A Doubter's Almanac (10 page)

And thankfully, the night itself never failed to wash him. In the morning he would wake early and begin recording again. In the tradition of Copernicus or Leonardo, he was extrapolating from nothing but his own data. His perfect two-windowed view of the universe. Figures upon figures.

In their incremental intervals, he was certain now of what he was seeing: the recognizable proof of a harmony. The numbers in their perfect columns bearing him forward.

—

N
OT LONG AFTER:
another row of panes in Earl’s palm. It was early afternoon when he let Cle slip one onto his tongue. Hours later, when he came out from its hold, she was gone. So was Earl. It was different this time—there’d been no mathematics, no visit from his sources.

Still, he’d understood something.

The way she’d been visiting his apartment lately: every other afternoon.

Around him the room was dark. Thin coronas of light flaring the perimeters of the shades. Bodies on the rugs and couches. The upswell of the drug making him queasy. He recognized a girl from somewhere, rose and walked over and touched her on the shoulder.

By the time they were outside, they were arm in arm. The curve of her hips. His brain undone and the drug still not finished with him: colors swooping in his eye. Yellows from a line of hollyhocks, blocks away. The silver-green glitter of the bay. His focus leaping. Cle. This new girl next to him, her voice falling and rising. Block after block while the colors struck from a distance. Night had fallen before they tired, somewhere below the hills of Albany. A tiny bar, dark and quiet. Colors gone at last but the drug still skirmishing at the edges. A longshoreman’s place—iron stools and a jukebox. A hint of threat. Vodka for her, bourbon for him: a double.

Its woody bite touched his throat and brought back the world.

—

A
LONE, LATER, HE
woke in a strange bed. The room bright: morning. Gray snakes of incense twisting on the ceiling. Clothes on the floor—his own. Jeans, boots. A fringed leather jacket on a peg by the door. He looked away: not the kind of thing Cle wore.

Whoever she was, she’d left. The tossed sheets. The dent in the pillow. He looked around for a note. Then, through the window, he searched for a street sign.

It was infinitely strange not to know where he was.

He remembered nothing: this was the odd part. A hole in the world, starting in the bar. The street. The stairs. The heat of her beneath him. But before that, nothing.

He must be in the flats, he realized, somewhere near Gilman. He gathered his things and left.

Block after block of low houses, dogs barking behind chain-link. The vistas obscured. Finally, at a corner park, he caught sight of the water, and the world snapped back into place. Turning toward home, he tried to piece together what had happened.

The Orrery

T
HE THOUGHT EITHER
woke him or came to him as he woke. The dark of night. He rose and checked the log-book again, inserted the month’s coordinates. Then he calculated.

Neatly, he wrote:

1.  The orbit of every planet is an ellipse with the Sun at one of the two foci.

Underneath this:

2.  A line joining a planet and the Sun sweeps out equal areas during equal intervals of time.

And, below this:

3.  The square of the orbital period of a planet is directly proportional to the cube of the semi-major axis of its orbit.

There they were, summoned by nothing but his own devotion. The
Epitome Astronomiae Copernicanae.
Working blindly, he’d rederived what the great Johannes Kepler had first deduced three and a half centuries before.

The laws of planetary motion.

—

W
HEN HE ARRIVED
at his teaching sections the following Monday, his students were already reading the article. The front page of the
Daily Cal
. He’d had no warning. The illustration was the famous seventeenth-century portrait of Kepler himself, a simultaneous artistic study, Milo had always thought, of both malleability and relentlessness. The byline leapt from the page.

Cle had said nothing about it.

All day, people greeted him. Professors. Other graduate students.

That evening, Hans Borland reached across the desk with the decanter. “Dry sherry?”

“Please,” Milo responded, pulling a glass from the row and sliding it across. “Might as well celebrate.” Then, an unmitigated lie: “I’ve been making progress on the dissertation.”

Borland fiddled with his cuff link. “Progress?”

“Yes.”

“That’s funny. Because I read today that you’re wasting your time.”

“Well—”

“With your antique sextant.”

“It’s a quatrant, Professor. Derived from a mariner’s sextant, yes.”

“I know what a quatrant is, Andret.” He looked stonily across the blotter. “It’s a fool’s stab at attention. What’s it got to do with the Malosz conjecture?”

“It’s a hobby, sir. I became interested in the work of Tycho Brahe.”

Borland’s expression froze. “The Borland invariant,” he said. “I was eighteen years old when I came up with it. And not even a month after my birthday, are you aware of that? I was at Caltech, already doing graduate work.” He glanced over. “And a year after that, I was on faculty.”

“As you know, Professor, I got a late start.” A pathetic remark.

Borland ignored it. “Tycho Brahe”—he reached for a stack of folders—“Tycho Brahe thought the earth was the center of the solar system.”

“He was a genius.”

“He was no genius at all, Andret. He got it wrong.”

