The Last Equation of Isaac Severy

by Nova Jacobs

  She glanced at Hazel and took a satisfied sip of tea.

  Hazel tried to ignore the burning sensation at the tips of her ears and a sudden desire to upend the tea table and kick her aunt’s chair out from under her. There was also a brief clip of Hazel emptying the contents of the teapot onto her head. “You’ve really thought it through, haven’t you?”

  “Please, this isn’t a Poe mystery; it hardly requires a C. Auguste Dupin level of detection. It took me a few seconds. Most people go around thinking that life is magical and mysterious, filled with all kinds of unknowns. Bullshit. Once you decide the universe is knowable, all kinds of answers become available to you.”

  “I guess I don’t go around thinking that way.”

  “Of course you don’t. Very few people are blessed with a methodical brain. Like everyone else, you probably stumble through life getting into trouble, debt, and heartbreak.”

  Hazel had no intention of betraying the accuracy of this statement. Instead, she looked around, taking in the study as a depiction of her aunt’s blessed brain and lonely life. She wondered if there might be some visible clue as to Alex’s whereabouts, but on the shelves lining the room, there was no evidence of family at all. No photographs, no mementos. There were only three-ring binders—hundreds of them—all grimy white, each labeled alphabetically, A through J, in colored marker. Was this the never-ending book project?

  Aware that she looked to be snooping, Hazel forced her eyes back to Paige. “I really don’t want to waste your time. Do you have any idea where Alex might be staying?”

  “He and I don’t speak.”

  “Do you at least know if he’s still in the country? If you had to find him—”

  “Have you heard a thing I’ve said?” Paige snapped.

  In response, Hazel stood abruptly, not caring to hide her frustration. “Thank you for the tea.” But after returning her cup to the tray, curiosity won over, and she glanced back at the binders. “Where are K through Z?”

  Paige tapped her forehead. “Up here. When it’s complete, The Book of Probabilities will clock in at around five hundred sixty-five volumes.”

  “You have a ways to go, then.”

  Her aunt smiled, almost sadly. “I have a secret for you. It will never be finished. I will die before I ever get near Z.”

  “If you can’t finish it, why write it?”

  Paige readjusted her toadstool mass. “Because what else is there to do but work on what one is good at?”

  Hazel wondered how her aunt was making any money on this, but wasn’t about to ask. Besides, Hazel knew something about living your life with complete disregard for profits. At least her aunt had something to show for it.

  “You know”—Paige wagged an arthritic finger at Hazel—“your generation could stand to live in the pursuit a bit more. You’re all rushed to get to the end. To succeed. Alex is the same. He can see only the end result and is totally incapable of appreciating mathematics for its own sake. If there is no tangible reward at the end, he sees the work as pointless. It’s an empty way to live, in constant pursuit of the trophy. It’s the reason he has failed.”

  “Well, he’s still young,” Hazel said lamely, more in defense of herself than of Alex.

  “His probability of succeeding as a pure mathematician drops precipitously with each passing year, and his chances of succeeding at applied mathematics aren’t much better. Plus, he has a lazy brain.”

  “I thought he had an accident.”

  “Right, his so-called brain damage from that autobahn incident. Horseshit. The real story of his failure is far more spectacular.” When Hazel didn’t respond, Paige said, “Don’t pretend like you don’t want to know.”

  Hazel sat down again while her aunt dumped more sugar in her tea.

  “There is a group of twenty-three problems in mathematics, called Hilbert’s problems—intellectual puzzles more than anything, though mathematicians take them very seriously. Most have been solved, but there are a few remaining. One particularly stubborn problem was solved by my son many years ago while he was at the Max Planck Institute.” Paige looked up to measure her guest’s reaction. “Wondering why you haven’t heard about such a triumph? Why Isaac never mentioned it?”

  Hazel nodded.

