A Doubter's Almanac (24 page)

When he looked up finally, there was a woman sitting on the pier. He pulled his coat tighter and leaped across the break onto the next floe, where he turned to wave. She made no response. But he could see her watching him. So he went farther, jumping the next break and then the next until he was a good part of the pier’s length out from shore. The block he stood on now wasn’t half as big as the first but still hunkered below him like a driveway. He tried to smile at her, but in the cold he wasn’t sure if his lips had moved. She was too far away to see, anyway. He would have liked to begin a conversation. A conversation with a woman.

She turned away.

He was irrelevant.

The Abendroth was irrelevant.

Even the Malosz was irrelevant.

There was nothing, in fact, that was not irrelevant.

The truth of all of this could easily have brought him to his knees but instead produced a laugh—a short, low eruption that escaped his mouth and went to the ice like a wrench slipping from his frozen fingers. Out he went, deeper. Nothing he could ever do would elucidate even the most negligible force within a single atom. Let alone alter it. God was not the explanation of these things but merely a gripe with the puzzle of them.

The block that he was standing on now was pitched at greater depth but still touched the bottom, its prow parting the water like a boat anchored against the tide. At its front edge, the current made a hiss. But when he crossed to the next piece, his footing suddenly tilted: he was afloat now. His weight rocked, a gentle rhythm that he countered with his hips as he watched it occur in staggered delay over the whole field of jigsawed white. A molecule in the sea. An iota. That’s all he was. He’d spent the good part of his life angling for a single glance at nature’s scriptural code and yet was at every moment nothing more than an abject slave to its billions of unnamed postulates. That was the joke.

It was in his nature to get jokes late.

A long-remembered sensation came back then: the pleasure of his cold breath. The whole calm of winter. The traffic behind him was bellowing, but out here the sound was swallowed by the ice. This was a world that had existed alongside him all the time. He’d been the one to forsake it.

He turned to the pier and saw the woman still sitting there. She was watching him warily now, her expression a warning.

It’s tragic how one can be saved. That’s what he would think, many years later, when his only son asked him for advice. He waved at the woman, but again she made no response. Now, at least, he was in on the joke. When she rose and walked toward the street, he crossed back to shore himself, attempting to whistle but in fact making no sound at all that was discernible over the rush of cars.

—

T
HE NEXT DAY,
a Greyhound took him the rest of the way to Cheboygan. Two stops and a change of buses. By the time he arrived, the sun was a good way down over the water. Across the street from the depot, the general store still displayed its tilting stack of sale wares—brightly colored garbage cans and the same repainted row of forest-green Adirondacks that had been advertising themselves on the day he’d boarded the bus for East Lansing, twenty years before. Hardly a detail had changed. Fertilizer bags. Shovels and trowels. A rope-tied pile of three-colored swim buoys. He stepped down and looked around. The cast of light off the lake. The sun’s late-afternoon habit of seeming to shine up from the water rather than down from the sky. A tinge of iron on the breeze.

Mrs. Fredericks still drove the Brown’s Cab.

At the door of his childhood house, he knocked.

Nothing. He realized he hadn’t spoken to either of his parents since the Fields Medal. He knocked again.

Finally, the familiar dot-dash shuffle of his mother’s slippers from the hallway near the kitchen.

“Lord,” she said, scratching her head. “Look who’s home.”

—

W
HEN HE ENTERED
the back study, his father looked up from his reading chair, waved cheerfully, and returned to reading. From the door behind him, his mother said, “See?”

Back in the kitchen, Milo said, “That’s how he’s always been.” He took his place at the table while she refilled her martini from a shaker.

“Are you kidding? I’m not even sure he knows you left.”

“I left two decades ago, Mom.”

“Well, go ask him if he remembers.” She sniffed. “Top’s come a little loose on the screws jar.”

She set the shaker on the table and took a seat. Then she directed her gaze to the newspaper for a moment and pretended to be reading. Her tears were like the condensation on a glass of water. He looked away.

He poured a martini for himself. “My compliments on the recipe,” he said.

“Thank you.” She sipped. “While pouring the gin, dear, I thought briefly of the vermouth.”

