A Doubter's Almanac (37 page)

On we drove. The black-green slashes of the pines. The blood-dot wildflowers on the road shoulders. Every now and then, through a gap in the trees, came another lake—a startling pane of aquamarine festooned with the day’s high silver clouds. For lunch, we stopped at a beach, and just as we were finishing our sandwiches, the trees bent at their crests and began to rustle.

After lunch we swam, each of us in our own style. Dad plunged under, held his breath for a few seconds, and retreated howling to the bank. Mom stroked a metronomic line to where a boulder breached, then turned and stroked back. Paulie stood in the shallows, dipping her hands to wet herself like an old woman in a tub. I performed a serene breaststroke in the deep, while Bernie, my lifeguard, paddled beside me. If I looked down, I saw the same brightly glowing pebble every time I looked, winking at me from the depths.

After the swim, we dried ourselves in the breeze and climbed back into the car. It was late afternoon now, and my roll had dwindled. Silently we continued. Somewhere northwest of Jackson we exited the paved highway and entered a narrow two-track that began in gravel, then crossed uphill over a long meadow and sloped down again into trees. The chassis scraped over roots. Mosquitoes appeared—first outside the car, then in. My mother leaned over and slapped my father’s neck. Bernie bumped at the windows.

An old wooden-plank bridge. A wide muddy creek sludging beneath it. My father stopped the car and climbed down the slope to the edge of the water. The land here was swampy. He took off his shoes and stepped into the reeds, then pushed his way through them until he was leaning heavily against one of the pilings. Finally, he climbed back up and walked the length of the span. When he returned, he said, “Solid.” He started the engine.

“You’re sure?” said my mother.

“Yes.”

“One hundred percent?”

“No,” he answered, steering us up onto the span.

“Nothing is one hundred percent, Mom,” I explained. “Not even gravity.”

This was one of the cornerstones of my recent thought: that physics was merely a dynamic averaging, and that all of us—our lives, our fates—were merely weighted, statistical trends in which outliers might indeed occur. In fact, they were obligated to.

The bridge held.

Under our wheels, though, its boards rattled raucously, and after a few moments—moments in which my mother’s hand first went to her chest, then to my father’s shoulder, then to the door handle—the ramp sloped us down again onto a peninsula of forest. It might as well have been a jungle. My father managed to open the windows into air that stank of mud and bark. Here and there as we pressed forward on the two-track, the curtain of vegetation had been trampled into low-ceilinged tunnels that gave intermittent views onto a featureless body of water. We swung toward its shore. But even from close, we could hardly see it. Just occasional fragments of a slack, humid brown, lazily misting.

When we exited the trees at last and encountered the house, my mother showed us her profile again. Then she showed us her face. She was puzzled.

My father shut the engine. A ramshackle wooden cabin simmered in a patch of gnat-strewn sunlight.

“Milo?”

“Yes.”

“You’re sure this is it?”

“Perfectly.”

The front stairs were split, the roof was carpeted with blooms of green moss, and the dull-gray paint had been worn away in long, vertical strips, as though a bear had been sharpening its claws on the siding. Two cracked windowpanes glittered beside the door. A hum could be heard.

“What’s that?” said my mother.

“The life of the forest,” said Dad.

“Insects,” said Paulette.

My mother sat up stiffly. “Well, has it at least been cleaned, honey? Did they know we were coming? Did you at least have them tidy it up for us?”

“It’s a
lake
house,” said my father. “We wouldn’t want it tidied up.”

—

B
Y THE TIME
we’d pulled the suitcases from the car and lugged them through the weeds to the doorstep, my mother had already appeared on the stairs with a broom. She held her nose, walked to the edge of the brush, and emptied the dustpan onto the ground. I saw a dark body and a long, reddish tail. Then she returned to sweeping.

The main floor resembled the dining hall of a long-abandoned summer camp. A gouged wooden table. A still-greasy iron pot and a stack of rusting enameled plates. An old fireplace that puffed the smell of wet ash when my father kicked open the door to the porch. Dusty, framed paintings of ducks on the walls.