  “You’ve never heard about it because someone else beat my son to the proof. By a couple of weeks.” Paige appeared amused by this. “An unassuming Russian, who’d been working in his mother’s basement for years, quietly published his proof. No fanfare, just mailed it off. And in our world, publishing is everything.”

  Hazel assigned this new information to her previous image of Alex. Now that she thought about it, beneath all the bluster, there had been an air of defeat about him.

  “But that’s not his fault,” she said. “It’s just bad luck.”

  Paige smiled. “Maybe. But it’s what he did afterward that revealed his true character. He did nothing. Zero. Completely gave up mathematics. He blamed it all on this supposed car wreck, of course. But I knew.”

  “Is that why you don’t speak to him?”

  She shrugged. “He doesn’t speak to me because he knows I disapprove of his vagrant lifestyle. Bumming around Paris, going to parties, sleeping around, God knows what else. How he affords all this laziness, don’t ask me.”

  “Maybe he has another source of income,” Hazel suggested pointedly.

  “Well, obviously. Though I don’t buy this AP photographer nonsense.” Paige snorted and swiveled back to her desk. “Now you’ll really have to excuse me. I’m attacking a particularly difficult section on the odds of succeeding as a jazz musician.”

  Hazel stood up, unsure how to transition out of the room. “I’ll find my own way out.”

  “Wait!” Paige practically shouted.

  Hazel paused at the door.

  “I made an agreement with myself long ago that I would leave the warmth to warm people. But tell them that I let you in, won’t you? That I didn’t turn a relative away? No one in this family gives me any credit.”

  “I will,” Hazel said, suddenly overcome with sadness for this aunt she had never liked.

  She started down the hall, glancing back just as Paige splashed something from a bottle into her teacup. When she reached the front door, she could hear her aunt muttering something to her dogs.

  Outside, Hazel closed the gate to the yard and, for lack of a better idea, turned in the direction of the beach, guided by the light of the surrounding bungalows. After removing her shoes and socks at the edge of the concrete, she stepped onto the cool sand and kept walking.

  When she reached the shoreline, she let the incoming tide engulf her feet. How long had it been since she’d touched the Pacific? Living on Puget Sound for so many years, surrounded by water on all sides, it was easy to lose track of the last time you set eyes on the actual ocean. It was easy to forget how this boundless expanse seemed to exist for moments like this, when you are rigidly stuck, with nowhere left to go.

  Hazel closed her eyes. In a very literal interpretation of Raspanti’s doomsday prediction, she imagined herself opening her laptop one morning, clicking through her usual news sites, and finding variations on the same headline, her mistake writ large: “Powerful People Do Irretrievably Terrible Thing.” Had she really inflicted such a grave injury onto the future? Was her mistake irreversible?

  She stepped backward and collapsed onto dry sand. Below the crash of the surf, she could just make out an alien sound, a pinging coming from her purse. She fished out her phone and discovered she had a text from Bennet. She considered deleting it but didn’t have the willpower not to read it first:

  H, Hope you can make the opening. xB

  She clicked on the attached link, and up popped a website for a Seattle art gallery. Bennet’s show, the one he had been working on for years, had arrived:

  New Exhibition—Bennet Hewes

  This Is My Sad Face: The Shock of Human Emotion

  Below it, a mixed-media likeness of her own
face stared out at the viewer with a flash of irritation. The photo underlying the image had been taken near the beginning of her relationship with Bennet, the light of a setting sun glancing off one cheek. But the details of her skin were gone, smeared over with paint, wax, and paper. It wasn’t a bad piece, and she knew this exhibition was a big deal for him, but she could only bring herself to reply, Nice title.

