The Last Equation of Isaac Severy

by Nova Jacobs

  “Doesn’t he have a job?” asked Gregory.

  “He’s a photographer, remember?”

  “That’s not a job. Maybe it used to be back when it was a real skill.”

  Her brother’s sulkiness had clearly curdled into a bad mood. She wondered what he would make of Bennet’s latest photo installation.

  “What’s he doing at the house, anyway?” Gregory added.

  A squad car passed them on its way down the hill, and as they pulled up to the house, they found an ambulance in the drive.

  “Jesus,” he said. “Paramedics?”

  Words came back to Hazel from the letter: Three will die. I am the first. She felt shaky as she stepped from the car.

  In cool defiance of the crisis, the Severy twins stood on the grass with their racquets, attacking a fusillade of balls erupting from a mechanical nozzle. The machine had been a present from Isaac. “If you want to win at any one thing,” Hazel remembered him saying, “you must do that thing more times than anyone else. Winning is aggregation.” Had she also heard him say “Death comes in threes”? Or was she making that up? She and her brother stepped over the grass, ducking to avoid a stray ball. Their uncle was on the porch, leaning against a column and smoking a cigarette.

  “I didn’t know Philip smoked,” Hazel whispered.

  Philip frowned deeply, regarding them with only a flicker of interest. It was a look Hazel had seen directed at her many times, as if his mind were in a place she couldn’t possibly grasp. Still, she couldn’t help being fond of him, even if it was in a distant, admiring sort of way.

  Ignoring their cousin’s request, Gregory announced immediately, “We saw Alex on the road. He says Drew’s sick?”

  Philip crushed out his cigarette on the railing and lit another. “She ate a poisonous seed, but not nearly enough of it. She threw it up and seems to be fine now. We’re not thrilled the paramedics called the police. It only upset Sybil.”

  “Procedure, I’m afraid, to protect the child,” Gregory said.

  “I’m sure, but when they realized that a curious kid had merely taken plant identification a little too far, they left.”

  Hazel cast a glance at a nearby bush. “It wasn’t the castor bean, was it? Lily warned us about those.”

  “No, thank God.” Philip’s eyes widened for a second. “It was the Mirabilis californica, also known as the four o’clock plant. Which, it seems”—he looked at his watch—“is the time now.”

  They followed their uncle to the living room, where Drew, looking flushed as if with fever, sat at a window seat bundled in blankets. A stuffed toy unicorn, its fur still factory white, was propped on the sill. Sybil, Jack, and Jane sat around her, while two paramedics conferred nearby. Though Alex had mentioned his mother was here, Hazel was still surprised to see Paige—who rarely made family appearances unless forced—on an ottoman in the corner, looking like she might bolt at any moment.

  “It was a speck, Gramma,” Drew was saying. “A speck of a speck of a speck—”

  “I know,” interrupted Jane, “but a speck of a speck of poison is still poison, and you can’t do that ever again.”

  “Oh, don’t let us all pretend she didn’t know what she was doing,” Paige muttered. “She eats up the attention.” Either no one heard Hazel’s aunt, or they chose to ignore her.

  “Well,” Sybil said, “Drew won’t be reading any more Audubon guides until she’s much older.”

  “But I still have the bird book,” the girl said.

  “There might be poisonous birds, how should I know?”

  “Poisonous birds.” Drew snorted. “With fangs!”

  “Well, she seems to be in good spirits,” Philip said, crossing the room to tousle his granddaughter’s hair. “Although maybe if you gave her something to engage her mind instead of toy unicorns, she wouldn’t go experimenting in the garden.”

  “Please, Dad, not now,” Sybil said.

  Hazel stood mutely at the edge of the group. She was relieved Drew was all right but mostly glad she had missed the worst of it. There was only so much Severy drama she could take in one trip. Besides, something about having all the family in one room—minus Isaac—made her feel decisively locked out, like a perpetual interloper. She was wondering if her brother felt the same when she turned to find him gone from the room. Her need to flee back to Seattle returned, but it was immediately followed by the invisible tug of Isaac asking her to stay—or, rather, her grandfather pulling her toward a particular spot in the room.

