The Last Equation of Isaac Severy

by Nova Jacobs

  This map, however, she was starting to like. Her grandfather had been consumed with eliminating the city’s gridlock, but these dots showed no apparent relation to streets or freeways. Isaac had created a map that was about something else. But what?

  “What about one of these numbers on the map?” she asked Alex.

  He shook his head. “Wouldn’t make sense.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s not impossible, but it would be . . . inelegant. These things usually have a certain something, an aha! ”

  Hazel thought about their room number. “What about 137? Is that aha! enough?”

  Alex smiled. “It’s the first number I tried.”

  “Strange thing to call an eighth-floor room, isn’t it?”

  “You know Isaac was fascinated with that number, don’t you?”

  She didn’t answer right away. Instead, she found a piece of hotel stationery and jotted down for him the numbers Isaac had left inside the book cover—137.13.9. “Not until I saw this.”

  He stared at the numbers for a long moment. “Where did you find these?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “What do they mean?” When Alex started to enter it as a password, she stopped him. “I tried that.”

  He tried various combinations of the numbers anyway and then sighed. “One thirty-seven is a spooky integer that shows up all over the place in math and physics. Most famously, it appears in a constant governing the interaction between charged particles, like electrons.”

  Feeling her vision blur slightly with fatigue, Hazel took a position on the couch closest to Alex as he went on to explain how the Austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli had been so obsessed with the number 137, it nearly drove him mad. As an old man, when his nurses were wheeling him into a room at the Rotkreuzspital in Zurich, the physicist looked up at the number on the door: 137. He reportedly groaned, “I’m never making it out of here.”

  “And did he?”

  “Pauli died in that room. Pancreatic cancer.”

  Hazel frowned. “You don’t think Isaac meant to die in here, do you?”

  He shook his head. “He’s got more subtlety than that. I think it was his idea of a joke. But these numbers, I have no idea.”

  Maybe it was the way Alex spoke or maybe it was her increasing exhaustion, but any suspicions she may have had about him seemed to fall away.

  “Why did Isaac never talk about you?” she asked.

  He looked up, startled by the question.

  “If Gregory or I ever asked about our cousin Alexis,” she continued, “Isaac and Lily were always cagey.”

  He gave her a mischievous smile. “Are you doubting my identity, Hazel?”

  “Well,” she said, a smile breaking on her own face, “I am taking your word for it that you are who you say you are. You could have the real Alexis bound and gagged somewhere, for all I know.”

  Silently he reached inside his jacket, produced an EU passport, and handed it to her. Hazel flipped past a collage of stamps to his bearded image, casually confronting the camera. She read the name: Severy, Alexis James.

  “You didn’t take your father’s name?”

  “I changed it, first year at university.” He took back the passport. “Though it wasn’t to flatter my mother, believe me. I suspect the reason Isaac never talked about me is because he was deferring to his daughter, who preferred to leave my existence vague.”

  “That doesn’t surprise me,” Hazel said. “I’ve never been a big Paige Severy fan. Sorry.”

  “Don’t be. My French financier father is even less enthusiastic about parenting, if you can imagine. Sent me off to boarding schools all over Europe, making sure to ship me far from where he was living at the time. I had to seek out what information I could about both sides of the family—the Severys being the far more interesting of the two. But my mother made it very clear that she found having a child inconvenient, and I think she did her best to bury my existence. She gave birth to me in relative secret and didn’t bother telling anyone until years later, even when I started to show real academic promise. Even then, she didn’t bother to correct anyone’s confusion over my androgynous name.”

  He laughed softly. “It’s funny, but I knew Isaac mostly as a fan of his work, not as a relative. I can count my actual visits with him on two hands. When we finally met for the first time on one of his trips to England—I was in middle school—I felt as if I’d known him forever. It was this moment of ‘Oh, there he is. There’s my family—’ ”

  He stopped short, and Hazel thought she detected a glisten in his eyes, but Alex quickly blinked it away.

