The Last Equation of Isaac Severy

by Nova Jacobs

  Dearest Gregory,

  As I expressed on the phone when we last spoke, I am conflicted about your actions. On the one hand, you are doing what I and many others can’t summon the courage to do: to live out our most violent revenge fantasies against those who hurt the innocent. On the other, I think about the child you once were . . . and my heart splits in half.

  I won’t go into detail about how I stumbled upon your particular murderous streak among all the homicides of Los Angeles, but I can say that I was hoping it was some grave mistake, some miscalculation on my part. I was devastated to find that my calculations were, in fact, accurate.

  Grieved by my own mathematics, imagine!

  Why didn’t I turn you in? Maybe knowing too much about your unkind upbringing has been my weakness—my own son is the reason for so much of your pain, and for that I feel responsible. Though how your lovely sister was able to rise from the ashes of her youth without vengeance, I do not know.

  If you’re wondering why I didn’t stop you myself—after all, my foreknowledge of these events did allow me to stake out the scenes of your “accidents”—my only defense is this: I dare not tamper with chaotic predestination. We don’t yet know the consequences of doing so.

  The mathematics must be obeyed, whatever its end.

  I will, however, indulge in this mild tampering: I have included newspaper clippings—proof for your records of what you have done. Perhaps seeing them all in one place will convince you to rethink this peculiar habit of yours.

  In other news: my own death has no doubt come as a surprise. I’m sorry if I’ve given you and the family a shock, but it was my time to go. The math has told me so, and I go willingly at the time and place given me.

  So after enjoying my favorite breakfast and the pleasures of my morning bath, I will wait patiently for my assassin. If one doesn’t arrive as expected—guns blazing—I will proceed to plan B. I call it Christmas in October.

  Don’t bother looking for my work—you won’t find it. The equation itself, I entrust to the one they will least suspect.

  I wish you and this murderous city—whose only saving grace, perhaps, is its mathematical grace—my best regards, whatever that’s worth.

  Much love,

  Isaac

  Hazel’s eyes fogged over. They had been right about her grandfather’s death after all. The police—everyone—had been right. The angel of death had appeared to Isaac in the form of an equation, and he had followed it to his own demise.

  She felt a strange relief in knowing the truth, however painful it was to see on the page. But this feeling was followed quickly by something else: fear that all her efforts had meant nothing. If she compared the letter Isaac had written her with the one she now held in her hands, his sanity would be difficult to defend. His letter to Gregory was, in fact, a suicide note. There had been no assassin; he had not been killed for his equation. So what about his letter to her? Had it been merely a paranoid entreaty she had been foolish to take seriously? Was the death map some kind of clever mirage? Had she, Alex, and Raspanti been trying to decipher the raving semaphore of a lunatic?

  There was, however, one strange similarity between the letters: a nearly identical phrase that gave her a kind of hope. Hazel reread the letter’s final paragraphs, focusing on the sentence: The equation itself, I entrust to the one they will least suspect. She had always assumed that she was the one he had been referring to, but then little with Isaac could be taken at face value. As Alex had suggested, the hotel room and its contents had been a devious misdirect to keep those like him occupied. Isaac had intentionally misled her. She had merely been a decoy, and the equation—the true equation—was still out there, safely concealed. But if Hazel wasn’t the one they would least suspect, who was?

  * * *

  Hazel pulled Tender Is the Night from its place on the shelf, where she had returned it on Halloween. She flipped it open, though she didn’t know what she could be looking for that she hadn’t found already. The Polaroid bookmark was still in place: the playful image of Isaac scribbling a series of prime numbers on a mirror. She wondered idly who had taken the picture, and when. She had been so focused on her grandfather’s eyes the first time she looked at the photo that she’d failed to notice the reflection of a camera and tripod at the edge of the mirror, but with no visible cameraman behind it. Perhaps it had been on a timer.