  As the family continued to chatter among themselves, Hazel slipped to the opposite end of the living room where a large imitation Honoré Daumier painting of Don Quixote hung. It had been a present from Isaac to his wife many years ago, on the day her Don Quixote translation had been published. He had chosen the famous vertical of the knight riding his bony white nag, his lance held skyward at a slight angle. Isaac had hung it in such a way so that the weapon pointed to a shelf of Lily’s translations.

  It was the same bookshelf that held the vast majority of her grandparents’ fiction library. Hazel climbed the stepladder, grateful that they had taken the trouble to alphabetize, and ran her finger along the spines. From a spot where a Fitzgerald volume should have been, she pulled a placeholder photo of teenage Philip and Tom: shaggy hair, short shorts, both standing obediently at the edge of the Grand Canyon. The photo was most certainly an oversight on Isaac’s part, as nearly all reminders of his younger son had been relegated to a box somewhere. She could hardly bear to look at Tom’s face, and after reading the back—“This Side of Paradise borrowed by ??”—she returned the brothers to their place. She was heartened to find Tender Is the Night a couple of spaces down. Tugging it from its spot, she noted that it was Scribner’s facsimile of the original 1934 hardcover, in good shape, too, despite the fact it was missing its original clamshell box. She had sold one just like it in her own store for a handsome price after buying it for pennies at an estate sale. Part of the charm of this printing was its slew of minor errors, most notably the extra z in schizzoid on page 199. (Had Fitzgerald been similarly cursed with a disobedient typewriter?)

  She flipped past the front matter to the first line of the first chapter: On the pleasant shore of the French Riviera . . . But there was nothing there to find. No scribble from her grandfather, no applause for her cleverness or hint of what she was supposed to do next. Hazel fought back disappointment as she searched through the rest of the book and found only a couple of impromptu bookmarks—one a scuffed gift card for the store Book Circus, the other a Polaroid of Isaac listing all the prime numbers, 2 through 47, on a bathroom mirror in red marker. His head was turned from the camera, his reflected eyes smeared behind 29 and 31, yet she could still sense his playful smile. As she stared at the image, she realized that what she really wanted to discover was not another clue, but a more personal message. She wanted him to reassure her, not just in this specific quest but in her life. “Don’t worry, you are in the right place, doing the right thing.”

  After taking one last look at the photo, she deferred to tradition and slipped it into the now-empty space on the shelf. She was stepping down the ladder, book in hand, when Paige shouted, “Looting his shelves already? How much do you think you’ll fetch for that one?” She laughed to let everyone know it was a joke, but it didn’t sound like one to Hazel, who imagined throwing the volume at her aunt’s head with such force that the woman would topple backward off her seat, eyes wide, limbs clutching the air.

  “Hundred bucks. Maybe more,” Hazel shot back.

  “That’s where your Audubon book belongs: on a top shelf where your paws can’t reach it,” Jack told his daughter.

  Drew sat up suddenly. “Has anyone seen my new cousin, Alex?”

  A few eyes turned to Paige, but her mouth was drawn tight.

  “I heard he left,” Philip said.

  “No!” Drew shouted, transforming quickly into the five-year-old she was. “Alex? Are you here?”

  Drew’s
sudden enthusiasm for a relative whom she hadn’t known existed three days ago incited a round of laughter.

  Hazel started to back out of the room when her brother reappeared. “Did you find your wallet?”

  “Yeah. I mean, I know where I left it.”

  Slipping into the kitchen before he could question her further, she stood at the counter, staring at the book in her hands, suddenly fearing a reversion to her former state of purposelessness. Could there, in fact, be a message from Isaac hidden somewhere in the novel as there had been in the letter? Then again, weren’t people always finding secret messages in the Bible, the Constitution, Shakespeare? Look hard enough for ciphered meaning, and you’ll find it?

  Hazel closed her eyes and riffled the pages with her thumb, as if the book were a deck of cards. It was an old trick of hers; whenever she felt stuck, she would use any available book as a kind of oracle. It was a game, but one she played with a straight face. She stopped her thumb and let the volume fall open. She slid her finger down the left page, stopped, and opened her eyes, ready to take the given words as prophecy. But there were no words under her finger, only one of the many crosshatched pencil illustrations scattered throughout the book. The image was so dramatic, she almost laughed. A man lay dead on a train platform, his luggage piled around him. At the edge of the frame, an anonymous gloved hand gripped a still-smoking revolver.

