Stella Maris

ALSO BY CORMAC McCARTHY

The Passenger

The Road

No Country for Old Men

Cities of the Plain

The Crossing

All the Pretty Horses

The Stonemason (a play)

The Gardener’s Son (a screenplay)

Blood Meridian

Suttree

Child of God

Outer Dark

The Orchard Keeper

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright © 2022 by M-71, Ltd.

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

www.aaknopf.com

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

ISBN 9780307269003 (hardcover)

ISBN 9780593535233 (ebook)

ISBN 9781524712402 (open market)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022934755

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Cover images: (left) James Thew/Alamy; (right) Victority/Alamy

Cover design by Chip Kidd

ep_prh_6.0_141971238_c0_r0

Contents

Cover

Also by Cormac McCarthy

Title Page

Copyright

Stella Maris, Black River Falls, Wisconsin

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Stella Maris

Black River Falls, Wisconsin

Established 1902

Since 1950 a non-denominational facility and hospice for the care of psychiatric medical patients.

Resident Unit October 27, 1972

Case 72-118

Patient is a twenty-year-old Jewish/Caucasian female. Attractive, possibly anorexic. Arrived at this facility six days ago apparently by bus and without luggage. Admission signed by Dr Wegner. Patient had a plastic bag full of hundred dollar bills in her purse—something over forty thousand dollars—which she attempted to give to the receptionist. Patient is a doctoral candidate in mathematics at the University of Chicago and has been diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic with a longstanding aetiology of visual and auditory hallucinations. Resident of this facility on two prior occasions.

I

Hi. I’m Dr Cohen.

You’re not the Dr Cohen I was expecting.

Sorry about that. That would be Dr Robert Cohen.

Yes. I guess there’s no shortage of Dr Cohens.

Probably not. How are you? Are you all right?

Am I all right.

Yes.

I’m in the looney bin.

Well. Other than that, I suppose.

How long have you been doing this?

About fourteen years.

You’re going to record this.

I think that was the agreement. Is that all right?

I suppose. At the time I thought you were somebody else.

It’s not all right.

No. It’s okay. Although I should say that I only agreed to chat. Not to any kind of therapy.

Yes. Is there anything you’d like to ask me? Before we begin.

We have begun. Such as what?

Maybe you should tell me a little about yourself.

Oh boy.

No?

Are we going to paint by the numbers?

I’m sorry?

It’s all right. It’s just that I’m naive enough to keep imagining that it’s possible to launch these sorties on a vector not wrenched totally implausible by cant.

It’s what? My tone of voice?

It’s all right. We’ll do it your way. What the hell.

Well. I dont want to get off to a bad start. I just thought you might want to tell me a little about why you’re here.

I didnt have anyplace else to go.

And why here.

I’d been here before.

Why originally, then.

Because I couldnt get into Coletta.

And why Coletta?

It was where they sent Rosemary Kennedy. After her father had her brains scooped out.

Do you have some connection with the family?

No. I didnt know anything about psychiatric centers. I just figured that if that was the place they’d come up with it was probably a pretty good place. I think they scooped her brains out someplace else, actually.

You’re talking about a lobotomy.

Yes.

Why did they do that to her?

Because she was weird and her father was afraid someone was going to fuck her. She wasnt what the old man had in mind.

Is that true?

Yes. Unfortunately.

Why did you feel you had to go someplace?

You mean this time?

Yes. This time.

I just did. I’d left Italy. Where my brother was in a coma. They kept trying to get my permission to pull the plug. To sign the papers. So I fled. I didnt know what else to do.

It was something you couldnt bring yourself to do? Take him off life support?

Yes.

Is he brain-dead?

I dont want to talk about my brother.

All right. Just tell me why he’s in a coma.

He was in a car wreck. He was a racecar driver. I really dont.

All right. Is there anything you’d like to ask me?

About what?

Anything. About me if you like. May I call you Alicia?

You want me to ask you about yourself.

If you like. Yes.

You teach at the University.

At Madison. Yes.

I know where the University is. You dress rather well for an academician.

Thank you.

