I confess that I gave no thought to propriety that day in the college’s library. I do not, however, regret my boldness. If I were permitted just one memory to keep, I would choose that moment. I have known you since I was a boy, but it was only then that you truly felt real.
Trinity College, Cambridge
1661
Isaac is nineteen.
Isaac swept the last of the leaves into a small pile in the corner of the university’s courtyard. Of all his chores as a sizar at Trinity College, this was the one he detested the least. When the air was crisp and the sun dappled the courtyard’s stones with gold, he admitted to finding some enjoyment in it. His other duties as a scholar and servant at the college held no such pleasure. Fetching meals from the kitchen for his wealthier classmates, waiting in the hall while they dined, and carrying wood for their fires weren’t things he looked forward to in any kind of weather. But he did them anyway. His mother did not leave him with a choice.
Though she could have easily paid for Isaac’s full tuition and spared him from having to empty his classmates’ chamber pots to pay his way through school, she had sent him off to Cambridge with barely enough money to purchase a notebook, a lock for his desk, a bottle of ink, and two weeks’ worth of candles. She’d made it clear that she was disappointed when he chose his studies over following in his father and grandfather’s footsteps. She held the hope that he would come to his senses, pack his trunk, and come home. Some days, Isaac almost did.
He reminded himself at least 101 times a day that his menial tasks as a school sizar paid for his tuition and that it was still better to be a servant to his fellow students than to Woolsthorpe’s sheep. Sizarship was an arrangement that allowed him to trade service for school aid and meant that his education was not at his mother’s expense, only his pride’s. He found it tolerable because it was temporary. Life as a sheep farmer was not. But there were times when he walked head-down through the halls of Cambridge in a sizar’s requisite coarse sleeveless gown and black cloth cap that herding sheep didn’t seem so awful. Sheep didn’t turn their noses up at him.
“Newton,” a voice snickered behind him.
Isaac turned.
“You missed a spot.” A tall student who sat in front of Isaac in the lecture hall and obstructed Isaac’s view with his pit-riddled nape kicked the pile of leaves that Isaac had just swept. He laughed and sprinted away.
Isaac chased after him and grabbed his arm.
“Gentlemen.” An elderly mathematics professor with a hooked nose that would put eagles to shame marched out from the cloisters surrounding the yard. He narrowed his eyes at Isaac. “Is there a problem here?”
Isaac let go of the student’s sleeve. “No, sir.”
The pockmarked boy smirked and straightened his cloak. “None at all.”
“Good.” The older man glanced at the leaves rolling across the courtyard. He turned to Isaac. “And I suggest, young man, that you get back to your chores. Those leaves aren’t going to sweep themselves.”
Isaac nodded. “Yes, of course.”
“Good day, gentlemen.” The professor straightened his cloak and walked away.
Isaac clenched his fists.
A tight smile sliced the tall student’s pitted face. “Know your place, Newton,” he said, brushing off invisible dirt from his sleeve. “Never put your filthy hands on me again.”
—
Isaac strode between rows of bookshelves in the college library, clutching a small embroidered coin purse with one hand and a weathered book with the other. The purse’s contents bulged against its intricate needlework. Isaac tossed it onto a desk at the end of the aisle. Silver coins clinked against the desk’s dark wood. Though sitting in plain sight, the purse was going to collect a fine layer of dust before it was found. Its owner did not haunt the library like Isaac did.
Isaac had had no interest in the pockmarked student’s money when he lifted it from his coat. He merely wished to repay him for the extra work he’d given Isaac in the courtyard. The small inconvenience of scouring Trinity’s grounds for the missing coin purse was nearly an equitable exchange. Isaac had stolen his money, but the student had robbed him of part of his day. Coins could be returned. Time could not. Though settling the score would have been swifter with his fist, it would have been less satisfying. The mathematics professor who had walked in on their altercation, Isaac thought, could not have come at a more perfect time. The interruption made it easier to part the coin purse from its owner.
