A Doubter's Almanac (49 page)

I’d called a couple of days before to remind Dad I was coming, but the connection had been bad. I’d given him the date and time, and right before we’d hung up he’d said in his thin voice, “All right, see you then,” as though I’d been phoning from the corner about stopping over with some takeout.

I tried his number again now from the car. From the cabin I could hear the ringing.

When I hung up, I flipped on the high beams. Along the near wall, the siding was hanging with moss and was still patched with the same grayed-out sheet of plywood that had been there on the day my mother and sister and I had left. I pulled in behind a junky-looking car, my lights catching the holes in the rear where the
FO
of the logo dangled. It was an old Taurus. The trunk was spotted with Bondo, and the windows were whitened with ghosts of mud, as though the clouds had been dropping pellets of dust all summer instead of rain. On the trunk, someone had written
WASH ME
.

At least he was going into town, then.

A hundred feet down the bank, the lake was rippling. At the end of the beach, the lights caught a pair of metal legs protruding from the thicket: the old dock sections, thrown down on their sides. He hadn’t put them back in the water after winter.

I wondered which winter that might have been.

Closer in, an angled bush stuck out halfway across the clearing. I peered into the dimness until suddenly I recognized it: the hull of the
Victory,
pinned down by vines. Behind it, the same blunted shape of the
Royal Sovereign.

I shut off the engine and stepped out into the chirping night. “Dad?” I called.

Around the near side of the house, my eyes found a track through the undergrowth. Behind the screens on the porch, the old pair of wicker chairs stood next to the table. On the table, a glass.

I called out again, this time toward the upstairs.

At the rear, hidden in the gloom, I stumbled on a row of teepeed beans and a narrow patch of what looked like lettuce. At the far end, clusters of tiny tomatoes were silhouetted in their planters.

He was keeping up a garden, then. Also a good sign.

The porch stairs had been repaired with planks—a pretty competent job of it, actually: firm under my step, and the handrail steady. Through the dusty windows I could see nothing. I knocked on the door. “Dad?”

When I pushed it open, the only sound was the lap of water through the screens. I flipped the switch, but nothing came on. I flipped the next one. Was he not paying the electric bill? I took a few steps in and searched until I found the old lamp in the corner of the dining room. The same place it used to be. In the blackness I felt for the pull cord. To my surprise, it worked.

I looked around. The place was being neatly kept, at least. Another good sign.

Alpha

M
Y FIRST
S
ATURDAY
at Stillwater Farms, Audra and I took a long walk together in the fields behind the center. Stillwater, which rented its excess acreage to the local farmers, seemed to be about the only business in that corner of rural New Hampshire that was turning a profit—although I doubt it depended on the crops. As a numbers guy, in fact, I’d admired the fiduciary spirit of the place from the moment I’d first laid eyes on its costs sheet. The local agriculture seemed to be part of the treatment philosophy as well, providing a serene but eminently practical view for the patients. I must say that I found it eminently and serenely therapeutic myself. Especially on those cool north-latitude afternoons when I was allowed to take an hour’s walk with my wife.

In the distance, one of the farmers was driving a dark green tractor through the rows, a churn of dust following. I could see clods flying up behind the tilling blades, like mice jumping up from the fields. I was six days into my stay, and I realized I still felt like one of those mice.

Audra was here for the weekend. She’d been at a group meeting with me in the morning, then at a therapy session with me in the afternoon, and she’d be at another group meeting that evening with the other spouses, followed by the nightly speaker. Tomorrow she was flying back to New York. “Oh, Hans,” she said, taking my hands and looking steadily into my eyes. “Thank God we did this.”

Since my arrival, the nurses had been looking into my eyes just as steadily, with their pen lights.

“I’m glad, too,” I said.

“I feel like we were snatched from an abyss.”

“Maybe we were. I hope that’s right.” My gaze went to the farmer in his tractor. I noted that even this far into my stay, my initial thought persisted: that rather than being snatched from an abyss, I was being thrown into one.

I also knew, however—as I was learning to say that week—that this was the drugs talking.