  When he fell silent, she leaned in closer. “We may have had slightly different childhoods, but actually, I had a very similar experience with him.” She looked down, aware of how close their knees were to touching. “Isaac had a way of making you feel immediately . . . ”

  He looked up. “Like a part of something great?”

  “Yeah,” she said, with an intensity that surprised even her. “It was like he had chosen you to join some thrilling spy ring.”

  He smiled. “I wouldn’t have put it like that, but yes—as if all that stood between the world and an Axis victory was you.”

  After another silence, Hazel ventured, “Did he really mention me?”

  “Yes.” Alex frowned, as if trying to recall a precise moment. “He said he and Lily had adopted two kids, though he preferred to think of you as grandchildren. It was only much later that I heard about Tom—the rough plot points, anyway.”

  Now it was Hazel’s turn to fall silent, and in that moment, she felt an intense desire to tell Alex about her own tangled past. In fact, she marveled at how natural it would have felt to tell him everything. Yet at the same time, a familiar something was holding her back—and in this small hesitation, Alex gave an unintended meaning to her silence.

  “God,” he said, rolling his eyes. “I’ve really been prattling on, haven’t I? How can you be so fascinating, Alex?”

  “No, not at all. Really, it’s just—” She broke off, unable to explain how she wanted to keep talking but didn’t know quite what to say.

  “You’re absolutely right. We should get back to it.” Alex spun around to resume attacking the keyboard.

  So they were both orphans in their own way, both estranged from their birth parents, with Isaac as their true guardian. As Hazel savored this fact, Alex fell back on increasingly mundane number combinations, all of which he listed aloud for her:

  The births and deaths of famous mathematicians.

  The births and deaths of famous scientists.

  Historic dates and anniversaries.

  At one point of extreme hopelessness, he resorted to the Fibonacci series, each number the sum of the previous two: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8 . . . And then, truly desperate, he tried various approximations of pi.

  Into her third cup of coffee, Hazel was wide awake again. She pulled a woolen throw around her and propped herself on a pillow to watch Alex work. She listened to him rattle off numbers and the related anecdotes about them.

  “Are we absolutely sure the password isn’t a word?”

  “His language was numbers,” he said, pausing to run a weary hand down the length of his face. “But no, I’m not sure.”

  “Once you’re in, what exactly do you expect to find?”

  He stopped typing and looked up. “Something brilliant, of course.”

  When Alex began to rub his eyes with increasing frequency, Hazel convinced him to take a break in the kitchen, where they raided the minibar for snacks and drinks. They opened two sleeves of Fig Newtons and made awful cocktails with whiskey and several flavors of Kern’s nectar.

  “I meant to ask you,” she said. “If you knew I was at the party, why let me spy on you like a creep?”

  He paused, as if weighing his response. “I thought you didn’t recognize me, and then I realized that you thought I didn’t recognize you, and outside of Shakespearean comedies, when does that
ever happen? You know, what do you call it?”

  “Stupid misunderstandings while in costume?”

  He smiled. “Exactly. I was curious where it would lead.”

  Hazel couldn’t argue with this. He had basically articulated her own reason for following him from the club.

  Back at the desk, Alex munched on fig bars washed down with Kern’s as he listed aloud more number combinations. Some compulsive need arose in Hazel to make him laugh again, as she had the first time they’d met. To that end, she offered up her own mathematical series:

  The dumb integers (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 . . .)

  Professor Snobitorium’s pompous constant (Oh, you don’t know it?)

  Hazel Severy’s “Some Numbers That Come to Mind” (5, 187, 12, a million . . .)

  Alex acknowledged her attempts at levity with patience, but he called her a pest and returned to his task. The sound of him talking to himself was soothing, pushing her toward sleep, but she forced herself to stay alert, keeping Alex’s hunched form as a point of focus. She finally stood up, bleary-eyed, and took the remains from the snack tray back to the kitchen. When she returned to the living room, she was surprised to find the blue light of morning already filtering through the curtains. Her itchy wig lay huddled against a leg of the card table, where she had tossed it hours earlier. Her real hair probably looked appalling. She searched the couch cushions for her purse and phone. It was 6:19, almost eight hours since they’d arrived.

