A Doubter's Almanac (8 page)

“It’s a distraction. That’s why I made it.”

“No, it’s stupendous. Have you shown it to anyone?”

“Just you.”

“Really? Just me? You know, I was kidding when I called you an idiot.”

“Half kidding,” he said.

“Okay, that’s about right. Half kidding.”

She rose and came to him then. Truthfully, a bother was still inside him, but he was powerless to hold on to it. She took the doughnuts from his hand, walked him to the bed, and leaned in against him.

The night before, of course, he’d been a virgin.

“Is that the truth?” she asked later, as they lay back on the pillows, messily eating the doughnuts. “I’m the only one?”

It took him several moments to realize she was referring to being shown the quatrant.

—

L
ATER THAT WEEK,
a house he didn’t recognize. Big rooms full of tacked-up posters. Velvet couches. He was following her in the hallways. The starry waterfall of San Francisco shivering in the glass. He was hoping to lead her into one of the bedrooms, but he was always a step behind. A dog on a chain.

She was stopping in front of every knickknack. Abalone-shell ashtrays. Incense pots. In the dark stairway he followed the swaying bangles on the bottom of her sweater. Along the back wall of the slope-roofed attic, a dozen other grad-student types were scattered on the cushions and mattresses.

Was that Earl?

It was. He was on a mat beneath the far window, his narrow head resting back. He sat that way during Milo’s section meetings—exactly that way: in the last row, his long hair against the wall behind him, his boots crossed. Sticky little smile on his lips.

When Cle walked up to him, Biettermann tried to kiss her. “Isaac Newton,” she said when she turned, gesturing with her hand. Milo moved up behind her. “I’d like you to meet Gottfried Leibniz.”

It wasn’t funny. She was nervous.

“A pleasure, Gottfried,” said Biettermann.

Milo could think of nothing to say.

Biettermann tilted his head and peered into Milo’s eyes, then offered his hand: the soul shake. He looked stoned. “Earl Biettermann,” he said. “From your calculus section, in case you forgot.”

“I didn’t forget. Is this where you write your poetry, Earl?”

—

C
LE WAS THE
one who gave it to him. Not ten minutes later, after Biettermann was gone. A tiny square on her palm. A little Mickey Mouse in bright blue and red. No bigger than his pinkie nail.

“Open up,” she said.

He was alone with her.

“Come on,” she said, nuzzling him. “Open the hatch.” She went up on her toes and kissed him.

The bite of smoke. The linger.

“Come on,” she said, moving it to his lips. “Open.”

—

A
NORMAL DOSE
for Berkeley in those days: probably 250 micrograms. Lysergic acid diethylamide. You could buy it in the public parks. Milo’s mood was expansive. His experience was nil. Cle stretched out on the mattress and pulled him down beside her. The gold-bangled sweater, the lemon soap. Biettermann was gone. Time difficult to locate. In his eye, the line of her knees and hips, a black horizon with hills. Everything he’d ever wanted.

Nothing was happening.

The ceiling: stamped tin. Victorian curlicues in repetition, repeating squares within repeating squares. Here was something now, a wave rolling across his vision—his concentration unraveling. Okay, there it was—a long, looping pull. The band downstairs rumbling the floor. Biettermann again now, at the far end of the room. Then gone. A black light vivifying the posters like a hidden sun.

Then he plunged.

At the bottom he found himself. Silence. He was inside something. A shimmering construction. It began to rumble like a buried engine. Immediately: his bearings. He was aware that his mind would burn but that it would survive the fire. All he had to do was climb. A slippery wall of flame steadily increasing its slope. Hanging on to the mattress now: he turned. She was beside him, mummified. Wrapped in gold. The gold smoldered, then began to burn. She was curling away in smoke. He gave in, dropped farther, was aware of a hovering border, stretching and respiring, billowing around him. A tent in the wind. Yellow and orange. The border now a point, now falling away. Gathering slope and velocity until he was stranded at its tip. A man on a boulder in an ocean.

He reached but couldn’t touch her. Then he knew he hadn’t even moved. There was no history to his actions. They disappeared into a maw. The surface of a dark pond that swallowed without a ripple, then grew into waves. The waves cannibalized themselves. Then grew again.