—

A
T
S
TILLWATER, WE
were encouraged to share. My suitemate, a garrulous man from a West Coast division of Wells Fargo, had no difficulty with the assignment. He was in the same business as mine, but on the retail end, peddling risk to attorneys and dentists. I bought and sold the shadow of the prediction of risk, for some of the richest men in the world, at a million times per second.

But these are details.

Stillwater was a far cry from Walden Commons, where my father had once been funneled into his own obligatory furlough. On the web, Audra had found the place in a single afternoon, along with several dozen reviews of its food, accommodations, gym equipment, and rate of recidivism. At the airport in Newport, a staff member picked me up in a Volvo, Vivaldi sparkling on the audio. A concierge nodded as he checked me in. An aide accompanied me to my room. Instead of searching my bags, he introduced me to my suitemate—the man from Wells Fargo—as well as to the trays of mints and macadamias in the pantry, the jars of juices in the mini-fridge, and the service intercom, which was available around the clock. Also, he pointed out where the ice maker could be found.

I was left alone to unpack.

Stillwater, in fact, made quite a show of not caring about the obvious. About what we’d brought with us, for example. About whether we would complete the treatment. The perimeter gates were kept unlocked, and the doors to the meeting rooms were always propped open. The Volvos were constantly available out front, their radios tuned to the classical station. In the coat closet of our Perry Street brownstone the week before, I’d divided a baggie of mid-Andes Bolivian between a stripped-out thumb drive and the battery compartment of my key-chain flashlight. When I landed in Newport, the flashlight was in my pants pocket and the thumb drive in my laptop. At Stillwater, nobody even checked.

We had to
want
to change.

My first evening in-house, I closed the door to my room, lowered myself into the leather chair, pulled out the thumb drive, and ruminated on its meaning. I was only half convinced that I needed anything to change. At that moment, actually, I’d say a good deal less than half. Even through the cap I could taste the bitter.

The picture in my mind was of Audra, backed up stiffly against the curtains. “Please don’t,” she was saying.

—

W
ELL, READER:
I
didn’t
.

That night was my first clean one in—how long? Half a decade? No, longer—it’s hard to even remember.

MDA, it turns out, had been the quaint days. I wasn’t a philosopher anymore. My thoughts didn’t have anything to do with Sartre or Camus (or even Gödel or Frege). They generally had to do with mathematics. Mathematics in the modern world. That is to say: with money.

It pretty much becomes your life, I’m here to report.

So, why was I suddenly willing to change? It could have been my own cleaned-up version of the old Andret willpower. It could have been Audra’s magnolia-trunk voice, still ringing in my ears. It could have been the beta blockers that Stillwater had prescribed at intake. It could have been the kids. But whatever it was, it held, just long enough that I’m here recounting all of this now. Stillwater assigned us to a course of lectures and meetings and to an exercise class before every dinner, and that night and the next day I went through all of it, clean and quiet and sober.

The therapeutic idea, I guess, was not to allow
too
many minutes—at least at first—for our own thoughts.

Well, what would those thoughts have been? That it was all pointless? That I was bound to fail, to follow the same, sad path that my father had? That it was, indeed,
over for me
?

Audra insists this is nonsense.

The Thursday before, I’d come home late from work. With the time differences to the Asian markets, Thursday nights were my ramp-up into the weekend. I remember needing my bother to go away. I remember needing to get back up on the elephant. Earlier in the day, in just a couple of hours, I’d cleared a medium-sized fortune for the firm—maybe twenty million—short and long on a pile of interest-only tranches that were bouncing like ball bearings on a flash currency raid out of Hong Kong. It was my third-best showing of the year.

At the brownstone, I’d found Audra in the kitchen. When I walked in, she was sitting at the table with Emmy, who was eating a bowl of cereal with bananas before bed. Niels must have already been upstairs.

Until then, I’d kept it out of the house. Even on the weekends, I’d kept it out of the house.

