The Last Equation of Isaac Severy

by Nova Jacobs

  “Oh,” Hazel said, trying to appear cool, “did I wake you?”

  Her cousin said nothing, just gazed sleepily in her direction.

  She noticed, not without passing envy, that Sybil was just as radiant at two o’clock in the morning as she had been earlier that day. Hazel also gathered that she was, in fact, asleep. She had never witnessed one of her cousin’s sleepwalking episodes, though she had heard all the stories—the most repeated one involving Sybil’s wandering out of a Park Avenue hotel on her honeymoon, hailing a taxi, and a frantic Jack having to flag down his own cab and chase his silk-pajamaed wife all the way to LaGuardia Airport. There was an undeniable levelheadedness to Sybil’s nighttime adventures. She always put on shoes before stepping outside, and she had the uncanny ability to sleep-navigate.

  Just as Hazel considered waking her cousin, Sybil fell against the door frame and muttered, “No, no, no. I told you already—” She let out a long whine and slid to the floor, where she began to quietly cry.

  Hazel was about to prod her awake when the hall light came on, and Jack shuffled into view. He had a dark, brooding face, superficially similar to the men Hazel tended to like, Bennet included.

  “There you are,” he said, sliding an arm around the weeping Sybil. “Sorry about this, Hazel.”

  “Should we wake her?”

  “Better not.” He pulled Sybil to her feet. Hazel thought he looked remarkably unrattled given his wife’s distress. Nor did he appear in the least bit curious about what Hazel was doing up this time of night. “Back to bed, darling.”

  As Hazel watched the pair move toward the stairs, she wondered if her cousin was really the upbeat wife and mother she appeared to be in her waking hours.

  When she could no longer hear the creaking stairs or the sobs, she closed the door and set the typewriter back on the desk. After respooling the ribbon and clicking it back into place, she was overcome with the need to write something. She rolled a piece of paper into the drum and began to peck at the keys, as if searching for a new form of communication with the dead.

  Dear Isaac,

  Are you sure you are of sound mind? (Have to ask.) How am I supposed to help you when you haven’t told me where to look? Room 137? Not helpful. This isn’t exactly a “By the way, can you water my plants now that I’m dead?” type of favor. I am broke and have a business that is failing. Tomorrow, I’m going to have lunch with my brother and then I’m going to get on a plane and resume my life. What else can I do? I hope you’ll forgive me.

  Miss you awfully,

  Haze

  PS: You can’t expect me to destroy the letter. It is the last thing I have from you, and I just can’t do it.

  As she was typing this appeal, Hazel noticed something—or rather, she noticed the absence of something. The keys weren’t sticking; the metallic ball stamped away without stutters. How, then, had Isaac’s letter been riddled with the typewriter’s habitual tics? She inspected the casing and found his initials—I.D.S.—scratched into the blue plastic. It certainly was his machine. Had he gotten the thing repaired after he’d typed the letter? She slid open his desk drawers one by one, hoping to find she didn’t know what. A receipt for typewriter repair? She found only mechanical pencils, notebooks of equations, and folders filled with clippings from the obituary pages—a lifelong obsession of his.

  Finally, giving up, she pulled her impromptu letter from the roller. She was not a detective, she told herself, and this was not a whodunit. Yet in a final move of genre-inspired panic, Hazel dropped the page and—snip snip—its corresponding piece of ribbon into the trash bin and set a match to it. After the flame swelled and died, she doused the ashes with water from a spider plant and tossed the mess out the window. It was the same window, she noted, that Isaac had mentioned in his letter. Seeing her sleuthing to the end, she pulled out her phone and after a few clicks, pulled up a lunar calendar. Yes, it had indeed been a setting crescent moon the evening of October 15, the night before he posted his letter—two days before his death. As she looked up at the now-dark patch of sky, a string of words began to gather in her mind, where they arranged themselves into yet another puzzling question: Why go twentysome years without fixing your typewriter, only to get it repaired the day before you die?