They sat there. The sun went behind the trees, dousing the kitchen in a last spray of northern light that made his eyes feel sharp.

After a time, he said, “Do
you
think I can ever love anyone?”

—

T
HAT NIGHT, HE
went downtown by himself. Old Cheboygan. The boat slips empty for winter. Hardly a car on the streets. He parked along the channel and went into a deserted bar, where he took a place at the window and watched a Coast Guard vessel push slowly up the seaway. A low-transomed stalwart with rigging like a Christmas tree. Its crew hustled around the deck as it edged to a halt across the channel and slipped sideways into berth. From the tops of the gantry cranes, the sodium lamps snapped on. More men were onshore, moving around in the sudden brightness, shouting into walkie-talkies and steering the ramps.

He could have been part of some endeavor like that. His father had spent five years in the navy and then forty in the public schools. His mother had gone off every day to her work at the county seat. Now he’d spent his own life in solitary chase of something he would never reach.

In the dark entranceway of the bar he pulled out his wallet. The old card was still folded in behind his license. He dropped a fistful of change into the phone. She recognized his voice immediately. It heartened him.

“I’m watching a ship tie up in the dark right now,” he said. “A huge one. It’s all lit up. It’s beautiful.”

She failed to understand. “Yes?”

“Like a constellation. Like the one we saw in Sioux City.”

Silence. Maybe he’d made a mistake.

“On the Missouri, Cle—don’t you remember?”

“You’ve failed at something.”

“What?”

“I can hear it, Milo. What happened? Was it the proof?”

“Yes.” Then, “I was just a few weeks away.”

“Oh—I’m sorry.”

Another silence.

“I need you,” he said.

“Of course you don’t.”

“You believed in me.”

“Everyone did. Everyone still does.”

“No. Only Borland and Hay. And
you
.”

“Well, Hans Borland would tell you to get right back to work, wouldn’t he?”

She was right.

“And what about that girl you brought to dinner? Where’s she?”

He didn’t answer.

“Well, I’m sorry to hear it. But I can’t help you, Milo. I’d like to, but I can’t. You have to go home and start again. I know you can do it. Life goes on.”

Across the channel, a skid loader climbed down the ramp with a pallet in its stays. Then the lights snapped off again and the ship became a gray ghost against the night. The phone clicked, but he had no more change. Just before it disconnected, he said, “What makes you think I can do it?”

—

H
IS MIND WAS
a paper bag that had been turned upside down and shaken.

The next day, he went out behind his parents’ house for a walk. Along the edge of the coverts, he climbed a low hill and followed the line of giant birches that ran at the top of the crest. They were dropping long curls of bark now, like old theater lobbies giving up their wallpaper. When they finally fell—in a year or two, in ten—the aspens below would shoot up, consuming their old masters in a single season, as though with teeth.

Nonetheless, his old forest had hardly changed. Not a leaf was different because of the Abendroth.

He followed the gentle rise of the hill. Due east ten steps from the tenth trunk in the tenth row, but a few inches below the level of his chest now—it was he who had grown—he found the maple.
It
was the same, too. The star still there, a pale keloid in the dysplastic craze of bark. He rotated the notched bung and released the dovetail. At the bottom, the cavity was dry and the sack lay closed as though it had spent all this time at the rear of a sock drawer.

He hoisted it up and carefully pulled out the chain.

Years in the dark but no apparent harm. In long armfuls he laid it out along the ground, understanding for the first time what Mr. Farragut must have felt a quarter century before when it was set on his desk by a kid in first-semester shop.
He’d
been that kid. He’d sanded every inch in circumference, shellacked every link in isolation. Now the whole thing chimed like a woodwind as he spread it out on the frozen bed of peat. The sheer magnitude of the undertaking stunned him. Since then, he’d done nothing to approach it. Not even the Malosz, whose solution, he sometimes thought darkly, had involved a piece of pure luck—luck that had come to him in these very same woods.

He gathered its length back into the sack, checking each link in his hands. Not a single one was flawed. His memory failed, but the intricacy of the design must have taken months. He might have thought years. This was something in his character, too. It had been there as a boy.

Now it had departed.

