Ethan Canin - A Doubter's Almanac

By now he’d spoken again to Borland, and the problem had become the official topic of his dissertation.

At Evans, the topology journals arrived wrapped in paper, like purchases from an expensive department store. At the circulation desk, the librarian handed them across the counter to him. As he opened the covers he imagined his competitors doing the very same thing at other libraries around the world. Not just the rivals he knew about but the ones he could only imagine: graduate students in Bombay and Moscow and Taipei. Men as focused as he was — or more focused — on unearthing the bones of the universe.

Sitting in the warm quiet of the reading room, he would scan the journals, then settle himself into his work. Into the precise, incremental logic of geometries. Sometimes he succeeded. Sometimes the hours themselves became numbers, in turn fractionating into other numbers. Minutes. Weeks. Onward he pushed. At this early point, the problem didn’t seem impossible. It was like a great mountain that he was still seeing from a distance.

On the way home one night after a successful evening of work, he found himself stopping at the bar at the end of his block, a dark, windowless place called the Shed. Only a sawhorse marked it from the sidewalk. He climbed down the steep stairs and took a seat at a table in back. Caught off guard when the bartender approached him, he stumblingly ordered a dry sherry. He’d never bought a drink in his life.

Whatever the man brought back, though, it wasn’t a dry sherry.

A few minutes later, moving to a stool by the cash register, he ordered another.

—

THERE WERE BEGINNING to be rumors. Cle reported them. He was an eccentric. A savant from the woods. Isaac Newton in North Oakland. “That kind of thing, anyway,” she said, stirring a hot chocolate with the tip of her finger. Another café, another afternoon. “Your name’s around,” she said. “I keep hearing it.”

Later, as they were buttoning their coats to leave, she said, “I flattered you, didn’t I?”

He reddened. “Hardly.”

She smiled, then reached up and tapped him with her finger on the lips. “Yes,” she said. “Hardly.”

—

THE NEXT TIME he saw Earl Biettermann, they were in a car together. Biettermann was driving. Milo sat in the rear, watching the hair swing from Biettermann’s cap when he dipped into the curves. He was driving too fast. The road was wet from a storm and glinted like ice. But this was California, and warm air was whipping through the windows. They were in the hills, on the way home from a party above campus. An old stick-shift GTO without a muffler. Biettermann sluiced into the curves like a skier, accelerating as he came into the straightaways. Milo was in the backseat, pressed against the door alongside a line of girls he didn’t know. Cle was in front of him, next to Earl. Milo’s gut tightened. It tightened again when the car upshifted. Biettermann wasn’t looking at the road. He kept turning his eyes to Cle, who was throwing back her chin beside him and laughing.

“You didn’t like that,” Cle said the next day when he found her at the Lime Rose. He shouldn’t have gone in, but he did. He should have been at the library.

“Didn’t like what?” he said.

“The way Earl was driving.” She looked across the table at him.

“Actually,” he said, “I didn’t notice.”

She smiled. “Ah,” she said. “I could see that you didn’t.”

—

SHE WAS RIGHT about the rumors. Before long, he overheard someone in the lounge call him a savant.

People knew about the quatrant, but nobody had seen it, and nobody seemed to know about his real work. Nobody saw him alone in the stacks reading Akira Kobayashi’s abstruse deductions on the Hirzebruch-Riemann-Roch theorem. As he made his way through the paper, his face grew hot. Kobayashi was preparing an assault on the Malosz. That much was clear. Milo looked up at the heads of the other graduate students, bent to their work in the carrels around him like rows of oil derricks. Later, he tried to make his way through Marat Timofeyev’s densely reasoned preprint on algebraic isotopy. Another assault.

His rivals were all unseen. At any time, any one of them could render all his work useless.

And yet the talk about him persisted. His untrained brilliance. His rogue ambitions. The quatrant was the subject of steady questions from his undergraduates, who were eager for the diversion, and sometimes even from his peers, who nodded with pursed lips when he answered, turning away to exhale smoke. All of them were competing for the attention of the faculty. Dissertation topics were discussed like the movements of armies.

He’d become known by now as Hans Borland’s protégé.

It wasn’t from Borland himself that he gathered this information but from another comment he overheard one evening in the department lounge. He didn’t even recognize the graduate student who said it. Again, the sideways turn. The exhaled cigarette.

—

HER FATHER WAS a professor at Carleton College. She told him this the first morning she woke up in his bed.

“Never heard of it,” he said.

“That’s because you’re basically an illiterate.”

“Well, thank you.”

“It’s in Northfield, Minnesota. Kids ride tractors to class.”

He looked over at her.

“It’s a half hour from Minneapolis, you idiot. It’s an excellent school. You can’t get away with the things you can out here.”

“You think I’m illiterate?”

“Yes, basically. You really are an idiot, you know. Socially speaking. That’s one of the things I like about you.”

“About me? That I’m an idiot?”

“You’re charming,” she said. “But it’s an idiot’s charm.”

She kissed him on the mouth. Her tongue had a flavor — the brandied hot chocolate that had been resting by the bedpost since the night before, when they’d come in after a walk from the Lime Rose. As soon as they’d gotten into the apartment, she’d set the cup on the floor, pulled the band out of her hair, and kissed him. “That you even have trouble with the concept”—she said now, pulling back—“this actually proves the concept.”

“It’s kind of thrilling to be called an idiot,” he said. He tried to kiss her again, but she sat up against the headboard and pulled the sheets to her shoulders. He looked at her hidden there in his bed. “It’s not good that your father’s a mathematics professor,” he said.

“Why?”

“Because you’ll compare.”

“You to him ?” She laughed, in a way he didn’t like. He’d noticed that about her already, how quickly she could turn. “My father’s an asshole,” she said.

Those words actually made him look away.

“Then maybe I shouldn’t mind the comparison,” he finally said.

“Maybe you should .”

Later in the morning, when he returned from the store with doughnuts and coffee, she was out of bed at last, wearing nothing but his Detroit Tigers T-shirt, kneeling on the floor examining the adjustments on the quatrant. “You didn’t move it,” he said. “Did you?”

“I wouldn’t dare.” She was peering along one of the slots. “It’s really incredible, isn’t it?”

“Not bad for an idiot.”

“No, not bad.”

“It’s a distraction. That’s why I made it.”

“No, it’s stupendous. Have you shown it to anyone?”

“Just you.”

“Really? Just me? You know, I was kidding when I called you an idiot.”

“Half kidding,” he said.

“Okay, that’s about right. Half kidding.”

She rose and came to him then. Truthfully, a bother was still inside him, but he was powerless to hold on to it. She took the doughnuts from his hand, walked him to the bed, and leaned in against him.