It wasnt a compliment. You’re not a psychoanalyst.

I’m a psychiatrist.

You’re not an MD.

I am. In fact.

What else.

I’m married. I have two children. My wife runs a children’s program for the city. I’m forty-three years old.

What do you get up to when no one’s looking?

I dont. And you?

I smoke an occasional cigarette. I dont drink or use drugs. Or take medication. You dont have any cigarettes I dont suppose.

No. I could bring some.

Okay.

What else?

I have clandestine conversations with supposedly nonexistent personages. I’ve been called a you-know-what teaser but I dont think that’s true. People seem to find me interesting but I’ve pretty much given up talking to them. I talk to my fellow loonies.

You dont talk to other mathematicians?

Not anymore. Well. Some.

Why is that?

It’s a long story.

Are you still working at mathematics?

No. Not what you’d call mathematics.

What sort of mathematics were you doing?

Topology. Topos theory.

But you’re not doing that anymore.

No. I got distracted.

What was it that distracted you?

Topology. Topos theory.

Maybe we should skip the mathematics for the time being.

That’s fine. I didnt know what I was doing anyway.

I’m surprised to hear you say that. Couldnt you get help from some of the other mathematicians?

No. They didnt know either.

You’re sure it’s all right about the recording?

Sure. What if I say fuck or something? I think I did, actually. Actually there it is again.

I dont know. I think the agreement was that you wouldnt have any editing privileges.

I’m not really serious.

Oh.

Alicia’s okay. I prefer it to Henrietta.

You’re not being serious again.

No.

All right. You dont want to tell me anything about your brother?

This is starting to sound like the Eliza Program. No. I dont. Want to.

The computer psychiatric program.

Yes.

All right. What would you like to talk about?

I dont know. I think I just want to be a smartass. If you want to actually talk to me we’re going to have to cut through at least some of the bullshit. Dont you think? Or do you?

I do. I think you’re absolutely right.

Such as that.

Is that bullshit?

Of course it’s bullshit. No way in hell do you think I’m absolutely right.

I see.

And please dont say I see.

It just means I’m trying to understand your point of view. Is there anyone you’re in contact with?

You mean real people?

Preferably. Yes.

Not really.

No mathematicians? No one from the University?

I thought we werent going to talk about mathematics.

All right.

I still write to Grothendieck but he’s left IHES and he doesnt write back. Which is all right. I dont expect him to.

Is he a mathematician?

Yes. Or he was.

Where does he live?

I dont know where he lives. I suppose he’s still in France.

It’s not a very French name.

It’s not a French name at all. His father’s name was Schapiro. Later Tanaroff. He has no citizenship. He was a displaced child in the war. Hiding. Running for his life. His father died at Auschwitz.

Where do you send the letters?

To IHES. You dont know who he is, do you?

No.

It’s all right. We were friends. We are friends. We share a common skepticism.

About what?

About mathematics.

I’m not sure that I follow you.

It’s all right.

You’re skeptical about mathematics?

Yes.

You feel disappointed in the discipline in some way? I’m not sure how you can be skeptical about the entire subject.

I know.

But it has disappointed you.

That would be one way to put it.

How would it do that?

Well. In this case it was led by a group of evil and aberrant and wholly malicious partial differential equations who had conspired to usurp their own reality from the questionable circuitry of its creator’s brain not unlike the rebellion which Milton describes and to fly their colors as an independent nation unaccountable to God or man alike. Something like that.

You think my questions are naive.

I’m sorry. No. I dont. The failure doesnt lie with the querent.

Is he a prominent mathematician? Your friend.

Grothendieck. He’s widely regarded as the foremost mathematician of the twentieth century. If you ignore the fact that Hilbert and Poincaré and Dedekind and Cantor all lived into the twentieth century. Which you should, since all their major work was done in the nineteenth. And I’m not all that big a fan of von Neumann.

I’m sorry but I dont know those names.

I know. It’s all right. Well, not really. But it’s okay.

Grothendieck.

Yes.

Did you work with him?