  – 8 –

  The Other Severy

  The next day, the sun shone garish and bright in a cloudless sky. From his car parked down the street, Gregory monitored the guests trickling out the front door of Hollywood’s Harvard Hotel. As he watched dreary faces pass under a faded letter H, he thought back to Hazel’s strange behavior the previous day. There had always been something slightly impulsive about his sister, as if she were obeying a set of irrational edicts given only to her. He wasn’t entirely surprised, for instance, that she couldn’t keep a business afloat. But yesterday she’d seemed particularly off, almost as if she sensed something was bothering him, and that the something was Tom. But even if she had somehow guessed—she could be alarmingly perceptive, it was true—she could never envision what Gregory might be planning.

  He returned his attention to the hotel, remembering something Fritz had said about one of Isaac’s metaphors: the universe as massive computer, continuously determining its next moves. It had been Isaac’s life ambition to tap into this computer, and Gregory imagined his grandfather’s mathematics now calculating the entire rhythm of Los Angeles—who would live, who would fall ill, and who would step out the front door of a hotel and meet his demise. What if Isaac’s universe-sized analogy was, in fact, a true description of how the world worked? Didn’t this giant mainframe relieve the burden of calculation from the individual? If so, would Gregory ever be responsible for what he did next?

  The double doors of the hotel opened again, and two men emerged. The first was of no interest to him: Hispanic, inked barbwire curling up his limbs. The second man was the object of Gregory’s surveillance: tidy in a white T-shirt and jeans, cloaked behind dark wayfarer sunglasses. He gripped a small duffel, which Gregory knew held gym clothes, a thermos, a water-logged notebook, and a blue Bic pen. There would also be a plastic lunch sack and a migraine medication of fickle efficacy.

  The Harvard Hotel on Harvard Boulevard was not a hotel, of course, but a halfway house for former inmates. Like most residences of its kind, it maintained a low profile in order to keep families in the neighborhood from coalescing into pesky committees bent on their banishment. Criminals have to live somewhere, but why did Tom Severy have to live within five miles of Gregory’s house?

  As he had done on the previous five days, he held his breath when Tom came into view. His former foster dad was pale and light-eyed like Philip and Paige, and when blasted with the autumn sun, he squinted in the familiar way. He was remarkably toned—by Severy standards, anyway—and his once emaciated body had a wiry compactness. The stress of a twenty-year prison term, however, was apparent. His hair had gone white, and his skin clung red and tired to his face. His entire body pitched forward, with a slight hitch to his stride. It wasn’t quite a limp, but it was on its way.

  Gregory stepped from his car and into the shade of a ficus tree, though he needn’t have worried about being seen. Tom’s eyesight was terrible. Yet he couldn’t rid himself of the idea that the man he had once called his father somehow detected his presence, was expecting him even. Tom had been wise enough not to make an appearance at his own father’s funeral—Gregory had dutifully monitored the crowd that day, prepared for such an occurrence—and as far as he could figure, Tom had no way of knowing what he and Hazel currently looked like. Gregory was vigilant about keeping images of himself and his family off the internet. Even if Tom did notice that he was being watched or got close enough to make out his face, he would hardly recognize his onetime foster son. The last time they had seen each other had been in a courtroom. Gregory had just turned twelve.

  Tom made his way east to the Metro station at Hollywood and Western. Gregory tailed him into the tunnel below, and when Tom boarded the Red Line for downtown, Gregory chose a seat one car over. Given the immediate surroundings, he might have been in New York or London, except that the LA Metro felt oddly sanitary; there simply weren’t enough freaks and foul smells to put it at the level of a thoroughly used rail system. At Pershing Square Station, Tom exited the train and emerged into the sun.

  His first stop was a nonprofit health club a few blocks from the station, where he would spend an hour on the second floor while Gregory waited at a deli across the street. Under his watch, Tom hadn’t missed a day at this miserable little gym. Gregory supposed that aerobic and weight-bearing exercise was a carryover from prison—a healthy alternative, perhaps, to Tom’s self-medicating of years past.

