Now, of course, I realize I was probably checking to make sure he was still alive.
“Did I wake you?” I would say.
“You’re implying that I was asleep.”
He seemed to move less now. In the bed, his arms lay across the blankets like pieces of wood. His hair was matted, his cheeks sallow, and his forehead devoid of all the old grimaces and narrowings that it used to display. He looked normal in every detail but somehow not yet himself. Like a statue of himself, carved by an artist who had technique but not soul.
“By the way,” he said, “as I know you know, that was just arithmetic. That three hundred ninety-four million seconds. You’re twelve years old. I’m well aware of that.”
“Okay.”
He sighed. “The true mathematics would be figuring out why every second seems like the last.”
“Clever.”
“Maybe, but not in any way true.” He appeared to think for a moment. “Or perhaps when you get older, you’ll see that it is indeed true. Just not mathematically so.” He patted the sheets, and another whiff of cologne reached me. “Anyway, twelve is about the right age for what I’m about to say.” He reached behind his shoulder and from under the pile of books on the headboard produced one of the bottles of Hennessy. “I’ve been tapering,” he said. “You’re about to witness the last drink your old man will ever take.” He shook the bottle to show me that it was nearly empty.
“The last drink in your life?”
“That’s right, in my life.” He tilted the neck, gulped down the last bit, and held out the bottle. “By the way,” he said, “it’s not as bad as they say.”
“I can get you something better next time.”
“I could get something better myself next time, if I wanted to. That’s the point. I don’t want to. You’re my witness.” He reached out and shook my hand. “So help me God.”
I didn’t know what to say.
“I’ve done some difficult things in my life, Hans. This is just go-ing to be one more.” He sat up now, swung his feet stiffly over the side of the mattress, and began pulling on his socks. “People said I couldn’t do some of those other things, either. But I proved them wrong.”
“What things?”
“Well, some difficult problems, for one. I’ve solved a problem that was thought to be unsolvable.”
“I know, Dad.”
“And I learned that only a small part of it is talent. The rest is determination. Stick to your ramparts, my boy, no matter who else is trying to shout you off of them.” He shifted around to look into my eyes. With his head turned, the arm on the far side began to quiver. “The will is everything,” he said.
“Okay.”
He held my gaze. “Look at me.”
“What?”
“Do you agree?”
“With what?”
“That the will is everything.”
“I guess so.”
“Then say it.”
“Say what?”
“Say, The will is everything.”
“I’m not going to say that.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. It’s corny. I don’t want to.”
“Well, why don’t you want to? Don’t you believe it?”
“I didn’t say I don’t believe it. Maybe I do. Maybe I don’t.”
“Say it, then. Say, The will is everything.”
“I won’t.”
“Just say it, Hans. Say, ‘I, Hans Euler Andret, will never give up.’ ”
“No.”
“Come on now, Hans. ‘The will is everything. I will never give up.’ ”
“No.”
“Say it!”
“No!”
He thought for a moment. Then he smiled. “Good,” he said.
Nunquam Cede
I KNEW I could count on you to understand.
Did my father recognize something in me that I hadn’t known existed? Was he warning me about what was coming?
As it turned out, it was that very week that I, Hans Euler Andret — mathematics prodigy, namesake of mathematicians, aspiring Beaver, son of a woeful addict myself — began using.
Why? Believe me, I’ve thought about it — I’ve thought about it now for years—and I still don’t have an answer. Why then? Why at all? I’d just watched my father nearly bleed to death on a cliff, then practically succumb in his bed to delirium tremens, then vow in my presence to never drink again. Of course I should have taken it all as a warning.
But I didn’t.
I don’t think it was a desire for my own destruction, nor a claim on my father’s scant attention, nor a fear of unseating him (or an attempt at it), nor the will to differentiate myself from my sister, nor a stab, even, at shooting myself down from the dizzying trajectory at which I’d been flying — all theories that have been offered to me over the years, by my wife, my friends, my sponsor, and my shrinks. Instead, I think that it was nothing more than the long-delayed satisfaction of a physical craving that must have been inside me since birth. My clock had simply run down.
I wonder now if my father recognized this fact.
Tapington was a small town, with almost nothing to recommend it except a few churches, low real-estate prices, a women’s college, and quiet. Still, I discovered a whole menu of choices: Pot. Speed. Meth. Coke. Crack. MDA. Whippets. Not to mention every manner of downer (in a county that didn’t need any more downers: we already had a closed polymer plant, a closed aerospace plant, and a closed Ford plant). I didn’t try coke or speed. I smoked a little pot with another kid from the math team; then I went straight to MDA.
The Mellow Drug of America.
That’s what my friends called it, anyway; or, sometimes, for reasons I never understood, Mr. Dowater Agrees. (Ecstasy, by the way, MDA’s more beguiling cousin, hadn’t yet appeared in Tapington, or at least not yet at Tapington North — a fact that actually might have saved my life.) When the dealers saw who was waiting out back for them between the bleachers and the cafeteria dumpster, they made easy work of me. They roughed me up. From having skipped all those grades, I was already on everybody’s list; and, of course, I was small for my cohort. When I came back, they roughed me up again, a little harder. But ever since my father’s stay at Southern Ohio Lutheran — the first one, now more than a year before — there had been a disquiet inside me: part anger, part sorrow, part bewilderment. For some reason it was relieved, at least temporarily, by being pushed around; and then, later, by the drugs. I came back a third time.
Never give up.
Finally, on a warm Friday afternoon just a few minutes after the three o’clock bell, one of them sold me a couple of tabs: one green; one yellow. The silhouette of a butterfly stamped across the face of each. It was a new world. I didn’t know anything about it. I didn’t know, for example, if the different colors meant different drugs. Or different doses. Obviously, I didn’t ask the kid who was selling it. Instead, I pretended at both nonchalance and skepticism. I remember making a snide comment about the butterfly design — I was afraid he was selling me children’s vitamins — but he just said, “See you next time.”