  He must have taken some perverse pleasure in naming his show after her last message to him. Hazel scrolled up until her previous text and accompanying selfie filled the screen: This is my sad face. She could hardly stand to look at it and was about to tuck away her phone when she noticed something about the image: behind her unhappy head was a fragment of Isaac’s map—evidently, the single shot of the map that had escaped erasure. She zoomed in on it, and to her astonishment, the resolution was sharp all the way in. Having spent little time exploring her own phone, she was still mystified by its capabilities. Hazel pulled in close enough to make out the names of downtown streets and to read the dots Isaac had placed there. There were a few dots sitting in a cluster, one reading 101515013122—or October 15, 2015, 1:31 a.m. and 22 seconds. If the dot was accurate, just a month ago, near the corner of Maple Avenue and East Sixth Street, some poor soul had breathed his or her last. But then, that was to be expected on Skid Row. A couple of blocks away were two more dots, near the historic district, where two people had apparently died in August within minutes of each other. “Your grandfather wasn’t predicting just any kind of death,” she remembered Raspanti saying. Okay, if not just death, then what?

  You know what.

  She shut her eyes tight. When she opened them again, they settled on a single red circle, near the intersection of Alameda Street and the 101 Freeway, the location of Union Station. She read the numbers: 111515. November 15. Today. The rest of the string read: 212506. That was tonight.

  Hazel couldn’t know where Alex would be or what he would do next, but if she had been the one to steal Isaac’s equation, she would certainly want to see if the thing worked. Tonight, at 9:25 and 6 seconds, something was going to happen at Union Station. That gave her less than two hours.

  – 22 –

  The Equation

  As Philip headed up the coast toward Malibu, he realized he would have to navigate from the unreliable memory of having been driven there weeks before. He wondered if he should have called ahead to warn Nellie or had her send the car, but he was done with formalities. Besides, if he had to flee from her a second time, he wanted a getaway vehicle.

  Philip had left the house in a gust of unspecified urgency and with a quick kiss to Jane, who had been keeping herself busy in the kitchen with clippers and an ailing plant. She hadn’t even looked up, tending to the leaves with obsessive focus. He found himself disappointed that she hadn’t asked where he was going. A simple “Where you off to?” and he pictured himself falling to the floor at Jane’s garden-clogged feet and unloading it all. Not just about GSR and Nellie but also about his inability to work, about how he missed his father horribly—as much as he missed their daughter, in fact. He would have even confessed his betrayal of their marriage, and how this young oddball physicist at the dawn of her career made him feel confused. It would have been an ugly confession, and he would have deserved a prompt clog to the face.

  It was well into the afternoon when he parked. The house stood boxy and graphic against the sky, looking more unreal than it had the first time. Philip headed up the walk and rang the bell. A man with a trim beard, around his own age, answered. He was tall, spectacled, and indifferently dressed, wearing untucked shirtsleeves and dress socks minus the shoes. It was the same man he had seen through the ground-floor window on his first visit.

  “How can I help you?” the man asked in a watery English accent.

  “I’m Philip Severy, here to see . . . your boss.”

  The man opened the door wide. “The magic word.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Severy, of course,” he said, looking his visitor over with intense curiosity. “The name gets batted around here a fair amount. I’m Cavet, by the way.”

  Philip followed Cavet as he turned down a familiar hallway leading to the back of the house.

  “It’s all last names here. Lyons likes it that way. Sorry about my appearance, but it’s the weekend, and I don’t normally answer the door. You can wait here.”

  They entered the expansive anteroom where Philip had waited during his previous visit. He frowned as he recalled how Nellie had sat there at the desk, no doubt pretending to work as she sized him up and tamed him with good food, all the while having him wait for a man she knew would never arrive.

  “If I know Lyons,” Cavet continued, “she won’t keep you waiting long. Not this time.”

  Philip drifted toward the desk, inspecting with renewed eyes the framed photographs on the mantel shelf: not of Nellie posing with her boss’s clients, but of Nellie posing with her own.

  Cavet hesitated at the door. “I hope you make the right choice, Severy.” Then he winked and withdrew.