  – 6 –

  The University

  On the Monday morning following his father’s burial, Philip arrived at his office in the Charles C. Lauritsen Laboratory of High Energy Physics to find two things attached to his door. The first was a stiff envelope sticking out of the jamb at neck level, as if poised for a tracheal paper cut. In neat pen it said: “Please read. Re: Your Father.” Philip pulled it from its crevice. There was no return address, only a strange design in the corner: a tiny spiral with a tail extending downward, like a disembodied brain. He folded the envelope and slipped it into his jacket pocket in exchange for his keys.

  The second item was a flyer taped to the door’s frosted glass, featuring a photo of himself staring into the camera with a look of mild digestive discomfort. Right below, a bouncy font announced the talk he would be giving later that week, entitled: “New Non-Perturbative Results for Non-BPS Black Hole M-Brane Constructions in M-Theory.” The lecture was part of a series of dry-run talks to be given in preparation for the International Conference on Particle Physics at the CERN laboratory in Switzerland in the new year. While standing above the world’s largest particle accelerator, men and women like Philip could reveal the brilliant math they had been forging behind closed doors—mathematical physics attempting to answer the only question he and his colleagues found worth asking, the question that had eluded even Einstein: How do we unify the four forces of the universe into one law?

  But at that moment, standing in front of his Caltech office of twenty-five years, looking at a photo of his visibly younger self, Philip didn’t feel in a position to be answering questions about anything, let alone the nature of the universe. He squinted to read the small print at the bottom of the flyer, which told him that his lecture was that Wednesday at five fifteen. Yes, right. He would have to scramble to prepare something now, something that didn’t make his research sound as if it had completely stalled. A conversation with his father would have helped spur him on, and the realization that he would never discuss anything with him again—would never pop into his father’s old office in the Sloan Laboratory of Mathematics and Physics, just two buildings over—made him feel unbearably old.

  Philip unlocked the door and, avoiding a pile of sympathy letters at his feet, stepped to the window for some air. He cranked open the fourth-story casement to reveal yet another cloudless day in paradise, the sun doggedly illuminating every speck of campus, every leaf on every olive tree. Philip had never quit marveling at how much intellectual power inhabited this 124-acre patch of Southern California. How anyone managed to ignore the swaying palms and raging light outside their windows long enough to have a single intelligent thought still mystified him. Give him a gloomy country—England, Sweden, Russia—and he’d show you a nation of busy scientists. Give him a balmy paradise, and he’d point to people finding every reason not to do theoretical physics. Caltech seemed to be the exception.

  Rescuing the envelopes from the floor, he tore into each with a letter opener Jane had given him many years ago as a tenure gift. Ever the sentimentalist, she had had the knife inscribed with a small heart close to the blade, and Philip now found his thumb exploring the heart’s delicate ridges and the sweet, if obvious, inscription: You are my constant.

  He paused for a moment to take in a pair of official-looking goldenrod envelopes. Their strident color and government seals insisted that they be opened immediately, but there was a limit to the information he could take in right now. Philip opened a side drawer and dropped them inside.

  Sifting through the sympathy cards, his eyes passed over the words irreplaceable and adored, and over names he knew well and those he recognized only dimly. But the words and phrases were just vacant syllables, incapabl
e of conveying the true nature of any person, let alone his father. “He has left a great blah blah” . . . “If there’s anything I can blah” . . . “He will be truly shut the hell up”. . . “Never have I met a more seriously, fuck off . . .” Philip was trying to decide what to do with the letters when he remembered the envelope in his pocket. He pulled it out and stared at the spiraled brain again. The symbol suddenly seemed familiar. But from where?

  He was about to pick up the knife again when Anitka Durov, a fourth-year grad student from Ukraine, appeared at his door. He didn’t have to turn to know she was standing there; her voice was unmistakable. After however many years of living in the United States, she showed no signs of giving up her thick accent.

  “Professor Severy, I wanted to say I’m very sorry for your loss,” she said with a peculiar flatness, as if she were holding a tourist’s phrase book just out of sight.

