didn’t he give you a flashlight?”

“ I can,” she said. “ I know how to do it.” She pointed in the direction of the parking lot.

I knew, too, of course. I’d always been able to do exactly what my father could. But instead I said, “Why don’t you lead us, then?”

In the dark now, her eyes were shining. She lowered herself onto the boards again, and I heard the brush of her sandals against the water. “Because I’m the backup,” she said. Then she added, “I’m tired of being the backup.”

“Come on, Paulie. Go ahead.”

“ You have to do it.”

I shook my head. “He’s just trying to make me into a miniature version of himself, Paulie. And you know what? Fuck the great Milo Andret. I’m not turning out like him. No goddamn way.”

Her smile glowed like a cattail.

Twenty minutes later, when we reached the car, she knocked on the front window, and Dad leaned across the seat and opened the back door for us. “Nicely done,” he said, reaching over the headrest to shake my hand.

“He had to follow me,” said my sister.

“Did you really? Is that right, Hans?”

“Yes, it is,” I said.

—

“YOU KNOW,” MY father said the next day. “I really don’t care whether you end up in mathematics.”

“You don’t?”

“I didn’t intend to end up here myself.”

He’d caught me in my bedroom just after my day’s outing. I’d noticed recently that if anything got in the way of the peak of my roll — my sister saying hello from the porch swing as I shuffled up the stairs, for example, or my mother asking me to set the table when I passed through the kitchen — I would whip around like a rabid dog. Even Bernie, who ran out to the fence whenever I came near the house, no longer did so with a stick in his mouth.

My father examined me. “Some kids might be curious about a statement like that — that their father doesn’t care what they do.”

“So?”

“So,” he said back.

He walked over to the corner of my room and let his fingers graze the leaves of my ficus plant. A couple of inches under the soil I kept maybe a hundred hits, divided into three film canisters, each one taped inside its own plastic bag.

“Dinnertime,” I said.

“Wait.”

“What?”

“I know where you’ve been heading.”

I sat down.

“What does that mean?”

“It means exactly what it sounds like. I know where you’ve been trying to go.”

“Which is where?”

“Away from where you know you ought to be going.”

I looked at him. “Oh,” I said. “That.”

“You can’t fight who you are.”

“That’s an interesting thought. What’s the proof?”

“It’s an axiom.”

“And which axiom would that be?”

“The first.”

“Ah.”

He looked at me closely. “You’re a mathematician, Hans.”

“You just said you don’t care if I’m one or not.”

“You’re right,” he said. “I don’t .” He grimaced. “But you are one. That’s all I mean. You can’t run from it. It’s your destiny.”

“Yawn.”

His look changed now. “The thing is—” I could see that thoughts were crowding his brain.

“What?” I said. “What’s the thing?”

“The thing is”—his hand moved near the ficus again—“what we do, it’s—”

“Yes?”

“Mathematicians, Hans.” There was something in his voice now. “We’re the stooges, you know. The fix is in. We can’t ever find what we’re looking for.” He shook his head and turned to the window. “We’re destined to lose.”

He was facing away from me, but I saw it anyway: he wiped his cheek.

I got up from the bed then and tapped him on the shoulder, and when he turned, I pulled him into a hug. It was the first time I’d touched him, probably, in years. He smelled of limes, the way he always did, but he was quivering minutely again, like a hummingbird. My grip grew tighter. I leaned my head until I could see my arms on the far side of his back and his narrow shoulder blades rising and falling. I can’t say, truly, who was doing any of it.

Within a short time, though, he calmed. His hand reached up, and I could tell that he was wiping his eyes. He stood a little taller then, which caused me to loosen my hold. When I finally released him, guiding him around the ficus toward the door, he turned and looked back at me. “Thank you” was all he said.

—

OVER THE YEARS, many things happened between my father and me, but few of them could have been more important than that one afternoon in my bedroom, when I hugged him. Sometimes when I look back on my life, I wonder if I’m alive today only because of that moment. From a certain vantage, it all traces back, like a proof.

I still believe what he said: We are destined to lose.

In those days, I was in the throes of gravities — dark forces whose counterforces had not yet emerged to right me. And my father, of course, was still fighting a friendless battle in his own long and godless war. In the months that followed, he tried a few more times to convince me to study mathematics with him again. And a couple of times I acquiesced, taking my seat on the bench beneath the mulberry. He’d abandoned his methodical progression through the four branches of the discipline and begun lecturing me instead on unrelated topics, a tactic that I see in retrospect was meant to tempt me back into the fold. He was hoping that something far-flung might win my attention. He began dwelling not on the orderly foundations of logical thought but on the great, thrilling problems that in those days remained unsolved: charismatic enigmas to people like us. The Riemann hypothesis. The Poincaré conjecture. Kepler’s obdurate question on the packing of spheres. He was hoping once again, I think, to share something with his son.

But I wouldn’t let him.

Not then, anyway. Made newly wise by the drugs, I felt the distasteful cheapness of his longing. My F in Fourier analysis was followed six weeks later by a D in partial differential equations, and then by a D again in numerical methods. By the end of that semester, my nine hits of MDA per week had grown to twelve or thirteen — a staggering number even for a healthy adolescent male. Whenever I came home, which was invariably late at night, I went straight to the sink and drank three full glasses of water. Otherwise, I think, I might have dried to a smudge of cheap white powder.

We are destined to lose.

I don’t know if I’ve ever felt such relief from a single piece of knowledge.

—

I SHOULD ADD, by the way, that my roommates at Ohio State turned out to be right. Those boxes did indeed become bank vaults. Shores-Durban partial differential equations, we now know (thanks in part to my unfinished dissertation), are applicable to microfluctuations in almost all types of massively multiplayer servo equilibria, including — as Marcus Diamond, vice president for technology recruitment at Physico Partners Capital Management, did not fail to notice during his recruitment trip to Columbus — the derivatives markets.

THEN ONE DAY in the summer of the year I turned fourteen, not long after I’d graduated from high school, everything I thought I knew about my family changed once again. One warm morning in June, my father rounded up my sister and me and herded us into the Country Squire, where my mother was already waiting. We didn’t stop at the town limit; we didn’t stop at the county line. We didn’t turn east toward the Macon Dalles or west toward the rickety wooden waterslide whose fading picture above the words COOL DOWN! constituted Tapington’s single billboard. It wasn’t until we’d driven a full hour north that I noticed the two bulging, belt-strapped suitcases in the rear of the car. Bernie was resting his head on one of them.