An unseen dimension prodding a boundary.

He was aware then of other shapes, floating away before he saw them. Volumeless interiors. Infolding crenellations. A circle—the two-dimensional cut of a sphere; then the sphere itself—the three-dimensional cut of its encasing sheen. It oscillated. The sheen itself encased. Unseen shapes consuming unseen shapes. Superbounded by complexities darting at the edge of his vision. Animals breathing on the far side of a wall.

He reached again for her hand.

—

“I
T WAS MATHEMATICAL,”
he said the next day. They were in a bar. “That was the interesting part. What I saw was mathematical.”

She laughed. “It was an acid trip, Andret.”

“No. It was the Malosz conjecture. I’m sure of it.”

“Every artist has thought that kind of thing.”

“I saw mathematical ideas.”

“That’s just what you remember.” She poured a beer. “Because of who you are. If you’d been like the rest of us, you’d be talking about the colors. That’s what I remember.”

He saw them again—the melting yellows and blue-reds.

But he also knew he’d understood something. Something geometrical. It was gone now, though. It was behind something.

—

O
NE NIGHT, HE
lit two candles and in their flickering light read all the quatrant’s numbers from the month. Then the ones from the previous month. His hands shook as he scanned back through the pages and pages. Something stood up inside him. There was a shape there. He imagined Brahe himself, four centuries before, in a Copenhagen attic, seeing the same shape.

He began to shun sleep and took to calculating at night, followed by classwork, so that he could record data during the day.

There was a time in history when the pattern of numbers he saw on his columned pages would have upended the world.

—

H
IS APARTMENT WAS
a half-hour walk from school, but even so, there were occasional knocks on the door: undergraduates asking to see the quatrant. Sometimes they’d just kneel on the sidewalk and look down through the window. He took to closing the shades. Their cheap fabric admitted a gloom of yellow light.

Cle had her own knock—three short, three long, three short. “Morse code for SOS.”

“Why SOS?” he said.

“Because you’re my savior.”

He laughed. They both knew it was the reverse.

He should have been devoting more time to the Malosz—Borland would be expecting some evidence of progress. But between classes and teaching and the quatrant and now Cle—she arrived every other afternoon with a cup of tea and a book—he had no chance. His intention was to work, but she would do something—touch one of her calves, unspool her hair from its bun—and they would move frantically to the bed, pulling at each other. They’d stay there until one of them grew hungry. Then they’d go upstairs to the Indian restaurant across the street. The spices turned her lips bright red. He almost couldn’t eat.

All the while, he could feel Borland waiting.

One afternoon she was pounding on the door. She rushed in, threw it closed behind her, and pulled down the shades. A Turkish coffee was in her hand, the blue ceramic cup shaking on its saucer. “It’s from that Middle Eastern place on the corner,” she whispered breathlessly. “I was going to bring it right back.” She lifted one of the shades and dropped it again. “But they came after me. I think he’s out there.”

“Who is?”

“The waiter.”

He regarded her. “Did you just steal a cup of coffee, Cle?”

“Screw you, Andret.” She peeked out from behind the shade again.

Then it happened: he was confused. For a moment, there seemed to be two thoughts entering his mind at once. It was a moment—half a moment—of misperception. She seemed to be very far away, her voice coming from some other room.

Then it cleared.

“All right,” he said. He took the cup and pulled out a chair for her. “Partners in crime, then. What do you think of that?”

“You’re not the type.”

“I’m not? What about this?” From the closet he pulled out a pint of whiskey that he’d bought that morning. He’d wrapped it as a Christmas gift for Borland; but now he tore apart the wrapping and fortified the coffee. He needed calm. “To something different,” he said. When she’d drunk it down, he poured a shot for himself.

—

A
T
C
HRISTMAS, HE
took the bus home to Cheboygan. The road leading up to the house was piled with snow, and all along the hill the rows of spruces hung low with their winter weight. In Berkeley, he’d boarded the bus in a T-shirt. Now he moved morosely through the old rooms in his flannels, looking out the windows while his mother sat at the reading table and his father tinkered outside. He read his coursework; he slept long hours in his bed; sometimes he went out to the woods, though he felt separated from them now. He would open the thin Pelado and Harkness text on characteristic classes that Hans Borland had lent him, then sit at the radiator flipping the pages in his lap, thinking of Cle.

