A Doubter's Almanac (38 page)

“The universe.”

“No. It’s weeping.”

“That’s correct, Hans.” From off to the side, I heard the strike of a match. “Mind a little company?”

“It’s a free country.”

The dock creaked. Over the far shore now, the sun was half a grapefruit turned down on a saucer. As soon as it dipped below the horizon, the mosquitoes arrived. Their whines circled us, the rise and fall of the pitch marking out a narrowing orbit.

“Listen to that,” Dad said, grinding the cigarette into the boards. “Christian Doppler was the first to describe it. Such a basic idea.” He lit another. “But so clever to get his name attached.”

For a while then, we were both silent, except for his long inhalations and our periodic slaps. The wind had calmed, and the cigarette smoke settled down around us. Presently, he said, “This is going to be our life here, you know. It might be good for all of us. And not just this one week. I think we’re going to stay a while.”

“A while? How long is a while?”

“I don’t know. A couple more weeks, maybe. A month. But I do know this: I’m going to do something again. Right there in that shed.” The boards creaked, and in the twilight his glowing cherry was pointing. “I’ve always worked best in the woods, Hans. I should have realized it a long time ago.”

He walked to the other end of the dock, where his body showed itself against the brightness of the house. He raised his hands to his face, as though hiding his eyes; then lowered them and looked up at the sky. After a few moments, he said, “I can feel it, Hans. I have one thing left.”

—

I
N THE COOL
mornings, Paulette and I explored the remnants of the trails that wandered through the woods. They usually went to water or high ground, but sometimes they ended in unexpected places—splits of sunlight or views. One path cut its way through a thicket of blackberries to a promontory of rock that faced, I realized the moment I stepped out onto it, directly east. Someone had come here to watch the sunrise.

One morning I woke early and walked out to watch it myself. I arrived before light, and as the sky took on its first paleness I swallowed my dose and sat down on a rock.

I’m not sure I can describe a Michigan sunrise on oxyamphetamines.

Mathematics still hasn’t exactly succeeded in explaining time. Newton, who observed the world, deduced that time proceeded as a constant. Einstein, who refused to observe the world, deduced that it proceeded as a variable. Others have contributed. Minkowski added his four-dimensional manifold; Poincaré his transformation, named for Lorentz. (No matter that some of these men called themselves physicists: what they were doing was mathematics.) The previous theory of time and space had revolved around a concept called the luminiferous ether, which is now spoken of, by men like my father, with a quaint smile. Yet I myself resist. Luminiferous ether is the closest I can come to describing what I saw while sitting on that slab of limestone, over a brightening Michigan lake, my neurons excited by a twice-methylated amphetamine, as the sun rose in a ball of rainbow flame from the far side of the earth.

Neither is there a satisfactory mathematical explanation, I should add, for why time shouldn’t be able to run backward.

Several hours later, alone in the woods and weary, I rose, acutely aware of my own meaninglessness among the buzzing ricochet of particle motion that was the cosmos. In the growing warmth, I stumbled back through the thicket. Trees dropped the last of their dew on my head, and nettles stabbed at my pants. Nearing the house, I came upon Dad’s shed. I was turning down toward the water when the door opened. “Hans,” he said. “Come in here.”

He’d already set himself up. On the desk lay the stacked pads, the cup of pencils, and the candies. Above him in the rafters stood the three boxes. He motioned me in. “You’re up early,” he said.

“Carpe diem.”

He laughed, glancing quickly in my direction. He sipped his coffee and set it down. Next to where he set it on the blotter was a drawing of a tree, viewed from below. “Here we are,” he said. “In nature.”

“I think you’re right.”

He looked at me again, more carefully. “Are you okay?”

“More than that.”

“You’re doing that thing with your jaw again.”

“No, I’m not.”

“Look out the window, then. What do you see?”

“The luminiferous ether.”

