A Doubter's Almanac (67 page)

“Long live Her Majesty’s Navy!” shouted my father.

“Long live Pascal!” I shouted back. “Long live the hydraulic principle!”

“The fate of England rests upon this battle,” called my mother. “Every man and woman to their duty.
Dei sub numine viget!
”

Then, from their deck, Dad took aim. His long arm descended, and from the thick barrel of the pipe-cannon came a lopsided yellowish missile, wobbling into view. It arched weakly, tumbling end over end and throwing a halo of drops before it landed with a slap on the water.

I was on the downward slope of a dose: I understood that the misfired potato had been a representation of his care.

“Fire, Hans!” yelled my sister. “Fire!”

“Fuck Princeton University!” shouted Dad. He bent to reload.

My mother glanced back at him. “Well, I don’t know—”

“Yes!” I shouted back. “Fuck the Tigers!” I reached into our own supply of potatoes and, with apology, selected the most perfectly spherical. “We shall return!” I called.

“Wrong battle,” hissed Paulie.

“I know that, Smallette.”

“Wrong century.” She looked at me suspiciously.

I dropped the smoothly carved missile into the barrel, fixed my eyes on the target, and thrust my arm down against the piston. Dad, of course, had drilled relief holes to reduce the force of the hydraulics, but somehow my chosen potato had found a way to defeat them. The recoil knocked me sideways. To my astonishment, a pale, buzzing projectile whizzed across the inlet and smacked like a croquet mallet against the stern of their craft. A bottle jumped sideways out of the hull like a fish leaping back into the sea.

“Oh my God!” shouted Paulie. “You did it, Hans! A direct hit! You wounded him!”

“Dear Lord,” came my father’s shaky voice. “We’ve been breached.”

I reloaded. The next potato had grown a strange curling bud at one end, like the handle of a Klein bottle—it lacked only the connecting dimple—but its central radius seemed, like its predecessor’s, to have been grown expressly for the bore of our cannon. Ah, wonders. When I fired, I saw that my bullet had been hurled by God. From the top of the
Royal Sovereign
’s stern came another echoing wallop, this one like a boot kicking a car door, followed by a gurgling dunk as the ordnance careened onward into the channel. My father looked up, frightened now.

“Jesus,” he said in a hushed voice. “Two in a row.”

“God save the queen!” shouted Paulie.

“We give up!” called my mother from the rear of their boat, laughing and raising her sun-hat on a stick.

“Nonsense,” came Dad’s measured reply. “One early triumph means nothing. We’ve just gotten started. We shall never give up!”

“Neither shall we!” yelled Paulie.

“Never give up,” I whispered at the sky.

“But we
do
!” called my mother. “We
do
give up!”

“Jesus,” I heard my father say. “We’re taking on water.”

They were. I bent to the potato pail, and when I stood again, I saw that Dad had somehow caught his foot inside the gash in their stern. I slipped the next potato into the barrel—it made a dull
poof
like a dropped sack of flour—and at that moment Dad fell over comically onto his back, his arms shooting up behind him and one leg stabbing through to the other side of the hull, where it kicked lamely at the water. I was aware, briefly, of a rent in time: my shot, though still in the barrel, had already felled him.

A dizzying revelation.

I looked up for a moment at the painted sky, and when I refocused I saw his flailing arms, reaching alternately for one gunwale and then the other. My poor father. The
Royal Sovereign
’s bow jiggered back and forth as though a manatee were bumping past it underwater. He tried to wedge himself up by grabbing the handle of one of the keel jugs. There was a swallowing sound, a row of bottles came out in his hand, and the long deck accordioned around him as though the pins had been pulled from a folding chair.

From the high point of the transom, my mother began crying with laughter.

Dad struggled to his feet. Then he fell again. He pulled himself up and slid back the other way.

That’s when I realized it: he was drunk.

Of course.

On the other hand, there was nothing to prove that time had not indeed run backward.

“Fire!” shouted my sister.

“Rudder,” I said. “They’ve lost rudder.”

“Fire!”

“Victory is ours, I do believe, Paulie. Superior tactic and preparation—we’ve prevailed.”

“Fire, dopehead!”

