The Last Equation of Isaac Severy

by Nova Jacobs

  “You can start with the money,” he said coolly, trying to project a sense of control he didn’t feel.

  Nellie took a sip of water before answering. “Some of it’s family money; he makes no secret of that. But Mr. Lyons has also made a very successful business by tapping into the intellectual wealth of our country, acting as a kind of matchmaker between government and academia—scientists in particular: mathematicians, physicists, geneticists, neuroscientists. The US government, even its military contractors, are woefully ill-equipped to digest all the strategic promise coming out of the academic community. There would be countless missed opportunities if it weren’t for his keeping up on not just scholarly developments but also emerging talent. It’s because of Lyons that nanotechnology has already found its way into the military, not to mention several technologies we now take for granted. I can’t disclose specifics, of course, but he likes to find talent early, before research is published, which involves a bit of creative persistence.”

  “Creative persistence, is that what you call it?”

  “He can be aggressive when going after someone he admires, yes.”

  Philip was rethinking his earlier summation of Nellie as a dunderhead. The way she spoke of her boss’s business seemed to go beyond rote memorization and into deep admiration.

  Philip pressed her. “My father found his aggression to be borderline stalking.”

  “There is a private detective aspect to his work, sure,” she replied. “You won’t find him popping up in the news or on any search engines, because GSR is operating, quite necessarily, under the radar. If he wants the government to benefit from these connections, he has to make sure that others can’t benefit—particularly the governments of rival countries. And that involves discretion.”

  “If everyone is enlightened, no one is.”

  “That’s the general idea.”

  “Why not broker between science and business? Surely there’s more money in it.”

  “Mr. Lyons is a patriot. He does have clients in the business world, but Uncle Sam comes first.”

  She smiled proudly.

  “You’re being strangely forthcoming for having told my father nothing for so long.”

  “Well, we can’t have you bolting for the door before our host arrives.” Nellie pulled out a cigarette case and extended it to him. They were Dunhills.

  “How’d you know I smoke?”

  “I didn’t.”

  He longed to pluck just one cigarette from its silver bed, but declined. “Better not. They’re migraine fuel.”

  Nellie lit one for herself. The linen of her suit quivered as she stepped to the window.

  “I should correct you,” she said, sliding the window open. “Your father wasn’t unaware of all I just told you. He came here several times in the months before he died.”

  “He met with Lyons? That’s not possible.”

  Nellie sent a lungful of smoke slinking outside. “I should know. I was here.”

  Philip stiffened in his seat, digesting the idea that his father had deliberately kept this from him, had hidden something that had become a private punch line between father and son.

  “Let me ask you this: How much did you know about your father’s work?”

  He let the question hang there for several seconds. Apart from the fact that Isaac had been cagey in the final years of his life, he and Philip had been very different scientists. They were both fluent in the same mathematical language, could understand what the other was doing, but the nature of particle physics—string theory in particular—was so at odds with Isaac’s very solid, quantifiable world. In the murky depths of chaos theory, his father had found regularity, uniformity, pattern. If Isaac Severy had a motto, it would have been “The universe is knowable.” Philip’s motto, and that of everyone who dealt in the quantum, was “The universe is knowable, up to a point.” In Philip’s view, not everything had been predetermined from the moment the universe sprang into being. In fact, his father’s world and the horrors of determinism were partly why Philip had become a particle physicist. There was safety in a universe underpinned by uncertainty, where not everything could be predicted precisely, where particles were moody, erratic, and strange. Because in that reality, at least, there was room for surprise, room to decide, room to correct error.

  Nellie rephrased the question: “Did your father share his latest project with you?”

  “Listen, I find it hard to believe—”

  “Thank you. You’ve answered my question.”

  “If you’ve already met with him,” Philip said, angry now, his voice rising, “and several times—if you’re to be believed—then why are you bothering me about it? You know far more than I do.”

  “Because, Mr. Severy, he died before things were finished, before we were able to come to an agreement.”

  Philip leaned across the desk and said evenly, “You mean he left your employer empty-handed.”