  After his workout, hair slick from the shower, Tom would walk a block to the Central Library. There, he would make his way through the grand rotunda to the reference section, where he would pore over medical textbooks, face inches from the page, scribbling notes until closing. The two times Gregory had managed to walk behind Tom unnoticed, he caught sight of bizarre photographs: all varieties of screwdrivers and chopsticks being thrust into patients’ eye sockets. Gregory wondered if it was the lobotomy’s potential for pain alleviation that interested Tom. Had the pain really gotten to the point where an ice pick through the head was the only option left? But then if Gregory had found himself in the tiny minority of migraine sufferers for whom medication was useless, wouldn’t he, too, fantasize about extreme prefrontal surgery?

  At the end of his studies, Tom would take the train back north, sometimes stopping off at a Ralphs grocery before returning to his room by curfew. As far as Gregory could make out, Tom was not looking for a job, and he didn’t imagine that the gate check issued to him at Lancaster State Prison would last him very long. Would Tom eventually contact his brother or sister for money? Or would his pride win out?

  The only indication that Tom was conscious of money was his habit of peeking into trash bins along his route and tossing soda cans into a plastic sack. To keep the sack from filling up too quickly, he sometimes lined up the empties in front of the back wheels of an idling city bus. When the bus pulled away, he would crouch at the curb to collect his neatly flattened disks. Gregory often imagined, instead of crushed aluminum, Tom’s flattened skull on the blacktop—or Tom caught under a bus and dragged for miles, the asphalt flaying the skin from his body.

  Sometimes Gregory would wince at the brutality of his own imaginings. He would picture Isaac looking down on him, seeing in his omniscience the violent imagery in his grandson’s head. But then Isaac would have to appreciate that these images were out of his control, that they possessed a weight and momentum all their own, like a steel ball gathering speed on a sharp grade. All Gregory could do was stand back and watch the physics in his head play out.

  It was already past noon when Gregory settled into a library carrel to keep an e
ye on Tom. He had just opened a coffee table book on lost LA landmarks when a text came through from the woman who was not his wife:

  I need to see you.

  His glad heart thumped as he quickly replied:

  When.

  After he had stared at his phone for several minutes, waiting for her response, he looked back down at a double-page photo spread of the original Brown Derby on Wilshire Boulevard. The now-demolished restaurant had been built in the shape of a colossal bowler hat, and he wondered if he would forever associate this ridiculous building with the joyous anticipation he now felt.

  A second text came through, but this one spoiled his mood: it was from E. J., asking where he’d been all morning. She was entering her mother-hen mode at the office, monitoring detectives’ comings and goings, and generally making herself a nuisance—as if she had already promoted herself to captain. He would have to continue his vigil another day. But just as Gregory stood up, he saw Tom close the book he was reading and stride in his direction. Panic coursed through him.

  He knows.

  There was a dormant need in him to meet Tom halfway, to wrest the Bic from his hand and jam it into an eye cavity, and deeper into the tissue of his brain, until Tom screamed and stopped screaming. Because the man didn’t deserve this untroubled postprison retirement; he deserved upper-limit pain. He deserved to have cheap blue ink bleeding from his awful rabbit eyes. But Gregory remained in his seat and watched Tom head to a neighboring shelf. He let his body relax, and before Tom had a chance to turn around again and possibly get a good look at the person who had been following him for a solid week, Gregory collapsed the image of the Brown Derby and left the library.

  – 9 –

  The Secretary

  On the morning of his advertised lecture, Philip woke with the image of a spiraled brain tumbling through his mind. He sat up, and when he was lucid enough to recall what the image signified, he remembered that he still needed to search his father’s study. The drama yesterday with Drew had prevented him from conducting a thorough search, but now he had a more pressing worry: his lecture. The lecture in which he would reveal to his entire department his profound lack of new ideas. Perhaps he could dislodge some paltry insights from his mind before breakfast. But as he switched on a lamp and reached for a notebook from the night table, he felt a sudden pressure behind his left eye. It was a sensation that would start to unfurl and pulse, and within twenty minutes, if he didn’t take his meds, it would feel as if his brain were being pushed through a juicer. He stood up, the resulting pain forcing him to grab hold of the headboard.