The Last Equation of Isaac Severy

by Nova Jacobs

  “Dad, stop with the dramatics, please. We’re allowed to have fallow periods. As you well know.”

  Isaac Severy famously didn’t have fallow periods, yet Philip watched his face for a sign that he had hit the mark. It had been years since his father shared what he was working on. Philip had stolen early glances at his father’s traffic equation, but when pressed on it, Isaac would evade all inquiry, saying only that the mathematics wasn’t ready.

  This time, Isaac had looked away, avoiding his son’s eyes for the rest of the meal.

  “If you’re not careful, Philip, you’ll have brain rot. Just like your brother.”

  It was then that Philip had started to suspect that his father’s latest work, whatever it was, was only a mirage.

  He abandoned the unpleasant memory and took one more gulp of coffee before leaving the faculty lounge.

  “Yeah, see you round,” he told Kuchek.

  Philip took a final glance at the note. I had been in touch with him regarding his recent research. Oh, really? And what research would that be? The topology of the geriatric brain? The calculus of killing yourself in a whirlpool bath? Philip flirted with the idea of calling the 703 number. “Hello, Mr. Lyons? Yes, I’m familiar with my father’s work, and I find it unlikely that it would be of use to anyone, let alone government scholars and their relations. Good-bye.” Still, a worm of curiosity had worked its way into his brain, and Philip wondered if his father had really been serious about contacting this man. And if so, why. He made a mental note to check his father’s study for anything unusual, and his old campus office while he was at it. Then he slipped the card in his pocket, put on his best Advanced-Topics-in-Supersymmetry face, and made his way to the lecture hall.

  – 7 –

  Headquarters

  Hazel had been sitting on the steps outside LAPD headquarters for twenty minutes when she heard someone laughing. She turned to find Detective E. J. Kenley standing behind her, the woman’s trim figure framed in the entryway.

  “You homeless now, or did your brother stand you up?”

  Hazel smiled, stood to greet the towering detective, and was pulled into a vigorous embrace.

  “We’re supposed to be getting lunch at Langer’s,” Hazel said. “It’s the only place that doesn’t make him gag.”

  “Right. What’s that thing he likes to say?”

  “I’ll eat when I’m dead?”

  “Dumbest thing I’ve ever heard,” E. J. said, laughing again. “He’s out on a case, but you’re welcome to loiter upstairs.”

  Hazel followed the detective through security, where she flashed a badge that read MYP in large letters. Minority Youth in Peril was E. J.’s pet project. Years ago, she had gotten fed up seeing her “little brothers and sisters” disappear quietly into the shadows while the clockwork of the media snapped into atomic precision any time a blond girl from the suburbs vanished. “Want to get away with kidnapping?” E. J. had once asked in a letter to the Los Angeles Times. “Snatch up a black kid from the Jordan Downs projects and watch the ice-floe reflexes of the press. But so much as touch a towheaded girl in Utah, and the entire world yanks out its hair in collective anguish.”

  The elevator opened onto the third floor, and they started down a modernist corridor flooded with natural light. When Hazel had last visited her brother at work, the building had still been relatively new, smelling of paint and freshly rolled carpet. Now the carpet shone with the steps of countless heels, and the pumpkin-colored walls seemed to belong to another era.

  “I was sorry to hear about Isaac,” E. J. said as the spacious hall gave way to the hive of the main office. “I know he was like a father to you both. You want some coffee? Let’s get some coffee.”

  Hazel trailed her through the belly of the Juvenile Protection Unit, catching glimpses of what her brother had to face every day. What appeared at first to be your average corporate office—everything Hazel had tried to escape in life: grids of fluorescents, watercoolers, inspirational posters—had, upon closer inspection, a more chilling quality. A desk detective scrubbed through digital footage of a teenage girl curled on a couch sobbing, while an adjacent screen featured a toddler’s legs blighted with hash marks.

  “Waffle iron,” E. J. whispered.

