The Last Equation of Isaac Severy

by Nova Jacobs

  Watching his twin sons face off against each other, Philip had said, “I forget which one I’m rooting for.”

  His father had smiled. “Whichever is your favorite.”

  As the ball went into the net, Philip let out an ambiguous holler directed at neither son in particular. He didn’t have a favorite son because he harbored identical feelings toward all three of his children: profound dismay at having fathered such unremarkable offspring. He loved them—of course he loved them. Silas, Sidney, and their much older sister, Sybil, were beautiful, glowing things who laughed and smiled like he did, and whose eyes were their mother’s startling green. But how he—a Stanford-MIT-educated particle physicist and professor of theoretical physics at Caltech—and Jane—a Stanford-Harvard molecular biologist by training, if not by profession—had produced three academic mediocrities never ceased to be a source of bewildering disbelief and low-grade depression.

  He would periodically unfold the genealogical map in his mind and try to isolate the genetic offender. His own parents certainly weren’t to blame. His father, a distinguished professor at Caltech for forty years, had devoted most of his life to the study of chaos theory and nonlinear dynamics, while his mother had translated Spanish Baroque literature to great acclaim. Jane’s mother and father, both doctors, of course, boasted equally impressive levels of accomplishment. But there were suspect siblings on both sides who pointed to genetic weakness. Jane’s sister, Faye, for one, was clever only when it came to marrying rich men and living off the alimony. His own sister, too, had abundant faults. She had been working on a book on probability for decades, a book some were beginning to suspect didn’t exist: “What’s the ‘probability’ you’ll ever finish that thing, eh, Paige?” But Paige had proven her cleverness in other ways, and her shortcomings were entirely social in nature.

  And then there was Tom, the youngest of his siblings, a troubling specter who still hovered over them. He had left behind two now-grown foster children, who’d long ago been adopted into the family. Philip had seen them earlier, hadn’t he? Yes, there were Hazel and Gregory, seated near the front, their dark, angular faces looking nothing like their adoptive clan.

  Aside from these two reminders, the family had mostly forgotten how Tom had once moved among them, following his own pained choreography. He had been something to love once—magnetic, even—and at one point could easily have been Philip’s intellectual rival. Philip wanted to remember that Tom, and not the Tom he had last seen in an orange jumpsuit trying to contain his hatred for his older brother from behind bulletproof glass. Yes, Thomas Severy was proof positive that there was decay lurking in the family’s genetic code.

  Philip’s daughter, hair spilling down her shoulders like a draft of sunlight, turned in her seat and whispered something to her own daughter, Drew.

  “Pa-Pop’s definitely in heaven, sweetie,” Sybil assured her.

  “How do you know?” Drew asked. “If you can’t see him, how do you know?”

  “Because sometimes you just know,” Sybil explained. “Just like you know my arm is in my sleeve even if you can’t see it.”

  The little girl frowned. “But—”

  “Shh, it’s quiet time.”

  As Philip watched a patch of sun play on Sybil’s beautiful head, he marveled at how nature had not made at least one of his three children dutifully bright. But then, that wasn’t how the coin toss of heredity necessarily worked. “Good things come in threes,” wasn’t it? Of course, it could go the other way, and for Philip and Jane Severy, it had come up three, indeed: dumb, dumb, dumb.

  Jane always protested when Philip expressed disappointment in their children. “Sybil has more social intelligence than the both of us. Have you seen her work a crowd? She’s not the twit you imagine.”

  In Philip’s view, the extent of their daughter’s effort to prove she wasn’t a twit was getting into Stanford eleven years ago—not without some parental legacy points, naturally—but Sybil had done nothing spectacular during her six listless years there except meet her husband, Jack, get pregnant, and embrace a particularly Jesus-y brand of Christianity. Upon graduation, she had transformed herself into a Sunnyvale wife, mother, and artist—artist of sorts, for her work, which involved slapping a found object to a canvas, was ghastly, and Philip couldn’t see how pieces like Shopping List #15, Pine Cone #2, and Some Garbage I Found #236 were worth getting excited about.

