Read Online A Doubter's Almanac by Ethan Canin - Free Book Online

her, he saw his fingers not just as straight, utile extensions of his will but as the varied isthmuses of form that they actually were, narrowing and widening, hiding and exhibiting their wrinkles. In the pearly light of the High Plains afternoon she brought them one at a time to her lips and kissed them. Then she lifted both his hands and for a long moment held them there against her cheeks.
    At last she let them drop and he started the car and drove them on toward California.

Devil’s Fork
    B ACK IN B ERKELEY, he took his usual seat at Evans Library and looked down at the stack of journals whose tables of contents had long ago become litanies of worry for him. In any week, there were at least a dozen publications that might arrive with someone else’s breakthrough on the Malosz.
    He placed his arm over the cover of Acta Mathematica and for a few minutes tried to focus his mind. Finally he gave in and opened to the first page. Fortunately, there was nothing there to upset him, as there wasn’t in any of the rest of the pile. He set it all aside.
    His habit then was to close his eyes. He had a particular gift for logical cartography and all his life had been able to leave his thoughts whenever he broke for the night and then return to them the next day at the exact location where he’d quit, as though his internal mappings—in his mind, he was currently unfolding three-dimensional knots and refolding them antichirally—were an illustrated book in which he’d simply turned down the corner of a page.
    But this time something different occurred. A darting little flicker on the screen of his cognition. For several moments he couldn’t resummon the previous night’s picture. The blankness lasted almost no time at all.
    He’d been getting too little sleep.
    —

    O NE NIGHT IN a deadening rain, Biettermann offered him a lift home from the mathematics building. Just the two of them this time in the rumbling old GTO, red taillights wobbling against the slick asphalt all the way up College Avenue. The car slid between lanes, moving headlong through traffic. Horns faded behind them.
    “Can’t you get this thing to go any faster?” said Milo.
    Biettermann snorted.
    Biettermann made him edgy but in truth there was something he liked about him, too. The long hair straggling over such eager eyes. Want played on Earl’s features the way it played on an animal’s. He was leaning up close to the windshield, one hand on the wheel, the other drumming the shifter. The brainy people that Milo knew—he remembered Earl’s perfect calculus exam—didn’t behave like the guy next to him. They didn’t drive as though a checkered flag had been dropped. The tires screeched, and the GTO shot through a gap in the traffic; then they were out in front, racing south toward Oakland, the wipers revealing an astigmatic world in brief half circles of clarity.
    “I was kidding about faster,” Milo said. “Maybe be a little careful.”
    “I know you were kidding, man. I laughed.”
    At a red light in front of the new BART station, the rain was slackening, the wipers painting ever-renewing Venn sets onto the glass.
    “Actually, Andret,” Biettermann said, “you’re the one who should be careful.”
    “Me? Of what?”
    “Of her .”
    They peeled out again.
    “You’re talking about Cle.”
    “I am.”
    “I am completely careful with her, Earl.”
    “I don’t mean it like that.”

    “Then how do you mean it?”
    They caught another red. This far south, the streets were quieter, the wipers squeaking against the glass. Earl looked straight ahead. “Not careful with her, Milo. Careful of her.”
    “What are you talking about?”
    “She’s dangerous, my friend.”
    “All right.”
    “Me,” Biettermann said, “I like dangerous.” He turned now and regarded Milo, not unsympathetically. “But you don’t.”
    “You’re right, Earl. I don’t.”
    When the light changed, Earl pulled away more reasonably. At Milo’s corner, he