As soon as I entered that room, though, I knew that tonight was going to be different. The world had dulled. Dulled and darkened—over months, I’m talking about—but suddenly it was about to wink out. Maybe it was because of the day. I was still irritated by a certain slant in the run, a slant in which the Shores-Durbans had missed a decent-sized slice of the pie. To the tune of maybe two and a half million. I was sure they could have gobbled it, but they hadn’t.
They fucking hadn’t gobbled it.

I was going to discover why.

If I could only get the world to shed its dark. I kissed my wife and daughter. As soon as possible, I stepped back out to the living room.

“Wait a minute,” said Audra, a moment later, entering from the kitchen.

I was leaning down over the Mpingo coffee table.

“What are you doing?” she said, backing up against the curtains.

I lowered my head hungrily. With one eye I glanced up. “What do you mean, what am I doing?”

“Wait. Wait. Wait. What is this, Hans? Are you kidding me?”

I sprang up and shot through the kitchen door for the refrigerator, which dispensed the glacial ice water that I craved. I was alive now inside a flickering shell of light. At the table, Emmy looked up from her cereal bowl and said, “Hey, Daddy-o.”

“Hey, love.” I kissed her on the forehead.

Back in the living room, I mouthed to Audra, “North of twenty sticks today, babe.”

She was still standing wide eyed against the curtains. She whispered, “What? Please, Hans—what is this?”

“North of twenty today, Aud!” It might have come out as a shout. “Not bad. Come on, honey. Sit down with me and celebrate!”

On the way home, I should also mention, Lorenzo had dropped me for a quick stop at one of the boutique hotels downtown. I’d done a couple of nice bumps there, too, with another quant I knew, on the dazzling glass towel shelf in the dazzling marble bathroom of a dazzlingly opulent bar. In those days, though, a bump lasted about as long as a breath.

“Hans,” said Audra. “I have no idea what you’re doing right now. In front of me like this, in your own house, and with your own daughter
right there
.” She pointed through the wall. “What is this? Is this a joke?”

“The door’s closed, Aud. She can’t see anything.”

I should also add: it wasn’t as though my wife had never seen it before, herself. She’d even
done
it with me, once, early in my career—some diluted Mexican street puff at a party during my first year in New York, on the medium-fancy roof deck of a midlevel, Midtown customer whose account already meant just a little less than nothing to me. I hadn’t exactly pretended to be new to it all.

“Stop looking so shocked,” I said. “How do you think I’ve been making all this bank?” I powered down the last of the water and shook the ice cubes onto my tongue. When I bit down I couldn’t tell whether it was the cubes that were breaking or my teeth. “How do you think I’ve been making our shiny little nut, sweetheart? You think I just do all this
on my own
?”

She retreated into the kitchen. I heard her cellphone open. I heard it close. “What?” she said again, reappearing in the doorway, running her hands through her hair. Her mouth made the shape of a scream, but what emerged was a short, breathy wheeze. I was hunched at the table, licking up the dust.

“How do you think I’ve been keeping us inside our little pyramid of fancy?” I said. With quivering fingers I pointed at the blazing French Empire chandelier above the fireplace. The room was alive now with light. I ran those fingers across my gums and sucked.

Her next scream was real.

A Topologist’s Apology

A
S
I
WALKED
back through the cabin, I tried the rest of the lights. The dining nook. The staircase. The porch. They were all burned out except for the one behind me in the living room. In the narrow hallway, I took my phone from my pocket and held it in front of me, the dull-yellow walls and worn floors easing forward out of the dark. Finally, at the pantry door, the old fluorescent lamps flickered on.

The kitchen was clean, too. A couple of washed plates in the rack. A sponge standing in the sink. Water still dripping from the tap. I shut it off. “Dad?” Alongside the refrigerator I found the old broom on its peg. With its splintered handle I rapped the floor, the way Mom used to do when it was time for breakfast. “Dad?” I called out, rapping it again. Behind the cabinet doors were a few supplies. Vegetable oil. A jar of pickles. A loaf of wheat bread. In the refrigerator, a pack of hot dogs and a quart of milk.