A Doubter's Almanac (33 page)

Then, just as suddenly, he was still. He curled up on his side, blinking.

I pushed a pillow under his head. “Dad?”

His color was returning, but still he made no sound. At last came a low gasp, then a short, ugly bark as he vomited. A moment later, I smelled the stench of his bowels.

It was only then that I shouted for my mother.

—

M
OM HAD PILLS.
Pills she’d kept on hand for some time, apparently. That evening, she gave him the first of them. She was a kind woman, my mother, forgiving to a fault; but she was also vexed for a good part of her life by a loyalty and a hampering self-consciousness that could seem like a prison. It was this self-consciousness, I think, that stopped her from calling the doctor. I’m fairly sure she understood what had happened, but instead of sending him for treatment, she treated him herself. With an old bottle of tranquilizers that she told me she’d found in his drawer. Before sleep that night, she gave him another.

I believe she was ashamed.

The medicine took him through until morning, and when I woke the next day I went in directly to see him. He was still alive. In fact, he appeared to have been restored almost to normal, sitting upright against the headboard reading his copy of
The Nation
. The agreeable smell of his cologne once again filled the room.

“Hans,” he said without looking up, “your mother tells me you helped me out yesterday.” He flipped a page. “Thank you.”

“Are you feeling better?”

“I’m fine. A little slow, maybe.” He rubbed his neck. “A little sore, too. But I’ve taken something for it.”

I stood next to the bed. I could hear my mother downstairs, speaking in a low voice with Paulette.

When I pulled the bag from behind my back and placed it on the mattress, he set aside his reading. A tentative, quivering crease appeared on his face. He touched the brown paper, and the crease spread across his features until it ran all the way from his darkly scabbed lips to the haggard-looking corners of his eyes. “Oh, God,” he whispered. “You figured it out, didn’t you?”

“I did, Dad.”

He pulled out the neck of one of the bottles and turned it to read the label. “Hennessy?” He set it back in and pulled out the next one. “All of these are
Cognac
?”

“The woman at the store must have misheard me.”

A look of puzzlement, then of what I might call a thoughtfully considered determination, crossed his features. “That’s fine, Hans,” he whispered. “It’ll do.”

He shifted his features into a full-out smile then that twitched just faintly at the ends. I don’t think my father had ever looked upon me—or has looked upon me since—with such thoroughly felt gratitude. “Oh, Hans,” he said. “This is perfect. Thank you.” He took my hand and squeezed it. “I knew I could count on you to understand.”

—

W
HEN
I
LOOK
at my own children now, by the way, it would be Niels who would have understood. Niels who would have gotten me what I needed. This in itself is an intelligence, as poorly explained as any other.

What is brilliance, anyway? The great Indian autodidact Srinivasa Ramanujan derived many of the foundational theorems of mathematics while lounging on the steps of a dilapidated hut in Tamil Nadu. As a boy, he mastered Bernoulli numbers and Euler’s natural logs. Then, when he finally found his way to university, he failed miserably at every single course that wasn’t mathematics. What can one say about this? That brilliance is just an obsessive kind of love?

A man like Ramanujan looked only at what it pleased him to look at. As do most of us, I think. Einstein once said that God is subtle but not malicious, and I have to agree: success in mathematics is in good part a question of merely wanting badly enough to look. To look inside the mind, I should add—for that is where the field, like a pinhole camera, has thrown the universe, perhaps even backward and upside down. The actual sharpness of one’s vision might even be secondary to the mere love of looking. Ramanujan’s ardor, coupled with a faith in the absolute knowability of it all: those are the keys. Dawkins once said that he opposed religion mainly because it taught us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.

Faith and love—that’s what it comes down to.

And what of life’s other brilliances? I believe that my daughter is a good deal more talented in mathematics than my son, for example. It’s Emmy’s name that we might one day read in textbooks, the way we’ve already read my father’s. The thing is, Emmy would never know what anyone secretly needed. Niels, on the other hand, would know it deeply, without ever having to be asked.

