by Nova Jacobs
There had been no answer at his house. She knew that Isaac wasn’t asleep because she could make out a light inside and hear the Baroque precision of keyboard music. When she tried the knob, she found the door was unlocked, and, well, she just couldn’t help herself. What had she been planning to do exactly? Storm his office? Plunder his files? Plead? Threaten? She had no plan, but she pushed open the door and stepped inside. A light from the kitchen fell across the dark floor. A cheerful Bach suite issued from speakers somewhere to her left. The place smelled of toast.
“Mr. Severy?” she called. Then louder, “Mr. Severy!”
She moved in the direction of the light, floorboards cracking beneath her. In the kitchen, she found a pot of cooling water on the stove and a ladle lying on top. She felt cool air on her skin and turned. The patio door was partly open. She walked over to it, peered outside, but it was still too dark to see.
“Mr. Severy?”
A sound came from somewhere at the end of the yard—a stirring, and the lapping of water.
Then he spoke: “Good morning. Join me for breakfast?”
His voice was calm, as if it were the most natural thing in the world for her to break into his house. Now it was Nellie who was thrown off balance.
“I would love some breakfast,” she replied as coolly as she could manage. She reached out with her right hand for the patio light switch, but couldn’t locate it. “Are we to eat in the dark, then?”
“Whatever you like. It’s entirely up to you, Nellie.”
A few seconds elapsed. Her fingers moved along the wall until they found the cool metal plate of the switch. It had been placed unusually far from the door, and she had to lean slightly to reach it. It was one of those old push-button switches. She pressed the top button, like a doorbell, and in this simple, nothing movement, something terrible happened. There was a bright flash and a sound, like a burst of lightning and thunder. Then darkness again.
The Bach had stopped, as if on cue. For some reason—instinct, maybe—she looked at her watch. It was five minutes before six, a time that would be imprinted on her mind forever.
“Mr. Severy?” she called. Then, softly, “Isaac?”
She knew there would be no answer. She couldn’t see a thing, but she knew what she had done.
Using the flashlight on her phone to light the way, she slid open the patio door and stepped into the crisp morning air. At her feet, an extension cord snaked from the patio outlet, across the grass, and finally to a platform that housed a whirlpool tub. As she made her way across the yard, she could smell it: the odor of burnt flesh and hair. She pointed the light at the still smoking water, where Isaac sat, head bowed to his lap and to a snarl of string lights.
She blinked at his silent gray head, which, unlike her African game—her lioness, her zebra, her antelope—would not be moving again. Not in twenty minutes, not ever. She had pulled the trigger on a taser gun of Isaac’s own making.
To anyone happening upon the scene, of course, it would look as if he had done it all himself. But if that was his intention, why hadn’t he? With an equation that didn’t discriminate between murder and suicide, why involve her at all? But the answer came to her instantly: because he trusted the Reaper to arrive at the appointed time. He needed him to, whatever form he ended up taking. The ultimate affirmation of Isaac’s life’s work had been his own death.
She turned to the café table. On the side nearest the water, there was a splash of tea left in a cup, a single triangle of toast, and the neat husk of an egg cradled in its holder. On the other side was a second breakfast, untouched. For an insane instant, Nellie considered sampling from the plate he had prepared so carefully for her, though she knew this was unwise. Besides, she felt sick, as she had never felt sick in her life. That smell. After wiping her fingerprints from the patio door, light switch, and front doorknob—just to be safe—Nellie returned to her car. She would drive herself to Malibu and go about her day as if she had never been there at all. She could halt her quest for the equation for twenty-four hours, at least—she certainly respected the man enough not to ransack his house as his corpse lay in the yard—but Isaac’s death only made his mathematics more precious to her.
Now Nellie straightened at her library window. Philip’s Subaru appeared and stopped in front of the house. He emerged. Perhaps it was best that he had turned down the offer to work for her, however much she might have liked to add another Severy to the company, at least to replace the one she’d lost. In any case, Philip had proven useful as an unwitting talent scout, packaging Anitka Durov as a kind of substitute. Philip needn’t ever know, of course, that Nellie had already recruited Ms. Durov months ago for a far less glamorous job: keeping an eye on him and reporting what she found. Anitka had been grateful for the money, but this was before she had fallen in love with Philip, at which point the reports stopped, forcing Nellie to fall back on more commonplace modes of surveillance. Sure, romance was only natural in the course of a young person’s life, but Nellie had learned that intimacy was a thing best avoided if one was to get anything done.
The passenger door opened, revealing Anitka. She had refused a driver, presumably because she wanted one final good-bye with her lover. And it was indeed good-bye, because Anitka was not going to be working in California but instead would be flown to GSR’s offices in Virginia. Perhaps it was a kind of revenge that Nellie was snatching Philip’s mistress from him and spiriting her three thousand miles away—but then again, Philip himself had arranged it.
Nellie glanced at a neat stack of materials on her desk. She wanted them to be visible when Ms. Durov walked through the door. On top was issue 75 of the European Review of Theoretical Physics, containing Anitka’s bogus article on the early inflationary universe and brane expansion. After reading up on the entire Durov affair, Nellie had come to the conclusion that Ms. Durov, confused PhD candidate though she was, possessed a wild and devious brilliance that could prove useful to GSR. And here Nellie had assumed the girl was merely useful as a spy.
