Ethan Canin - A Doubter's Almanac

It was a Saturday, and I was already three or four hours into my roll.

“Mom?” I finally said. “Where exactly are we going?”

“I don’t know, honey.”

Paulie looked up from her book. “How can you not even know?”

My mother showed us her profile and grinned shyly across the seat. “Because your father won’t tell me.”

“Then why are you smiling like that?” said Paulie.

“Because I do know that we’re going on a little vacation.”

“What?” said Paulie. “You didn’t tell us that!” She tapped my father on the shoulder. “You can’t just take us somewhere without telling us, or telling us where .” She tapped him again, then again, like a woodpecker. “That’s kidnapping.”

“I won’t tell you, either,” he said, swiping at her hand.

“Tell us!”

“I won’t.”

“Why not?” I said.

“Because it’s a mystery.”

“Interesting, Dad,” I offered. “That’s a solipsism.”

“It’s not a solipsism, Clever Hans. Solipsism is a philosophy. It was just a self-documenting sentence.” (At twelve, my sister was a disciple of Kurt Gödel.) She added, “People misuse the term.”

“It’s a solipsism, Smallette.”

“It’s got nothing to do with solipsism. Solipsism is the idea that the mind knows only its own constructs. It was a self-documenting sentence.”

“Which is a type of solipsism.”

“Enough,” said my mother.

Silence. In that silence I was driving in a car with my family while watching myself drive in a car with my family. Sometimes I was watching myself watch myself. I knew that we were approaching a singularity, the point on the map that was shared equally by three different states — Indiana, Ohio, and Michigan — and yet belonged to none; but soon we bent a little to the east, and I understood that our chance had passed. Before long we crossed under a sign that read WELCOME TO MICHIGAN. It was a bright new sign but felt like a cheap greeting card. I turned and watched it disappear. Soon after that we came to turnoffs for Detroit and then Kalamazoo. Past these we went. Then we were moving through runs of narrow electric-blue rents in the landscape that I quickly understood to be slits connecting us to the other side of the earth. The sky on the other side was also the color of day. I began to doubt most of the things I knew. “Well,” I said at last, to break the mortal silence.

“Lake country,” said my father, turning to smile at my mother.

“Beautiful,” she replied.

Oh, of course: lakes.

Paulette was staring at me.

“What?” I said.

“What?” she said back.

With that single utterance, my roll dropped away. Words could do that sometimes, could shift everything in an instant from a luminous ether to my family’s dense, gravitational drab. I sat numbly. Miles of forest continued to speed upward across the windshield. Bernie moved behind me and metered his hot breath against my neck. My roll revived, shifting into its quiet phase. Thoughts stuck to the roof of my cranium, where if I leaned back I could observe them, clinging there like bats. Details halted in my eye. The smoke of my father’s cigarette, cleverly snaking its way toward the narrowly opened window. The synchronized pendula of my mother’s earrings. We were following a sinuous two-lane county highway, and I could feel the bends of the pavement as segments of a great, broadening circle, each one evolving into the ever-widening circumference. The bodies of water we passed announced themselves with a thinning of the conifers, then with a bend or two of wetland stream, dotted with lilies that looked like women’s hats floating away on the current. I was aware of the women beneath them, stepping carefully across the slippery bottom.

On we drove. The black-green slashes of the pines. The blood-dot wildflowers on the road shoulders. Every now and then, through a gap in the trees, came another lake — a startling pane of aquamarine festooned with the day’s high silver clouds. For lunch, we stopped at a beach, and just as we were finishing our sandwiches, the trees bent at their crests and began to rustle.

After lunch we swam, each of us in our own style. Dad plunged under, held his breath for a few seconds, and retreated howling to the bank. Mom stroked a metronomic line to where a boulder breached, then turned and stroked back. Paulie stood in the shallows, dipping her hands to wet herself like an old woman in a tub. I performed a serene breaststroke in the deep, while Bernie, my lifeguard, paddled beside me. If I looked down, I saw the same brightly glowing pebble every time I looked, winking at me from the depths.

After the swim, we dried ourselves in the breeze and climbed back into the car. It was late afternoon now, and my roll had dwindled. Silently we continued. Somewhere northwest of Jackson we exited the paved highway and entered a narrow two-track that began in gravel, then crossed uphill over a long meadow and sloped down again into trees. The chassis scraped over roots. Mosquitoes appeared — first outside the car, then in. My mother leaned over and slapped my father’s neck. Bernie bumped at the windows.

An old wooden-plank bridge. A wide muddy creek sludging beneath it. My father stopped the car and climbed down the slope to the edge of the water. The land here was swampy. He took off his shoes and stepped into the reeds, then pushed his way through them until he was leaning heavily against one of the pilings. Finally, he climbed back up and walked the length of the span. When he returned, he said, “Solid.” He started the engine.

“You’re sure?” said my mother.

“Yes.”

“One hundred percent?”

“No,” he answered, steering us up onto the span.

“Nothing is one hundred percent, Mom,” I explained. “Not even gravity.”

This was one of the cornerstones of my recent thought: that physics was merely a dynamic averaging, and that all of us — our lives, our fates — were merely weighted, statistical trends in which outliers might indeed occur. In fact, they were obligated to.

The bridge held.

Under our wheels, though, its boards rattled raucously, and after a few moments — moments in which my mother’s hand first went to her chest, then to my father’s shoulder, then to the door handle — the ramp sloped us down again onto a peninsula of forest. It might as well have been a jungle. My father managed to open the windows into air that stank of mud and bark. Here and there as we pressed forward on the two-track, the curtain of vegetation had been trampled into low-ceilinged tunnels that gave intermittent views onto a featureless body of water. We swung toward its shore. But even from close, we could hardly see it. Just occasional fragments of a slack, humid brown, lazily misting.

When we exited the trees at last and encountered the house, my mother showed us her profile again. Then she showed us her face. She was puzzled.

My father shut the engine. A ramshackle wooden cabin simmered in a patch of gnat-strewn sunlight.

“Milo?”

“Yes.”

“You’re sure this is it?”

“Perfectly.”

The front stairs were split, the roof was carpeted with blooms of green moss, and the dull-gray paint had been worn away in long, vertical strips, as though a bear had been sharpening its claws on the siding. Two cracked windowpanes glittered beside the door. A hum could be heard.

“What’s that?” said my mother.

“The life of the forest,” said Dad.

“Insects,” said Paulette.

My mother sat up stiffly. “Well, has it at least been cleaned, honey? Did they know we were coming? Did you at least have them tidy it up for us?”

“It’s a lake house,” said my father. “We wouldn’t want it tidied up.”