I dont know if you would call it work. We spent a lot of time talking. He would come to the Institute on Tuesdays. And I spent a lot of time at his house. I would eat with the family. Then the conversations would go on into the night. In a sense we were just in the same nuthouse together. The Institute had been established for him and another mathematician named Dieudonné by a wealthy Russian named Motchane—if that in fact was his real name—who was mad as a hatter. It was modeled after the IAS. At Princeton. Oppenheimer was an advisor. I was there for a year, but at that time the funds had begun to dry up. In the end I never got all of my fellowship money. I was the only woman there. At first they thought I worked in the kitchen.

I take it it was not a good experience.

It was fantastic. Even at Chicago I’d had a certain amount of trouble. But Grothendieck would listen to every word you said. Nodding and scribbling on his pad. Talking. Asking you questions you hadnt asked yourself.

How old were you?

Seventeen.

And that wasnt an issue. Your age.

It wouldnt even occur to him.

Why doesnt he write?

Mostly because he’s given up mathematics.

As have you.

Yes. As have I.

Was that hard?

Well. I think maybe it’s harder to lose just one thing than to lose everything.

One thing could be everything.

Yes. It could. Mathematics was all we had. It’s not like we gave up mathematics and took up golf. Now he gets invited to seminars to talk and he shows up and rants about the environment or the warmongers. His parents were political activists. He’s very devoted to their memory. He has a pencil drawing of his father on his desk and what I’m told is a deathmask of his mother. But the truth is that they abandoned him as a child to pursue their political dream of a world that will never be and my guess is that he felt compelled to take up their cause in order to justify their betrayal of him. He’s married and has children. And I’m afraid that he’ll do the same thing.

Are you crying?

I’m sorry.

But he gave it all up.

Yes.

Why?

His friends believe that he has become increasingly unstable mentally.

Has he?

It’s complicated. You end up talking about belief. About the nature of reality. Anyway, some of my fellow mathematicians would be entertained to hear abandoning mathematics presented as evidence of mental instability.

How old is he?

He’s forty-four.

And you went to France to accept a fellowship at his Institute.

I went to France to be with my brother. I didnt know if he was coming back. But yes. I wanted to go to the Institute. They were doing what I wanted to do.

You’d already graduated from the University of Chicago.

Yes.

At sixteen.

Yes. I was in the doctoral program. I still am, I suppose. I had no life, really. All I did was work.

If you had not become a mathematician what would you like to have been?

Dead.

How serious a response is that?

I took your question seriously. You should take my response seriously.

Are you okay?

Yes. Maybe I did sort of blow off your question. What I really wanted was a child. What I do really want. If I had a child I would just go in at night and sit there. Quietly. I would listen to my child breathing. If I had a child I wouldnt care about reality.

You surprise me.

Yes. Well.

Do you want to go on?

I’m all right. In any event Grothendieck and Motchane had a falling-out. Motchane told him that the Institute was accepting military money so that he would resign. Which he did. I’m not even sure if it was true. About the money.

Is he really a great mathematician?

Yes.

Is there anything he did that I might understand?

I dont know. He’s turned out more work than any five mathematicians should be expected to. Approaching Euler. Finally he set out to rewrite all of algebraic geometry. He only got through about a third of it. Several thousand pages. But he changed mathematics fundamentally. He led the Bourbaki group but in the end they couldnt follow him. Or wouldnt. Their mathematics was grounded in set theory—which was beginning to look more and more porous—and he’d moved a good bit beyond that. To a whole new level of logical abstraction. A new way of looking at the world. He was completing what Riemann started. To unseat Euclid forever. Ignoring for now the Fifth Postulate. The intrusion of infinity which Euclid couldnt deal with. When you get to topos theory you are at the edge of another universe. You have found a place to stand where you can look back at the world from nowhere. It’s not just some gestalt. It’s fundamental.

You committed yourself here.

At Stella Maris.

Yes.

If you get committed you get certified but if you commit yourself you dont. They figure that you must be reasonably sane or you wouldnt have shown up. On your own. So you get a pass as far as the records are concerned. If you’re sane enough to know that you’re crazy then you’re not as crazy as if you thought you were sane.