The supplementary materials Philip had provided further convinced her that Anitka was a genuine talent, the most impressive of these materials being the young woman’s corrections of one of Isaac’s papers. After running the corrections by Alex—who confirmed that his grandfather had indeed made a significant error and that Anitka had quite elegantly righted the mistake in the margins—Nellie was convinced that her search was over. With a natural talent for chaotic mathematics, not to mention a solid background in the mental rigors of string theory, Anitka Durov was the perfect candidate to nurse Isaac Severy’s crippled equation back to health. Together, she thought with a smile, they would cast the future into complete transparency. Imagine!
Nellie watched Philip lean against his car and pull Anitka to him, their dark coats merging into a single woolly mass. He put his mouth to her ear, and then, as a parting gesture, kissed her forehead, as if seeing a child off to school. Without so much as a glance back at the car, Anitka strode with great intention toward the building. Philip watched until she had gained admittance before driving away.
She could hear Anitka being ushered up the stairs by Cavet, who was trying hard to suppress the pleasure in his voice at the sight of their new hire. Nellie sat on the edge of her desk and picked up a pen, trying to locate a convincingly occupied air. When she found it, there was a knock at the door.
“Yes, come in.”
The door opened, and Anitka Durov, now coatless, stepped into the room, wearing a pressed navy suit and heels—a near mirror of Nellie herself. Her new protégée looked outwardly confident, yet her face bore the unmistakable traces of romantic torment. Oh, you will learn, dear girl You will learn to divert all of that into a far more useful place.
Seeing that Anitka was about to apologize for her lateness, Nellie quickly interrupted.
“Ms. Durov!” she said, extending her arms. “Welcome back.”
– 31 –
The Gift
Philip returned t
o campus with a conflicted heart. He had just come from ferrying Anitka to Malibu, where in turn Nellie would send her east—the idea being that he was sending her to a place where he would likely never see her again. He desperately needed her gone because where does a person draw the line with betrayal?
But his motives weren’t entirely in the interest of morality or even his family; he had also done this for her. Anitka was not suited to the world of academia. She knew this. Yet when they said good-bye that morning, and she looked up at him with doubting eyes, he had nearly pulled her back into the car and asked her to forget the whole thing.
The sting of her absence, both in his chest and in the passageways of the physics building, would remain for a while and then fade, to be replaced with a different kind of desire. He thought of his room again, the one he had glimpsed during his coma, and his brain started to ignite with newfound purpose. There was much to do. His room was waiting.
But before Philip could get back to work, there was something he couldn’t put off any longer. He unlocked his office. Hidden away in a desk drawer sat a flat package covered in brown paper. It had been given to him on his last birthday, but he had neglected to unwrap it, and there it had sat for almost a year. It was only when Jane recently asked about it that he remembered where it was. “I’ll hang it in my office,” he assured her. “Try not to hide it behind the door,” she replied.
Philip set down the hammer and nails he’d borrowed from a custodian and opened the drawer. He tossed aside the forgotten envelopes from the Department of Corrections and pulled out the package. He tore off its wrapping and, setting the artwork in the chalk tray of his blackboard, stepped back to view it properly. It was a small black frame, exactly a square foot in area, and two inches deep. In the center, caught delicately between two pins like a rare butterfly, hung one of Sybil’s found objects. He knew the artifact immediately: a scrap of paper, slightly yellowed and ripped along one edge. It was very old—twenty years, at least. Penciled on its surface was a series of squiggly arrows and small circles. He recognized it as one of his re-creations of a Feynman diagram: an illustration of the strange behavior of quantum particles, as described by Richard Feynman. The circles represented virtual particles, and the arrows, a particle of light’s possible trajectories. It had been Philip’s attempt to illustrate the behavior of light to his then-young daughter, of how photons “choose” their paths when bouncing off a mirror. He never thought that Sybil had cared for these things or had even retained these small lessons, yet she had kept this relic all these years.
It was a striking object on its own, and not just because of its content but because of its presentation. Sybil had suspended the drawing carefully between two layers of glass in such a way that ambient light reflected off the surface and made the diagram seem to glow. She had deftly manipulated the very light particles he had been illustrating for her. He saw at once that the entire thing was beautiful. Had all Sybil’s pieces been similarly beautiful? Had he simply failed to realize as much?
Philip fell back in his chair, dropped his head into his hands, and wept. He wished Jane could be there with him now, because he’d tell her what he had realized too late: that their dear daughter, after all, had been remarkable.
– 32 –
The Sphinx
Arrangements were made. In turning away from her life of the past ten years—her store, her boyfriend, the tug of her brother and Los Angeles—Hazel was shedding the old, the nostalgic, the past. She was now sprinting toward the uncertain, the shining, the present tense. At least, this is what she told herself one day in mid-December, as an Alitalia Airbus carried her into another hemisphere.
