A Doubter's Almanac (36 page)

“At me?”

“Yes, at you.”

“Why?”

“Are you kidding me? Look at you, you dopehead. You’re Captain Fuck-Up.”

“Because of the grade?” It had occurred to me, strangely, that my father, who never mentioned my trips to the truck plant, in fact knew all about them—while my sister, who accused me all the time of being a drug addict, had no idea.

She leaned down to pick at a sliver of board. We stayed like that for a time, standing alongside each other, waiting for the sunset. But the sky was cloudy and the air so humid that the sun never did set; it just gave up in exhaustion a few minutes later and disappeared. Before long, the bullfrogs began croaking. Soon they sounded like a bunkhouse full of alarm clocks, a new one going off every few seconds from a different direction. Finally, Paulie said, “He thinks he’s wasted his time on you.”

This meant something to her, I knew. We were both aware that
she
was mathematically talented, too, even if our father ignored it. I put my hand on her shoulder. “Those cattails look like priests,” I said, pointing to the row of white rectangles that glowed around us in the dusk.

“Quit it, Hansie. That doesn’t make me feel any better.”

“Look, Paulie, I just want to know where he went. What the hell’s he doing? He’s been away a lot longer than twenty minutes.”

“He wants to figure out whether you can find your way back, Hans.”

“What?”

“To the car. In the dark. The way
he
can.”

“Great.”

“Well, can you?”

I looked around. There was no moon. To the east lay black sky; to the west, the distant glow from town. Around us, the faint light attached itself to the silver docks and the tall white cattails but slid off everything else. “It’s night, Paulie. We were walking a long time. There’s no way I can do it. Didn’t he give you a flashlight?”

“
I
can,” she said. “
I
know how to do it.” She pointed in the direction of the parking lot.

I knew, too, of course. I’d always been able to do exactly what my father could. But instead I said, “Why don’t you lead us, then?”

In the dark now, her eyes were shining. She lowered herself onto the boards again, and I heard the brush of her sandals against the water. “Because I’m the backup,” she said. Then she added, “I’m tired of being the backup.”

“Come on, Paulie. Go ahead.”

“
You
have to do it.”

I shook my head. “He’s just trying to make me into a miniature version of himself, Paulie. And you know what? Fuck the great Milo Andret. I’m not turning out like him. No goddamn way.”

Her smile glowed like a cattail.

Twenty minutes later, when we reached the car, she knocked on the front window, and Dad leaned across the seat and opened the back door for us. “Nicely done,” he said, reaching over the headrest to shake my hand.

“He had to follow me,” said my sister.

“Did you really? Is that right, Hans?”

“Yes, it is,” I said.

—

“Y
OU KNOW,” MY
father said the next day. “I really don’t care whether you end up in mathematics.”

“You don’t?”

“I didn’t intend to end up here myself.”

He’d caught me in my bedroom just after my day’s outing. I’d noticed recently that if anything got in the way of the peak of my roll—my sister saying hello from the porch swing as I shuffled up the stairs, for example, or my mother asking me to set the table when I passed through the kitchen—I would whip around like a rabid dog. Even Bernie, who ran out to the fence whenever I came near the house, no longer did so with a stick in his mouth.

My father examined me. “Some kids might be curious about a statement like that—that their father doesn’t care what they do.”

“So?”

“So,” he said back.

He walked over to the corner of my room and let his fingers graze the leaves of my ficus plant. A couple of inches under the soil I kept maybe a hundred hits, divided into three film canisters, each one taped inside its own plastic bag.

“Dinnertime,” I said.

“Wait.”

“What?”

“I know where you’ve been heading.”

I sat down.

“What does that mean?”

“It means exactly what it sounds like. I know where you’ve been trying to go.”

“Which is where?”

“Away from where you know you ought to be going.”

I looked at him. “Oh,” I said. “That.”

“You can’t fight who you are.”

“That’s an interesting thought. What’s the proof?”

“It’s an axiom.”

“And which axiom would that be?”

“The first.”

“Ah.”

He looked at me closely. “You’re a mathematician, Hans.”

“You just said you don’t care if I’m one or not.”

“You’re right,” he said. “I
don’t
.” He grimaced. “But you
are
one. That’s all I mean. You can’t run from it. It’s your destiny.”

“Yawn.”

His look changed now. “The thing is—” I could see that thoughts were crowding his brain.

“What?” I said. “What’s the thing?”

“The thing is”—his hand moved near the ficus again—“what we do, it’s—”

“Yes?”

“Mathematicians, Hans.” There was something in his voice now. “We’re the stooges, you know. The fix is in. We can’t ever find what we’re looking for.” He shook his head and turned to the window. “We’re destined to lose.”

He was facing away from me, but I saw it anyway: he wiped his cheek.

I got up from the bed then and tapped him on the shoulder, and when he turned, I pulled him into a hug. It was the first time I’d touched him, probably, in years. He smelled of limes, the way he always did, but he was quivering minutely again, like a hummingbird. My grip grew tighter. I leaned my head until I could see my arms on the far side of his back and his narrow shoulder blades rising and falling. I can’t say, truly, who was doing any of it.

Within a short time, though, he calmed. His hand reached up, and I could tell that he was wiping his eyes. He stood a little taller then, which caused me to loosen my hold. When I finally released him, guiding him around the ficus toward the door, he turned and looked back at me. “Thank you” was all he said.

—

O
VER THE YEARS,
many things happened between my father and me, but few of them could have been more important than that one afternoon in my bedroom, when I hugged him. Sometimes when I look back on my life, I wonder if I’m alive today only because of that moment. From a certain vantage, it all traces back, like a proof.

I still believe what he said:
We are destined to lose.