  With Alex still at the desk, she slipped down the hall to the bathroom. Looting a vanity kit, she brushed her teeth and flossed. Then, pulling this or that trick out of her purse, she tried her best to minimize the appearance of having stayed awake all night. At least the smell of her suit had dissipated. But then why should she care? Alex wasn’t a rebound possibility; he was a relative, if not a strictly biological one.

  Alex’s muttering grew louder for a moment, penetrating the thin walls, before subsiding again. And in a sudden burst of clarity, she realized what she had known to some extent all night: that singsongy voice. Okay, murmuring wasn’t a fingerprint. It certainly wasn’t scientific. Yet in her gut, she knew it had been Alex in Isaac’s study the day of the funeral. Alex going through Isaac’s things. Alex stealing down the stairs afterward.

  She confronted herself in the mirror. So? She still needed help getting into the computer in order to deal with its contents. Then she could get back on a plane to Seattle knowing that she had made Isaac happy—wherever he was, whatever that meant. That was the goal, wasn’t it?

  She took a deep breath, and when she left the bathroom, she was startled to find Alex standing at the end of the hall looking at her.

  “I was afraid you’d left,” he said.

  “Did you crack it?” she asked breezily, as if she wasn’t at all surprised to see him standing there.

  “Goose eggs, I’m afraid.” Leaning against the wall, he tripped the light switch, flooding the hall in warm light. He made no move to turn it off. She couldn’t help but notice how nice his face was, minus the beard and phony mustache, and she thought it a shame that such a face should go unremarked upon.

  As his eyes settled on her for a moment, his hand rose to his neck, to the corresponding place, she realized, where her scar was. The upturned collar of her jacket had concealed it last night, but this morning she had failed to properly cover it.

  “What’s this?”

  “Oh.” She hesitated. “Childhood accident.”

  “You don’t have to tell me.”

  “No, it’s fine. It’s a burn, actually.” This wasn’t entirely a lie, but it wasn’t the truth, either.

  His eyes went a bit wide.

  Knowing that she wasn’t ready to tell the story, not here in the hall, anyway, she said only, “It looks way worse than it felt.”

  He let his hand fall from his neck. “That’s what memory does, I guess. Deletes the pain.”

  Hazel was suddenly aware of the diminished space between them, as if they had been involuntarily inching toward each other for the past minute. Or was she imagining it? One of us should say something.

  Alex seemed aware of their increasing closeness, too, because he very abruptly turned and pitched himself into the living room. She followed.

  “Listen,” he said, assuming a casual position on an arm of the couch. “If I knew more about what he told you before he died, it might give me a better idea how to get in.”

  “But he didn’t tell me anything.” Again, this was not strictly a lie.

  “Then what does he expect you to do with all this?”

  How could she tell Alex, who clearly worshipped Isaac’s work, what she had been asked to do with his mathematical legacy? How could she tell him about the command to destroy everything (except some equation)? How could she reveal Isaac’s vague warning—Three will die. I am the first—or details about a man she was supposed to contact? Hadn’t she spilled enough already? Yes, she was using Alex to get inside the computer, but wasn’t he using her?

  She moved to the wall. “You haven’t said much about the map.”

  “Until I see the math, Hazel, it could be anything.”

  On impulse, she took out her phone and snapped four shots of the map, each image a separate quadrant of the city.

  “Is that a good idea?”

  She didn’t answer because she had just noticed a pair of red dots that had previously escaped her attention. They were positioned directly on Beachwood Canyon. She motioned Alex over. “It’s not easy to tell, but these two dots could be on Isaac’s street. It could be the house.”

