A Doubter's Almanac (41 page)

“And I guess it’s not a mutant.”

In the dimness we watched. Gradually their toil brought the two of them to opposite sides of the same post, where in chiral symmetry they undulated, facing each other across the hairy wood. Their tails beat long sweeps that kept their lips tightly pressed to the algae. It was as though a single pale suckerfish had come out in the night to look at itself in the mirror.

“What about you, Mom?”

“What about me?”

“Do you ever think
you’re
alone?”

“It’s the human condition, Hans.” Then, after a moment, “But it’s different when you have children.”

“I suppose it must be.” I flicked the light on and off. “I’m going away to college, though. And Paulie goes the year after.”

“Of course you are. But neither of you is leaving for a while yet.” She clicked her tongue. “And I’ll be fine when you do. I’ll be more than fine.”

For a few minutes then, amid the thrum of the crickets and the occasional hoot from the owl, we continued to scrutinize our two giants. Then she said, “Your father is a great mathematician, Hans. But he’s certainly done some things that haven’t helped his career.”

“I know that already.”

“You do?”

“Well, it’s not too hard to figure out.” I threw a pebble into the water and watched the creatures eye its descent. When it hit the bottom, they both nosed down and sniffed at it. “Mom,” I said. “What actually happened to him at Princeton?”

“Your father? Well, he did a few ill-advised things. It’s a long story.”

“That’s okay. You don’t have to tell me.”

“He wasn’t getting along with people, for one. And then he allowed some unwise things to take place. But he’s still the same mathematician that he always was.
I
know it, and I think that
they
know it, too.”

“Shhh,” I said. “Listen.”

“What?”

“He stopped.”

“Did he?” She cocked her head. “Oh, yes, I think you’re right.”

Out beyond the cattails now, the bathroom light flickered on.

“I saw his Fields the other day,” I said.

“Did you really, honey? When you were at home together?”

“No. He brought it up here.”

She glanced over. Then she touched my arm again and looked out at the water.

“Mom?”

“Yes?”

“His old boss is coming up to see him.”

“What?”

“Dad’s old boss from Princeton. He’s coming up here.”

She took hold of my shoulder and turned me toward her. “What do you mean? Are you talking about Knudson Hay?”

“You look shocked.”

“Well, I sort of
am
.”

“He has a conference in Ann Arbor, and then he’s coming up to see us. Dad told me on the drive back. I wasn’t sure if you already knew.”

“Well, no, actually
,
I
didn’t
. But thanks for the tip.” She turned again and looked up at the house, where in the tiny bathroom window now my father’s silhouette appeared. Then the light went out. She said, “I just wonder when he was planning to tell me.”

A Nonconforming Interval

A
ND SO BEGAN
one of the rare periods in my family’s life in which I can fairly say that together all of us might have been called—for a time, at least—
happy
. It was my mother’s influence, I think—as such things always seemed to be. After I told her that Knudson Hay was coming, something changed in her.

For this particular stretch of our existence, for those few high weeks of midsummer, she once again became capable of the persuasive, outspreading delight that I recalled so clearly from my younger days. She spent her mornings on her outdoor projects, singing lightly as she worked. The sound of her voice, even from a distance, was like another drug to me. My sister, who’d always been a barometer of my mother’s moods, came out and sang beside her.

As for me, when happiness arrived it felt like lethargy—like a distant, narcotic stillness that laid itself over my unease. The disquiet that had for so long existed within me—a disquiet that I’d hardly noticed, strangely, until it began to wane—became more apparent with each day it diminished. One morning, I woke before dawn and hiked to the head of the marsh, where I found a family of beavers swimming in the pools. One of their tails slapped the water like a rifle shot, and in an instant the whole group vanished into the depths. But soon they were abiding me. Before long, I was their regular visitor. I would rise each morning, take my dose, and hike to their lair, where I would sit on the shore and watch them work their dam. That dam was a marvel: a crisscrossed wad of tightly tied brush anchored by barkless trunks that had been sharpened at their felled ends like pencils. The first time I’d seen it, I’d thought it was the ruins of an old railroad bridge; but one morning I witnessed a forty-foot birch being toppled and added to the girding. It slapped the water like one of their tails. I sat there as a clan of swimming rodents floated it expertly into place.