“What?”

“Fire!”
Then she said, “Oh my God, I believe he’s having
fun
.”

“Damn all of you,” came my father’s thick-voiced rebuke. He struggled to his knees and managed to pull his leg back through the breach, lowering his shoulders and shaking his head from side to side like a buffalo fighting a spear. “Man the torpedoes!”

“Honey, honey,” said my mother, “we surrender! We surrender!” She moved lightly behind him, still laughing, and pulled him to his feet.

“We shall never—”

“No! No! No!” she said. “We shall right this very minute! Children, we surrender!”

“Never!”

They were halfway submerged now. He twisted around, staggered from her grip, and mounted the slanting transom. There he teetered for a moment on the screeching bottles before, with a bellow, he flung himself sideways like a walrus. The lagoon shattered. A mud-colored polytope of his mass shot glitteringly into the air, where it remained for a moment like a strobe in my eyes. “Lord God,” I breathed.

“Victory is ours,” whispered Paulie.

“Lord God.”

“Hold your fire,” called my mother, waving her hat. “We come in peace.”

We waited.

I looked up at the unfathomable sky. “We accept in peace,” I said.

Then I returned to my battle station. The dark remnant of my father’s gravity had by then repaired itself, and all that remained of him now was a rippling dissipation of the original disturbance. Patiently it graphed itself toward us. The cove was only a few feet deep where he’d entered, but it was as brown as coffee. He seemed to have passed through to the other side of the earth. My mother reclaimed her spot on the high end of the boat and continued to wave her hat, beaming her smile across the cove as though we were the next two guests on her talk show. The plastic pipe of their potato cannon spun numinously in the ripples.

He’d flung himself into the water twenty yards from where Paulie and I now shaded ourselves beneath the willow, but by the time his wake reached us there was no sign of him at all. Just the inscrutable lagoon, meticulously reaveraging its depth. A heron squawked. A catfish nosed the reeds. His wake returned from the far shore and passed beneath us again. Still no sign of him. By now, Paulie was glancing around, and my mother’s smile had reversed itself. I looked up at the horizon, where an airplane’s contrail was neatly unzipping the sky. My sister shaded her eyes and leaned low to the water while my mother rose to her feet on the now-ebulliently-buoyant deck and called out, tentatively, “Milo?”

The cattails swayed.

Presently, in a more tremulous voice, she whispered, “Hans?”

“I’m sure he’s fine, Mom.”

“Mom?” said Paulette. “Hans? What’s happened?”

“That is a mystery,” I said.

But it wasn’t. In fact, I knew exactly where he was. As my mother raised her eyebrows in alarm and my sister turned her head nervously to shore, first over one shoulder, then over the other—as though my father were a leopard waiting for us in the trees—I myself remained languorously at ease. I pulled another potato from the pail and set it calmly alongside the barrel, just in case.

“To him I resign myself,” I said, glancing to the heavens. “And the just cause which is entrusted to me.”

“What?”
said Paulie.

“Nelson. On the eve of battle.”

The drug gave me one last little shiver then. In its wake, I realized that my father would survive. Would survive this now; would survive whatever came for him, then and for all time. I understood that despite every bit of evidence—despite the ruins of his career and the drunken hurtle of our lives, despite the unremitting quarantine of his own genius and the ever-fateful tick-tock of his calamitous inheritance—he would remain forever invincible, even in memory. Always logical of mind, always forward of intent.

He was merely holding his breath, as he’d been training himself to do all summer.

“It’ll be all right,” I said. I could sense him advancing toward us through the water, like a torpedo.

“Hans?” Paulette whispered. “Hansie, please—”

“He’s fine.”

When the torpedo hit, my sister screamed. A scattering cape of weeds flew out behind him as he rocketed from the water, seized her by the waist, and lifted her into the air. She screamed again. His arms shook as he carried her through the churning mud to the shore. When he set her down on the sand, they were both laughing.

I remember being happy.

I watched my mother pole the wreckage of the
Royal Sovereign
to land and step out with a picnic basket in her arms. It had remained miraculously dry. She spread its contents across a pinwheel quilt, which had remained just as miraculously dry. Whistling softly, she began prying rubber tops from containers.