  Then she spotted something else. Between the red-inked numbers 59 and 61, in a fragment of reflected silver, was a second pair of eyes staring back. They belonged to a face she knew well, and Hazel now saw that Isaac had been writing the numbers for this face to see—a lesson in primes. The eyes stared at the mirror with the intense interest of someone absorbed in memorization.

  – 28 –

  The Brother

  When Philip finally awoke, nearly his entire family was waiting for him, even his sister Paige. He blinked, reached out for Jane, their eyes both filling up.

  Whatever the reason for Philip having lived and his brother having not—spooky mathematics, determinism, or just the stupidity of chance—Philip had only very narrowly survived ingesting an entire bottle of migraine medication. His wife, having found him that night at the falls after spotting his discarded clothing along the trail, had tried and failed to get cell phone reception in the canyon. So she sprinted back to the nature center, broke a window, and phoned an ambulance. Jane then recruited two hikers—who, as it happened, had passed Philip on the trail earlier—to help carry his limp body back to the trailhead. When the paramedics arrived, they went to work on him immediately. Jane’s speed had saved his life.

  “I’m sorry,” he managed to croak.

  “Don’t be. You were coming to find me.” Jane insisted it was all her fault for dropping out of communication that day and making everybody panic.

  Drew pulled herself away from Jack, who had been released from the psychiatric hospital a day before, and leapt to Philip’s side. “I don’t want you to have a headache ever again, Grandpa,” she declared. “Did you know dogs can get migraines?” Philip kissed her head. It was the most Drew had said in a long time, and at that moment, Philip nearly prayed to a God he didn’t believe in that little Drew be spared the family’s cerebral scourge. Either that, he pleaded, or let the future hold a cure for such unreasonable magnitudes of discomfort.

  The family waited several days before telling Philip that his brother was dead. The fact that the recently released Tom Severy had not just died, but had intentionally thrown himself in front of a Metrolink train on the same night Philip had been rescued, seemed like information best kept from the still-fragile physicist. When they did finally tell him, he asked numerous questions but remained mostly calm. He looked over at his sister, who, judging from her impassive expression, must have been similarly composed upon hearing the news. “At least he’s not in pain anymore,” she said softly.

  It wasn’t so much that Philip and Paige had exhausted all their grief in recent weeks; it was more that Tom’s death had always seemed predetermined, or as if it had already happened long ago. For months, both siblings had suspected that their brother was either out of prison or about to be. They had each received the same bright goldenrod envelopes from the Department of Corrections but had let the notices accumulate on their respective desks, unopened. Their father had likely done the same or had tossed them out altogether. For what good had ever come from news of Tom?

  Two decades earlier, after a vampiric Tom Severy had been pulled by police from a den of filth and abuse in South Los Angeles—his wife dead, the couple’s foster children maltreated—the Severys had all but pronounced him gone from their lives. Isaac refused to utter his son’s name anymore, let alone visit him in prison. “We tried everything. Everything! What else is left?” he said one day, in what would be the last time Philip heard him speak with any real emotion about his younger brother. It was true that Isaac and Lily had overlooked nothing in their desperation to cure their son: they summoned experts, call
ed in favors, and threw money at months-long hospital stays. They’d turned Tom on to antidepressants, acupuncture, marijuana, vitamin B injections, holy basil, St. John’s wort, elimination diets, Chinese infusions, plus all manner of quackery and snake oil. But all they had gotten in return was their son’s resentment reflected through a prism of fierce physical pain. Isaac and Lily eventually gave up trying to hospitalize him when he began to routinely escape his confinement, preferring instead to seek out powerful anodynes found only on the street.

  After his arrest, Philip and his mother had been the only family to visit him in the Los Angeles jail, and later, after Lily could no longer bear it, only Philip made the drive out to the state penitentiary in Lancaster. But Tom hated these meetings, and after one memorable visit, in which he spat out that he despised his brother, resented his superiority and intellectual affectations, and wished nothing more than to see the entire family dead, the trips necessarily tapered off. Tom had been receiving treatment in prison for his migraines, including a controversial shock therapy, but even such extreme measures must have been meager when compared with those sneaky injections Tom had been giving himself for years. Maybe, at last, as Paige had observed, there was some comfort to be had in the fact that Tom Severy was now freed from a life of episodic torture.