“Nobody gets it entirely right.”

“Pardon?”

“Or almost nobody. Kepler, maybe.”

“Listen to me, Andret. Stop talking nonsense. It’s the excuse of the lame, and it’s fouling this campus. It’s fouling this whole country of yours, for that matter. You are
not
lame, Andret. Do you hear?”

“I try not to be, anyway.”

“Poppycock, Andret. Listen to me. Are you
listening
to me?”

Borland seemed to actually be waiting for an answer.

“Yes, I am,” said Milo.

“You have to go against the times. You have to always go against the times. Do you know what that means? What do you think Kepler was doing? What do you think Galileo was doing? It is where discovery comes from, Andret. Not from going this way and that with the crowd.”

“Yes, I know, but—”

“Now get back to work. All you’ve done is rederive an ancient calculation. You have a talent and you have a discipline, and I can see that you’re wasting both.” He dropped the folders back onto the desk. “Don’t make me wonder if we’ve made a mistake with you.”

—

“W
ELL,” SHE SAID.
“Did you like the article?”

It had been days. He’d been at work, trying to change things. “You’re with Biettermann,” he said without looking up.

“What?”

Now he lifted his head.

She exhaled smoke. “And what if I am?”

“Well, for one, you could have told me.”

She lit another cigarette. “Stop acting like a bourgeois.”

“There’s nothing bourgeois about it.”

“Stop caring about your parents’ morality, Andret. You’re above that.”

He looked away. It was unclear if she even knew about what he’d done. He still couldn’t remember the girl’s name.

“And stop being so ugly,” she said.

“Thank you. Glad to know what you think.”

“Andret, do you really want to hear what I think?”

“No.”

“I think you’re incredible.”

“Bullshit.”

She looked into the distance. “I want to save you,” she said. “I think that’s what it is. Save you from your own brilliance.” She tapped out another cigarette. “Or maybe
for
it.”

“What?”

“You heard me.”

“I don’t need to be saved, Cle. That’s ridiculous.”

—

A
WAKE NOW FOR
almost two full days, scribbling notes into the tiny cardboard pad that he’d been carrying since the meeting with Borland. To meals. To class. To every single place he went. He’d made his way deeper into the problem. Walking alone along the water one evening, he watched the cargo ships creeping south beneath the bridge. Tiny blinking cities of light on the water. Starry bottles drifting sideways in the black. Incredibly, this was where he’d stumbled upon a crack. A narrow one. A thought had reached back. Encasing sheens. Volumeless shapes. He sent his mind deliberately away, then allowed it back. The crack remained. It was real.

The Malosz was not insurmountable. It could be solved in the higher dimensions.

This is where the answer first made itself known to him, in the muddy-smelling dark on a garbage-strewn dock above the tidal flats in Emeryville. Tinge of rot in the air. Wintertime headlights streaming ceaselessly from the west, dividing north and south at the shore. Complex white curves incising themselves against a black-paper rendering of the world. The trudging ships below. It would be provable in another dimension. This was the route. His rivals would never think of it because it was so deeply counterintuitive. But the more he considered it, the more clearly he knew—this path would be orders of magnitude simpler.

He’d found it.

From a tar-soaked piling, he flicked his cigarette into the smelly sand. Pinched a drink from the flask in his back pocket and headed home to sleep.

—

“E
ARL AND
I
are mortals,” she said.

A doughnut store this time. Shattuck Avenue.

“Bullshit.”

“Mortals hang out with mortals, Andret. Do mortal things.”

“Bullshit, Cle.”

“We talk. We walk. Sometimes we trip. We don’t bother with conundrums the human mind has never breached.”

“You’re sleeping with him.”

“Maybe I am.”

“What? Cle?”

“I said maybe I am.”

“I’m begging you.”

“Don’t beg.”

“Please, Cle.”

“I said don’t.”

“Then fuck you.”

“Brilliant. Thank you.” She looked out the yellowed window, dragged on her cigarette. “If you want to fuck me, you know, you still can. Anytime you want.” The smoke lingered. “You can always do that.”

“Thanks.”

Silence.

“You don’t think I know what you did, Andret?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. It doesn’t matter.”

“Yes, it does. I’m sorry.” He’d been waiting to say it. “I’m sorry, Cle.”

He took her hand. It was someone else’s hand.

“You think I care, Andret? I don’t. I don’t give a damn about her.”

“I don’t either. I’m begging you.”

“Look at me, Andret. Only mortals beg. You’re not to do it.” She reached and pulled his face close, held it there. “Not you, Andret. Stop following other people’s rules. You’re beyond them.”

—

T
HAT NIGHT, ANOTHER
party: Biettermann again. Alligator smile. A girl beside him and a bumping crowd.

Biettermann said, “China White.”

The girl lifted her fist. A blue dragon, twisting across her knuckles.