  “God, you’re kidding,” Hazel said, her hand instinctively moving to an old scar on the side of her neck. She fingered its long, petal-shaped groove, hardly aware she was doing it.

  As E. J. continued down the hall, Hazel paused at a strip of corkboard lined with pictures of men, young and old. Their eyes all held the same exhaustion, the same depleted look of lives spent by turns fighting and giving in to dark impulse. A few of the photographs had a red masking-taped K covering the face.

  “That’s how we mark the dead ones,” E. J. explained. “For karma.”

  “Karma?”

  “Late last year, this scumbag’s working on his truck, gets gasoline on his clothes. Later, he starts fiddling with the gas water heater and—whoosh!—the pilot light turns him into a human torch. A neighbor saw everything, but by the time she got her bony ass to the phone, it was all over. Some people here like to call that karma, or the universe having its way. I call it plain spooky.”

  Hazel didn’t want to think about the universe having its way with people, scumbag or not. She didn’t want to think of Isaac in that tub with those string lights.

  E. J. ushered her into a break room and poured two mugs of coffee.

  Hazel took one. “I don’t get how you can, you know—”

  “Come to work every day?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You disconnect a little, make it a scavenger hunt. You go crazy otherwise.”

  “And my brother?”

  E. J. laughed for no apparent reason. “You’ll have to ask him.”

  After a few polite questions about Hazel’s life, E. J. pointed her toward Gregory’s cubicle by the far windows. She then excused herself to resume her search for the missing Jasmines and Jamals of Los Angeles.

  * * *

  From her brother’s desk, Hazel could see the gleaming spire of city hall across the street. Mercifully, there was no evidence of distressed children in the immediate area, just nostalgic prints of LA architecture along one wall—including Union Station, its Art Deco interior overlaid with the image of a sleek train. Her brother’s desk was austere, save for a small photo of Lewis and a coffee mug featuring a math geek’s coy declaration of love: . It had been Isaac’s gift to Gregory at an age when a boy can still be anything, when his brain has not yet run up against its own border checkpoints.

  Before Hazel knew what she was doing, she began opening his desk drawers. She was snooping, of course, yet her body seemed to know this before she did. It felt like she’d been craving this the entire trip: a moment that might illuminate her brother’s increasingly detached behavior, because God forbid she confront him herself. Most of the desk was locked, except for the center-left drawer, which opened to reveal a stack of folders. The folder on top, with its illustration of a butterfly, seemed out of place, like something you’d see in a girl’s backpack.

  When Hazel flipped back the cover, the contents looked deadly boring: financial printouts of some kind. She shifted her attention to the blue folder below it. Inside was a small stack of long-lens photographs, all of a man with close-cropped white hair and sunglasses. Most of the images showed him walking, waiting at bus stops, or reaching into trash cans. Someone, presumably Gregory, had jotted times and cross streets in the margins. The man seemed familiar, but maybe it was because he reminded her of the men she’d just seen on the wall. How strange her brother’s life was, creeping after creeps, stalking the stalkers. She wasn’t sure what made her more uncomfortable: the man himself or Gregory’s surveillance of him. She closed the folder quickly and slipped it back into place.

  She was about to do the same with the butterfly folder, when she spotted Isaac’s name in the corner of a page. On closer inspection, she realized the printo
uts were her grandfather’s bank statements. Highlighted in yellow, at one-month intervals, were withdrawals of $2,700 in cash. The statements went on for pages and pages, years back, and every month the same withdrawal. A sticky note on the second page read: Let’s talk?—Fritz.

  Hazel noticed a Xerox machine a few desks away. But just as she had the thought to dash off some copies, Gregory’s voice drifted from down the corridor. She put back the folder and struck a pose at the window, as if she were having one last look at the city before returning home.

  * * *

  Her brother seemed annoyed as they headed outside to the parking lot. She made a few comments about E. J., how nice it was to see her again, but he only grunted. “Must be fun being a detective,” she almost added, but reminded herself that policing the wheel of abuse that trundled eternally through the generations could hardly be a good time. Then again, from her perspective, sleuthing around LA seemed preferable to returning to a demeaning existence up north.

