A Doubter's Almanac (11 page)

“China
what
?” said Milo.

Biettermann laughed. The girl, too. Biettermann grabbed her mouth and kissed the full lips. The girl looked at Milo. Kissed Biettermann and looked at Milo. He turned away. When he turned back, she was still looking. Her mouth still on Biettermann’s. She nodded, tilted her hand toward him and opened it. The dragon’s fire curling into her palm.

Then, stepping from behind her: Cle.

Biettermann kissed
her,
then, too, right in front of him. His arm around both of them. Cle closed her eyes.

Milo stared.

All three of them looked at him now.

“White,” said Biettermann. “China
White
.”

They all laughed.

Then Biettermann opened his palm: a syringe. “You ready to travel, my friend?”

—

L
ATER, HE WONDERED
why he’d refused. He could have at least stayed near her. Instead, he’d gone off by himself, walked home, and spent the rest of the evening in the bar near his apartment.

A month and two weeks. That’s how long it was before he saw her again. On his calendar he checked off the days.

China White

T
HERE WERE AT
least two ways to solve any problem: from the beginning, which was the usual approach; and from the end, which was not. Likewise, every theorem could be proved either directly, using incremental logic, or indirectly, by conjecturing the negative of the hypothesis and demonstrating a contradiction. Thus there were at least four permutations to choose from.

This was how he began.

A pad. A room. A tiny view. Not numbers but geometry. One couldn’t draw a fourth dimension. This was a mathematical dictum, and of course he challenged it, but after days of trying to negate it he at last accepted its truth. Yet one could extrapolate.

At night he experimented. With his eyes closed he built a one-dimensional world and imprisoned himself within it. From there he imagined the second dimension—the unfathomable impingement of a greater universe. Then, after days of this, he imprisoned himself in two dimensions and imagined a third. The fracturing of experiential knowledge. It was forceful work. It was physical work. It required him to bind his thinking. He could maintain the fiction for only minutes at a time. The effort left him hungry.

In a way it was akin to idiocy—Cle was right. But he understood at the same time the radical difficulty of what he was attempting. The weight of discipline required to unlearn the world and refabricate it from principles.

Intuition mattered, too. There was no going forward without intuition.

At last he relented in his experiments and took to the problem itself, attacking first from the ordinary dimensions. This was merely underwork to confirm his approach. It was work that Akira Kobayashi was obviously embarked upon, too, in Kyoto. A month later, he was aware—though unsuccessful in articulating the particulars—that this route would lead nowhere. At the bottom of his own labyrinth of reasoning he glimpsed an infinite loop, a multibranched chain closed only by its own first tenets. A logical dead end. The realization flooded him with relief. Kobayashi was not a threat.

Marat Timofeyev, on the other hand, in Kiev, seemed to be attempting the problem from the negation of the hypothesis, working apagogically—the path that Andret now turned to. Timofeyev’s steady papers on complex manifolds, his meticulous proofs of mid-lying conjectures: this was a man laying a foundation. But soon Andret grew sanguine about Timofeyev, too. Unless his rival’s papers were diversionary, he was creeping forward by inches on a journey that was many miles long. A careerist, he realized one night in Evans Library as he unwrapped a new set of journals. A man interested only in a professorship.

At the realization, he allowed himself a weekend’s rest. A bottle of bourbon. In his apartment he sipped it from a coffee cup.

He didn’t call Cle. He didn’t want to go over a cliff.

Then he went back to work. His first task was to leapfrog what Timofeyev had done. He began by assuming the result, by starting from the proven conjecture and filling backward. If this was true, then so must have been that; for that to have been true, then so must have been this. The individual steps were simple, each requiring the smallest of conclusions. But the complexity of them all together was exhausting. It was as though in the morning he built a house of 1,000 cards, all in his mind, and in the afternoon he chose a single one to remove. Then the next morning, he would build a house of 999 cards. This was what Timofeyev had been doing, but in reverse. One morning, he realized that in this manner it would take years to reach a proof.

