A Doubter's Almanac (23 page)

Before long, he’d ceased pausing the program altogether. He added the remainder of the blocks and simply let the whole thing run. For close to an hour, the green fire burned steadily, the drive and fan cycling irregularly—this was the sound of a successful implementation—until finally his attention returned with a start and he realized that the rhythm of the machine had changed again. The drive was whirring steadily now, without variation. This could signify only one thing: the logic board was repeating itself.

Another memory leak.

He was being tested by God.

Before he pulled the plug from the wall he took a short break to rest back in his chair. He might have dozed. When he came to, his glass was on its side and a puddle of bourbon was spreading. It hadn’t reached the computer yet, but for a moment he thought about allowing it to. At this rate, Seth Kopter would demolish him.

Leaning forward in his chair, he touched his finger to the liquid. He made the lake first: Georgian Bay; then Saginaw Bay and the North Channel. Then the crescent where Cheboygan sloped in a half-moon to the water. With the tip of his pinkie he placed a drop where his old woods ran. For a moment, he nearly dozed again.

Then he wiped what he could off the edge of the blotter into the glass and leaned down to lick up what remained.

—

I
T WAS WHEN
he woke sometime later in the night, his head still on the desk, that he realized what had disturbed his sleep: the TI-120 had gone quiet. He looked up. The blaze on the screen had been extinguished to a single green ember, blinking calmly at the top. Something glowed steadily alongside it. He leaned forward.

A number.

He copied it out to twenty-one places and checked it the old way.

Annabelle answered the phone in a woozy voice. “Milo,” she said. “Look at the clock on the wall. Tell me what time it is.”

He took a breath. “It worked,” he whispered.

Ant on a Rubber Rope

A
DAY WAS
a week now. A day was a month.

The Abendroth would be solved—of this fact there was no longer doubt.

In the morning he opened the door to his office. He closed it. The light grew. Faded. He opened it. Closed it. A week. Another week. Sleep was interruption. The energy of his mind was focused parabolically by the logic board, compressed to a scalding yellow dot like the pea-sized sun that had branded the whittled trinkets of his childhood. The TI-120 incinerated everything it touched. The numbers. The multivariable plots. The curve geometry. It burned and burned.

—

“M
ILO,”
H
AY SAID.
“A computer’s nothing but a tool. Without proper direction, the tool would be useless. Completely useless.”

They were in a back booth at Clip’s again. This time, the outing had been Hay’s idea. “But I’ve decided you were right about something else,” he went on. He cleared his throat. “I’m going to buy machines for everyone in the department, Milo. Good ones.” He sipped his drink. “Like the one in your office.”

“What? When were you in my office?”

“I was walking by. Where’d you get that thing, anyway? I can’t even tell what model it is.”

“What were you doing in my office?”

“Dennis was in there, Milo. I happened to look in. I was up there to see one of your colleagues. That’s a powerful-looking specimen you’ve got in there.”

“Who the hell is Dennis?”

“The janitor, Milo. Dennis Alberts. He’s been around Fine Hall longer than
you
have.”

“Why was the door open?”

“I already told you, Dennis was in there.”

“You came into my office when I wasn’t there?”

“The door was open. I looked in to say hello.”

“What janitor?”

“Are you kidding me, Milo? Let’s not do this, please.”

“What janitor?”

“Dennis Alberts, Milo. The Fine Hall janitor. I just told you.”

“There’s a janitor who goes into my office?”

“He’s been here for twenty years, Milo. Do you think your wastebaskets empty
themselves
?”

“What was he doing in there?”

“Look, Milo.”

“What?”

Hay took a drink, then placed his hand on Milo’s arm. “I want to tell you something,” he said. “Listen to me. You’re a great mathematician, Milo. A truly great one.
This
computer,
that
computer—none of it has anything to do with what you are. You’re a
world-class
mathematician—a theoretician of the highest order.” He raised his glass. “And the world has now acknowledged it.” He signaled to the waitress for another round. “That’s all I wanted to say.”

“Well, thank you, Knudson.”

“You know who got you the Hyun Chair, right?”

“Yes, I’m well aware.”