Isaac left the purse on the desk. The beginnings of a grin teased his lips apart. A measure of disappointment weighed it down and kept the smile from spreading. The distraction he had required to surreptitiously lift the purse made it evident that his fingers were not as nimble as they’d been when he’d easily made bread magically vanish into thin air. If the girl behind his wall happened to pay him a visit, he would no longer be able to make her smile.
The years that had passed since he last saw the girl had made him grow weary of his little sleights of hand. None of them made her reappear. More than country fair tricks were required to crack open Woolsthorpe’s walls. Isaac wandered past the library’s mathematics section to its rows of Greek classics, searching for real spells in their myths. Poring through dusty pages every afternoon was better than staring at his dorm room’s walls, waiting for a crack to materialize.
“Andrea,” he whispered beneath a sigh.
The name came unbidden. It slipped out of his mouth just as it always did when he felt alone. The girl behind his wall had formed the name with her lips when he’d asked her who she was. He had not heard her voice and could not be sure of her answer. Andrea was his best guess. It was an unusual name for a girl, but he wasn’t surprised. Nothing about her was common. He closed his eyes and pictured how her hair fell around her shoulders, untamed by braids or ribbons. She moved with the same freedom. She was a fairy from a fable, above all natural laws and norms.
Isaac came to a gap in a row of books. He laid the book he had been carrying on the edge of the shelf. The Iliad had brought him no closer to solving Andrea’s puzzle. He made his way down the row and stopped. His grandmother had passed away years before, but her raspy voice was never too far from his mind. He could not eat a bowl of stew without hearing her urge him to finish it, and he could not leave his notebooks scattered over the table or his bed unmade without her telling him to tidy up. Anything he had taken, she reminded him, had to be returned to its proper place. The student’s coin purse was an exception.
But Homer deserved more respect. Isaac pushed the Iliad into the gap on the shelf, making sure it was flush with the other books. Bright white light shimmered over his fingers. He spun around. A crack glowed on the bookshelf across from him. Through it, a woman with the same shade of autumn in her hair as his secret childhood friend played a silent song. He searched her face for the familiar. The delicate lines of her porcelain features distracted him, but when he saw her gentle green eyes, he realized who she was. “Andrea?” he gasped.
Andrea confirmed her identity with a nod. She moved her lips, posing a silent question. His heart stopped. Had she said his name? He brushed the thought aside and hastened to the crack, consumed by the need to get as close to her as possible. He held out his hand, daring her to prove to him that she was real.
Andrea cast her instrument aside and accepted his challenge. She pressed her hand to his, soldering the memory of her touch into his flesh. He laced his fingers around hers, feeling the muscle and bone beneath her skin. She was as real, warm, and alive as he was. A weathered copy of Theocritus’s Idylls reappeared next to her wrist. Isaac grasped her fingers, trying to keep her longer.
More volumes filled the crack around their clasped hands. Andrea clung to him, digging her fingers behind his knuckles. He tried not to flinch. The pain was worth it, if it meant that she was going to stay. Ovid’s Metamorphoses crushed that possibility. The book took shape between their palms and pushed Andrea away.
—
Isaac waited until his roommate John Wilkin’s breathing grew even. He looked over at his bed to make sure he was asleep. Wilkin snored.
Isaac carried a candlestick to his desk, casting shadows over his small dorm room. He sat down and cracked open his journal. Anagrams of his name were scrawled in the borders of an entry lamenting the conditions of his sizarship. Shuffling the letters of his name soothed him whenever he wanted to pretend that he was someone else. Isaac flipped to a blank page and began that night’s journal entry the same way he began every entry about Andrea. Hypotheses non fingo. Beneath it, he scribbled its English translation. “I frame no hypotheses.”
A man of science, Isaac thought, might have ransacked every shelf in the library to try to explain how his hands had grazed another world. But he was not such a man and felt no compulsion to reduce what had happened to him into theorems and numbers. He did not need equations to know how he felt. He required only one book.