Ordinarily I would have wanted to tell somebody. But the drug now was a friend in itself. Not only did it tell me things, but I could tell
it
things.

The feeling I had then—the feeling that I told the drug I had then—with the sun just beginning to halo the trees, with the glinting, silver wakes of a family of beavers fanning out in the stillness, was unmistakable: I was happy.

On my way home that day, my roll finally fading, I passed through the woods behind the shed. There, through the tiny window, I stopped for a moment and watched the back of my father’s head. It dipped. It rose. It dipped. I felt another charge of joy. Like the beavers, he was working.

—

T
HAT EVENING WHEN
he finished in his shed, he sauntered down to the beach in his bathing suit. He kicked off his flip-flops, waded into the water, and stood hyperventilating in the shallows at the end of the dock. A few feet away, the rest of us lay on the boards in the last of the afternoon heat. It was during this period that Dad, even when I wasn’t rolling, was becoming a creature of particular interest to me—a pale-skinned, nervous, highly familiar being and at the same time something entirely strange. I suppose it was typical for a boy my age to begin taking notice of his father. He was part of me and not part of me. Part of all of us and not part of all of us. What could I actually learn of his life beyond my paltry and distorted view of it? A tic shook the stringy muscle of his shoulder. He splashed lake water on his face and rubbed his hands through his hair. Then he bent at the knees and ducked under.

The muddy brown inlet closed over him, and all we saw then was his bulging wake plowing forward, as though a great, determined sea creature had somehow found its way into our cove. I glanced out at the spot, a few feet farther than the one from which he’d emerged the week before, where his shaking head would soon pop back up into the air.

The surface grew still. A pair of minks peeked out from the boulders. Partway up the beach, Bernie sat up and barked.

Suddenly Paulie said, “Why can’t he just be like everyone else?”

Mom looked over at her.

My sister shielded her eyes with her hand, shook her head, and dropped herself back to the dock. “Why does he always have to be
working
on something?”

My mother turned to the deep then, where the prow of his wake had appeared again, pushing steadily along the surface. “Because it’s the only thing he knows how to do,” she said.

—

I
F YOUR FATHER
was never like other fathers, if he never tossed the ball with you, if he never talked with you about your day at school while you walked the dog together in the evenings, if he never brought you to a hockey game or played tag with you in front of the house when he arrived home from work, if he was always late when he picked you up, if he swore when he tripped on curbs and stumbled when he got out of cars, if he spent his days in battle with the underpinnings of the universe and his evenings with the bottle, then you might understand what it felt like, at that susceptible age, to live for a few months with the buoyant, outgoing man who seemed to emerge in the woods that summer from the dark husk of another man’s ruin.

I had no idea whether his work was going well. It might have been. At times I could sense what felt like hopefulness.

One afternoon, I heard an unfamiliar noise coming from the bushes, and when I walked up to the road I found him standing at the end of our drive alongside a towering heap of soda bottles. They were piled all the way to the limbs of the cedars, as though a dump truck had just dropped them off. He was busily dividing them into garbage bags. I watched him from the cover of the trees. Half liters were going into one bag, liters into another, two liters and jugs into a third. As soon as one bag was filled, he would pull out a replacement. There must have been a thousand empty bottles in front of him.

Without looking up, he said, “I’m assuming you know about the economy here in Michigan.”

I stepped out. “As a matter of fact, I don’t.”

“Bad,” he said. “B-a-d. I’d say Detroit’s already a goner.” He pulled out a roll of duct tape and sealed off a bag with it. “A Faygo plant went under out on Sixty-nine.”

“What’s a Faygo plant?”

“A
bottling
plant, Hans. Faygo’s a soda—local company. I got their clean stock. At least, it was
supposed
to be clean.” He tossed one of the bags into the driveway, where it bounced down the slope like a beach ball. “Ten bucks,” he said. “This whole pile cost me ten bucks, and we’re going to make something you’ll remember for the rest of your life.”

The man in front of me still looked like my father.

“Yes, Hans,” he said. “They won’t soon forget.”

“Who might that be, Dad?”