“It wasn’t entirely easy.”

“You already told me that. And I already said thank you.”

“And because I believe in you, Milo, I want you to keep the floppies.”

“What?”

Hay set down his glass. “It’s fine, Milo. You can keep the C++ disks.”

“I was planning to return them.”

“I know you were. It’s fine. I managed to get another set for myself anyway. Just keep the ones you have. I actually
want
you to have them.”

“I was in a hurry, Knudson. I’m sorry.”

“Well, to be fair, you could have just asked me to borrow them.”

“And what if you’d said no?”

“Why would I do that?”

“I don’t know, Knudson.
You
tell
me
.”

“What, Milo? Okay, look—never mind. It’s all fine. I know you’ll do something much greater than I could with them. They’re yours now. I have every confidence that they’ll be well used.”

More drinks arrived. Milo downed his.

Hay looked at the table. “I know what I’m not,” he said.

Milo glanced across.

“I’m well aware of my own limitations,” Hay continued.

“I don’t understand.”

“I’m not a great mathematician, Milo. I know that perfectly well.”

Milo turned his head to the street. “You can never say that, Knudson.”

“Yes, I can. I can say it with complete assurance. I’m no great mathematician. I’ve made my peace with it. But what I
am
good at is understanding
other
mathematicians. At taking
care
of them. At motivating them and bringing them along.”

“I work hard, Knudson.”

“That’s not what I mean. I know you do.”

“All right. Okay.” Milo took a drink. Outside, an ambulance came into hearing. As it passed by, snaking through the traffic, its strobe detonated against the bottles on the back wall of the bar. He closed his eyes.

—

B
Y MIDWINTER, HE’D
prepared four papers. The four pillars of logic that would form the contributory proofs for his coup de grâce. Annabelle begged him to read the finished manuscripts for errors before she sent them off to the journals. But he could smell the final assault now and had already buried himself in the next round of derivations. So she hired an assistant professor to proofread what she typed up herself. She’d helped her own husband in the same way, years before. “And he never even thanked me,” she said. “Do you know that?”

Andret looked up. “Well,” he said. “Thank you.”

As it happened, all four papers appeared in the same month. Two in a single issue of
Inventiones Mathematicae,
one in
Acta Mathematica,
and one in the
Annals.

—

“N
OT A BAD
couple of weeks,” said Hay. “Even for Milo Andret.” They were in Hay’s office this time, and he motioned for Milo to sit, then touched the line of reprints at the edge of his desk. “Without doubt the three best journals in the field. But that goes without saying, doesn’t it? Drink?”

“Please.”

“I can’t imagine what this kid Kopter is feeling right now.”

“I can do nothing
but
imagine it, Knudson. What’s to stop him from still getting the jump on me?”

“No review would publish if he used your work without credit—that’s what.” He ran his hand along the reprints. “And you’ve got all the good ones covered.”

“It’s a new world.”

“Not so new as you think.” Hay raised his glass. “Truly, it’s magnificent work you’ve done, my friend. It brings honor to this department. I called Manny Hyun last week, just to make sure he’d heard. Tell me, how close do you think you are
now
?”

“To what?”

“Why must you always test me, Milo?”

Andret’s bourbon had been poured neat again. He downed the remainder. “I can see the whites of their eyes,” he answered.

—

O
LGA BECAME HIS
only relief. She didn’t talk, as Annabelle did, about his achievements. She didn’t ask about his progress. She didn’t congratulate him and she didn’t goad him on. In her tiny bathroom one afternoon he spotted his issue of
Inventiones Mathematicae,
but it had been obscured beneath a scatter of last week’s newspapers.

It was as though the exhaustion itself had charged him with hunger. Every few days, he came to see her. He found he wanted her two and three times a visit.

“My,” she said one evening, after he’d outstayed his usual departure, “I think you must be eating steak this day.”

“You’re my steak.”

“Is that so?”

She was atop him, her dark eyes burrowing into him like the lenses of a radiographic machine. He took her nipple between his lips.

“Answer me,” she said.

“Answer you what?”

“Am I all you wish to eat?”

“Of course you are.”

“Who is Annabelle then?”

“What?”

