He began to shun sleep and took to calculating at night, followed by classwork, so that he could record data during the day.
There was a time in history when the pattern of numbers he saw on his columned pages would have upended the world.
—
HIS APARTMENT WAS a half-hour walk from school, but even so, there were occasional knocks on the door: undergraduates asking to see the quatrant. Sometimes they’d just kneel on the sidewalk and look down through the window. He took to closing the shades. Their cheap fabric admitted a gloom of yellow light.
Cle had her own knock — three short, three long, three short. “Morse code for SOS.”
“Why SOS?” he said.
“Because you’re my savior.”
He laughed. They both knew it was the reverse.
He should have been devoting more time to the Malosz — Borland would be expecting some evidence of progress. But between classes and teaching and the quatrant and now Cle — she arrived every other afternoon with a cup of tea and a book — he had no chance. His intention was to work, but she would do something — touch one of her calves, unspool her hair from its bun — and they would move frantically to the bed, pulling at each other. They’d stay there until one of them grew hungry. Then they’d go upstairs to the Indian restaurant across the street. The spices turned her lips bright red. He almost couldn’t eat.
All the while, he could feel Borland waiting.
One afternoon she was pounding on the door. She rushed in, threw it closed behind her, and pulled down the shades. A Turkish coffee was in her hand, the blue ceramic cup shaking on its saucer. “It’s from that Middle Eastern place on the corner,” she whispered breathlessly. “I was going to bring it right back.” She lifted one of the shades and dropped it again. “But they came after me. I think he’s out there.”
“Who is?”
“The waiter.”
He regarded her. “Did you just steal a cup of coffee, Cle?”
“Screw you, Andret.” She peeked out from behind the shade again.
Then it happened: he was confused. For a moment, there seemed to be two thoughts entering his mind at once. It was a moment — half a moment — of misperception. She seemed to be very far away, her voice coming from some other room.
Then it cleared.
“All right,” he said. He took the cup and pulled out a chair for her. “Partners in crime, then. What do you think of that?”
“You’re not the type.”
“I’m not? What about this?” From the closet he pulled out a pint of whiskey that he’d bought that morning. He’d wrapped it as a Christmas gift for Borland; but now he tore apart the wrapping and fortified the coffee. He needed calm. “To something different,” he said. When she’d drunk it down, he poured a shot for himself.
—
AT CHRISTMAS, HE took the bus home to Cheboygan. The road leading up to the house was piled with snow, and all along the hill the rows of spruces hung low with their winter weight. In Berkeley, he’d boarded the bus in a T-shirt. Now he moved morosely through the old rooms in his flannels, looking out the windows while his mother sat at the reading table and his father tinkered outside. He read his coursework; he slept long hours in his bed; sometimes he went out to the woods, though he felt separated from them now. He would open the thin Pelado and Harkness text on characteristic classes that Hans Borland had lent him, then sit at the radiator flipping the pages in his lap, thinking of Cle.
Calling felt like weakness.
Only when he was asleep did he not pine for her. His nights were fitful, disturbed by dreams of plunging. Every morning shortly after dawn, regardless of whether it had snowed during the night, his father would put on his boots and go out to salt the walks. Then came the hollow wallop of the drifts falling to the hedges as the old man worked his way around the garage eaves with a broom. Milo would turn to the wall and try to sleep, thinking of the soft shelf of heat where he’d curled his legs behind Cle’s just a few nights before.
She’d gone home to see her family in Minnesota. No more than a narrow sliver of land separated them now, but something other than the map made it insurmountable. He’d called her on his first night home and she’d seemed distant, an intermittent stream of laughter emerging on the line from somewhere in the house. She had sisters. He waited for her to call back, but she didn’t. He gave in and tried again two nights later, but the sister who answered the phone hesitated for a moment, then told him she’d gone out. He vowed not to call again till the week was up.
He wondered what Earl Biettermann was doing over the break.
Time was interminable. He knew he ought to be working on the Malosz, but watching his mother with her novels and his father with his tools — he was starting another one of his projects — leadened him. It took a certain energy to lift his mind to the plane on which it could bring force to bear on a problem. Now this energy had deserted him.
One morning, a few days before the vacation ended, his father brought him outside to the garage. Laboriously, the old man bent down, turned the cross-shaped metal latch, and raised the creaking door. Inside, the family’s old powder-blue Valiant had been cleaned and polished.
“Yes?” said Milo.
“We’re getting a new one,” said his father. “Delivered tomorrow.”
“I don’t understand.”
“The Plymouth. It’s yours.”
Milo didn’t know what to say. He walked around to the driver’s window and looked in at the familiar seats. A pair of keys on the dashboard, tied together with string. He stepped over and shook his father’s hand.
The old man said, “In this kind of weather, use thirty-weight oil. Forty in the summer if it’s hot.”
“I will. Thank you.”
“Your mother’s inside. It was her idea. She’ll want to know if you like it.”
“I do. I like it very much.”
That evening he called Cle again. This time her sister handed over the phone. He told her about the new car. She told him about her vacation. The Wells family owned a toboggan, and the sisters had taken it into the hills around Northfield, then cooked supper over a fire. They’d roasted a goose for Christmas and spent the rest of the days in Minneapolis, ice-skating on a lake and shopping.
There was a silence.
Finally she said, “Don’t you want to know whether I got you anything?”
“Do I?”
“Well, I might have.”
This knocked down the wall inside him. He told her he would drive across the Upper Peninsula and pick her up in the Valiant at her front door and bring her back to school.
“I already have my plane ticket, silly.”
“I’ll drive underneath the plane.”
She laughed.
“Really,” he said.
“That’s silly. I told you.”
“When do you leave?”
“Day after tomorrow.”
“Which flight?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“So I can make sure God protects it.”
“He doesn’t do individual flights.”
A silence. Then she said, “Actually, that was kind of sweet.”
Two days later at the American Airlines terminal in Minneapolis, he ran up the corridor waving a bright orange hunter’s hat. At the gate, the passengers were already lining up to board.
“Lord,” she said. “Am I dreaming?”
“No, I am.” He took her valise. “The car’s outside, Cle. Come on, I almost burned it out getting here. I’ll drive you all the way to your door.”