  Days later, when the Severys let Tom’s ashes fall over the Pacific Ocean from the port side of a rented sailboat, there were only a few tears shed for this strange person who had long ago been one of them. With misty eyes, Philip spoke briefly of the child and young man his little brother had once been—spontaneous, charming, intensely bright, if slightly volatile—before his illness and addictions had turned him mean and unrecognizable. Paige told a story about Tom picking oranges with her when they were both small, an uncharacteristically warm story coming from Philip’s sister.

  Their mother was there, too. Lily had no idea what was going on, but it had seemed wrong to keep her from her own son’s burial at sea. She assumed it was a surprise sailboat excursion organized by Isaac, who, she was convinced, would emerge from the cabin at any moment with champagne and sandwiches. It was on that trip that Philip told his mother she’d be coming to live with them permanently in Pasadena, causing her only to smile absently and pat his arm.

  Hazel wiped at her cheeks more than anyone, though her emotions arose more from her own brother’s recent incarceration than out of any loyalty to her once foster father. Of course, the news of Gregory’s vengeful spree was endlessly more shocking to the family than Tom’s death. While Hazel had emerged from her chaotic childhood relatively healthy and undamaged, her brother, despite all appearances, had not. But then, no one knew better than Philip what a difference a couple of years and a fateful twist of DNA can make.

  As Tom’s dark ashes folded into the sea, Philip thought of the nature and location of his brother’s demise: suicide, downtown, on the same day he had nearly died himself. He thought of the fire-red dot on the map Nellie had shown him, placed inside a tangle of downtown freeways—and just fifteen miles northeast of it, at the edge of the mountains, its sibling dot sitting at a canyon riverbed. If the map had gotten its way, both of them should have been dead. The equation was unquestionably powerful. But clearly, as Philip had suspected, there was something off in his father’s beautiful calculations.

  – 29 –

  The Answer

  As Tom’s ashes dissolved into the Pacific, Hazel made her way toward the boat’s cabin. She had to stop and grab hold of the starboard rail for a few breaths. She couldn’t let herself fall apart right now. It would only draw unwanted attention. It was true that the memory of her foster father on that train platform had stirred within her a level of compassion that surprised her, but it was Gregory who was making her struggle now. Despite the fact that they had grown apart in recent years, his sudden removal from the real world left her feeling disoriented—the lone survivor on their isle of two.

  She paused at the cabin door to make sure she hadn’t been seen. Still huddled along the port side were Philip, Jane, Jane’s sister, and the twins, looking out at the ocean, where some of the ashes had scattered to the crosswind. Paige sat nearby, scribbling notes to herself and every so often speaking in slow, enunciated tones to her mother. Jack, Goldie, and Fritz Dornbach formed an unlikely trio at the bow. Last, there was the hired skipper, busy managing ropes and canvas.

  Alex had not shoved off with them that morning. Hazel hadn’t seen him since the night at Union Station, where she had watched him lift his camera to his face for a moment to document Tom’s position on the tracks. But he had hesitated, finally letting the camera drop to his chest. Last she remembered, he had walked slowly but deliberately toward the station exit. For all she knew, it would be the last she saw of him.

  Hazel closed her eyes and gripped the book she had been carrying around for the past several days.

  On the pleasant shore of the French Riviera, about half way between Marseilles and the Italian border, stands a large, proud, rose-colored hotel . . .

  She had wasted so much time, but at last she knew what her grandfather had intended for her to do. All along, the equation had been waiting patiently for her to show up, to hold out her hand and ask for it. Hazel wondered how many things in life could be ours if we only knew whom to ask. Ask. She took a deep breath, grabbed hold of the door latch, and swung herself inside the cabin.