—

O
N THE WAY
home that week from OSU, where my mother and I had both taken midterms, she turned to me in the passenger seat and said, “Are you worried about your father?”

“Not really.”

She kept her gaze on me. “Good,” she said. “You just focus your mind on your studies.” Then she looked back out at the road.

We were in the long stretch of empty land about three-quarters of the way back from Columbus. Whenever a car neared from the other direction, I could see her peering forward into the lights. My midterm had been on eigenfunctions, and hers had been on the circulatory system. “How’d you do on your test?” I said.

“Not bad. How about you?”

“Not bad, either.”

She smiled and lifted the milkshake to me from the carton between us on the dashboard. We always shared one on the way home, but tonight she hadn’t taken any. It was my favorite: strawberry.

“What do you think’s the matter with him?” I asked.

On the outskirts of Tapington, the traffic was thickening from a shift change at the appliance plant, and the cars turning in and out of the parking lot were lifting opals of light across her cheeks. “I really don’t know,” she said. “But I do know that you and your sister shouldn’t be worrying about it.”

—

“H
ANS,” SAID MY
father. “Tell me how old you are.”

I glanced at him. “Is this a real question?”

“Absolutely. It’s not easy when you have more than one kid, not to mention a wife. The figures change at irregular intervals.”

“Let’s see—I’ve lived three hundred ninety-four million one hundred eighty-three thousand six hundred eighty-”—I glanced at my wrist for show—“eight seconds, Dad.”

“That’s what I thought.”

We were in his room again. He’d returned to the world now in most of his previous capacities, but whenever he came back from teaching he still went upstairs for a nap. I had the feeling that it had become a permanent habit. Every day, a little before four o’clock, just about the time Paulie and I returned from school, he retired to bed. While he slept, the rest of us went about the house quietly, and after I’d finished my homework and read a few pages from one of the science fiction novels that I’d started to enjoy in those days, it would be time to go upstairs to say hello. I would tiptoe along the carpeted hallway, then stand at the door to his room. After a moment, he would blink open his eyes, without turning his head, like a lizard.

Now, of course, I realize I was probably checking to make sure he was still alive.

“Did I wake you?” I would say.

“You’re implying that I was asleep.”

He seemed to move less now. In the bed, his arms lay across the blankets like pieces of wood. His hair was matted, his cheeks sallow, and his forehead devoid of all the old grimaces and narrowings that it used to display. He looked normal in every detail but somehow not yet himself. Like a statue of himself, carved by an artist who had technique but not soul.

“By the way,” he said, “as I know you know, that was just arithmetic. That three hundred ninety-four million seconds. You’re twelve years old. I’m well aware of that.”

“Okay.”

He sighed. “The true mathematics would be figuring out why every second seems like the last.”

“Clever.”

“Maybe, but not in any way true.” He appeared to think for a moment. “Or perhaps when you get older, you’ll see that it is indeed true. Just not mathematically so.” He patted the sheets, and another whiff of cologne reached me. “Anyway, twelve is about the right age for what I’m about to say.” He reached behind his shoulder and from under the pile of books on the headboard produced one of the bottles of Hennessy. “I’ve been tapering,” he said. “You’re about to witness the last drink your old man will ever take.” He shook the bottle to show me that it was nearly empty.

“The last drink in your life?”

“That’s right, in my life.” He tilted the neck, gulped down the last bit, and held out the bottle. “By the way,” he said, “it’s not as bad as they say.”

“I can get you something better next time.”

“I could get something better
myself
next time, if I wanted to. That’s the point. I
don’t
want to. You’re my witness.” He reached out and shook my hand. “So help me God.”

I didn’t know what to say.

“I’ve done some difficult things in my life, Hans. This is just go-ing to be one more.” He sat up now, swung his feet stiffly over the side of the mattress, and began pulling on his socks. “People said I couldn’t do some of those other things, either. But I proved them wrong.”

“What things?”

“Well, some difficult problems, for one. I’ve solved a problem that was thought to be unsolvable.”

“I know, Dad.”