Isaac retrieved from beneath his pillow the fifteenth-century edition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses that he had stolen from the library. He traced the scratches Andrea’s fingernails had left on its leather binding, envying how they were going to last longer than the five tiny crescent-shaped wounds she had scraped over his skin.
The scars you gave me have faded, my dearest, but I can still feel them. They soothe me with the veracity of your existence. I pray that my humble gift and the tale I have left for you between its pages offer you the same comfort.
Yours always,
Isaac
1666
1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55
Ovid’s Metamorphoses had not been on Andrea’s wish list for her birthday, but holding it in her arms, Andrea realized that there was nothing that she had needed more. The warmth of its leather, the weight of its pages, and the five small scratches her nails had left on its cover kindled the embers of her faith in the man and world behind her wall.
Another sheet of paper stuck out from between the book’s covers. Andrea pulled it free. The edges of the page were ragged, cruder than the kind Isaac used for his letters. Neither was it sealed with wax. Andrea’s pulse quickened as she unfolded it. An excerpt of Ovid’s ancient tale of Pyramus and Thisbe, written in Isaac’s hand, filled the page. The story of the forbidden lovers who whispered their love for each other through a crack between their homes drew her in and refused to let her go. Stone walls. Fleeting whispers. Stolen time. Untasted kisses. Each passage knew her pain.
Andrea came up for air. Isaac had intended the tale to comfort her. Instead, envy tunneled inside her. The bricks between Pyramus and Thisbe seemed like such a feeble barrier compared to the centuries that kept her from Isaac and answers. But Andrea could not bring herself to resent the book that had delivered the lovers’ story. Its scarred cover pushed away all doubt. She had touched Isaac’s world and he had touched hers. And now she had proof. She picked up her phone and dialed Nate’s number.
A man is sorry to be honest for nothing.
—OVID
San Francisco
Present Day
Andrea is eighteen.
The drum solo of Jimi Hendrix’s “If 6 Was 9” pounded against Nate’s garage door. Andrea’s heart thundered louder. She adjusted her backpack’s straps over her left shoulder and knocked on the door’s white wooden slats. “Hey, you. It’s me.”
The drums fell silent. The garage door opener hummed. Nate waved at her with his drumsticks. “So what’s this big secret you couldn’t tell me over the phone last night?”
Andrea licked her dry lips. “You sounded great.”
“Thanks, but you didn’t come all this way to tell me that, right? Is something wrong? You’ve been acting weird since we left Sri Lanka.”
Andrea took her usual spot on a threadbare couch that had more springs than stuffing. It sank under her, remembering her shape. “No. Nothing’s wrong.”
“Then why do you look like you’re carrying a severed head in that bag of yours? Come on, Dre. Whatever’s bothering you, just spit it out. Unless, of course, you really have someone’s head in there.”
Andrea clutched her bag. The top of Ovid’s Metamorphoses peeked out from under its flap. She had spent the night researching all she could about it and Isaac. History made no mention of the scratches she had left on its cover, but it chronicled a darker secret Isaac made its verses keep. An auction of the contents of a three-hundred-year-old metal chest at Sotheby’s in 1936 brought them to light. The British economist John Maynard Keynes had purchased 39 out of the auction’s 329 lots. What he discovered in Isaac’s private handwritten manuscripts drastically altered his image of the scientist and mathematician he thought he knew.
Isaac’s encrypted laboratory notes revealed an illicit pursuit he had taken great pains to hide. Though he was heralded as one of the world’s foremost scientific intellects, Isaac was a devoted alchemist who based his clandestine experiments on ancient Greek myths. The verses that he believed hid secret alchemical recipes burned a hole in Andrea’s backpack.
“Well? Are you going to go all Dexter on me or not?” Nate leaned against his pickup, a blue Ford held together by equal amounts of duct tape and willpower.
“Nate…I…well…there’s something I’ve been wanting to tell for a while.”
“Should I be sitting down for this?”