  “Thank you,” he managed.

  “I was sorry we didn’t get to talk at the service.”

  “I didn’t realize you were there,” he said, glancing up.

  She smiled. “I met your father once. He was an incredible man.”

  “That he was.”

  “His exploratory work on highway systems was quite brilliant.”

  He started to clear a space in his desk for the letters as she continued. “This idea that traffic is a single, predictable organism rather than a bunch of separate objects?”

  He threw her an impatient look. “If you’ll excuse me, Anitka—”

  “It’s a bad time?”

  “They do make me teach once in a while.”

  “Sure, I get it.” She pivoted theatrically out of the room.

  But as he gathered his material for the lecture, Philip could sense her lingering outside the door, waiting to ensnare him the instant he crossed the threshold. Anitka Durov was the last person he wanted to see at the moment, and not just because she had the strange power to unnerve him. She had become a departmental pest, an unpopular doctoral candidate who, after having completely rejected her original course of study, was now desperately hunting for a dissertation advisor. Her original advisor, Kimiko Kato, one of the top string theorists in the world, had emphatically refused to work with her, female solidarity aside. And now Philip had become Anitka’s prime target, despite the fact that her intended thesis was in polar opposition to everything he stood for. She had formed a deep attachment to him after he had come to her rescue the previous spring in what became known across campus and the physics blogosphere as “the Durov Affair.” Anitka Durov had, against all odds, pulled off one of the most improbable hoaxes in the history of scientific journals when she submitted a phony, pseudonymous paper on an underexplored question in string theory to the European Review of Theoretical Physics.

  When the prank was discovered, as she had taken no real pains to hide its true authorship (apart from a fake author website easily traceable to her IP address), Anitka was promptly suspended. She fought the suspension aggressively, arguing that there had been a noble, twofold purpose to her hoax: first, to expose the flaws in the editorial review process of physics journals, and second, to humorously demonstrate (though none found it funny) the lack of scientific rigor in the string theory community at large. How was it, she asked, that after two weeks, only one reader had noticed anything wrong with her half-nonsensical paper?

  It would have been one thing, the department felt, if she had simply submitted her paper to the online arXiv, where it could have been deleted or ignored, but to commit fraud to actual paper, in a real archival journal, was inexcusable. Yet Philip knew that the faculty’s indignation had little to do with “serious scientific fraud,” as the members so condemned it. The truth was far more personal. In nearly any other circumstance, they would have applauded the entire confidence trick, smugly congratulating themselves for being in on the joke. Anitka’s name would have been bandied about at parties, praised at the blackboard, and waggishly cited in academic papers, but because she had lampooned the work of many distinguished theorists—going so far as to copy and paste verbatim from their papers to create a kind of humiliating pastiche—the targeted faculty were less inclined to find her stunt cute or admirable.

  Philip was the only professor to come to Anitka’s defense, calling her demonstration “reckless and stupid” but “ultimately carried out in the spirit of academic risk taking.” After a few months of suspension and a warning from the department, Ms. Durov was permitted to continue her studies. But Anitka’s reputation had been blighted by the whole episode, and now, as she was homing in on Philip as an advisor, he was regretting his former heroics.

  He stepped into the hallway.

  “Maybe we could talk later,” Anitka suggested as he headed off to class.

  “Why don’t we catch up over email?”

  “Or over a drink?”

  “Uh . . .”

  “Look, I don’t mean to be pushy,” she said, “but I need your thoughts on my dissertation.”

  “You’ve changed topics, then?”

  “You know I haven’t.”

  His chest rose and fell. “As I’ve said before, you’d be better served finding someone else—at this point, someone outside the school who might be of actual help to you.”

  “I’d like your opinion on some new ideas is all. No strings—” She swallowed the pun.

  He was only half listening as he locked up his office. “Well, I can’t talk before Friday.”

