The Last Equation of Isaac Severy

by Nova Jacobs

  The map immediately made her think of Isaac’s traffic project. A similar map had hung for years in his study at home, though with flags instead of dots. Had he returned to the project? Hiding his obsession from his family? She scanned the dots, but they didn’t appear to correspond to the map’s roads or freeways. The points were scattered across the city, gathered here and there in dense pockets, and thinning out as they neared the map’s edges. Was this the work she was supposed to destroy?

  Hazel turned to the computer and hit the power button. A minute later, a prompt appeared on-screen: Password Required.

  “Are you kidding me?” she said, wondering how long whatever she was supposed to be looking for would be dangled beyond reach. But Hazel reminded herself that Isaac had given her everything she needed to know up to that point. If he wanted her to access his computer, surely he had provided the password.

  She pulled her grandfather’s letter from her purse and read it again, even though she practically had the words memorized. But she couldn’t see any more meaning to be extracted. Hazel surveyed the contents of the room, hoping to spot a clue in the decor. There were several board games stacked on a shelf, many of them old or obscure, including the unpopular geography game Ubi, and Letter Jungle, a disastrous cross between Scrabble and Hungry Hungry Hippos. The wall map seemed her most likely ally, but she couldn’t begin to know how to make sense of it. On the opposite wall, a large sunburst mirror reflected her frowning forehead.

  Reminded of the photograph of Isaac covering a bathroom mirror in prime numbers, Hazel took the Fitzgerald novel from her purse. She flipped through it again and found something she had disregarded before. Inside the cover, written in light pencil, was a short string of numbers. This being a used book, she had initially assumed this was an old Dewey decimal or inventory number, as she used for her own store; but when she looked at it properly, she saw that it didn’t resemble either one: 137.13.9. There was that number again, 137, and there was that same 3 of Isaac’s. When Hazel pulled up the password prompt again, she typed in the digits, both with and without decimals, backward and forward and in various combinations. But she got only Sorry, password incorrect. She even tried typing the primes she remembered from the Polaroid in one solid block.

  Sorry, password incorrect.

  Finally, littoral.

  Sorry, password incorrect.

  Hazel pushed the chair back from the desk and flung open the drapes. As her eyes adjusted to the sun, she saw that the full-length window let out onto a rooftop patio. She slid it open and climbed out into an enclosure of succulents, prickly pear, and agave, wondering how anyone was able to tend the garden if the maids weren’t allowed through Isaac’s room. Could there be direct access to the patio? She stepped to the railing but didn’t see one. As she looked out over Hollywood and the 101 Freeway, a profound sense of unease came over her. There were no more messages to follow, no more codes to decipher. If his work was important enough to require all this secrecy, why leave it to her? Why not to Philip or Paige, or even Gregory, someone who might have an idea what to do next?

  She imagined her grandfather’s response traveling to her from some distant, unspecified place: “I leave it to the one they will—”

  —least suspect? But am I really to destroy this? How can I do anything when I can’t access your computer?

  “After I mailed you that letter, there wasn’t much time before—”

  Before what? What happened that morning?

  Hazel went back inside to call her brother. She thought of asking him to meet her at the hotel, where she would show him everything. He’d know what to do. But when the line rang and his voice mail kicked in, Isaac’s warning, Do not contact police, even those related to you, came back to her with full force. She hung up. But a question lingered. Why shouldn’t she trust her own brother?

  In frustration, she fell back onto a damask sofa and covered her face with a pillow.

  * * *

  Hazel opened her eyes to the drapes billowing in the breeze. She sat up, head aching. She held her grandfather’s letter crumpled in one hand. Her phone had woken her. Fishing it from the sofa, she saw she had a voice mail from Bennet. The ache in her head was now overtaken by a constriction in her chest, and the instant she heard his cool, detached voice—“Listen, we should probably talk . . . ”—she knew what was happening. It’s the girl with the tights, isn’t it? He went on: “I hate to do this over the phone, and with everything that’s going on, but I thought you’d be back by now. Please call me.”