Why was it no longer possible to follow a thought toward anything but torment? Night suddenly closed over the trees, and he realized he’d forgotten a flashlight. An owl called out, and after a pause, its babies commenced their chatter. He pushed closed the burlap. Then he set out for home. In a gulley his foot slipped on a root and he sat heavily on the ground, the sack splaying out before him. A shout escaped. The owls quieted, and he lay back in the sudden hush. It was not unpleasant, actually, to rest there in the quiet and feel the winter earth below him, just beginning to thaw. He dug his hands into the leaves and smelled the vinegary ferment. He’d spent countless hours in these woods with no thought of anything but their welcome. He lay there quietly, waiting for the owls to resume, until he understood that tears were on his face.

It was necessary to find a way forward. But how? What would he do now?

A Scandinavian Weed

B
ACK IN HIS
apartment in Princeton, he shook out his briefcase and rummaged through the drawers in his study, then went to the bedroom closet and turned out the pockets of his suits, pulling out matted scraps of paper until he came to what he was looking for.

The next afternoon, Dr. William Brink leaned back in a creaking wood rocker and let the knees of his pants show above the desktop. “And how may I be of help, Dr. Andret?”

“I need something.”

“Yes? Something of which type?” The chair-front came down with a rattle. “Aid and comfort of a psychological nature?”

“No.”

“Something more rapid?”

“I’m seeing things.”

“Seeing things?”

“Things that aren’t there, Doctor. Crazy, multiplicative geometries. I’m a mathematician, you know.”

“Of course, I know that, Dr. Andret.” Dr. Brink bowed his head courteously. “I know that very well. And by any chance are you hearing things, also?”

“No.”

Brink gazed steadily across the desk at him. “And you wish to speak to me in detail about all of this? It’s a bit unusual. It must be frightening.”

“No, I don’t. I don’t want to talk about any of it. I just want something to take care of it.”

“Ah. Something quick and efficient, then?”

“That’s right.”

He could tell that Dr. Brink understood.

—

“W
HAT ARE YOU
swallowing there?” Olga Petrinova said, raising her head from the pillow.

Andret looked down at the bottle. “I have no idea. All I know is that it works.”

She turned lazily in the bed. After sex, she’d slipped back into the union suit, which despite its lacy bands gave her the appearance now of a Soviet factory worker rising for a night-shift. Andret was in the kitchen looking for something reasonable to wash down a pill with. On his first run through the cabinets, all he’d found was red wine. He didn’t like her watching him.

“What?” he said.

“You should be careful with that.”

“It’s nothing to be careful about.” He shook a couple of them onto his palm. “You should heat your apartment.”

“Milo,” she said, rising up onto her elbow. “You have been here for two nights now. You are eating tablets. What is going on? You are afraid of something, yes? Or some
one,
is it?”

“I’m not afraid of anything. It’s damn cold in here.” He slapped closed one cabinet and began rummaging in the next.

“You have never stayed before one whole night even. You do not tell me there is not something new here. Is this your mysterious Annabelle?”

“If you heated this place it might almost be comfortable.”

“Why are you always such bastard? May I ask?”

“No, as a matter of fact. You may not ask.”

What could he tell her? That though he was here with her for the moment, he was indeed longing for Annabelle—but that Yevgeny Detmeyer had just returned from England? That his actual taste in women ran severely to the bland? That with the Abendroth now in smithereens, he was careening?

Under the sink now, at last: some gin. He replaced his wine with it and downed the pills, shuddering as he looked closely at the prescription: it was Ativan.

When he turned again, Olga was beckoning. He took another drink.

Annabelle Detmeyer had typed his papers for him. She’d been alongside him when he’d come so close to the consummate work of his life. She’d believed in him. Cle had believed in him. He had a feeling that even Helena had once believed in him. Now he had Olga, waiting for him to perform on a sprung mattress in an apartment so cold his balls had disappeared inside him. He took another swallow of gin and walked back into the room. The world skidded past. Her rapacious mind, tactfully obscured. Her copy of
Inventiones Mathematicae,
poorly hidden in the bathroom. Olga was a mathematician, and everything that brought to mind mathematics brought to mind his failures, their vilely polluted flame burning blackly in his head.