“And I learned that only a small part of it is talent. The rest is determination. Stick to your ramparts, my boy, no matter who else is trying to shout you off of them.” He shifted around to look into my eyes. With his head turned, the arm on the far side began to quiver. “The will is everything,” he said.

“Okay.”

He held my gaze. “Look at me.”

“What?”

“Do you agree?”

“With what?”

“That the will is everything.”

“I guess so.”

“Then say it.”

“Say what?”

“Say,
The will is everything
.”

“I’m not going to say that.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. It’s corny. I don’t want to.”

“Well, why don’t you want to? Don’t you believe it?”

“I didn’t say I don’t believe it. Maybe I do. Maybe I don’t.”

“Say it, then. Say,
The will is everything
.”

“I won’t.”

“Just say it, Hans. Say, ‘I, Hans Euler Andret, will never give up.’ ”

“No.”

“Come on now, Hans. ‘The will is everything. I will never give up.’ ”

“No.”

“Say it!”

“No!”

He thought for a moment. Then he smiled. “Good,” he said.

Nunquam Cede

I
KNEW
I
could count on you to understand.

Did my father recognize something in me that I hadn’t known existed? Was he warning me about what was coming?

As it turned out, it was that very week that I, Hans Euler Andret—mathematics prodigy, namesake of mathematicians, aspiring Beaver, son of a woeful addict myself—began using.

Why? Believe me, I’ve thought about it—I’ve thought about it now for
years
—and I still don’t have an answer. Why then? Why at all? I’d just watched my father nearly bleed to death on a cliff, then practically succumb in his bed to delirium tremens, then vow in my presence to never drink again. Of course I should have taken it all as a warning.

But I didn’t.

I don’t think it was a desire for my own destruction, nor a claim on my father’s scant attention, nor a fear of unseating him (or an attempt at it), nor the will to differentiate myself from my sister, nor a stab, even, at shooting myself down from the dizzying trajectory at which I’d been flying—all theories that have been offered to me over the years, by my wife, my friends, my sponsor, and my shrinks. Instead, I think that it was nothing more than the long-delayed satisfaction of a physical craving that must have been inside me since birth. My clock had simply run down.

I wonder now if my father recognized this fact.

Tapington was a small town, with almost nothing to recommend it except a few churches, low real-estate prices, a women’s college, and quiet. Still, I discovered a whole menu of choices: Pot. Speed. Meth. Coke. Crack. MDA. Whippets. Not to mention every manner of downer (in a county that didn’t need any more downers: we already had a closed polymer plant, a closed aerospace plant, and a closed Ford plant). I didn’t try coke or speed. I smoked a little pot with another kid from the math team; then I went straight to MDA.

The
Mellow Drug of America.

That’s what my friends called it, anyway; or, sometimes, for reasons I never understood,
Mr. Dowater Agrees
. (Ecstasy, by the way, MDA’s more beguiling cousin, hadn’t yet appeared in Tapington, or at least not yet at Tapington North—a fact that actually might have saved my life.) When the dealers saw who was waiting out back for them between the bleachers and the cafeteria dumpster, they made easy work of me. They roughed me up. From having skipped all those grades, I was already on everybody’s list; and, of course, I was small for my cohort. When I came back, they roughed me up again, a little harder. But ever since my father’s stay at Southern Ohio Lutheran—the first one, now more than a year before—there had been a disquiet inside me: part anger, part sorrow, part bewilderment. For some reason it was relieved, at least temporarily, by being pushed around; and then, later, by the drugs. I came back a third time.

Never give up.

Finally, on a warm Friday afternoon just a few minutes after the three o’clock bell, one of them sold me a couple of tabs: one green; one yellow. The silhouette of a butterfly stamped across the face of each. It was a new world. I didn’t know anything about it. I didn’t know, for example, if the different colors meant different drugs. Or different doses. Obviously, I didn’t ask the kid who was selling it. Instead, I pretended at both nonchalance and skepticism. I remember making a snide comment about the butterfly design—I was afraid he was selling me children’s vitamins—but he just said, “See you next time.”