  He tried his best to focus on the mourners who were lining up to enumerate his father’s many qualities. Philip would need to recall these sentiments later at the reception. “So kind of you to mention . . .” “So thoughtful of you to say . . .” Etcetera.

  Philip wished he could get out of having to talk to the people who would soon invade the family home. In fact, he wished someone had spared him news of his father’s death entirely. He wanted to be told twenty years from now, because without his father, the very important role he had been playing for his entire career—Professor Philip Severy in The Hunt for the Unified Field Theory—now quite suddenly lacked an audience. In the movie house of his life, had there really been only one person sitting out there all this time? It was now apparent to him that he didn’t love his work with the whole of his heart and mind, as he had once believed, but he had loved it for another’s sake. And he needed to find a way to restart the show or be forever regarded as just another annotation in the history of theoretical physics. Forget about Stockholm calling; his days of reliable brain activity were numbered. He was fifty-seven, and in these Wild West days of particle collisions, he was feeling increasingly isolated and immaterial. He was running out of time to wrap up the secrets of the universe in one big elegant bow.

  Forcing his attention back to his surroundings, Philip noticed that the twins were gone from their seats. He looked to Jane for explanation, but she was focused on yet another STEMy dweeb addressing the crowd. These were his people, of course, but for some reason, Philip could no longer stand it. He stood up and started walking, with no particular destination, just away over the gently rolling grounds.

  He spotted his sons in an open expanse of grass, hitting a make-believe ball with make-believe racquets. From this distance, he couldn’t tell which son was which. That was, of course, what made their matches so captivating: the two were so similar that it was either boy’s victory. His father had tried to impart to the twins the roles of probability and statistics in their game. Tennis, after all, was so temptingly mathematical.

  tennis match − c + ! = tennis math!

  Because they were physically identical, his father would say, in the heat of a game, it probably came down to the angle of the sun, an eddy of air, the tensility of a racquet string, or whether the memory of a girl’s smile skipped across one of their minds. “We don’t think of girls while we’re playing, Grandpa,” they would groan. (Or at all?)

  It occurred to Philip that tennis and theoretical physics had at least one thing in common: both favored the young. As he sat down in a cool spot of grass, taking in their imaginary game, he wished desperately to be his sons’ age again. Oh, to have a teenage brain—hell, a twenty-five-year-old brain—neurons igniting like rods in a lightning field! Philip leaned back against a headstone and wondered if, in those final minutes before the power from a tiny seven-watt bulb shot through the saltwater to stop his heart, his father had wished for the same thing.

  – 3 –

  The Mathematician

  The man with the beard was still at the podium when Hazel extracted the letter from her pocket and unfolded it. She glanced around quickly for fear of being observed, but the people near her were either focused on the speaker or involved in their own thoughts. The letter was typewritten, which wasn’t exactly surprising—Isaac had often saved his penmanship for his math—but he had used his IBM Selectric, an ancient typewriter that duplicated letters and punctuation arbitrarily if one didn’t hit the keys in just the right way. He clearly had never bothered to get the machine fixed or to use correction tape.
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  My Dear Haze,,,

  My time is over. This fact has become as clear to me as theeee crescent moon setting outside my study window as I write this. I wish I could dodge my assassin, I wish I could flee to the Cottte d’Azurrr or somewhere equally beautiful. But our killers find us all, so why flail so desperately?

  Hazel, I am counting onn you to carry out an un pleassantt request. I would do it myself were I not being followed. Know that I am offf sound mind when I ask that you destroy my work in Room 137. Burn. Smash. Reformat the hard drives. I cannot get into why, only that you must do this quickly. Before others find it.

  The equation itself you must keep. (I leave it with the family member they would least suspect.) Deliver the equation to one man only: John Raspanti. His favorite pattern is herringbone.

  Important:

  1. Do not stay in or visit the house past ttthe end of October. Three will die. I am the first.

  2. Do not share this with anyone. Do not contact police, even those related to you. Nothing can be done about the above.

  3. Once you have committed this letter to memory, destroy it.

  SSShore up your courage, my dear.