In those days, I was in the throes of gravities—dark forces whose counterforces had not yet emerged to right me. And my father, of course, was still fighting a friendless battle in his own long and godless war. In the months that followed, he tried a few more times to convince me to study mathematics with him again. And a couple of times I acquiesced, taking my seat on the bench beneath the mulberry. He’d abandoned his methodical progression through the four branches of the discipline and begun lecturing me instead on unrelated topics, a tactic that I see in retrospect was meant to tempt me back into the fold. He was hoping that something far-flung might win my attention. He began dwelling not on the orderly foundations of logical thought but on the great, thrilling problems that in those days remained unsolved: charismatic enigmas to people like us. The Riemann hypothesis. The Poincaré conjecture. Kepler’s obdurate question on the packing of spheres. He was hoping once again, I think, to share something with his son.

But I wouldn’t let him.

Not then, anyway. Made newly wise by the drugs, I felt the distasteful cheapness of his longing. My F in Fourier analysis was followed six weeks later by a D in partial differential equations, and then by a D again in numerical methods. By the end of that semester, my nine hits of MDA per week had grown to twelve or thirteen—a staggering number even for a healthy adolescent male. Whenever I came home, which was invariably late at night, I went straight to the sink and drank three full glasses of water. Otherwise, I think, I might have dried to a smudge of cheap white powder.

We are destined to lose.

I don’t know if I’ve ever felt such relief from a single piece of knowledge.

—

I
SHOULD ADD,
by the way, that my roommates at Ohio State turned out to be right. Those boxes did indeed become bank vaults. Shores-Durban partial differential equations, we now know (thanks in part to my unfinished dissertation), are applicable to microfluctuations in almost all types of massively multiplayer servo equilibria, including—as Marcus Diamond, vice president for technology recruitment at Physico Partners Capital Management, did not fail to notice during his recruitment trip to Columbus—the derivatives markets.

The Tristate Singularity

T
HEN ONE DAY
in the summer of the year I turned fourteen, not long after I’d graduated from high school, everything I thought I knew about my family changed once again. One warm morning in June, my father rounded up my sister and me and herded us into the Country Squire, where my mother was already waiting. We didn’t stop at the town limit; we didn’t stop at the county line. We didn’t turn east toward the Macon Dalles or west toward the rickety wooden waterslide whose fading picture above the words
COOL DOWN
!
constituted Tapington’s single billboard. It wasn’t until we’d driven a full hour north that I noticed the two bulging, belt-strapped suitcases in the rear of the car. Bernie was resting his head on one of them.

It was a Saturday, and I was already three or four hours into my roll.

“Mom?” I finally said. “Where exactly are we going?”

“I don’t know, honey.”

Paulie looked up from her book. “How can
you
not even know?”

My mother showed us her profile and grinned shyly across the seat. “Because your father won’t tell me.”

“Then why are you smiling like that?” said Paulie.

“Because I do know that we’re going on a little vacation.”

“What?” said Paulie. “You didn’t tell us that!” She tapped my father on the shoulder. “You can’t just take us somewhere without telling us, or telling us
where
.” She tapped him again, then again, like a woodpecker. “That’s kidnapping.”

“I won’t tell
you,
either,” he said, swiping at her hand.

“Tell us!”

“I won’t.”

“Why not?” I said.

“Because it’s a mystery.”

“Interesting, Dad,” I offered. “That’s a solipsism.”

“It’s not a solipsism, Clever Hans. Solipsism is a philosophy. It was just a self-documenting sentence.” (At twelve, my sister was a disciple of Kurt Gödel.) She added, “People misuse the term.”

“It’s a solipsism, Smallette.”

“It’s got nothing to do with solipsism. Solipsism is the idea that the mind knows only its own constructs. It was a self-documenting sentence.”

“Which is a type of solipsism.”

“Enough,” said my mother.

Silence. In that silence I was driving in a car with my family while watching myself drive in a car with my family. Sometimes I was watching myself watch myself. I knew that we were approaching a singularity, the point on the map that was shared equally by three different states—Indiana, Ohio, and Michigan—and yet belonged to none; but soon we bent a little to the east, and I understood that our chance had passed. Before long we crossed under a sign that read
WELCOME TO MICHIGAN
. It was a bright new sign but felt like a cheap greeting card. I turned and watched it disappear. Soon after that we came to turnoffs for Detroit and then Kalamazoo. Past these we went. Then we were moving through runs of narrow electric-blue rents in the landscape that I quickly understood to be slits connecting us to the other side of the earth. The sky on the other side was also the color of day. I began to doubt most of the things I knew. “Well,” I said at last, to break the mortal silence.

“Lake country,” said my father, turning to smile at my mother.

“Beautiful,” she replied.

Oh, of course: lakes.

Paulette was staring at me.

“What?” I said.

“What?” she said back.

With that single utterance, my roll dropped away. Words could do that sometimes, could shift everything in an instant from a luminous ether to my family’s dense, gravitational drab. I sat numbly. Miles of forest continued to speed upward across the windshield. Bernie moved behind me and metered his hot breath against my neck. My roll revived, shifting into its quiet phase. Thoughts stuck to the roof of my cranium, where if I leaned back I could observe them, clinging there like bats. Details halted in my eye. The smoke of my father’s cigarette, cleverly snaking its way toward the narrowly opened window. The synchronized pendula of my mother’s earrings. We were following a sinuous two-lane county highway, and I could feel the bends of the pavement as segments of a great, broadening circle, each one evolving into the ever-widening circumference. The bodies of water we passed announced themselves with a thinning of the conifers, then with a bend or two of wetland stream, dotted with lilies that looked like women’s hats floating away on the current. I was aware of the women beneath them, stepping carefully across the slippery bottom.