Upstairs was a pair of plain bedrooms packed tight under the eaves. My mother pressed one of the mattresses with her fingertip, and a puff of dust shot from the button. She picked up the broom again.

“How long are we staying?” she called down to the living room.

“Till the end of the week,” came my father’s jaunty reply.

I had enough in the lining of my jacket to last about three times that long.

Mom looked over at me.

“That’s okay with me,” I said.

“Good,” she said. Then she added, “Perhaps I’ll have it clean by then.”

—

T
HAT EVENING, MY
mother joined me at the dock, which stretched over the shallow end of a long, muddy cove. In one hand she held a glass of wine, which was unusual for her, and in the other the bottle itself, which was unheard of. She took a place beside me. I’d been pre-enjoying my next day’s dose.

“Well,” she said, “I believe your father has found the only mud-bottomed bog in the entire state of Michigan.”

“It seems he did, Mom.”

Around us, the fauna was bringing out its instruments for the evening. The crickets were marking out a metronomic beat, and a lone bullfrog, somewhere in the reeds, was blowing a contrapuntal bass run, over and over. A huge cloud of ungainly insects swirled above us, ricocheting off one another, then spinning down in frantic, coupling pairs to the water. Each pair would land on the surface and stir up a tiny, buzzing wake before a small, gulping splash would sound.

My mother looked up at the cloud of wings and feelers. “Mayflies,” she said.

“They seem to be committing suicide in pairs.”

“You’re right.” She leaned back and let out a sigh. “They’re mating.”

She took a drink, then laughed ruefully.

“I kind of like it here, Mom.”

She made no answer.

“It’s peaceful,” I offered.

“Sometimes I do like a glass of wine,” she said. “I really do.” She turned to smile at me, and when I lay back against the dock boards to look up at the sky, she did the same. The crazy looping of the mayflies had thinned by now, and soon the last straggling bachelors and bachelorettes were spiraling down to the lake. Before long, even the fish had lost interest. Then, as though a shift whistle had blown, a smaller species of insect sprung into being. Thousands upon thousands of furtively darting specks appeared, gradually whirling themselves into a single roiling cloud that hummed above us like a high-voltage wire.

“Hans,” she said, “would you mind if I asked you a question?”

“You already did.”

I waited.

“Well?” I said.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh.” She pointed up. The moon had risen now, and against its halo we could see that some kind of rapacious bird had entered the fray. It winged crazily into the thicket of insects, diving and lunging, snapping this way and that, then disappeared out the other end into the black. Soon there was another one, adding its dark, vulturine missile to the circus.

“Are those seagulls?” she said.

“I don’t think so, Mom.”

“Swallows?”

“I think they’re bats.”

“Bats?” She sat up. “Yes, you’re right. They’re definitely bats.” I heard the
lup-lup
of a pour, then the bottle being set down against the wood. Presently, she said, “Your father used to have a beautiful apartment, you know. Leaded windows and a stone fireplace. He was an endowed professor.” She sipped.

“It’s okay,” I said.

“Bats.”

“They’re mammals, Mom.”

“There were beautiful lanes all around Princeton, Hans. Country lanes where you could walk for an afternoon. There are plenty of lakes in New Jersey, too. And they’ve all been tastefully settled. You can get fried clams along the sea there. I hope you get to taste a fried clam on a beach someday, sweetheart. There are all kinds of worldly human beings in the East who do interesting things and travel to interesting places and work to elevate themselves.”

She rubbed her hand in my hair.

“Sometimes I think about that,” she said.

—

T
HE NEXT MORNING,
I woke to the scrape of waves against the shore. From the rubberized mattress I sat up and looked out through the screens of the porch. On the other side of the pollen and spiderwebs, the water was as brown and still as a mudflat. That’s when I realized what the sound was: my mother was on the steps already, working a broom.

Paulie sat up behind me. “Why are you cleaning a rented house?” she called.

My mother stopped. “Because that’s what life is, honey.”

My sister smirked. “I don’t understand that,” she whispered.

“Think about it, Smallette.”

“I
have
thought about it.”

“It’s a simile,” I said. “Life is cleaning a rented house.”