In a day’s time, she would meet Giancarlo Raspanti in Milan. Once they were in a secure location, she would complete Isaac’s final request in handing over his most treasured work to a trusted colleague—work that now lay close to her skin, tucked inside a money belt. Every so often, she would slip her hand over her belly and feel the paper crinkle, just to make sure it was still there. She had asked for it eight days ago, and it had been given to her by a sphinx. Just like that. Sphinxes, of course, have their riddles.
After stealing into the boat’s cabin that day, she had found the children sitting on the pine-planked floor: Lewis smacking at a noisy, bright-buttoned game, and Drew cross-legged, an artist’s pad open in front of her. Hazel had poured herself a glass of fizzy water to subdue her growing seasickness before turning to the children.
She sat down on the bench directly above the little girl and watched her rip a drawing of a beach scene out of her notepad. Beneath it was a second drawing, of a woman with a giant head, long, flowing hair, and what appeared to be wings sprouting out of her neck. Drew may have been a bright child, but her artistic skills sat squarely within her age group.
“Is that your mommy?” Hazel asked.
“Yeah. Daddy says she’s an angel now. But I don’t know.”
Drew set aside the drawing and began sorting a giant box of crayons by color.
Knowing there would be few opportunities to be left alone with her, Hazel acted quickly. She pulled the Polaroid from Tender Is the Night and set it on the floor next to the crayon box. Drew stopped sorting and frowned at the image of her great-grandfather writing on a mirror.
“Do you remember when that picture was taken?”
“Yeah.”
“What do you remember about it?”
Turning away from the photo, Drew began reciting, “Two, three, five, seven, eleven, thirteen, seventeen, nineteen, twenty-three, twenty-nine, thirty-one—”
She would have kept going had Hazel not gently stopped her. “Wow, how many prime numbers do you know?”
“A hundred. Up to five hundred and forty-one.”
“That’s impressive. Did Pa-Pop teach you that?”
Drew nodded.
“What else did he teach you?”
Drew turned and looked Hazel hard in the face. She said quietly, “I don’t know.” After a moment, she added, “Unless you know the magic word.”
“Magic word?” Hazel laughed. “Please?”
Drew snorted. “No.”
Hazel’s gaze fell on the girl’s other drawing: a flock of M-shaped birds floated in a white sky above a shallow carpet of sea. In one corner, a mangled stick person was suntanning on a sliver of beach, soaking up rays from a tremendous sun.
A definition that had been scrawled in the book came back to Hazel, “of or pertaining to the seashore.”
“Littoral,” she said aloud, but Drew kept drawing, as if she had heard nothing.
Hazel opened the novel again to the string of numbers written on the inside cover: 137.13.9.
“Is it a magic word or magic number?” Hazel asked.
“A magic word is a magic word,” Drew answered.
Hazel looked back at the numbers, running a finger over them. Wouldn’t it be strange if the key to this thing that everyone wanted—the code that could unlock the most coveted mathematical technology—was scribbled in graphite in the corner of a paper book? And for the first time, she saw the digits as something other than an obscure mathematical series: she saw them as a game, not unlike her book oracle. She turned to page 137 and ran her finger down the text until she hit line 13: and she was absorbed in playing around with chaos; as if her destiny were a picture puzzle . . . She counted out the ninth word. Of course.
“Chaos,” she said.
Drew looked up. “What?”
“Chaos.”
Drew nodded at her with shy approval. The little girl then carefully withdrew a brick-red crayon from its box and pulled the pad of paper close. She located a fresh page, and after positioning herself on her stomach, worked at the pad for the next fifteen minutes. She scribbled numbers and symbols with rounded proportions, some of which Hazel recognized, and many—Greek in origin—that she didn’t. When Drew finished the first page, she turned it over to write on the back. When she had exhausted the first sheet, she started on a second. H
alfway down the back of the second sheet, she sat up and casually handed the pages to Hazel, as if she were merely a court reporter who had taken dictation.
Drew blinked up at her. “It was really hard to remember. Can I forget it now?”
“Yes,” Hazel said. “You can.”
On the back of the last page, she noticed something that wasn’t mathematics at all. Set apart from the equation was a message:
My Dear,
You solved my little puzzle, as I knew you would. I am forever in your debt for safeguarding this. Do you believe me now that you have a logician’s mind? In knowing your own power, your possibilities become infinite. Don’t ever doubt it.
Love,
Isaac
Tears spilled from Hazel’s eyes. After taking in the message one last time, she folded the sheets in half, and just as she was opening her purse, she heard the door click. She looked up, quickly wiping at her eyes, and saw her uncle Philip standing there.
He shut the door behind him and, without a word, stepped over to the counter. He poured himself a glass of water. After a long drink, he turned to her and extended his hand.
She hesitated.
“Let’s see it, Hazel.”
She handed over the pages. He unfolded them and for several minutes took in the deep-red scrawl, his eyes moving back and forth down each page.
“No wagging tongues,” he muttered.
“Sorry?”
“Nothing.”
After ten minutes, he turned back to her. His look was one of strange acknowledgment, as if he were finally seeing her.
“So, you,” he said. “He left it to you.”
She nodded. “Well, to Drew, really. But yes.”