“You. The neighbors. Everybody. The whole goddamn world. Even your mother.” He pointed up and down the cove, then pulled a pair of bottles from the pile and wound them together with tape. “This is our mahogany.”

“Okay.”

He squeezed the taped bottles together until a popping sound erupted and the structure suddenly deformed. “Polyethylene terephthalate,” he said. “Radially corrugated. Remarkably resistant to compression.”

“I see.”

“Hundreds of them, Hans. All we have to do is lash them together. The corrugation is the brilliance. It’s what makes the structure achievable. You can figure the displacement yourself.”

“Of?”

“Of what else, Hans? The
hull
.”

—

“A
ND HOW MANY
bottles would bring neutral buoyancy?” he asked that night at dinner.

“What size are the bottles?” said Paulette.

“Two liter.”

The questions in our family always went to my sister first. If she made an error, I would get my turn.

“Who’s in the boat?” she said.

“I am,” answered Dad.

“In fresh water?”

“Good question, Paulie. Yes, fresh water.”

“How much does a bottle weigh?”

“Fifty-two grams exactly.”

“Empty?”

“Of course.”

“With the cap?”

“Yes.”

“Well,” said my sister, “how much do
you
weigh, then?”

Dad shook his head. “Estimation is a mathematical skill.”

“Of course it is,” I added. “Otherwise it’s just arithmetic.”

“Brilliant, Clever Hans.”

“Excellent point, Smallette.”

“And what about the ullage?” she said.

We both looked at her.

“And what about the
what
?” said Dad.

“The ullage. The part of the bottle that’s empty, under the cap.”

“Forget the ullage.”

“Yeah, Smallette, forget the ullage.”

“Okay,” she said. She walked to the end of the table and stood in front of his chair. His body had long ago returned to normal. His belly was flat, his skin was tan, and his hair had been carefully combed. His eyes darted around intelligently, the way they had when I was younger. He looked, I remember noticing, exactly like my father.

“One sixty?” she said cautiously.

“
What,
Smallette!” I nodded sagely. “
I
weigh
one sixty
. Try one eighty. How about one seventy-five, at the very least?”

“One fifty-eight,” he answered.

“I told you! 36 bottles for neutral buoyancy in fresh water. And another for the weight of the plastic. That’s 37.”

“35.83, Smallette. Plus .93 for the extra. That’s 36.76.”

“Try putting the cap on 76 hundredths of a bottle, Clever One.”

“This is math, Smallette, not boatbuilding.”

“No, it’s not,” said Dad. “It’s boatbuilding.”

He turned to my sister.

“Thirty-five in salt water,” she said triumphantly. “Plus another for the bottles. Thirty-six.”

“And for two-thirds freeboard, Paulie?” he asked.

“What’s freeboard?”

“The part above the waterline,” I snapped. “A hundred and eleven in fresh! A hundred and eight in salt!”

“That was trivial, Hans!”

“We don’t need to buy any boat, kids!” Dad stood up, pulling my mother into a quick hug. “That’s the beauty of it,” he said, releasing her and pointing out the window. “Sailors!” he boomed. “To the task!”

—

I
F YOU WERE
standing on the shore of our cove the next morning as the sun burned the last mist from the shallows, you would have seen three skinny figures hunched in a line along the bank, fastening together something long and low and shiny from a pile of strangely shaped objects that was heaped beside them. A big, hairy dog was ambling in their midst. It’s possible that all four beings would have appeared content, possibly even joyful. At the very least, the three who were working were doing so with singular concentration.

This, I now understand, is what a mathematician would call happiness.

Paulette and I were assembling one end while Dad assembled the other. From our wrists hung thick rolls of duct tape. We unspooled it meticulously, trying to prevent the lengths from adhering to themselves. (This aspect was particularly gratifying: I’d taken my usual dose, of course, and in my hands the eager ribbons bent toward their sticky sides with what I understood to be the molecular equivalent of affection.) Paulette held everything in place as I taped. Then we switched, and I held the pieces for her. My father preferred to work alone—as he always did—by clamping the bottles between his knees. Bernie panted faithfully, shuffling back and forth among us. A few of the containers had bits of soda in them still and we spilled these onto the bank, where a line of ants was filing in from the woods, their feelers trembling. Bernie sniffed at them.