  But she couldn’t bring herself to call. Instead she held the phone out in front of her and snapped a photo. She sent the image to Bennet with the words: This is my sad face.

  – 11 –

  The Appointment

  Philip sat down at his desk and examined the card Nellie Stone had given him. The name P. Booth Lyons looked up at him in a neat serif—and now something that had been lunacy to him last week seemed perfectly sensible. His father would want him to resolve this, to find out who this Phone Booth was and what he wanted. “Aren’t you curious?” he could hear his father asking. “Don’t the riddles of the world interest you at all?”

  But Philip wasn’t kidding himself. He knew exactly what he was doing when he picked up the phone, dialed, and waited for Ms. Stone’s schoolmistressy voice to answer. Yes, he was calling to demand what it was about his father’s work that was worth his being stalked through the Athenaeum parking lot the other night. But he was also running away from a student who was making him perspire at the mere idea of seeing her shadow on the milky glass of his door.

  He had known Anitka Durov for years without ever having been affected by her charms, but now the creeping symptoms of something—something not allowed—had quite suddenly revealed themselves in his body, like a covert disease. What had been shaping up to be a mere “late erotic outburst” had transformed over the past few days into a kind of madness. He hadn’t felt this way in ages (not since Jane) and had forgotten over his many years of arcane concerns and hunched inquiry just how involuntary this sort of attraction was, how completely out of one’s control or reason. He could almost hear his father chiding: “Oh, but you can’t, Philip. You may not be the towering physicist you had hoped—heir apparent to Newton and Einstein—but you’d never betray the ones dearest to you. Do people even have affairs anymore? Isn’t that some clichéd activity from decades past?”

  But any kind of sermonizing was useless, because that’s not where passion lived—it wasn’t anyplace in the brain where one could go in and futz with the wires. The entire stupid, blushing, infatuated area was, by its very nature, blocked off and totally indifferent to your long list of arguments against its existence: You’re married! Happily! Happily? She’s not even that beautiful! Oh, but she is. Jane would find out! What the hell are you thinking! And so went the lone voice of principle in his head, bellowing at a locked gate.

  He thought of his parents’ apparently successful marriage. Had his father ever been afflicted by this nonsense? Or his mother, for that matter? At the thought of Lily, he knew he was overdue for a visit. That’s what he should be doing this afternoon, making a leisurely drive to Santa Monica with Jane and the kids, taking in the ocean air with Mom. But the idea of having to keep up with her batty cognitive processes depressed him. Or, more accurately, the fact that his father had practically discarded his mother, sent her away to an assisted living facility—and Philip had done nothing to stop it—depressed him. But then, once the mind was shattered, whether it be from senescence, illness, or drug abuse, it was as if the person were already dead. That’s how it was with his family.

  The phone picked up after a single ring, and Ms. Stone’s unceremonious voice greeted him. “Good afternoon, Mr. Severy. So happy to hear from you.”

  Philip cleared his throat. Caller ID was forever taking him by surprise. “Hello, Nellie. Can I call you Nellie?”

  “Of course.” He could hear her smile traveling down the line. “Yo
u can call me Lennie if you’ll agree to that lunch.”

  “All right, but it’ll have to be today.”

  A pause. “Could you hold for a moment?”

  The line went silent for what seemed like several minutes. Philip was considering hanging up when her voice returned. “Can you come out to Malibu? I’ll send a car.”

  Twenty minutes later Philip found a town car idling on California Boulevard. It might have been the same car that had followed him through the parking lot that night, but when he questioned the driver about it, the man shrugged and said he only worked days.

