A Doubter's Almanac by Ethan Canin

Author:Ethan Canin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2016-02-15T16:00:00+00:00

The Tristate Singularity

THEN ONE DAY in the summer of the year I turned fourteen, not long after I’d graduated from high school, everything I thought I knew about my family changed once again. One warm morning in June, my father rounded up my sister and me and herded us into the Country Squire, where my mother was already waiting. We didn’t stop at the town limit; we didn’t stop at the county line. We didn’t turn east toward the Macon Dalles or west toward the rickety wooden waterslide whose fading picture above the words COOL DOWN! constituted Tapington’s single billboard. It wasn’t until we’d driven a full hour north that I noticed the two bulging, belt-strapped suitcases in the rear of the car. Bernie was resting his head on one of them.

It was a Saturday, and I was already three or four hours into my roll.

“Mom?” I finally said. “Where exactly are we going?”

“I don’t know, honey.”

Paulie looked up from her book. “How can you not even know?”

My mother showed us her profile and grinned shyly across the seat. “Because your father won’t tell me.”

“Then why are you smiling like that?” said Paulie.

“Because I do know that we’re going on a little vacation.”

“What?” said Paulie. “You didn’t tell us that!” She tapped my father on the shoulder. “You can’t just take us somewhere without telling us, or telling us where.” She tapped him again, then again, like a woodpecker. “That’s kidnapping.”

“I won’t tell you, either,” he said, swiping at her hand.

“Tell us!”

“I won’t.”

“Why not?” I said.

“Because it’s a mystery.”

“Interesting, Dad,” I offered. “That’s a solipsism.”

“It’s not a solipsism, Clever Hans. Solipsism is a philosophy. It was just a self-documenting sentence.” (At twelve, my sister was a disciple of Kurt Gödel.) She added, “People misuse the term.”

“It’s a solipsism, Smallette.”

“It’s got nothing to do with solipsism. Solipsism is the idea that the mind knows only its own constructs. It was a self-documenting sentence.”

“Which is a type of solipsism.”

“Enough,” said my mother.

Silence. In that silence I was driving in a car with my family while watching myself drive in a car with my family. Sometimes I was watching myself watch myself. I knew that we were approaching a singularity, the point on the map that was shared equally by three different states—Indiana, Ohio, and Michigan—and yet belonged to none; but soon we bent a little to the east, and I understood that our chance had passed. Before long we crossed under a sign that read WELCOME TO MICHIGAN. It was a bright new sign but felt like a cheap greeting card. I turned and watched it disappear. Soon after that we came to turnoffs for Detroit and then Kalamazoo. Past these we went. Then we were moving through runs of narrow electric-blue rents in the landscape that I quickly understood to be slits connecting us to the other side of the earth. The sky on the other side was also the color of day. I began to doubt most of the things I knew.

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