He also realized that his own stumbling had disappeared. The blink-outs. He hadn’t had one in weeks.

He bought another bottle of bourbon and set it on the desk. A sip or two seemed to align his thinking. During one stretch of mental projection, he fleetingly envisioned a course all the way to the finish—it laid itself out before him like a rock skipping across a pond. Then was gone.

He was able to reconstruct the particulars only long enough to realize that such a route, momentarily discernible as it was, would soon be overwhelmed by calculation. With growing confidence, he moved to his original insight—that the higher dimensions, despite their unseeable complexity, would yield the answer.

This was the correct path, he sensed with finality one night as he walked again on the Emeryville flats, where before him on the dark bay the ships cast their crawling illumination against the night. This was the path on which he would stake his future.

—

H
E’D FOUND HIS
approach now. He was quite aware of it.

But he could no longer work in the library, the quiet there speeding up his thoughts to where they raced beyond him. He’d taken to working in the coffeehouses instead and even a sandwich shop near his apartment, where the noise buffered his thinking. The brain needed to work at a certain speed. And alone. The parts of him that were Milo Andret needed to go away.

One rainy night, waiting for sleep, he was startled by the phone. 1:23 a.m. He sat up in bed.

“Andret—”

It was Cle. This was ruination.

He couldn’t make out the words. He didn’t want to say anything, but he couldn’t hang up. He set the receiver on the sheet. Now she said nothing at all. The only sound he heard was music. More voices. He forced his own silence. A clock leaf flipped down.

Finally, he said, “What did you want?”

No answer. Behind her, brief voices again through the noise: a party.

“I’m going to hang up now,” he said. “I don’t want to. But I’m going to hang up.”

That he didn’t—that he didn’t set the phone back in the cradle, that he laid it on the pillow instead, beside his ear, where it kept up its whispering—that he didn’t hang it up because he’d had an intuition became a point of comfort to him that would buoy him many years later, when he was stricken all the time with doubt.

Five clock-flips later, she said, clearly enough, “Help.”

—

S
HE WAS LIGHT.
No weight at all. Running. Her body limp across his chest. A crowd. Voices.

At Durant the squeal of a cop car and a veer from the curb. Now they were in the back, her pale face tilted up. Speeding through the night. The twirling strobe cracking the world.

The steel gurney. The double doors. The gray mask pushed against her mouth.

—

“W
HAT’D YOU DO?”
he asked when they finally allowed him in. It was the next afternoon. He’d gone home in the early morning and picked flowers outside his apartment with a flashlight. Since daybreak he’d been waiting in the lobby.

A tube ran from her nose.

“Could have been laced,” she said.

“What could have been?”

She looked around. “How do I know?”

“Where’d you get it?”

She nodded off.

“Cle, where’d you get it?”

“Where do you think?”

“What was it?”

“Won’t—” She nodded off again.

“Won’t what?”

He pinched her hand. She looked bleached. The name bracelet on her wrist was stained with either blood or puke. An IV was taped into the crook of her arm.

“Thanks,” she mumbled. Her hand tilted toward the flowers. “Taking care of me—”

“You’re welcome.”

She might have smiled. Her arm twitched. He covered it with the blanket. She was asleep, but he said it anyway. “Looks like I wasn’t the one who needed to be saved.”

—

I
N A ROOM
at the end of the hall he found Biettermann, sitting up against the headboard reading
Rolling Stone
. A dripping noise. Andret pulled back the curtain. The tubing had been removed from Biettermann’s nose, but the white tape still clung there.

“What was it, Earl?”

“How do I know?”

“Nice.”

“Thanks, brother.”

Milo came around the bed. The dripping sound was the IV emptying onto the floor. “Interesting approach to treatment, Earl.”

Biettermann smiled wanly. “Ah, a joke.”

“You could both have died.”

“Ah, yes—you’re right.” He shook the magazine to turn a page. Then he looked into it and pretended to read. His eyelids closed.

“Well, I happen to care about her,” said Milo.