“Who is she?”

“I don’t know.”

In his ear: “You don’t know?”

“Nobody. Where’d you get that name?”

“Where do I get it? That is not the question. The question is who is she.”

She surprised him now by kissing him deeply. Then she was lifting his hips.

“Who is the mysterious Annabelle?”

“I don’t know.”

Again in his ear: “Do you think I care, Milo?”

“I don’t know if you do.”

“I do not.”

“Then you don’t.”

“Yes, you are right.” She quickened her pace now, her hands pressing down his shoulders. Her breath heaved as she pulled herself into his chest and then released, pulled herself in and released, shimmying up his body as though he were a tree she was determined to climb. When she drew forward he felt her hot breath on his face, and when she drew back he smelled her sweat, spiked with a smoky current of bourbon that weakened him like nerve gas. She was murmuring in Russian. At last she stiffened, closing her eyes.

Afterward, she lay next to him. He was looking out the window at the moon, but all he could feel was her gaze against the side of his skull.

“You are right that I do not care,” she said. She lit a cigarette. “But I do think that
she
might.”

—

A
NOTHER KNOCK ON
the door. Early morning this time. He’d been up all night working.

The knock came again.

“What is it!”

“It’s me, Milo.”

Knudson Hay.

“Milo, we need to speak.”

“I’m busy. Not now.”

“Then I guess you haven’t seen this.”

When Milo yanked open the door, it bounced off one of the boxes and smacked back against his shoulder. “Goddamn it, Knudson! I’m so fucking close! What now!”

Hay had an envelope in his hand. “I’m sorry, my friend,” he said. “I still have every faith in you.” Then he pointed back to the chair. “But you might want to be sitting down for this.”

Andret kicked at the door. “What the hell is going on, Knudson?”

“It’s Kopter,” Hay said, holding out the envelope. “He appears to have found a proof.”

—

T
HE MATRONLY OLD
bartender at Clip’s stopped in front of him. “Safe to say,” she said, wiping at the counter, “that you’re the only one in here reading a math article.”

He’d asked her to leave his empties before him. The cut edges of the glasses were projecting stellate tessellations across the mahogany. He tilted one, and its rays shifted errorlessly along the matrix of prisms. Nature never broke its own laws. Every piece of code was encyclopedized within every atom of creation. And all of it was merely waiting. A pretty girl tapping her boot on the barstool while the cripple plans his heartfelt words. That was what he was—the cripple, deluded by a single kindly glance. A life devoted to an anachronistic dream of glory. A long-rotten version of the hunt. Even after the lamp at the cash register had warped in his eyes to a hazy oblong of yellow—this, too, was exactly explicable—he was unable to drive from his mind the fact that he’d taken a public beating at the hands of a fourteen-year-old boy.

Seth Kopter had used an entirely different method. He’d probably not even
known
about Andret’s papers. And he’d made much better use of the computer.

“Keep my tab open, would you?” He slid off the stool toward the men’s room.

“Of course, sweetheart.”

He himself had probably been no more than a month away.

Reductio ad Impossibilem

I
N
C
HICAGO, THE
long winter’s chain of filthy ice still crowded the lakefront. A crazed castle moat of gray-white flotsam stretching east a quarter mile from shore, heaving steadily in the wind. The waves lifted and settled the fractured sheet in slow rhythm, like a housemaid endlessly shaking out a tablecloth. He’d been waiting at O’Hare for his connection to Cheboygan but had taken a cab to the lake instead. What did it matter what he did now?

He walked from the pier to the waterline and set his foot on one of the slabs of ice. It was as long as a tennis court and rested half on the sand and half in the shallows, its surface pocked with sooty flecks from the traffic roaring behind him. When he stepped up onto the mass of it, it didn’t even acknowledge his weight. And why should it? He moved out a few strides. Through his wing tips he could feel the knock of the current. When the wedges farther out on the lake struck one another, his feet vibrated. He walked forward until he reached the seam—a zigzag of black, bobbing with cigarette butts and seaweed. The north wind was frigid, and with all the buildings to the rear of him the screeches from the deeper floes seemed to be trumpeting out from the shore.