Ethan Canin - A Doubter's Almanac

At least he was going into town, then.

A hundred feet down the bank, the lake was rippling. At the end of the beach, the lights caught a pair of metal legs protruding from the thicket: the old dock sections, thrown down on their sides. He hadn’t put them back in the water after winter.

I wondered which winter that might have been.

Closer in, an angled bush stuck out halfway across the clearing. I peered into the dimness until suddenly I recognized it: the hull of the Victory, pinned down by vines. Behind it, the same blunted shape of the Royal Sovereign.

I shut off the engine and stepped out into the chirping night. “Dad?” I called.

Around the near side of the house, my eyes found a track through the undergrowth. Behind the screens on the porch, the old pair of wicker chairs stood next to the table. On the table, a glass.

I called out again, this time toward the upstairs.

At the rear, hidden in the gloom, I stumbled on a row of teepeed beans and a narrow patch of what looked like lettuce. At the far end, clusters of tiny tomatoes were silhouetted in their planters.

He was keeping up a garden, then. Also a good sign.

The porch stairs had been repaired with planks — a pretty competent job of it, actually: firm under my step, and the handrail steady. Through the dusty windows I could see nothing. I knocked on the door. “Dad?”

When I pushed it open, the only sound was the lap of water through the screens. I flipped the switch, but nothing came on. I flipped the next one. Was he not paying the electric bill? I took a few steps in and searched until I found the old lamp in the corner of the dining room. The same place it used to be. In the blackness I felt for the pull cord. To my surprise, it worked.

I looked around. The place was being neatly kept, at least. Another good sign.

MY FIRST SATURDAY at Stillwater Farms, Audra and I took a long walk together in the fields behind the center. Stillwater, which rented its excess acreage to the local farmers, seemed to be about the only business in that corner of rural New Hampshire that was turning a profit — although I doubt it depended on the crops. As a numbers guy, in fact, I’d admired the fiduciary spirit of the place from the moment I’d first laid eyes on its costs sheet. The local agriculture seemed to be part of the treatment philosophy as well, providing a serene but eminently practical view for the patients. I must say that I found it eminently and serenely therapeutic myself. Especially on those cool north-latitude afternoons when I was allowed to take an hour’s walk with my wife.

In the distance, one of the farmers was driving a dark green tractor through the rows, a churn of dust following. I could see clods flying up behind the tilling blades, like mice jumping up from the fields. I was six days into my stay, and I realized I still felt like one of those mice.

Audra was here for the weekend. She’d been at a group meeting with me in the morning, then at a therapy session with me in the afternoon, and she’d be at another group meeting that evening with the other spouses, followed by the nightly speaker. Tomorrow she was flying back to New York. “Oh, Hans,” she said, taking my hands and looking steadily into my eyes. “Thank God we did this.”

Since my arrival, the nurses had been looking into my eyes just as steadily, with their pen lights.

“I’m glad, too,” I said.

“I feel like we were snatched from an abyss.”

“Maybe we were. I hope that’s right.” My gaze went to the farmer in his tractor. I noted that even this far into my stay, my initial thought persisted: that rather than being snatched from an abyss, I was being thrown into one.

I also knew, however — as I was learning to say that week — that this was the drugs talking.

—

AT STILLWATER, WE were encouraged to share. My suitemate, a garrulous man from a West Coast division of Wells Fargo, had no difficulty with the assignment. He was in the same business as mine, but on the retail end, peddling risk to attorneys and dentists. I bought and sold the shadow of the prediction of risk, for some of the richest men in the world, at a million times per second.

But these are details.

Stillwater was a far cry from Walden Commons, where my father had once been funneled into his own obligatory furlough. On the web, Audra had found the place in a single afternoon, along with several dozen reviews of its food, accommodations, gym equipment, and rate of recidivism. At the airport in Newport, a staff member picked me up in a Volvo, Vivaldi sparkling on the audio. A concierge nodded as he checked me in. An aide accompanied me to my room. Instead of searching my bags, he introduced me to my suitemate — the man from Wells Fargo — as well as to the trays of mints and macadamias in the pantry, the jars of juices in the mini-fridge, and the service intercom, which was available around the clock. Also, he pointed out where the ice maker could be found.

I was left alone to unpack.

Stillwater, in fact, made quite a show of not caring about the obvious. About what we’d brought with us, for example. About whether we would complete the treatment. The perimeter gates were kept unlocked, and the doors to the meeting rooms were always propped open. The Volvos were constantly available out front, their radios tuned to the classical station. In the coat closet of our Perry Street brownstone the week before, I’d divided a baggie of mid-Andes Bolivian between a stripped-out thumb drive and the battery compartment of my key-chain flashlight. When I landed in Newport, the flashlight was in my pants pocket and the thumb drive in my laptop. At Stillwater, nobody even checked.

We had to want to change.

My first evening in-house, I closed the door to my room, lowered myself into the leather chair, pulled out the thumb drive, and ruminated on its meaning. I was only half convinced that I needed anything to change. At that moment, actually, I’d say a good deal less than half. Even through the cap I could taste the bitter.

The picture in my mind was of Audra, backed up stiffly against the curtains. “Please don’t,” she was saying.

—

WELL, READER: I didn’t .

That night was my first clean one in — how long? Half a decade? No, longer — it’s hard to even remember.

MDA, it turns out, had been the quaint days. I wasn’t a philosopher anymore. My thoughts didn’t have anything to do with Sartre or Camus (or even Gödel or Frege). They generally had to do with mathematics. Mathematics in the modern world. That is to say: with money.

It pretty much becomes your life, I’m here to report.

So, why was I suddenly willing to change? It could have been my own cleaned-up version of the old Andret willpower. It could have been Audra’s magnolia-trunk voice, still ringing in my ears. It could have been the beta blockers that Stillwater had prescribed at intake. It could have been the kids. But whatever it was, it held, just long enough that I’m here recounting all of this now. Stillwater assigned us to a course of lectures and meetings and to an exercise class before every dinner, and that night and the next day I went through all of it, clean and quiet and sober.

The therapeutic idea, I guess, was not to allow too many minutes — at least at first — for our own thoughts.

Well, what would those thoughts have been? That it was all pointless? That I was bound to fail, to follow the same, sad path that my father had? That it was, indeed, over for me ?

Audra insists this is nonsense.

The Thursday before, I’d come home late from work. With the time differences to the Asian markets, Thursday nights were my ramp-up into the weekend. I remember needing my bother to go away. I remember needing to get back up on the elephant. Earlier in the day, in just a couple of hours, I’d cleared a medium-sized fortune for the firm — maybe twenty million — short and long on a pile of interest-only tranches that were bouncing like ball bearings on a flash currency raid out of Hong Kong. It was my third-best showing of the year.