by Nova Jacobs
“Philip, hi.” She fumbled with her boxes before setting them on the pavement. “We were all very sorry to hear about your daughter. If there’s anything—”
“Thank you, I’m fine. Really.” He didn’t think he could handle any more pity.
He was about to move on, when she said, “You heard about our break-in?”
“Break-in?”
“Someone forced open several offices on the top floor last week, including mine.”
Philip only now remembered that Elderberg had been the one to move into his father’s old office. His father had rarely used the space since his retirement, but he had never entirely moved out of it, either.
“These boxes belonged to Isaac,” she continued. “I had them locked away in a cabinet, so I doubt anything was taken.”
Philip peered up at his father’s old window. “Student mischief?”
Elderberg shrugged. “Who knows? Unsettling all the same. I was about to drop these at your office, actually.”
“I can take them now, thanks. Sorry, with everything going on, I’d completely forgotten about clearing out his stuff.”
“Please,” she said, helping him gather the boxes. “I was happy to have the great Isaac Severy occupy my workspace for a time.”
The boxes were heavy; Philip’s muscles ached just from the short walk to the parking lot. He loaded them into the trunk of his car and tried to tell himself that the forced entry was a coincidence. Nothing had been taken, after all. But then, how would anyone know? He lifted the lid of the top box to reveal a collection of discolored newspaper clippings.
The articles were all from Southern California papers, mostly the LA Times, their dates spanning decades. “Film Producer Dies in Freak Yard Accident.” “Man Electrocuted in Pool, Faulty Wiring Blamed.” “Man Drowns off El Segundo Beach.” “Static Electricity Turns Man into Human Torch.” “Father Dies Locked in Own Refrigerator.” “Family Car Rolls Backward onto Mother.” Some of the articles were flagged with a red Sharpie.
Isaac had been a nut for these sorts of gruesome incidents. As Philip recalled the similarly grim clippings that littered his father’s house, he felt an urgent pulse travel up the back of his neck, followed by a phantom strobe of light. These auras happened more frequently now, which led him to suspect his migraines were evolving in some way, finding means to outwit his medication.
He shut the trunk and ferreted his pill bottle out of the glove compartment. Philip had managed to convince his doctor to up his prescription significantly, allowing him to accumulate a decent stockpile, but his Subaru reserve would need replenishing. There was a single pill left, and as he tipped the bottle over like a liquor shot, he felt the very image of an upmarket junkie. A highbrow, tweedy version of Tom.
Glancing up briefly to make sure no one had seen this undignified move, he noticed a black town car with opaque windows parked in a corner of the lot, facing out. As he felt the pill slide down his throat, he was overwhelmed by the suspicion that he was being watched, and had been for days.
A second later, he saw Nellie Stone in a black brim hat and sunglasses cutting across the parking lot toward the town car. Philip quickly ducked behind the wheel to avoid detection, but something made him look back in the direction from which she had come. In the shadow of the physics building, he could make out Andrei Kuchek standing there. His colleague wore an irritated expression and clutched a pile of books to his chest, as if it were armor. Kuchek took one last look in Nellie’s direction, mumbled something to himself, and hurried back inside.
Philip felt his anger returning. Letters from Lyons he could ignore, but these repeated intrusions into his life? Nellie had left several messages on his phone the past week, all of which he had deleted without listening to.
When the town car had pulled out of the lot and was gone, Philip locked up his car and tracked Kuchek to the faculty lounge, where he poured his colleague a cup of coffee and asked him about the encounter.
“What did she say, Andrei? Was this the first time she’s approached you?”
Kuchek was typically unresponsive.
“Did you hear what I said, Andrei? Andrei.”
Kuchek dropped his pencil and answered in his strong Czech accent, “I told her you were on leave. Pushy woman. Why don’t you ask her what she wants yourself? I haven’t the time.”
“I know, Andrei. Don’t worry, I’ll see that she doesn’t bother you again.”
Kuchek picked up his pencil and, in a rare moment of curiosity about someone not connected to his work, asked, “Who is she?”
“Someone who knew my father,” Philip said. “If you see her again, please don’t speak to her.”
On his circuitous way back to the parking lot, Philip found himself standing on the modernist footbridge of the Millikan Reflecting Pool in the fading sunlight. He wasn’t sure why he’d come this way; he felt ridiculous on this tiny bridge, like a character in a storybook. He knew he should go home to Jane. He knew he should make time to have a closer look at his father’s boxes. But he felt so inert, as if he were waiting for something to happen—and then it did.
Philip jumped slightly at the sound of her voice.