  Once inside the humming cocoon of the back seat, Philip’s tension fell away, and for the next hour, through traffic on the Santa Monica Freeway and all the way up the breezy Pacific coast, he was able to put the haunting image of Anitka aside and focus on some notebook mathematics. One of the advantages of his chosen profession was that he could work anywhere with nothing but pencil and paper. Whenever a stranger asked Philip to describe what he was scribbling, if he was feeling generous, he might use a metaphor he had borrowed from a colleague at Princeton: his brand of mathematics was like stepping into a mansion where all the lights had been turned off, the curtains drawn, and the light switches strategically hidden. The mansion was infinitely large, with an endless number of rooms and doors, and with various physicists working at opposite ends of the estate. The hope was that someday they would all meet up in the murky middle.

  But for now, Philip was on his own. His task was to map his particular wing, one room at a time, without breaking or knocking anything over. It was only when he had mapped out one area of the house that he could properly move to the next. When entering a darkened room, he would stumble around for a while, arms chopping the air, bumping into this or that. Each identifiable object gave him clues to the surrounding objects. Where there is a dressing table, there must be a chair. Where there is a brass poker, there is a fireplace. As was the nature of this madly designed manor, the light switch was never near the door but always in the last place he looked. Not until he turned it on could he fully appreciate the strange elegance of his surroundings.

  Philip had been stuck in the same room for years now, with no apparent solution within reach. He had often considered abandoning the room altogether, but in the end he knew that this room belonged to him, dark as it may be. He would keep returning to it, an hour at a time, until he knew its contents, until he found the light switch at last. He would die here if necessary.

  Rolling down his window, Philip let the Pacific air hit his face. Yes, he would be just fine. She is a passing psychosis. He wasn’t going to give in to some insane impulse simply because his father had died and left his life’s purpose in chaos—chaos with a small c, the messy kind.

  An hour and fifteen minutes had gone by when the car halted in front of a stark house, all light and modern angles. It sat near the edge of a bluff, like a pile of blocks waiting to be knocked into the sea. Nellie stood at the threshold, wearing a linen pantsuit in the same off-white hue as the building. There was something about the way she was looking out that struck him as odd, as if she were hiding something, concealing her own anticipation. Could it be that there was really something to his father’s recent mathematics? Might she and P. Booth Lyons know something he didn’t?

  As he stepped from the car, Nellie extended an arm, as if guiding a dear friend in from a blizzard. “He hasn’t arrived yet. But let’s enjoy the rest of the afternoon, shall we?” She led Philip through a glass-covered atrium, down a naked hallway, and into a large room bathed in natural light. Everything was spare and white and glass.

  “Is he off relating with scholars?” he asked.

  She didn’t even pretend to laugh. “You’re the only scholar he’s interested in at the moment.”

  “You mean my father is.”

  She didn’t answer, only motioned him to some molded modern furniture along one wall. “We’ll wait here.”

  Philip took a seat. “Is it your practice to have people followed?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “The Athenaeum parking lot.”

  “Oh, that.” She smiled. “I’m sorry you didn’t take advantage, frankly. It happened that I didn’t need the car that night, and I noticed you’d ducked into the club. It was impulsive of me.”

  Before he could respond to this, the doors swung open and an efficient-looking man in white appeared. He set a bottle of spring water and a platter of painstakingly constructed delicacies in front of Philip.

  “Thank you, Sasha,” Nellie said. “I just hope it won’t spoil our guest’s lunch.”

  Philip popped several caviar-topped morsels into his mouth, taking it on faith that he wasn’t going to wake up later in a posh torture chamber in Mr. Lyons’s basement. He mumbled approvingly. It was the best food he had tasted in months, and it instantly lightened his mood.

  “Told you,” she said from across the room.

  The server hurried away, and Philip turned in the direction of a large picture window. He couldn’t see the water below, but the vacant sky told him it was there. The clouds were turning pink in the diminishing light. “Nice life you lead here.”

  From her place behind a glass desk, she answered without a trace of enthusiasm, “He makes sure my life stays interesting.”

  Philip scanned the periodicals filed in a nearby rack as he plucked another morsel from the platter. “So are you a Helen or an Eleanor?”