Calling felt like weakness.

Only when he was asleep did he not pine for her. His nights were fitful, disturbed by dreams of plunging. Every morning shortly after dawn, regardless of whether it had snowed during the night, his father would put on his boots and go out to salt the walks. Then came the hollow wallop of the drifts falling to the hedges as the old man worked his way around the garage eaves with a broom. Milo would turn to the wall and try to sleep, thinking of the soft shelf of heat where he’d curled his legs behind Cle’s just a few nights before.

She’d gone home to see her family in Minnesota. No more than a narrow sliver of land separated them now, but something other than the map made it insurmountable. He’d called her on his first night home and she’d seemed distant, an intermittent stream of laughter emerging on the line from somewhere in the house. She had sisters. He waited for her to call back, but she didn’t. He gave in and tried again two nights later, but the sister who answered the phone hesitated for a moment, then told him she’d gone out. He vowed not to call again till the week was up.

He wondered what Earl Biettermann was doing over the break.

Time was interminable. He knew he ought to be working on the Malosz, but watching his mother with her novels and his father with his tools—he was starting another one of his projects—leadened him. It took a certain energy to lift his mind to the plane on which it could bring force to bear on a problem. Now this energy had deserted him.

One morning, a few days before the vacation ended, his father brought him outside to the garage. Laboriously, the old man bent down, turned the cross-shaped metal latch, and raised the creaking door. Inside, the family’s old powder-blue Valiant had been cleaned and polished.

“Yes?” said Milo.

“We’re getting a new one,” said his father. “Delivered tomorrow.”

“I don’t understand.”

“The Plymouth. It’s yours.”

Milo didn’t know what to say. He walked around to the driver’s window and looked in at the familiar seats. A pair of keys on the dashboard, tied together with string. He stepped over and shook his father’s hand.

The old man said, “In this kind of weather, use thirty-weight oil. Forty in the summer if it’s hot.”

“I will. Thank you.”

“Your mother’s inside. It was her idea. She’ll want to know if you like it.”

“I do. I like it very much.”

That evening he called Cle again. This time her sister handed over the phone. He told her about the new car. She told him about her vacation. The Wells family owned a toboggan, and the sisters had taken it into the hills around Northfield, then cooked supper over a fire. They’d roasted a goose for Christmas and spent the rest of the days in Minneapolis, ice-skating on a lake and shopping.

There was a silence.

Finally she said, “Don’t you want to know whether I got you anything?”

“Do I?”

“Well, I might have.”

This knocked down the wall inside him. He told her he would drive across the Upper Peninsula and pick her up in the Valiant at her front door and bring her back to school.

“I already have my plane ticket, silly.”

“I’ll drive underneath the plane.”

She laughed.

“Really,” he said.

“That’s silly. I told you.”

“When do you leave?”

“Day after tomorrow.”

“Which flight?”

“Why do you want to know?”

“So I can make sure God protects it.”

“He doesn’t do individual flights.”

A silence. Then she said, “Actually, that was kind of sweet.”

Two days later at the American Airlines terminal in Minneapolis, he ran up the corridor waving a bright orange hunter’s hat. At the gate, the passengers were already lining up to board.

“Lord,” she said. “Am I dreaming?”

“No,
I
am.” He took her valise. “The car’s outside, Cle. Come on, I almost burned it out getting here. I’ll drive you all the way to your door.”

She looked around. “You’ll have to get rid of the hat, though.”

—

I
T WAS A
three-day trip that took them five. The roads were good, but snow stretched knee-high to the horizon. They stopped three times in the first hundred miles and tore at each other’s clothes—at the back of both rest stops between Minneapolis and Albert Lea, where she hung her Catholic-school sweater in the window and climbed past him into the backseat, and the third time on a picnic table beside a creek culvert that passed under the highway, his pants pulled down and her skirt pulled up, the whole thing hidden from the cars but not the trucks. Big rigs blared their horns as they passed. It was still broad daylight.