Ethan Canin - A Doubter's Almanac

A wind came up suddenly, bending the trees. Then, just as quickly, it calmed.

“What about Emmy, Dad?”

“What about her?”

“Do you think you could make a whistle for her, too ?”

—

“PART OF IT,” he said, “is a revelation. Look at the color of this.” He pulled up the bottom of his shirt, where the skin was bronze, like tanning cream. “My liver’s off. The proteins are gone. That’s what Gandhi tells me.” He tapped the lip of swelling that had appeared again. “Osmotic pressure. Simple mathematics, coming back around to take a swing at me.”

“Well, it’s better than it was.”

“The things you take for granted. One part goes and everything else follows. You cross the line, you don’t get another chance. When I shave, it bleeds for an hour. And look at my hands.” He held one up. “It’s all a perfect strangeness.”

“Does that hurt?”

“No. But they’re red as beets, aren’t they? It’s my joints that hurt. And sometimes I itch in places you wouldn’t want to know. The itching’s the worst. Most of the other stuff wouldn’t really even bother me. Not that much, anyway.” He looked at me sourly. “It’s like watching a zombie movie, but you’re starring in it.”

When he scratched his shoulder, I saw the nail marks under his collar. He rose and undid the rest of his shirt buttons. “Did I ever show you these?”

“What am I looking at?”

“I’m turning into the thing I loved,” he said. He parted the fabric of his shirt then, and two rubbery breasts swung out. When he dipped his shoulders, they bounced. “Not bad, am I?”

“I’ve seen better.”

That made him laugh. When he caught his breath, he leaned against the chair and undid his belt, then let his pants slide down. From his shorts he lifted out one of his testicles. It was hairless and small. “And feel this .”

“I think I’ll pass, Dad.”

He pulled out the other one. “They’re just about gone, Hans.”

He shuddered, letting himself down into the chair again. “Even my old friends have run for the hills.”

—

THE PAIN IN his joints had begun to wake him from sleep, and one evening, Dr. Gandapur stopped by and tried him on a little morphine. Dad swallowed the pill and lay down on the couch. A few minutes later, he sat up and vomited.

Cle heated a cup of soup, and they tried again. This time Dad kept it down; but after Dr. Gandapur left, he stayed on the couch for the rest of the night, half sitting and half lying against the leather, licking his lips and staring wide eyed at whoever was checking on him, as though trying to figure out whether it was Cle or I who was plotting the attack.

The next morning, when the doctor drove back out to see him, Dad said, “Don’t ever ask me to do that again.”

“I understand,” said Dr. Gandapur.

“No,” said Dad, blinking across at him. “You don’t understand. I need to be able to think .”

“Even at night?”

“Yes, even at night.”

Later, at the door of the Mercedes, I said to the doctor, “I’m sorry about that.”

“Oh, there’s nothing to apologize for. It was I who overstepped. He’ll do fine on what he’s on, perhaps with a little more at bedtime. A mind like his — the drug must perturb it.”

“Frankly, I wouldn’t think he’d give a damn about perturbing anything these days.”

He laughed. “But you see, he still does .” He settled himself in the seat. “We never rightly understand the existence of another, do we? Of course, he prefers the medicine that he already knows.” He bowed his head, and his pale fingers came to rest on the mirror. “And that is what we will keep him on, for as long as it is possible.”

—

CLE HAD ROASTED a chicken. I’d made a salad, from carrots and lettuce and the pink, box-cornered balls of wax that were sold by the Felt City General Store as tomatoes. The afternoon had been warm, but now the lake was dark and a wind was stirring the trees.

We were a good way through the meal when I realized that Dad had stopped eating. Cle had come in from the kitchen and was standing behind him, pouring wine with one hand and rubbing his shoulder with the other. Dad set down his fork on the table and looked up. Then he looked back at his plate. Beside him, Cle’s eyes slowly rose. After a moment, I turned around.

Peering through the porch windows were Paulie and my mother.

THE COMBINATORICS MEETING had been held at a plush hotel in the West End of London, which was a fifteen-minute walk from my plusher one in Mayfair. A chilly October day, not long after my first trip out to see Dad. The Thames that morning was alive with barges and seabirds. Out front of the hotel, the souvlaki vendors were hawking hot plates, the oily blue sheen of handprints streaking the lobby doors. It wasn’t difficult to spot the mathematicians as they milled among the carts, comparing prices.

The meeting itself was more lavish than I had expected. A chandeliered ballroom with nineteenth-century oil paintings on the walls. On the side tables, carefully fanned advertisements for jet-shares. In the alcoves, the murmur of fountains. I wondered why mathematicians chose these kinds of places if they really wanted to stay in their math departments.

On the Internet I’d been able to find only a meager history of Benedek Fodor. His Wikipedia page was a grainy picture and one sentence about his interests, which were wildly divergent — matroid theory, tensor theory, Riemannian geometry. There was nothing at all about his life. I’d picked up bits on my own: he was an autodidact, the son of a cheese maker from a village in the Mátra. At nineteen, the Abel Prize; at twenty-nine, the Fields. There were only a handful of articles about either one, though, and all of them had been written from the same information. He’d not even bothered to appear at the ceremony for the Fields. No wife and no children. Still shared a house with his parents. In every article, I read the same quotes, from a local precinct official and a tavern owner and a policeman, apparently the only residents of his prefecture who would speak to a reporter. They were all aware that Benedek Fodor had accomplished something significant, but none of them knew what it was.

I’d left my Wall Street clothes back at the hotel.

When I found him, he was standing outside the door of the auditorium, poking his narrow head into a dismal-looking presentation on Dirichlet series. Inside were half-a-dozen mathematicians in a room that could have held a hundred. “Dr. Fodor?” I said, extending my hand. “May I introduce myself? My name is Hans Andret.”

He kept his arms at his side. “Say his name?”

“Hans Andret.”

“ His name.”

“Do you mean Milo Andret?”

“Ah,” he said. Carefully, he raised his hand. The rough palm. The dirty shirt cuff. “Perhaps,” he said, in a precisely edged accent. “Perhaps I know who you are.”

I offered to take him to lunch. He glanced down at the carpet, then nodded. We stepped away from whatever new thing was being revealed about Dirichlet series and walked down the block to a noodle shop off the square, a place I’d noted on the way in. Not for the food but because it looked quiet enough.

He ordered two bowls of soup. When the first arrived, he ate it to the bottom, then lifted the bowl to his lips and sucked down the last bit of broth. All this before we’d spoken anything beyond pleasantries.

“You understand?” he finally said, setting down the dish. “You understand what is it?”

“Understand what what is?”

“The problem.”

The waiter brought him his second soup, and he started in.