  – 30 –

  The Recruit

  On a gray morning in early December, Nellie Booth Lyons stood at the window of her upper-floor library waiting for the newest member of GSR to arrive. She glanced anxiously from the street to her watch. Late.

  Just last week, Nellie had stood at this same spot and watched one of her best people climb into a hired car, likely never to return. “I can’t do this anymore,” Alex had told her that day. “I need to get back.”

  “Back to where? Doing what?” she’d demanded.

  “There are other things besides mathematics, Nellie.”

  “Really. Playing at being a photographer? Dating? You need structure. We can give you that here. There are plenty of attractive women in Malibu, Alex, just as beautiful as the women of France.” But he didn’t appear to be interested in the beautiful women of Malibu. And having replenished his bank account during his time at GSR, he was ready to float across Europe again, sipping cappuccinos and practicing “freelance mathematics,” whatever that meant.

  The real reason for Alex’s departure was more complex, of course. After the thrill of hunting down the ultimate mathematical treasure, there was something wrong with the spoils.

  Alex had managed, after snooping through Isaac’s study—and absconding with a revelatory bit of typewriter ribbon—to track down the equation to a room 137 and to a certain unmathematical cousin of his. After keeping an eye on her, he had obliquely charmed the poor girl into revealing the hotel room in which the treasure was hidden. On the following night, Alex had circled back to claim the computer and map for GSR, but not before waiting for the cousin to circle back herself and then leave again. He had been briefly troubled by the entire episode—the sneaking around, the betrayal of a family member. “A family member I happen to like,” he told Nellie. But at that point, who betrayed whom among the Severys was for her a tiresome detail when she had finally gotten what she wanted: the mathematics of a lifetime.

  However, one day, while Nellie and Alex picked through the equation, a fissure appeared, and from that fissure erupted ever-smaller cracks—until a full-blown fractal disaster appeared before them. But she and Alex had disagreed about what these fissures meant:

  “The equation is a fake, Nellie, an illusion designed to distract us from the real thing.”

  “What about the map? It works.”

  “Of course it works, because Isaac is dangling the results of the true equation in front of your face, to show you what you can’t have.”

  “Fake or not, there is truth in it, Alex. Truth enough to convince Philip Severy, who sat here n
ot long ago and gaped at it. It may take years, but from this illusion, we can reverse engineer the original.”

  Nellie had hoped Alex would stay and help her untangle the whole mess, but he had come down with a last-minute case of mathematical morality. “For argument’s sake, say that I stay, Nellie. For what? So you can sell the equation to the Pentagon? The Federal Reserve? The banks? Does the future belong to them? I signed on for the thrill of finding the thing—to see it for myself—not so that you could make a slightly taller stack of cash.”

  She sighed at the memory. How benighted of him to suppose she did this for the money. Nellie would have to manage without him. She had spent too many years trying to wrest mathematics from Isaac Severy, and she’d be damned if she was going to give up now just because the dead man was still pulling pranks. It wasn’t fair of Isaac to have shown her what he was capable of, to have given her the suggestion of his brilliance, and then to have backed out on their verbal agreement simply because he objected to the general idea of winning wars and making money. Isaac had developed a particularly severe case of mathematical morality, and had died for it. More precisely, she had killed him. There was no point in trying to forget, especially on a day like this, with a heavy marine layer lingering, as it had on that morning in October.

  Much like herself, Isaac had been an early riser, the type who just couldn’t wait to get started on his day, even if it was the day he was to die. Why Nellie had picked the morning of October 17 to drop in on the Beachwood Canyon house unannounced, she couldn’t say. She hadn’t picked the day for any particular reason. How could she have known there was a dot on Isaac’s map corresponding to the date and time of her arrival? She knew only that she was tired of having Isaac followed and was getting exasperated by the chase. She had hoped instead to throw him off balance with an impromptu visit, to further woo the man she had fiercely come to admire—as one admires a distant, brilliant father—and to woo the mathematics that came with him.