  “Maybe. The stickers are too big to say for certain.” He moved in closer. “Actually, there are three.”

  She squinted.

  “One’s partially hidden behind the other, see?”

  “You’re right.” She read one of the visible dots aloud: “1-0-1-7-1-5-0-5-5-5-3-1.” She started to read the other “1-1-0-1-1-5 . . .” before turning to him. “Do these mean anything to you? Is it a code, maybe?”

  At that moment, a loud and efficient rap came at the door.

  “You should get it,” Alex said, his voice oddly urgent.

  The rap came again, and she left the room. Through the warped peephole, she spied an Eschered image of Flor, bearing a steeple of towels. She relaxed and opened the door.

  “Good morning,” the housekeeper said. “I know it’s early, but I heard you up. Fresh towels?”

  Thinking it best to appear normal, Hazel accepted them. “Thank you.”

  “I should tidy for you, yes?” Before Hazel could protest, Flor had moved past her down the hall.

  “Actually—” Hazel started to say, but the woman was already in the bathroom, unnecessarily wiping up.

  Hazel returned to the living room where Alex sat staring at the suspended checkers game.

  “We have maid service,” she announced helplessly.

  He didn’t appear to hear her. “Did Isaac like checkers?” he asked.

  “Why?”

  “Because either he was playing a game with himself or . . . he had a visitor.”

  Hazel tried to picture her grandfather allowing someone into his hideout, the one he took such pains to conceal.

  “Do you really think he’d bring someone up here?”

  Before Alex could answer, Flor appeared, a cell phone to her ear. “Excuse me. The front desk is asking if anyone called for an Uber.”

  “Oh, right,” Alex said, jumping up and checking his phone. “I have an appointment to get to. Thought we could share a ride.”

  Hazel smiled, though she was disappointed their time together had come to an end. “Of course.”

  * * *

  When they stepped outside, she was glad to find the cloud cover still lingering, making the early hour more tolerable. As they climbed into the back of an awaiting SUV, she reflected on how quickly Bennet seemed to be receding from her mind. Or was this an illusion brought on by the strange excitement of the past ten hours? She worried that onc
e she was alone again, the double pang of heartbreak and anxiety would return.

  Alex suggested that they drop her off at the house first and that he continue to his destination from there. She thought of asking where he was going, but that old reflex of not wanting to appear like she cared too much kicked in. As she gave in to the SUV’s lurching movements, she thought back to the map and wondered aloud, “What did you know about Isaac’s traffic project?”

  Alex began to idly spin his wig on one finger like a plate. “How much do you know about chaos theory?”

  “Some.” Hazel thought of the drip-drip of the kitchen faucet, and of how her brother had used the theory as a very cute excuse not to clean his room: “My room isn’t messy, it’s an intelligent system hiding in apparent disorder.”

  “There was that book everyone was reading in the nineties,” she offered. “And I know Isaac used chaos in his work.”

  “Then you know he was trying to create a mathematical model of traffic using chaotic math.”

  “Right, his project with the city.”

  “We talked by phone quite a bit during that time,” Alex said, smiling sadly at the memory. “That project was supposed to be his way of helping drivers better navigate the roads, but it quickly turned into this obsession—this need to forecast specific events. Some might argue that Los Angeles traffic is already fairly predictable: just avoid the morning and evening commutes. But that’s an oversimplification of motorist behavior—it doesn’t take the ‘noise’ into account. It doesn’t consider everything we can’t foresee: a driver’s mood, the weather, debris in the road, rubbernecking, a flat tire, a stray dog, a fly buzzing in a driver’s ear. Isaac knew that if he was going to truly predict the patterns of traffic, he would have to know absolutely everything. He would have to deal with the noise. Of course, there’s no way to predict each of those tiny chance occurrences—it would be insane to try. But with mathematics, if he could somehow boil all this arbitrary activity down to a single mathematical constant, he might predict congestion, even accidents, right down to the precise minute and location.”