  Eternally,

  Isaac

  Hazel’s neck grew warm, and her hands began to tremble. She shut her eyes, and as the words assassin, destroy, equation, Do not share this with anyone impressed upon her mind, a swarm of dread invaded her chest. But the dread was followed by something else: something subtler, an almost hideous thrill. She drew in a sharp breath, tucked the paper back in her pocket, and tried to return her attention to the service, but fragments of the letter scrolled across her mind. Was her grandfather really suggesting that he had been murdered? Who the hell was John Raspanti? And what did herringbone have to do with anything?

  Mathematics continued to pour from the bearded man’s mouth, accompanied by sharp hand gestures to emphasize certain symbols. Hazel scanned the crowd, which looked increasingly agitated. She had completely lost track of time but guessed that the speaker had kept them captive for at least a quarter of an hour.

  When the man finished and stepped back from the mic, the entire gathering stood at once. Even Lily sprang to her feet. Only Hazel was slow to stand. Her insides had tightened, and her grandmother’s earlier words, ghoulish parade, echoed in her ears.

  * * *

  For the mourners who managed the twenty-mile drive to the Severy home in the Hollywood Hills of Beachwood Canyon, up switchbacks to the house on the bluff, lunch awaited. Hazel again caught a ride with her brother and his wife. As she stepped from the back seat, she opened her eyes wide and inhaled deeply, hoping to ground herself in sense memory. The two-story Victorian, distinctly out of character in a canyon of Spanish and Normandy Revival, had always carried a whiff of bygone imperialism. Its aerie perch looked out on Hollywood and the Deco domes of the Griffith Observatory, but Hazel thought the decaying clapboard, combined with a healthy population of tropical flora, gave the house an almost colonial feel, like some faded British outpost.

  Inside, she surveyed the now fatherless objects littering the house: broken conch shells, moldy campaign buttons, a cast-iron apple corer, a carved piece of bone. A dinner guest had once likened the house to a Joseph Cornell box, each room with its own codified charm, subdivided again by a recessed nook or secret cabinet. And within those niches were still more chambers of discovery, if one knew where to look. Now, as Hazel examined Isaac’s curios, they seemed laden with hidden meaning, each one a potential hazard or clue.

  She stepped into a book-lined alcove not only to evade the rapidly filling living room but also to consult with herself as to what the hell she was going to do with the contents of her pocket. From a bookshelf flagged with family snapshots in lieu of bookmarks (her grandparents had been sentimental that way), she pulled down Newton’s Principia Mathematica and plucked from its pages an old photograph of Isaac standing amid roses in LA’s Exposition Park. As she directed her growing anxiety at his image, Hazel became aware of a clutch of guests huddled in the next room, none of whom she recognized. Their words were indistinct, yet she sensed they were gossiping about her grandfather.

  “. . . a bit unhinged, maybe . . .”

  She didn’t like their tone, and, as sometimes happened with her—had been happening as far back as she could remember—Hazel conjured up a scene of comic violence, in which she burst into the room and pelted the group with smoked salmon from the buffet table, before jamming a broken schmear knife into a few necks. Then, amid screams and sprays of blood, she fled the house, triumphant. The idiotic image evaporated, and she returned her attention to the photo where her then-middle-aged grandfather was looking overheated in a corduroy jacket. She had seen the snapshot countless times and had no need to study it now so thoroughly. She was merely delaying the moment when she would have to make herself visible to the mourners roaming the house. Go be with your family. Yes, these people were technically her family, but she had never entirely felt comfortable among them. She could fake it, of course—had faked it for much of her life—but with Isaac gone, her feelings of “other” were rapidly intensifying.

  Nearly half the place was filled with mathematicians of one type or another. Growing up, she had thought little about the mental caliber of the guests who filtered through the house. But now, as an adult, Hazel could grasp the critical difference between mathematics and mere arithmetic, and she quickly discovered that there was nothing like a talent for the former to separate pure, distilled intelligence from the affected kind one picks up at college.