“That’s sweet.”

“What’d you give her?”

“What’d
I
give her? I didn’t give her anything.” He shook the magazine, but the page wouldn’t turn. Andret leaned down and lifted the sheet. The other wrist was handcuffed to the bed rail.

“Jesus Christ, Earl. What’d you do?”

“Evidently something.”

“You don’t even remember, do you?”

“Listen, Andret. I buy the best.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I take care of my friends. I took care of
your
friend.”

“What’d you give her?”

“Why don’t you go ask her?”

“I just did.”

“And?”

“She doesn’t know.”

Biettermann snorted.

“She doesn’t.”

“Listen, Andret. She
begged
. I don’t push anything on anybody. She’s not the Snow White you think she is. And you’re not Prince Charming.”

“Wrong fairy tale.”

“Doesn’t change the point. You think you’re going to save her with a kiss?”

“I couldn’t have. She wasn’t breathing.”

“Then how come you didn’t carry
me
away, too? How come you didn’t come back up for
me
?”

“I’d say you’re lucky I called an ambulance.”

“Well, somebody called the cops, too.” Biettermann looked at him. “That was you, wasn’t it?”

“It should have been.”

“Listen, Andret, we’re not junkies. This stuff gives me ideas.”

“What stuff, Earl?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.” He leaned forward and shook the magazine. Then he said, “But when you’re ready to try it out, you just let me know.”

—

I
N
M
ARCH, THREE
weeks before spring break began, he left school. A bag of sandwiches and a tank of gas. Bells ringing from the towers and a silver light in the hills. North on 80, a flask propped beside him. He stopped at the same places they’d stopped on the way out—Reno, Elko, Salt Lake, Rock Springs—and walked alone on the same paths they’d walked together. Napped in the same truck stops. Huddled in the same clear cold with the same rumbling big rigs. In his mind he was going to demolish her. In the back of the car where he’d once slept curled into her warmth, he dozed with a peacoat pulled across his chest.

He was going to think about her and think about her until she disappeared.

On a ruined trail near Rawlins he followed the path they’d followed that winter, blinking his eyes into the stiff wind. On the banks of a river east of Cheyenne, where hand in hand they’d sat on a boulder tossing rocks onto the snow-dusted ice, he sat tossing them into the rushing current. Each one splashed and vanished. She vanished alongside, down into the black. On his third night on the road, just past the Nebraska border, he pulled in at the same bright diner, where the same middle-aged waitress refilled his barley soup but didn’t come back with the bread.

When he finished, he found his way to the bathroom. Took a long pull from the flask. Before the same chipped mirror he examined his face. It had been hardened. It had been turned to stone.

Something had been removed, too. What remained was ambition.

He took another pull. Back in the dining room, the waitress was already wiping the table. He stood off to the side until she looked up at him and smiled. “Where’s your friend?” she said. “You leave her somewhere?”

He lifted the jacket off the chairback and worked his arms into the sleeves. “California. Things didn’t work out.”

She swept the utensils into her palm. “You’ll find another.”

“I don’t know.”

“Well,
I
do,” she said, leaning to push in the chair. “You’ll find another.”

—

H
E ARRIVED IN
Cheboygan just as his parents were sitting down to Sunday dinner. His mother’s hand went to her mouth. His father reached to the china cabinet for another plate.

Almost a month remained before the university returned from break. The next morning, the phone rang. It was the registrar’s office. His sections had gone untaught. The police had been sent to his address. Did he wish to withdraw? Four days later, a certified letter, asking the same question. His fellowship money was on the line. Finally, a call from the dean. His father fielded it.

He did his work out in the woods. Frozen days. Bright snow. His thirty-second year on earth—late, in fact, for a mathematician. Wool coat. Spiral notebook. Flask. He’d brought the chain home with him, and on his first day in the woods he set it back in the maple where it belonged. After that, a month spent nearly entirely outside, in one of his old shelters under the trees. He wasn’t hungry, and he barely needed sleep.