  And there it was again, the feeling that had been sneaking up on her all day: she didn’t want to go home. Or was afraid to. The sense of something left dangerously unfinished nagged at her, as if Isaac’s letter might haunt her like a paper ghost. But she had a life to get back to. Bennet had been a bit aloof lately, sure, but if she took a frank look at her own behavior, she was the one putting up emotional blockades. She hadn’t even told him she was living in her store, so how could she rely on him if she couldn’t even manage a basic level of honesty? They were supposed to be each other’s safe house, but she wondered if, in their twenty-two months together, that had ever materialized in any real way. Even her bookstore wasn’t the sanctuary it had once been. So if not her store or her boyfriend, then what was she going back for? Stop it, she told herself. You can’t abandon your life because it’s hard. Make it work, love your boyfriend, save your business. Buck the hell up.

  As they climbed into Gregory’s Honda, Hazel idly wondered if she should install a camping shower in the bookstore bathroom. She’d be digging through trash cans next, like that sad man. And those bank statements—she could certainly use $2,700 a month herself. She felt slightly guilty for having snooped, but if the statements were important enough for Fritz to make copies, why hadn’t Gregory let her in on it?

  When they were turning onto the freeway for the airport, Gregory cleared his throat. “I guess I screwed up lunch, huh?”

  She nodded. “Say good-bye to cream sodas and hot pastrami on rye.”

  The invocation of a Langer’s deli sandwich—the best in the city—did nothing for her food-indifferent brother. She changed the subject and asked him about work, but all she got out of him was “There’s a lot of field stuff lately. It’s good to get out of the office.”

  She gave him a sideways glance, wanting more than ever to tell him about the letter, to bring him into the fold.

  “Remember Isaac’s typewriter?” she blurted.

  Gregory was focused on making the next exit. “Of course.”

  “The one with the sticky keys?”

  “Sure, not that it ever stopped him from using it.”

  “Isaac had it fixed.”

  “I know.”

  Hazel turned. “You know?”

  “I fixed it.”

  “When?”

  “A couple years ago. I tried to fix it long before that, actually, when I was at Claremont. An engineering professor asked us to repair a broken machine for our final exam. The math thing wasn’t working out, and I wanted to impress Isaac, I guess.” Her brother’s expression soured, as it often did when he hit on the topic of mathematics. “I took the whole thing apart but only made it worse and almost failed the class. So about two years ago, I thought I’d redeem myself.”

  After a pause, he asked, “Why?”

  “No, it’s just . . . nothing.” An idea was forming in her mind.

  “I guess I’ve never really lived down those four years,” he continued. “It only made things worse that my name was Severy. May as well have been Hawking or Kepler.”

  “Please, Eggs,” she said, invoking her old nickname for him, chosen for the bratty reason that her brother disliked eggs, and it vaguely rhymed with his name. “You have to be a genetic freak to be a Severy. A person has the same chances of being born a Bolshoi ballerina or an albino—”

  “Not all mathematicians are freaks,” he interrupted. This was an old argument of his. “Some just have a head start in life.”

  “Well, you’ve turned into a fine detective,” she said, changing the subject. “Not to mention an excellent typewriter repairman—it works perfectly now.”

  He frowned. “So you were using it?”

  “Oh,” she said, stalling. “I was poking around his office and took it out to play with. Nostalgia, I guess.”

  “Anything else of interest?”

  But his question seemed far away, muffled, because a more compelling question now demanded her attention: If Gregory fixed the typewriter years ago, why were there mistakes in Isaac’s letter? The answer came to her in an instant, as if Isaac had whispered it into her ear. “Because the mistakes were intentional, my dear.”

  Hazel tapped at her window urgently. “Can you pull over here? Bathroom break.”

  “We’re blocks from the airport.”

  “I really have to go.”