  Philip walked the length of the room, stopping at the glass wall that framed ocean and sky. It looked as if it might rain, which added to the strange sinking feeling in his chest. As he watched the cloud cover descend on a colorless Pacific, the misery of the previous night came back to him. The twins having gone to a friend’s house, he and Jane had endured a silent dinner together, with both of them drinking more than usual. But when little Drew emerged from her room in her PJs and asked—for the first time in a while—if Mommy and Daddy would be back for her soon, Jane had to flee the room for fear of breaking down. Philip had wrestled back his own torment until Faye swooped in to take Drew back to bed.

  He followed his wife outside, where she had fallen onto the grass. “I can’t stand it, Philip,” she choked. “Where am I supposed to put all this?” She thumped at her chest as if trying to dislodge something from her rib cage. He took her fist in his hand and whispered, “One day at a time, darling. We’ll go on our hikes again like we used to.” Jane took back her fist and began to tug nervously at the lawn. The tugging became strangely methodical as she put her face to the ground to seek out anything that wasn’t grass. “Maybe there’s a better time for weeding,” he gently suggested. But she didn’t appear to hear him. So Philip just sat there and kept his wife company as she crawled along, sending fistfuls of weeds flying. He didn’t dare turn to the house, where he sensed her sister watching from the doorway, as if to say, “See?”

  He thought again of this morning, of how Jane hadn’t looked at him once, of how she was looking thinner and thinner every day. Of course she hadn’t asked where he was going; she had completely lost interest in the world around her. The question was: How long was he going to watch her waste away?

  A thin mist accumulated on the window. Philip’s mind was growing weary of all the gloom and began to seek out a reliable pleasure source: Anitka. Anya. He liked repeating her Russian diminutive over and over in his mind. Anya. But just when he had isolated the perfect image of her standing at the foot of her bed, dairy smooth skin, untying a black robe, an unwelcome voice invaded his fantasy.

  “You think yourself clever showing up in your own car?”

  He turned, searching for her, but the room was empty. Her voice issued from a hidden speaker somewhere: “You think this gives you some control over the situation, Mr. Severy?” There was the usual smile in her voice, betraying some secret delight.

  “No, no,” he answered. “You have all the control, Nellie. You’ve made that very clear.”

  The speaker sighed. “Why don’t you come to me?”

  “And where’s that?”

  “Go into my study.”

  He crossed the room and pushed open the double doors onto the faint smell of cigarette smoke. All the animal trophies were dim, except for the lioness, which cast a glow on the case containing the taser rifles. Nellie’s voice leapt to a speaker at the desk: “The door in the corner, w
alk through it. Turn right.”

  He was soon in a bright, functional hallway with a door at the far end. Her voice floated above him: “The door leads to a stairwell. Wait at the bottom.”

  He descended two flights of stairs—How deep does this place go?—until he was confronted with a pair of earmuffs and goggles hanging beside a metal door.

  “You’ll want to put those on,” she instructed.

  He did as he was told, and on the other side of the door was a second door. He pushed it open and found Nellie standing with her back to him, head-to-foot in khaki, staring down the scope of a hunting rifle. She took aim at a rapidly moving target: a black cutout of an antelope. She fired into the antelope’s flank—with what looked to be real bullets—and removed her earmuffs. He did the same.

  “Good of you to come,” she said. Her secretarial glasses had returned.

  “I’m guessing you’re zoned for this.”

  “Of course. I do have some influence.”

  “Influence or money?”

  “So I’m just some rich eccentric, is that it? Throwing money around on private firing ranges?”

  “It’s what I thought when I assumed you were a man. Is there any reason to change my mind now?”

  She smiled, so wide that her irises nearly disappeared. Then she clicked on the rifle’s safety and held out the gun to him. “Care to perforate some cardboard?”

  He shook his head. “What happened to your taser rifle?”

  “It doesn’t give the same kick. Heads up.”

  They shielded their ears, and she fired at the leaping silhouette, creating a blossom-shaped wound in its side. When it was gone, she tore off her muffs and dismantled the rifle. As she removed the magazine, she exhaled heavily, clearing the air for a new topic.