“Wow,” said my father, dropping to his knees. “Ribs!”

Untroubled.

That’s what we were. Our family, at that moment, was
untroubled
.

“And you even thought to put it in plastic,” said my father.

“I’m brilliant,” cooed my mother.

“That, you are.”

We ate.

After the meal, we all lay back to rest. Presently, the sun’s rays grew long. To the east, the trees cast themselves in their silver edging; then in their rose-hued shimmer; then in their inky, purple opulence. Around us on the shore, the evening birds emerged; then the frogs began their song, their melodies disputing the rough shrill of the crickets and the electric roil of the marsh flies that were gathering now above us like a restless foreign crowd in a great public square. The buzzing harmonies laced themselves into an aria. In the shadows of the cove, the temperature of the water at last defeated the temperature of the land, and from the reed beds, a chilly breeze came ambling up to find us. Without thinking, we all moved closer together. I could feel the heat from each of them now, from my mother and father and sister, their limbs splayed all around me on the quilt. And as we lay there, the rhythm of our breathing began to organize itself into the rhythm of a single being, rising and falling. In the shelter of that unfamiliar peace, I watched the horizon climb steadily toward the heavens. Higher and higher it rose, until at last, as it neared the sun, the world seemed suddenly to quiet. A shorebird called out. The clouds darkened, then flared brightly at their rims, and for a few moments, as dusk began to spread, the sky was lit by nothing but a crowning thread of fire.

If you would be a real seeker after truth, you must at least once in your life doubt, as far as possible, all things.

—RENÉ DESCARTES

For Barbara, Amiela, Ayla, and Misha,

and for my parents, Stuart and Virginia

Acknowledgments

M
ANY PEOPLE HELPED
with this book. Among the most generous was Jon Simon, topologist, friend, and professor emeritus at the University of Iowa, who read the manuscript with astonishing care and offered an extremely generous set of notes, corrections, and suggestions on the mathematics. Similarly helpful was Chard deNiord, poet, essayist, fiction writer, and longtime friend, whose frankness remains legendary. My agent, Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, provided her usual levelheaded mix of encouragement and clarity, as did Gina Centrello, president and publisher of Random House. Steve Sellers was a great boon, as always. So were Joe Blair and Bill Houser.

At Penguin Random House, my editor, Kate Medina, read the manuscript so many times I’ve lost count, never failing to push it in the right direction. Her fine and generous reading and constant support were instrumental. Anna Pitoniak was never-endingly intelligent, responsive, and reliable—a delight to work with. I’m grateful to my copy editors as well, Amy Ryan and Susan Betz—secret heroes, both of them—and to Steve Messina, the book’s production editor, who was my kind of meticulous. Also at Penguin Random House, Maria Braeckel and Alaina Waagner got things going for the wide world. I’m grateful to Avideh Bashirrad there, too, along with Benjamin Dreyer, Derrill Hagood, Joe Perez, and Simon Sullivan.

A number of other wonderful friends gave particularly generously of their time, including Liaquat Ahamed, Dan Baldwin, Alex Bassuk, Deb Blair, Nate Brady, Po Bronson, Michael Flaum, Alex Gansa, Dan Geller, Dayna Goldfine, Mike Lighty, Jon Maksik, Yannick Meurice, Linda and John Spevacek, Jane VanVoorhis, Lauren White, Judith Wolff, and Anne Ylvisaker. I owe a debt of gratitude to my brother, Aram, and to his wife, Lianne Voelm, for their adroit advice. Kurt Anstreicher introduced me not only to some of history’s great mathematical problems but also to Bob Vanderbei of Princeton University, who was kind enough to tour me through that famous department of mathematics. My thanks to all of them.

For some key details, I’m indebted to my friend Commander Thomas Corcoran, U.S. Navy (Retired), a man who knows both naval history and computer programming. For Wall Street trivia, thanks go to two other friends, Scott Lasser and Gray Lorig. Eric Simonoff at William Morris Endeavor was also very generous with his time. Thanks again to Maxine Groffsky, who stood by me for so many years. And a special thank-you to Wendell Berry and David Blackwell.