  When there was no response, he turned and saw that she had opened her laptop and was studying the screen intently.

  “Sorry?” she said, looking up. “Is there something else you need?”

  He decided on a different question. “What does the P in P. Booth stand for?”

  “Phone, isn’t it?” she answered dryly. “Actually, I don’t know that I’ve ever asked. Even close friends call him Lyons or Ly.”

  Nellie returned to her laptop and began clicking away. Philip studied her.

  “So you’re not an inquisitive person.”

  Her fingers paused above the keyboard. “You know, Mr. Severy, until you came along, I always thought of myself as inquisitive, but you’re throwing my entire sense of self into doubt.” She resumed her task, her words per minute noticeably increasing.

  He watched her impassive expression and wondered if Nellie was really the shrewd professional that she projected and not some smartly dressed dunderhead who had been trained in the art of phony smiles and musty diplomacy.

  His phone buzzed. When he saw his daughter’s name on the display, he remembered that it was Halloween. After taking Drew trick-or-treating, Sybil and Jack were coming over for dinner and staying the night. Jane had even reminded him of it that morning. At least Sybil wasn’t angry with him anymore. But Philip let the call go to voice mail and instead texted his wife: Might be a little late.

  He stood up, irritated by the delay. He examined a collection of framed photographs on a mantel near Nellie’s desk, images of her standing next to or shaking hands with significant-looking men and women in suits. Philip recognized one of them as a former Pentagon chief.

  Her desk phone rang, and she picked up. “Yes . . . yes,” she murmured. “Of course.”

  She replaced the receiver. “He’s very sorry. Why don’t we wait in his study?”

  Somewhat curious to see more of the building, Philip followed Nellie through a set of double doors and into a room that was smaller and darker than the first, but similarly arranged. He was suddenly struck by the notion that in ten minutes Nellie would receive another call from her boss, instructing her to put him in yet a smaller study. They would keep moving from study to study, each one progressively shrinking, until at last a small door would open and a doll-sized P. Booth Lyons would arrive, sweaty and apologetic.

  At Philip’s feet was a large, yellowing fur rug and above him a collection of what appeared to be fiberglass animal heads, all of them white, affixed above the desk and along the walls. The heads, which glowed softly like Japanese l
anterns, stared down from their wooden plaques: lion, zebra, rhinoceros, buffalo, antelope.

  Nellie noticed him peering up at an unfazed lioness. “Aren’t they beautiful?”

  “I haven’t decided.” In truth, he found them unnerving.

  “They’re trophies from Humane Hunt,” she said, taking a seat in Mr. Lyons’s leather chair.

  “Never heard of it.”

  “That’s because Mr. Lyons invented it. Club members can hunt down real Kenyan or Tanzanian game without killing them.” She gestured to a glass case in the corner near the door. Inside were a pair of what looked like futuristic hunting rifles. “It’s similar to a taser, though it works at greater distances, delivering a jolt of electricity that temporarily stuns the prey. The hunter then uses a special camera to capture the 3-D contours of the animal, which—”

  “I get it. You create a mold of the head and throw it up on your wall like a real trophy. I’m sure the animal experiences no stress or upset whatsoever.”

  “Exactly,” she said, oblivious to the sarcasm. “As long as the hunter is careful, his prey wakes up within twenty minutes unharmed.”

  Philip looked down at the fur beneath his feet. “What about the rug?”

  “Oh, a casualty, I’m afraid.” She blinked at it with what looked to be genuine sorrow. “The method isn’t flawless.”

  Philip took a seat at the immense desk opposite her. “So while I’m kept waiting, how about fielding a few of my questions? No bullshit answers this time.”

  “I’m sure Mr. Lyons would be happy to—”

  “I’d like to hear from Ms. Stone.”

  She leaned back. “What would you like to know?”

  “How he makes his money, what this Government-Scholar business is, and why Lyons has been after my father all these years.”

  Nellie laughed. “But you and he will have nothing left to say to each other.”