“The what?” He pointed through the glass. “I want you to look at the trees, Hans. That one right there, in the sun over by the clearing—the cherry. It’s a black cherry, from what I’ve read. Tell me about its leaves.”

“They’re lovely.”

“Mathematically.”

I leaned closer. “Two ellipses, intersecting.”

“Or?”

“Two crossing hyperbolae.”

“Of?”

“Contrary orientation.”

“The formulae?”

“That’s trivial.”

“Tell me anyway.”

“TF
₁
+ TF
₂
= K.” I licked my lips. “I’m not a kid anymore, Dad.”

“Indeed. And the hyperbolae?”

I considered my options. “The centers of a set of circles externally tangent to a pair of their brethren.”

“Very clever, Hans. I see that you’re still capable of thought.” He moved closer to the window. “Well, think about this then. Think about the men who discovered those relations. Think of the men who extracted those truths. From the universe, I mean. Two thousand years ago. Ptolemy. Euclid. Nicotoles. It was the undoing of kings. Now ninth graders write it on their flashcards.” He looked back at me, smiling at the word. “But at the time, these men were tearing down the foundations of their cultures. They gave their lives in pursuit.”

He stopped. His hand went idly to the rafters above him and brushed against the
WRONG
box. “You and I,” he said in a softer voice. “We’re the same.”

I made no answer.

“Your mother, though—she’s not like us. I wish it weren’t so. But I can see that you have what I have.”

“Which is what?”

“The curse.”

“Ah,” I said. An earwig poked out of a crack in the desktop. “That’s neither provable nor disprovable.”

“Have you read about Euclid’s doubt? Have you read about his struggle?”

“No.”

“How about Apollonius of Perga? Have you read of the grief that became
The Conics
?”

“Ditto to that one, too.”

“That’s because it was never recorded, Hans. None of it ever was. But I can assure you—I can
guarantee
you—that it was there, for every one of them. For every one of
us
.”

“I don’t think either of us has any curse.”

But my words glittered cheaply in the air. My father smiled at them sadly.

“History is merciless, Hans. That’s the truth you and I both know. The struggle doesn’t matter. The struggle vanishes. What remains is the work, and the work either stands or falls.”

—

I
T WAS ONLY
as she was cheerfully cleaning up from breakfast the next morning that my mother said across the table, “Who did we rent this from anyway, honey?”

Dad looked up. “Nobody.”

She lifted her coffee mug and sipped, puckering her lips at the taste. “I don’t understand,” she said. “Someone didn’t just
give
it to us.”

“Nope.”

“Milo, did we just stay in somebody’s house without their permission?”

My father leaned forward, drew butter onto his knife, and ran it across his toast.

“Milo,” she said. “Are we in somebody else’s house?”

“No,” he said. “We’re not.”

“Well, that’s good.”

“It happens to be ours, Helena.”

She set down her mug and smoothed the front of her blouse. “What did you say?”

“We bought it.”

“Please, honey.”

“It wasn’t much more than a new car.”

“Milo,
please
.”

“And we have plenty of time to pay it off.”

Flatland

T
HUS BEGAN THE
last summer I ever spent with my family.

The next morning, I found my mother sitting in a chair before the screened window on the porch, staring out into the morass of vines that reached from the boggy lake to the sides of the house and in a few places came in through the screens. A glass of cheap wine stood on the floor beside her. Over the morning it slowly lowered. In the air above her head, a sign was visible to my sister and me, and probably to my father also. It read:

DO NOT SPEAK TO ME

Paulie and I fixed our own lunches. I ate Special K from a chipped coffee mug and then a few slices of bologna while my sister cooked a strange-looking vegetable that my mother had brought up from Tapington. Since our arrival, a pair of rooty orbs had been sitting on the counter like diseased organs from a surgery. Paulie cut one up and threw it into the skillet.

“What is that thing?” I said.

“Celery root.”

She searched the cabinets until she found a bottle that still contained a little bit of oil.

“I thought the celery
was
the root.”

“Are you kidding me?”