  “Your father divulged just enough to leave us wanting the rest.”

  Philip sensed a desperation in her statement that quickened his pulse. It had been a mistake to come here. He stood up. “I’ll be going.”

  “I know this must be upsetting for you, but please, if you’ll just wait—”

  “Enough.” Philip drew himself up tall to disguise his unease. “If you think you can waste my time here on some power trip while you peddle this garbage about my father’s cooperation, just so that I’ll hand over his supposed research to you and your very weird boss, then you are both out of your deranged”—he gestured at the walls for emphasis—“animal-electrocuting minds.”

  Nellie stepped toward him. “So you really have no idea what he was working on?”

  Philip thought again of his father’s peculiar reticence about his work. Could it be that Isaac Severy had shown these people what he had refused to share with his own son? He pushed the thought away. It was just too sad.

  “I know what he was working on,” he said finally. “He was working on mathematics, and in my world, that doesn’t turn much of a profit.” He walked to the door. “You needn’t bother contacting me again.”

  Seconds later he was in the hall searching for the front door. Nellie didn’t pursue him, but he imagined her tracking him via a mesh of lenses and fiber optics. He found what looked to be the same glass-covered entryway, but when he opened it and stepped out, he found himself on the side of the house surrounded by hedges. It was already dark, and the house was encircled in flood lamps. Heading up a stone path in the direction of what he hoped was the street, he found himself looking through a massive, single-pane window at a ground-level office. A young Indian woman sat at a desk near the window, poring over a stack of books. After a few more steps, there was a partition and another desk. Behind it, a silver-haired man in delicate glasses scowled at a tablet computer, but when he noticed Philip walking past, he quickly smiled. It was an easy smile, patient and friendly, but Philip didn’t like it and hurried away.

  When he reached the sidewalk, he walked swiftly from the house in the direction from which he had come. What the hell is this place? What else did my father keep from me? He’d walked a couple of blocks when a dark town car turned onto the street and made its way toward him. On instinct, Philip stepped into the nearest driveway and pressed himself along a border fence. When the car had passed, he took out his phone and dialed for a cab.

  – 12 –

  The Party

  To keep herself from spending the entire evening in bed or on the floor, Hazel forced herself to attend Fritz Dornbach’s Halloween party. She needed something to distract herself from the fact that Bennet had broken up with her over the phone for no good reason other than “We’ve always been different—you know that, Hazel.” And although she hadn’t dared confirm it in their very short conversation, she was certain he was already spending long, feverish nights with that assistant designer.

  In an attempt to minimize the pain, she asked herself if she loved Bennet as muc
h as she had imagined. She wanted the answer to be no, but aside from her grandfather, he’d been the closest person in her life, and his frank rejection felt like the onset of a terrible illness. It also felt like further proof that she belonged nowhere and with no one, and that she had somehow done this to herself. This idea of self-sabotage had come up in therapy years ago (back when she’d been able to afford it), but it was one thing to acknowledge it in the room and quite another to alter her behavior. Whatever the root cause of their breakup, Hazel was willing to bet that Bennet’s designer friend was a more confident, emotionally grounded version of herself—one of those embrace-life, consequences-be-damned kind of girls who’d been given a steady IV drip of self-worth since infancy. Well, let him have her. Hazel was going to a party. Maybe in loud music and idiotic conversation, she could forget Bennet and Isaac and the intolerable heaviness of recent days.

  Wearing a gray wool suit and a champagne wig that she’d unearthed from the attic, she took a city bus to the crush of trendy nightspots near Hollywood Boulevard. In Fritz’s spare-no-expense hunt for a wife, he had rented out a two-story club for the evening, stocked with doormen and red carpets. To those who assumed Fritz to be nothing more than a dull middle-aged lawyer-accountant, it was on such evenings that the ribald man beneath the suit emerged. Even if Fritz didn’t find the love of his life that night, the party was a timely move because on Halloween, despite the weather’s slide into autumn, the women of Los Angeles shrugged off their cardigans to reveal vast expanses of skin and a limitless capacity for affection.