“That might be a good idea.”
“Scoot over.”
Andrea made room for him. His hip grazed hers. Nate was sweaty from playing the drums, but he still smelled like soap. And safety. Andrea rested her cheek on his toned shoulder. On this side of the wall, Nate was her oldest friend. She tilted her face to find his eyes. They still looked at her the way they did when they’d traded snacks at recess and didn’t flinch or laugh at her when she insisted that “Something” by the Beatles tasted like warm bread pudding. Today, she counted on them to do the same. She held Nate’s hand.
“You’re trembling,” he said.
“In a good way.”
“What do you mean?”
“We’ve been friends a long time.”
“We have.”
“And we’ve told each other everything.”
“Yes.”
“But there’s one thing I haven’t been able to tell you.” Andrea lowered her eyes. “Believe me, I’ve wanted to. I…just haven’t found the right words.”
“Look at me, Dre.” He tilted her chin with his finger. “It’s okay. You don’t need words. I already know.”
“You do?” She squeezed Ovid’s book through her backpack.
“I love you, too.”
Nate’s words struck Andrea an inch and a half below her rib cage, two inches to the left of a small leaf-shaped pale pink birthmark, and landed squarely on the spot where her soul and the truth lived. She had loved Nate for as long as she could remember but did not know if it was in the way that he wanted her to. The laws of physics prevented her from ever knowing for sure. Pauli’s exclusion principle applied to hearts as much as it did to identical fermions. “No two objects can occupy the same place at the same time.” A boy had broken through her bedroom wall and tunneled into her heart a long time ago and filled more of it with every letter he wrote. Andrea clutched her stomach and clamped her mouth shut. Five words lodged in a wet ball in her throat. She swallowed them back. I love you, too, Nate.
Andrea scrambled off the couch and grabbed her backpack. Her shoulder hunched under the weight of an old book and its secrets.
“Dre…” Nate stood up. “What’s wrong? I thought—”
“I have to go.”
He grabbed her elbow. “No. Wait. I’m sorry. Forget what I said. Why did you come here? What did you want to tell me? Look at me. Please. I’m still me.”
“You are.” Andrea fought the tears rising inside her. “But I’m not.”
“I don’t understand.”
She looked away.
“What’s his name?” He clenched his jaw.
“What?”
“The guy you came here to tell me about. That’s why you came here, right? To tell me that you met someone?”
“You’re being ridiculous.” She marched to the door.
“Am I? Then come back here and kiss me the way you did when we were in Sri Lanka. Tell me you love me the way that I’ve always loved you.”
Andrea looked away. “I can’t.”
“Tell me his name. You owe me that much.”
“Isaac.” She hugged Nate and leaned her face against his chest so that he wouldn’t see her cry. “His name’s Isaac.”
Nate exhaled slowly. A tear trailed down his face, dripped from his chin, and continued the course gravity had set for it on Andrea’s cheek. Andrea made the mistake of looking up. She met his eyes and saw what she had done. The man that Nate had grown to be no longer stood in front of her. In his place was the boy she’d met in fourth grade. And yet, Andrea almost didn’t recognize him. His cheeky grin and the naughty glint in his eyes were gone. The last time she’d seen him look this way was when he had first walked into her class, clutching two drumsticks as though they were his only friends. With two syllables of another man’s name, Andrea had sawed through the muscle, tissue, and veins that had bound them since they were ten years old. Nate was bleeding out. And so was she. She prayed that it was not too late to stitch them back together. “Nate…”
He shoved her away. “Go.”
“I’m sorry. I—”
“Don’t.” He gritted his teeth. “Don’t you dare pity me.”
“Please, Nate. Let me explain.”
“There’s nothing to explain, Dre. It’s really quite simple. I’m a fool. All these years with you I’ve been seeing things that weren’t there.” He laughed bitterly. “I was worried about ending up like my mother. It turns out that I’m exactly like her. She saw fairies. I saw you. An imaginary you who loved me back.”
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