  Gregory sighed and cut across a lane. He pulled into a McDonald’s parking lot while Hazel searched for Isaac’s letter through the pockets of a ridiculous rolling bag that Bennet had given her, her initials stamped conspicuously across the front. Tucking the letter in her purse, she made her way to the overcooled McDonald’s bathroom. She unfolded the note on top of a hand dryer and, with a pen, examined the lines carefully, underlining all words with redundant letters, including the stuttering comma:

  ,,,

  theeee

  Cottte d’Azurrr

  onn

  pleassantt

  offf (of)

  ttthe

  SSShore

  “The Côte d’Azur on pleasant of the shore,” she muttered. It was almost a sentence, but it didn’t sound like much of a clue or directive. Côte d’Azur—“coast of blue”—the French Riviera. She hoped he wasn’t sending her on a European treasure hunt. He couldn’t expect her to go jetting around, digging holes along the Mediterranean. She tried rearranging the words: “On the shore of the pleasant Côte d’Azur . . .”

  Hazel startled herself by setting off the hand dryer, and it was at that moment that something about the words clicked. A smile spread across her face, and she laughed out loud. She refolded the paper, slid it into her purse, and practically ran back to the car.

  “Everything all right?” Gregory asked. But she could see that his concern was forced, the muscles of his jaw working to contain his irritation. “It’s been, like, fifteen minutes.”

  “I know. Sorry.”

  She climbed in, rapidly thinking of an excuse not to get on that plane. She apologized again and found herself saying that she’d left her wallet at the house. She would have to reschedule her flight.

  “Brilliant. You have a ride tomorrow?”

  “I’ll figure something out. I’m really sorry.”

  Gregory made several sharp turns until they were headed back north on La Cienega Boulevard. Hazel adopted the frustrated expression of a traveler who’s just left her ID at home, but to herself, she silently recited the first line to one of her favorite books, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night—the first eight words of which Isaac had planted in his note expressly for her to find:

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

  Almost immediately, her shiver of delight at having cracked her grandfather’s puzzle turned to a small, quaking fear. Now that she could see Isaac was leading her somewhere, how could she let go of his hand?

  * * *

  As they eased their way up the switchbacks of the c
anyon, their cousin Alex came into view, striding long-legged down the hill, cuffs in the dust, camera slung across his chest.

  “Is he looking to get hit?” Gregory asked.

  As if taking the hint, Alex turned toward a clearing between houses, where a set of communal steps led to the bottom of the hill.

  Hazel rolled down her window. “Shouldn’t we stop?”

  Gregory hit the brakes just as Alex’s head was about to vanish below the staircase. Hazel called out to him, her voice tremulous and strange in her own ears.

  He spun around, and when he saw her, he smiled. “Hello, Hazel.” But as he approached the car and saw who was driving, his smile retreated. “Oh, hey, Greg . . . ory.”

  “We thought you’d left,” Gregory said. “Where is it you live again? France?”

  Alex didn’t answer but said, “Did you hear what happened? Drew became very sick this afternoon.”

  Gregory pulled the parking brake. “Is she all right?”

  “Yes, but Sybil was in hysterics. I don’t know the details, actually. I’m sure you’ll hear all about it.”

  “So you’re leaving?” Hazel asked.

  Alex shifted his weight. “About that. I’d prefer you didn’t mention that you saw me on the road. I sort of slipped away after my mother arrived. Kind of horrible, I know, but we’re not exactly close. It looks a bit weird, you understand, my abandoning the family in a time of crisis and all that. Anyway, I’d appreciate it.”

  “We didn’t see you,” Hazel agreed.

  Alex looked at her for a steady moment, and she looked back. She had never liked beards on men, but Alex’s didn’t bother her. Maybe it was because he wasn’t trying to make a statement but looked as if he genuinely couldn’t be bothered to shave. Gregory put the car into gear, signaling an end to the conversation, and before she had a chance to say good-bye, they were pulling away. Alex looked after them for a few seconds before spinning around and resuming his descent. As she watched him disappear in the side-view mirror, she had the feeling that if she were to see him again, it would be from this same angle, as if he were never in the process of arriving but always heading off to somewhere far more important.