Ethan Canin - A Doubter's Almanac

“I understand.”

He touched me lightly on the shoulder. “But truly, Hans,” he said, dropping his voice. “Do you really think he is capable of doing new work? In his condition? Frankly, it would be hard for me to imagine.”

“Of course.”

“It happens.” He turned again to the garden. “To the brain, I mean. It’s the drink, naturally. And the hepatic function. But there is clearly something else occurring, too. Certainly in other men I’ve seen it. There is something in certain abilities that is never far from — far from—” He looked out at the lake. “I cannot really know.”

“No, please go on.”

“Far from terror, perhaps. It is not such a rare phenomenon, you see. I used to encounter it around the maths division when I was at university, and I have seen it here, even, in my little country practice. It seems to be quite primal. At its crudest, it is a bona fide paranoia. Plenty in the field are gone before the age of twenty. I’ve seen that, too. Perhaps it is a harbinger. I believe it to be physiological.” He looked down. “I sometimes imagine it as God’s revenge.”

“Against mathematicians?”

“One must bear in mind that they might be considered spies.” He was smiling now.

“By the Deity, you mean?”

“Indeed. Your dad’s cantankerous nature, by the way — you know that this is his liver, too, don’t you? And of course the drink plays a part in it — but it is also the man himself. The emotions are ablaze in him.” He set down the bucket. “For people like you and me — well, we are shielded by all our damping circuitry. We maintain a cushion against the world, if you will. A comfort against the ravage. But I believe it is not so for him.”

He regarded me. “Think of what life must be like for a mind like your father’s. I mean, human existence is bounded by tragedy, is it not? And shot through with it, as well. I was born in Lahore, so I know this in a particular way. But your father, too — he knows it just as particularly, in his own way. I have learned to keep such thoughts somewhat at bay. And so have you. But for him, there is no ignoring it. There is no joy in God’s creation. No pleasure in sunlight or water. No pleasure in a good meal. There is no pleasure in the company of friends. There is nothing. Nothing that might assuage the maw. He stands directly in its whirlwind. I’ve come to believe that this is the consequence of a brain like his. That this is the price for solving a puzzle as great as the one he solved.”

—

BEFORE I LEFT for the airport, I cleaned Dad’s room. Empty bottles. Sticky glasses. All the crushed-out cigarettes. On the floor by the door lay a mass of newspapers and magazines, heaped together. The spines were bent, the sections scattered in pieces, as though for months he’d simply been throwing everything from the bed. Atop the dirty blanket he lay snoring. I set about quietly moving everything back onto the shelves.

That’s when I came across it.

It was resting on its side, in a gap between books, the rings of a glass darkening its cover. The Northern European Review of Enumerative Combinatorics, volume 13, number 2. September 1999. On the cover, the title of Benedek Fodor’s paper had been circled in heavy pencil, just as it had been on my own.

IT WAS A warm afternoon. Chickadees hopping in the tamaracks outside the window of Matthew’s office. “What you said the other day, Hans,” he said, “that you didn’t want to betray your mother — what did you mean exactly?”

“I didn’t want to betray her optimism.”

“By telling her the truth?”

“Optimism is an attempt to circumvent the truth.”

“Wow,” said Audra.

I glanced at her. “That’s how I see it, anyway.”

“Couldn’t it just be an attempt to influence it?” she said.

Now I turned to look at her.

Matthew said, “And you would have been threatening her optimistic interpretation.”

“If I told her about myself, then I’d have to tell her about him, too.”

“But didn’t she already know about him?”

“Of course. But she did and she didn’t. She was still good at believing it was going to get better.”

“Indeed,” said Audra.

“Believe me,” said Matthew. “It’s common.”

“Maybe it’s common,” said my wife, “because it’s common for women to believe that they have no choice.”

Now we both turned to her. She folded her arms.

“True indeed,” said Matthew. “But then what? What would have happened if you had told her? If you’d told her the truth?”

“About me?”

“About you, about your dad.”

“You mean, that he was just sitting out there with a bottle?”

“I mean the full truth, as it would have affected all of you.”

“That he was out there drinking, and”—here my voice actually cracked—“that he wasn’t really working on anything?”

He waited a moment. “That’s difficult for you to say, isn’t it?”

“He was a mathematician, you know. The work — for him, it was everything.”

“Tell me, Hans. People in your field — they make their mark early, isn’t that right?”

“In my former field, you’re talking about.”

“I mean in math.”

I think I might have cringed. “I’m not sure,” I said. “That’s what’s often said. I don’t know if it’s accurate.”

“But it’s said?”

“By many people, yes. Abel made his mark early. So did Eisenstein. So did Galois. Hardy, definitely. Gauss wrote the Disquisitiones when he was in his teens. But Euler worked all his life.”

“And you — you’re awfully young, too — you’re awfully young to be doing what you’re doing.”

“It comes at a cost.”

“What’s the cost?”

I pointed at the walls, then at Matthew, then at the wood-shake inn building, with its 120 rooms, that stood across the grass like the king of England’s hunting lodge. “My father taught me most of what I know.”

“In every respect.”

“Yes.”

“And if you’d exposed him?”

“It would have all changed.”

He smiled. “What would have?”

“Well,” I said, turning to the window. “My mother would have realized — realized what I guess she finally did realize.”

“Which is what?” said Audra.

“That she’d tied herself to a great mind, who was finished now. Who was about to pull all of us over a cliff.”

—

“SO, WHY THEN ?” said Matthew. It was the next day, our late-afternoon session. “Why all of this so suddenly? Why’d you come home one day and do a couple of bumps in front of your wife and daughter?”

Audra winced.

“You’d had plenty of practice at hiding it,” he said. “Surely you’re a better delinquent than that.”

“I don’t know.”

“Take a stab.” He glanced out the window. Out in the field, the tractor was stirring up a cloud again.

“I really don’t.”

He rose and stood at the glass. The tractor edged along a row, made the corner, and began working the next one. “Genius is a true degenerative psychosis,” he said, “belonging to the group of moral insanity.”

“Pardon?” said Audra.

“Cesare Lombroso. A criminologist. He died a hundred years ago, but now the neurobiologists are starting to agree with him. Fewer dopamine receptors or something like that. Psychosis and inventiveness seem to run along a kind of continuum.”

I said, “I’d been thinking about my father.”

He sat back down. “Tell us.”

“He’d started talking to me about his life. When I was visiting him at his cabin. He was pretty ill then already.”