  Hazel gave her name at the door and ten minutes later was seated on a second-floor banquette, eagerly downing a stiff cocktail that had been handed to her by Fritz before he’d left to pursue a leggy pair of dragonfly wings. Hazel watched the undersized attorney trudging off in his King Louis XIV getup, which ostensibly allowed him to wear heels without being called out on it. The comedy of this image had no effect on her sullen mood.

  As she waited for the cocktail to do its work, she made conversation with a tuxedoed realtor named Jim. He gulped a martini from an oversized glass and every now and then, in case anyone doubted his identity, he would call up the James Bond theme from a chip on his bowtie. But mostly Jim talked about how people he didn’t know should behave and about how lucky he had been in life. “It’s true,” he said, “I pull nice things toward me, like a magnet.” Hazel nodded along but wondered how these promotional sorts always seemed to find her.

  “So, who are you shupposed to be, anyway?” he asked in a splintered Sean Connery lisp.

  “Oh, a vague Hitchcock blonde. I was going for Kim Novak, but the suit isn’t quite—”

  “So what are you doing later, Mish Hitchcock?”

  Suddenly, the drink hit her, and she didn’t know whether Jim was really asking what she was doing later or they were merely role-playing. The alcohol was, in fact, magnifying her misery, and as a wave of tears pressed at the back of her eyes, she found herself telling Jim about her broken heart. It all came out in a clump of disconnected thoughts and run-on grammar, and at the end of it, she took a long drink.

  “That’s tough,” he said, rattling the ice in his glass. “Another cocktail?”

  “I really shouldn’t. But don’t you think there’s this idea out there in the world,” she rambled on, “that men are always the obsessive ones pining away, as if women aren’t just as consumed and humiliated by the whole thing? I don’t know, am I making any sense?”

  Jim nodded emphatically, then turned his response into an opportunity to describe a lucrative land deal he had recently brokered. He was still talking when Hazel spied someone vaguely familiar entering the club in a turbulent white wig, floppy suit, and fake mustache. She squinted, trying to place the man behind the costume. He crossed the room, and as he drew nearer, she craned her neck to keep him in view. It was the way he moved, the long-legged stride, that tipped her off. It was Alex.

  He glanced over at her briefly, but his face showed no sign of recognition. He walked past her to the bar, where a blonde in a tiny bee costume wriggled for the bartender’s attention.

  “You know that guy?” Jim asked.

  “Sort of.” She looked back at the bar. Alex was frowning at the bee, who had turned to show off her wings.

  Jim took a water gun from his pocket. “Bond can kick Einstein’s assh any day.”

  “Twain.”

  “What?”

  “I think he’s supposed to be Mark Twain. It’s the linen suit.”

  Though Hazel was annoyed that Alex hadn’t recognized her—after all, she had identified him, and his costume was arguably more ridiculous—she was also surprised at the intensity of her own annoyance. Her cousin was still frowning at the bee, though his frown was now of the attentive, interested kind. Hazel knocked back a piece of ice and stood up. She wasn’t in the mood to have the spectacle of romance played out in front of her. “It was nice chatting with you, Mr. Bond, but I have to go adjust my wig.”

  “No. Please. Don’t,” he said while simultaneously turning to a woman behind him.

  As Hazel walked away, she heard the Bond theme erupt, followed by high-pitched laughter. Both were quickly drowned out by a DJ who had begun spinning a deafening beat from a nearby booth. Hazel plugged her ears and, halfway to the bathroom, ran into Fritz. She was suddenly very glad to see him and wondered if he might not be able to help her in some way, though she was feeling too buzzed to pinpoint how.

  “Fritz!” she shouted. “Do you think we could talk?”

  He smiled, but was clearly distracted by something behind her.

  “I need to ask you something important.” What was Isaac working on when he died?

  “Does it have to be now, hmm?” He twitched in the direction of his pretty dragonfly.

  “No, no. I’ll find you later.”