“But it doesn’t pertain. It’s a logical phrase, but it’s not logic. That’s Mom for you. And for your information, Hans, it’s a metaphor, not a simile.”

“Please, Hans. Please, Paulette,” said my mother. She was standing against the screens now. “Let’s treat each other kindly. Can we do that? Can we do that for a week?”

“Sure,” I said. “Till Saturday.”

“God,” said Paulie. “I would enjoy that. But it would be a world record for him.”

“Enjoying
anything
would be a world record for you.”

“Please, you two—can we?”

And somehow, for a few days, we did. A truce. After breakfast, Paulie and I walked together down to the shore. By the time the sun was over the trees, we’d grown tired of catching the grapefruit-sized bullfrogs. After a few hours, we just sat down in the waist-high grass and waited like Buddhas for them to hop into our hands. This idea had come to me on the upslope of my dose. I’d rarely been on the upslope in the presence of anyone but my friends, and now I found myself regarding Paulie with an unfamiliar esteem. (In fact, I’d taken a smaller amount than usual—a yellow instead of a green—but by that point in my career, I could conjure most of the drug’s observatory powers without actually taking anything; nonetheless, it was exactly this sort of benevolence, exactly this sense of kinship with the world, that I craved. It suddenly seemed plausible to me that Paulie and I would be friends.)

“Wow,” I said. “Look at this. Look at all of this.”

“I am, Hansie.”

Our palms were slick with excretions. Around us in the tall reeds, the narrow blue bars of the damselflies jerked up and down like elevators. Closer in, amid the jungle of stems, an infinity of insects climbed and burrowed and hopped and marched. When I lowered my head I could see that entire civilizations had developed on the bottoms of leaves. When I lifted it, I could see that other civilizations had developed on the tops. Winged ants and dusty grass-colored moths. Tiny, six-legged, triangular helmets of green. Life was perched on every incline and level, either stalking or hiding. Egg sacs submitted their designs to
The Encyclopedia of Tenacity
or
The Encyclopedia of Disguise
. Evolution analyzed the data on dispersion versus adhesion. Spiderwebs attempted to prove what the tree limbs had merely conjectured. Alongside the cabin’s crumbling chimney, an enormous woodpecker in a bright red hat hammered at the roof. Below it, Mom rapped the ceiling with a broom handle.

“God,” I said. “Are you seeing all this?”

“I am,” said Paulie. “I am.”

We watched a pair of red ants pitilessly drag a thrashing inchworm across the sand. It was like the ending of a great novel.

“I used to think I was so important,” she said.

“I know exactly what you mean.”

Then she glanced up at the cabin. “Hans,” she said, turning, “do you think he’s all right?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Because he stopped drinking, for one. Then he took us on a vacation. He took
Mom
on a vacation. He looks—I don’t know—he looks
better
.”

—

“I
AM
BETTER,”
Dad said as he made his way ahead of me through the woods. It was evening, and he shone a small flashlight in front of him. Pulling back a branch, he said, “I’m
much
better.” Then he added, “Don’t worry, we’re almost there.”

He stopped to point the light. “Can you see it yet?”

“Is it the old outhouse?”

“No, it’s another bungalow. It’s small, but it’s part of the estate. That’s why I chose this place.”

It was a tiny hut. There was a padlock on the door, but he had the key in his pocket. The inside turned out to be hardly bigger than a closet and contained nothing that the padlock might have protected. Just a small, splintered table and a wooden swivel chair tilted up against it, as though someone had been holding a spot at a library. A dusty, diamond-shaped window looked out into the trees. There was only enough room for the two of us to stand close against the walls, one on each side of the table. Paulie and Mom were back at the cabin.

He flipped on the light. “I’m going to do my work out here,” he said, as though I’d asked him a question. “I’m ready to do something again.”

—

T
HAT EVENING,
I
was watching the sun from the dock. It was an orange tennis ball lowering itself back into the can.

“You were standing in this exact same place last night,” said Dad from behind me.

“Oh, hi there.”

“What do you busy yourself with out here?”

“I listen to the universe.”

An owl hooted.

“Tell me,” he said. “Is it laughing?”

“The owl? Or the universe?”