“No.”

“It’s the stalk, Hans.” She sprinkled in a palmful of pepper. “Did you really not know that?”

“Knowledge isn’t the same as intelligence.”

“You draw fine distinctions, sir.”

I sat down behind her at the rickety table. At school that spring, she’d been running with the oddball crowd. “Are you a vegetarian now, Paulie?”

“Some of the time, yes.”

When she’d finished, she sat down at the table with me and ate straight from the skillet, staring out the window the way my mother had been staring all morning. I watched her until she was nearly finished. Then I said, “Are you happy here?”

“What?”

“Are you happy here like this, with our whole family together?”

“I don’t think about it.”

“Ah.” This was a revelation: my sister didn’t think about it. My dose was still spreading, and I saw all the complicated lines of entanglement again, radiating out from her in a silken web. The thickest strand went straight to my mother, who had moved her chair outside now into the warming sun. My mother didn’t think about happiness, either. Not her own, and not ours. She thought about our
well-being;
she thought about our
health;
she thought about our
futures
. But her concern did not include anything so poorly cageable as happiness. From me, on the other hand, the thickest strand shot straight through the window, climbed the brush, and arrowed through the narrow door of the shed to where my father sat gloomily over his papers. Happiness was something my father would never in his life have considered; in fact, it was something he regularly scoffed at; but I saw then, with bruising clarity, that it was the single prize he’d always chased. His devotion to the solvable. It was the momentary lee of his torment.

It was the same way for me.

—

T
HE NEXT DAY,
right after breakfast, Mom held up three strips of wallpaper against the mantel. Felt City, the town at the end of the road, had a general store, but the general store didn’t offer much in the way of decorating samples. “Which one do you like?” she said to us.

“The fish,” answered my father.

“Which fish, dear? There are two different kinds.” She smiled like an elementary-school teacher and held up the wallpaper again. “See?”

She was being cheerful. This was the punishment she inflicted when she was especially hurt.

“The trout,” he said.

“Are these the trout?” She flicked one.

“Yes.”

“I like the other ones,” I said. “What are those? Bass?”

“Pike,” answered my father.

“That’s a guess,” said Paulie.

“Or muskie,” he said. “And one of them is a walleye, possibly.”

He was trying to be as cheerful as she was.

“If you two disagree,” said my mother, “that leaves Paulie and me. What do
you
say, sweetheart?”

“The ducks,” said my sister. “Without a doubt.”

“Well, I’m not having fish on the walls of my house,” said my mother. “Two to one, Paulie wins.”

Mom did the work herself. The old mortar had a rough surface, but she used a lot of paste. When she was finished, clusters of bumps still showed through, but the wood ducks and mergansers and especially the mallards stood out elegantly. Their webbed feet splayed beneath the lightly drawn waterline, and their proud heads pointed hopefully toward the actual lake. When Mom was done, she mopped the whole cabin, then brought in wildflowers and set them in cups.

—

“P
AULIE,”
I
SAID.
“I don’t think he’s doing as well as you thought.”

“Why not?” It was a warm morning, and we were standing in the upstairs bedroom together, looking down through the window. Below us, Dad had just crossed the clearing, heading toward the shed.

“He’s preoccupied,” I said. “He isn’t working.”

“How do you know?”

“I was in his office. He isn’t working on
mathematics,
anyway. He’s drawing
trees
.”

She was silent. On the windowsill was an old fishbowl that she’d found in one of the closets. She’d filled it with lake water and a few rocks and put in a pair of crayfish. She tapped the glass, and one of them did a little threatening push-up, backing up quickly and waving its claws. She tapped again. Then she said, “You were in the shed with him?”

“Yes.”

She picked up a stick and touched one of its pincers until the creature scooted into a corner. Then she just stood there, the sun through the window catching the edges of her hair. In a certain light, she was actually kind of pretty.

“I just happened to be walking by, Paulie.”

“I walk by all the time.”