  After a small nod, he retreated down the hallway, expecting her to call after him, as was her habit. When she didn’t, Philip turned around and was surprised to see her marching in the opposite direction. He watched her for a moment, his eyes involuntarily straying to the curve of a hip as she turned into the stairwell. He looked away, feeling a stitch of guilt as he realized how brusque he’d been with her. But how else to rid himself of a pest?

  He checked his watch. In his rush to flee Anitka, he had given himself excess time to make it to class, which didn’t start for another ten minutes. Philip ducked into the faculty lounge. Not being in the mood for departmental chitchat, he was pleased to find the kitchen deserted, but as he crossed the room, he noticed a colleague seated at a corner table, nose to the woodgrain, pencil scribbling. It was only Andrei Kuchek, and chitchat-wise he was harmless.

  For as long as Philip had known Kuchek—as many papers as they had coauthored as members of the department’s string theory group—Philip was still made to feel like a stranger whenever he walked into a room where his friend was working. Kuchek was the classic specimen of a nearsighted, socially challenged academic: a man who devoured his work whole and avoided speaking to anyone unless absolutely necessary. For this, he was mercilessly, though affectionately, teased. Kuchek’s own students routinely called him the Asp or Professor Aspy, which Philip had initially assumed was some unkind allusion to Kuchek’s lean, snakelike appearance. Only later did someone inform him that Asp was short for Asperger’s, a syndrome for which Kuchek seemed a strong candidate.

  “Morning, Andrei.”

  No reply. Typical. It was the little game the two of them played, though Philip could never be sure that it wasn’t entirely one-sided.

  “Good to see you at the service, Andrei. Really, it meant a lot.”

  Nothing.

  “How’s the coffee this morning? . . . What’s that, you say? Extraordinary?”

  He was filling his mug with steamless coffee when he realized he was still holding the brain-spiral envelope in his other hand. He set down the coffeepot and, with a butter knife from the rack, slit open the envelope. On a single rectangle of white cardstock, in tidy penmanship, it read:

  So sorry to hear of your father’s passing. A truly monumental loss. I had been in touch with him regarding his recent research.

  Please call. Whenever is convenient for you, naturally.

  P. Booth Lyons

  Government-Scholar Relations (GSR)

  There was a phone number at the bottom, 703 area
code. Wasn’t that Virginia? P. Booth Lyons. Philip stared at the card for a long minute before he realized he had been holding his breath. Why the hell was P. Booth Lyons contacting him? His father had playfully referred to him as either “Phone Booth” or “that spook,” because Lyons had been borderline harassing Isaac for years, dating back to his retirement. But it was all through letters, emails, and persistent voice messages from his secretary, which led Philip to believe that he was probably harmless. Though there had been one night, after Isaac found a note on his front door (that’s why the brain-spiral seemed familiar), that Philip had briefly considered getting a restraining order so that his father might live out his emeritus years in peace.

  The last time the subject had come up had been over a father-son lunch at the faculty dining hall, during which Philip had started to wonder about his father’s mental stability. “Mr. Phone Booth is starting up again,” his father had said over a chicken salad. “If I want to start my career as a mathematical spy, I guess now’s my chance.”

  “Right.”

  “I’d kind of like to know what this Government-Scholar business is while I’m still alive. Should we go meet him?”

  “I don’t know, Dad. What happened the last time a bunch of mathematicians and physicists got together to help the government? Oh, right: somewhere in Asia, a quarter million people died because their skin melted off.”

  “Yes, yes, but how do we know that the ‘Government’ in ‘Government-Scholar’ is the US? He’s never actually specified which government we’re talking about.”

  “A con man hazy on specifics, huh? The man is harassing you. Let’s not indulge him.”

  A frown from his father. “Have you always been this way? So staid and unadventurous?” Isaac was not generally a vicious man, but he continued, “I think this tranquilized attitude of yours is enfeebling your mind and your work. I keep up with everything you’re doing, Philip, and frankly . . .”

  In that second, he wished his father really were battling senility, because that would hurt less than the alternative.