  “Please do, my dear.” Fritz adjusted a curl and stomped off, leaving Hazel to assume it would be the last she’d see of him that night.

  After a slight tilt of her wig in a gilded mirror, she found an empty couch in a dark corner, far from her former location. The idea of lazy conversation with strangers had struck her as appealing earlier, but now all she wanted to do was sit and watch pretty people grasp for one another and let her recent troubles dilute with drink. She waved down one of the darkly feathered blackbird waitresses and pointed to a random cocktail on a menu tent. She then sank into the sofa to watch a gathering at a table several feet away, where a man in a tuxedo was conducting a shell game with three overturned bowler hats and a foam ball. A female Sherlock Holmes edged her way to the table—houndstooth dress, haughty air—and began pointing to the hats. When the bowler came up empty every time, she stamped her stilettoed foot and demanded another turn.

  Hazel couldn’t help but smile at the scene. Why was it that the entire world now seemed reflected through Isaac? He had loved shell games, specifically the kind that forced a player to consider the probability of a ball being under this or that cup. The Monty Hall problem had been a favorite, named after the famous game-show host who made contestants pick prizes from behind one of three doors on Let’s Make a Deal. One evening in the kitchen, while helping to crack nuts for one of Lily’s pies, Isaac had posed a variation of this problem to eleven-year-old Hazel. He hid a bean under one of three walnut shells and asked her to locate it, and when she took a guess—“the middle one?”—he told her she wasn’t necessarily wrong, but that he’d give her one more chance to change her answer if she wished. He then revealed the last walnut to be empty, leaving two nuts still overturned.

  “Would you like to change your answer or keep it?” he asked. She thought about it for a long moment and said, “Keep my answer,” because why should it matter? She still had a fifty-fifty chance, regardless. But after playing the game twentysome times in a row, she noticed that she’d lost roughly two out of every three games. At last, she said, “I want to change my answer.” When her grandfather asked her why, Hazel looked down at the shells and s
aid, “Because, Grandpa Isaac, when you lift one of the empty shells, you change the game.”

  He looked at her, startled. “Do you know how many very smart people can’t grasp this concept?” he said. “And you, eleven years old, figured it out in ten minutes. Math may be your least favorite subject, but you have a logician’s mind, kiddo.”

  She hadn’t believed him, of course, not really. He was just being supportive, trying to boost her interest in algebra or whatever irritating subject she happened to be studying in math class. It had been kind of him then, but it was one thing to play shell games with her in the kitchen and another to construct some kind of mad, life-sized version of the game.

  Suddenly someone shouted very close to Hazel’s ear, “Look, Sherlock Holmes!”

  Hazel turned and, seeing the source of the shouting, groaned. The blonde bee had materialized one couch over, Alex at her side. A wall sconce cast an orb of light on the pair, lending the scene a sickeningly romantic cast, one that Hazel promptly sabotaged with images of exploded glass, screams, and blood. But the usual comic absurdity she gave to such fantasies was absent. There was a weight in her chest that felt uncomfortably close to jealousy. Alex murmured something in the bee’s ear, which made the bee laugh hard and loud. When her laughter subsided, she announced, “I have to go to the little girls’ room,” and skipped away.

  The instant his companion was gone, Alex set down a hardcover book he had been carrying, the title of which Hazel couldn’t make out, and pulled from his floppy suit a notebook. He flipped through it methodically and, every now and then, made a notation in pen. Hazel just sat there with a drink to her lips, thinking she should probably reveal herself but not wanting to spoil her one chance at invisibility.

  Just as she tried to see what Alex was writing, he slipped the notebook into his jacket, grabbed his book, and hurried off.

  Hazel looked hard in the direction he had fled. Following some strange instinct, she stood up and pushed her way through warm bodies until she spotted Alex’s furry white head descending the staircase. When she reached the bottom of the stairs, she caught sight of him striding toward the exit. There he goes, the White Rabbit, always running off. Hazel imagined a poor, distressed bee upstairs, returning from the little girls’ room, searching the couches for a man who had made her laugh.