  In the numbers arena, Hazel had always been lacking. She had barely gotten through precalculus in high school, and, after moving to Seattle for college, she had dived into the arts and humanities with scattershot enthusiasm—drama, dance, literature, history—sidestepping the hard and fast in favor of the slippery and indefinite. If she had been a member of any other family, she might have been confident in her choices. But with the Severys, Hazel often felt that whenever one of them looked at her—even Lily, who had double-majored in comparative literature and mathematics at Berkeley—they weren’t really seeing her but were scanning a set of data points visible only to them, like insects in ultraviolet. She could practically hear them whispering, “Why entrust this one with the letter?” Hazel had been asking herself this very question. As if her grief wasn’t enough to bear, she’d now been given this cryptic assignment?

  She returned Isaac and the rosebushes to the Principia and nervously checked her phone, which set off another sort of anxiety: Why hadn’t Bennet’s name appeared in the call log? Why couldn’t she rely on him to support her today of all days? First, he had begged off joining her on the trip because of a work emergency, and second, after offering her a ride to the airport, he had diminished the favor by greeting her with a Nikon camera to the face. Though Bennet worked for an artsy furniture design company that promised to “blur the line between form and function, between our furniture and ourselves,” he nursed loftier creative ambitions outside of work. To that end, he insisted that his “emotions project,” or whatever he was calling his next art installation, demanded constant photographic vigilance. Click.

  After examining the shot, he’d said, “I can never capture your sad face. Why is that? Cheerful, stunned, irritated—never sad.”

  “Can you exploit my grief later?”

  She could, of course, snap a photo of herself now so that her boyfriend might complete his collection. This is funereal me—sad enough? Though at that moment, her face more likely betrayed rising panic. Hazel slid her phone back in her pocket, at the same time checking the opposite hip. Her pockets weren’t terribly deep. What if the envelope fell out as she sat down?

  With a mind to concealing the thing safely somewhere, she left the alcove and made straight for the hall, avoiding the populated end of the house. As she turned a corner, she halted at the sight of a middle-aged man in a light herringbone jacket chatting up a female guest, but it was only Isaac’s accountant, Fritz D
ornbach. There was comfort in seeing this man whom her grandfather had always liked, and it occurred to her that if she were to confide in anyone, she could do worse than the family’s attorney-bookkeeper. But then, Isaac couldn’t have been more clear: Do not share this with anyone.

  She stole behind Fritz toward the staircase, which someone had roped off with some tasselled curtain ties, presumably to discourage wandering guests. Hazel ducked under the barrier. The second-floor landing was dim, its windows curtained shut. As her pupils adjusted, she made her way past Isaac’s study door, where her step triggered a groaning floorboard—the same loose board under which she and her brother had once kept treasures and left each other secret notes. A loose nail pressed up through her shoe, as if a kind of prompt, but she discarded this as a potential hiding place; it was too easy for Gregory to get nostalgic and stumble upon it.

  Turning to the study door, she imagined herself twisting the glass knob to reveal Isaac on the other side, hunched in a chair, looking up with a patient smile. For a second, she even thought she could hear his rhythmic murmuring coming from within, the sound of a mathematician thinking out loud. A murmur of mathematicians.

  She continued down the hall to her old bedroom, where she was considering staying the next night or two. She had thrown her luggage in her brother’s car just in case. Besides, with the house likely going on the market, this could be her last chance to stay in her old room. Whatever dangers Isaac imagined the house posed, he needn’t have warned her about not staying past October: she planned to be back in Seattle well before Halloween.

  The bedroom hadn’t changed much over the years. It still contained her adolescent belongings: stuffed animals, ceramic figurines, a bookshelf filled with childhood reading. At another time, these keepsakes might have brought her comfort, but as her eyes scanned the books’ spines—Madeleine L’Engle, Ellen Raskin, C. S. Lewis, E. L. Konigsburg—Hazel felt bewildered and alone. Had this house ever really felt like home? Or had it always been just another way station in a transient childhood? She and her brother had loved Isaac and Lily deeply, but had never entirely rid themselves of the feeling that they were long-term charity cases, forever crashing on the couch of an intimidatingly distinguished family. For a time, at least, she had successfully smothered this feeling of inexpressible exile.