Ethan Canin - A Doubter's Almanac

But that was what he was searching for, he realized: something that would earn Hans Borland’s respect.

Later in the afternoon, when he knelt to the quatrant, practicalities began to enter his mind. Even if he didn’t ever solve the problem, Borland could not fail to notice the attempt. He could just take on a small part of it, even, as he’d seen in Zentralblatt that other mathematicians had done. And the work itself might easily widen from there, into a dissertation, perhaps. Even a career.

At the time, most of his classmates hoped to find jobs at Xerox in Palo Alto or at IBM in White Plains or at one of the industry-funded think tanks that were popping up now along the coast; but to Milo, such ambitions were impure. He was not a practical person, but that day he decided he needed to be practical. The Malosz conjecture. His mind came to rest.

In his office, Professor Borland said, “Might as well start at the top.”

“How do you mean?”

“Submanifolds of complex projective spaces — it’s a famously difficult problem, young man.”

“Yes, I read about how difficult it is.”

“Ha! You read about it!” Borland seemed to be in a lighter mood today. He fiddled with the ascot at his neck. At that moment, somehow, they both turned to the window, where against the pewter-colored bay the sun abruptly turned the bridge’s suspension cables into a pair of shining silver parabolas.

“Ah,” said the old man. “Perhaps we’ve just witnessed a sign.”

“It did look like it.”

Borland turned. “Young man,” he said, his voice hard again, “plenty of ships have gone down on those rocks, I have to tell you. Men have died trying to outsmart Kamil Malosz.” He lowered his glasses and gazed across the desk at Milo, his eyes stony; but the lips below them expressed a tinge of wryness. Milo was incapable of deciding whether the old man meant him well or ill.

—

ONE AFTERNOON AT the mathematics library he returned from drinking a soda on the steps and found someone sitting in his chair. He circled the table and approached from the other end: it was the same girl who’d been watching him before.

“No,” she said.

“No what?”

“No. You’re not confused.”

“Did I—”

“You have a minute?”

“For what?”

“For me.”

“Well—”

“To talk.”

Dark, sleepless eyes. A man’s shirt again, her black hair tucked into the collar. “That depends,” he answered.

“On what?”

“On what you want to talk about.”

—

THEY MET AT the Lime Rose, a basement café she knew, not far from campus. He arrived early. She’d arrived earlier.

“Borland’s impressed with you,” she said, the moment he took the seat across from her. The shoulders of her sweater were dusted with rain. At the small table, her face was prettier than he remembered. The same sleepless eyes, but filled now with either sadness or willingness. She had an odd name: Cle Wells.

“How do you know Borland?” he said.

“Everybody knows Borland. Everybody in the math world.”

“And you’re in the math world?”

“Not exactly, but I know plenty of people who are. My dad, for one.”

“Oh?”

“A professor. Of analysis.”

“Here?”

“No. But he knows Hans Borland.”

Milo swallowed. “Okay, then what did he say?”

“That he’s telling people you have promise.”

Milo laughed.

“He’s not exactly famous for his generosity, you know.” She raised her chin at him. “You know that, right?”

“I’m aware of that rumor.”

“Then why’d you laugh?”

“Because I already know what he thinks of me.”

She lifted her coffee to her lips, smirking. “Well, then, indeed.”

“I just don’t know whether he’s right.”

“You don’t know whether he’s right about you ?”

“No, in fact — I don’t.”

She set down the cup. “Well,” she said. “He is.”

“And how might you know?”

She looked out the window. “That’s a little mystery, too, isn’t it?”

“I don’t believe you know any more about it than I do.”

“Well, that’s where you’re wrong.”

“One of us is, anyway.”

She looked back at him.

“Wrong,” he said. “Clearly.”

“Okay then.” From her bag she produced a pack of Camels. “The Malosz conjecture,” she said, tapping out a cigarette. “Submanifolds, right? In some kind of weird mathematical space. Famously difficult.” There was a pause while she rummaged for matches. “Killingly difficult.”

“All right,” he said. “That’s a way to put it. So what?”

“So that’s just the beginning.”

“Of?”

“Of what I already know about you.”

She blew the smoke over his head, and he ducked to let it pass.

“By the way,” she said, looking straight across at him. “I hope you don’t think I’m trying to seduce you.”

—

THE FINISHED QUATRANT was the size of a kitchen table, its four thickly carved spokes exactly dividing its circumference. One cloudless night late in the winter, he waited for the last coat of lacquer to dry and then lifted the whole structure onto a tripod at the center of the apartment. From there, its outlook bisected the windows.

Just before sunrise, he climbed from bed. Chilly air flowed underneath the door as he sat down and began tallying the sun’s path across the two trapezoidal illuminations of sky. Afterward, he went hurriedly to the library, where he worked his way through a backlogged pile of problem sets.

The next day, he stayed home again, irritatedly dispatching classwork as he recorded another set of coordinates, carefully tracking the low winter orbit that was evolving along his tiny patch of cosmos.

—

HE WAS A teaching assistant in two different classes that semester: Differential Equations, which was populated by math majors and engineers, and Calculus for Poets, which was populated by girls. Or at least it included quite a few of them. Differential Equations had none.

Late in the year, he handed back one of the midterms. Professor Rosewater was known for writing grueling exams: there were plenty of Ds and Cs and only a few Bs. One student, a lackadaisical young man from the back row whom Milo had taken for a loafer, had scored 100 percent.

The name on the booklet was Earl Biettermann.

He saved Earl Biettermann’s test for last. He’d already asked the math-department secretaries about him. At the rear of the classroom, the young man sat sprawled in a chair, his scuffed motorcycle boots crossed at the ankles.

“You’re a mathematics major,” Milo said, slipping his exam booklet onto the desk.

“So?”

“So what are you doing in a class like this? You’re taking PDEs and real analysis.”

“And?”

Milo felt a prick of anger. “So, why are you taking Calculus for Poets?”

“Because I happen to be a poet,” said Biettermann.

—

“THAT’S SOMETHING EARL would say,” Cle Wells said, again at the Lime Rose. “That’s definitely something he would say.”

“You know everybody, I guess.”

“I guess everybody knows Earl.”

“The commutative property.”

She wrinkled her nose. “I would call it the associative.”

“Well, no,” he said. “ I don’t know him, and I don’t really want to know him — so it’s not associative.”

At this she smiled. She reached across and tapped him on the end of the nose, a gesture she might have made with a child. “Well,” she said. “It’ll be associative soon enough .”

BY FALL SEMESTER of his second year, he had his habits. Berkeley had grown familiar to him by now — the stand-up sandwich counters and the head shops, the cars and buses and all the milling crowds. He spent evenings in the library at Evans, working on the Malosz conjecture. A good part of this time was spent poring over papers by other mathematicians. A professor in Kyoto. A graduate student at McGill in Canada. An amateur topologist in Kiev. None of their papers mentioned the Malosz specifically, but he could see what they were doing. They were positioning themselves around its edges.