“I wanted to say how sorry I was about your daughter. I hope you got my card.”
He turned. Anitka stood at one end of the bridge, wearing a saffron-yellow cardigan and striped scarf, a look more New Haven than Pasadena, and her face was strangely blank—no, unhappy. He had never seen her look sad before, and it stirred something protective in him.
“I was on my way to the library. Good to see you.”
“Anitka—”
She stopped.
“Your dissertation. How’s it coming?”
“Still looking for an advisor,” she said with forced cheer. “I have feelers out to John Britton.”
Philip felt the familiar twinge of professional envy. “And how is Great Britton taking your attack on his work?”
“He hasn’t responded, exactly.” She began to step away. “Walk me to the library?”
They started down the tree-lined path in the direction of the Athenaeum, and in a rising sensation of déjà vu, Philip realized this was the second time they had walked this way together. His preoccupation with Anitka had dimmed dramatically since Sybil’s death, to the point where he was sure he had conquered his mania entirely. But he now knew that whatever Anitka had injected into his bloodstream, his recent grief was not an inoculation, just an aggravating course of antibiotics. They overshot the library. Neither of them mentioned it, and they soon found themselves in the quiet of the adjoining neighborhood.
“You’re lucky to live and work here, with your family so close,” Anitka said.
“Yours is in Ukraine?”
She nodded. “I haven’t seen my parents and brothers in two years. I tell myself I can’t afford the travel, but the truth is, I can’t stand the look on their faces when they see me—sort of this desperate pride. I’m the only one who really aspired to anything, and now they expect me to be this sensation, to get rich off science.” She laughed. “It’s idiotic fantasy.”
“You’re in the right place for what you’re doing.”
“But what percentage of PhDs go on to make any kind of living? There are a few slots at Caltech for tenured string theorists and, what, a handful at a few other schools?”
He gave her a sidelong smile. “Remember, those positions are for people who don’t despise the reigning theory.”
She waved her hand with an annoyed flourish. “That’s exactly my point. Think of the few people, like you, who are able to make their livelihood from it. How can I possibly make a life out of introducing a rival to the dominant ideology? And even if I do finish my thesis and graduate, what then? Maybe I get a job teaching F = ma to morons? Or I can hope for an ad: ‘Wanted. Unemployed Theoretical Physicist with No Marketable Skills Outside Pondering the Nature of the Universe.’ ”
He had never heard her talk with such self-effacement.
; “You were right, what you said that night,” she continued.
“I’m just one person,” he protested. “Don’t go—”
“Please. I realized last week, you’ve been right this entire time.” She came to an abrupt stop in front of a ranch-style house. “This is me.”
She turned and stepped up the drive, slipping through a wooden gate to the backyard. He didn’t move. How about leaving right now, Philip?
“Are you coming?” she called over the fence.
He briefly closed his eyes, and followed. Just visiting is all. He walked alongside the house to the back, where a small guest cottage dominated the yard. Anitka stood facing him, her figure framed by a charming ivied trestle. She turned up the stone path to her door and unlocked it.
Inside, she pulled off her scarf and left him alone to survey the place. There were a few sparkly cushions on the couch to indicate that a woman lived here, but little else. The chipboard shelving along one wall bowed under the weight of books and academic papers. Next to it was a dry-erase board, doodled with the mathematical objects that populated the landscape of their discipline. In the center hovered a playful verse from a dead physicist:
Age is of course a fever chill
That every physicist must fear
He’s better dead than living still
When he’s past his thirtieth year
–Paul Dirac, 1926, age 23
“I’ve always hated this rhyme.”
She laughed from the kitchenette. “I guess I like to live my life in a state of perpetual horror.”
Shifting his attention back to the books, Philip noticed an entire section of shelving devoted to chaos theory and nonlinear dynamics—not her area of study—including a collection of his father’s bound papers, flagged with sticky notes. He pulled one off the shelf and looked through its curled and dog-eared pages.
“You’re a fan of my father’s.”
“What did I tell you?”
“Everyone says that, but this is serious.”
She returned with two mugs of tea and handed him one.
“I find his mathematics enjoyable. Don’t you?”
“Sure, but he’s my father.”
“It’s like reading music.”
Philip smiled.
“I once found a mistake,” she said.
“You’re kidding.”
“Oh, a small thing. Nothing, really. I thought of telling him, but then he died.”
But then he died. She had a talent for being blunt while just skirting offense.
Philip wandered to the far side of the room, where an oval table was covered in academic papers and journals. He looked through the titles and saw all the familiar authors: Veneziano, Schwarz and Green, Nambu, Witten, Maldacena, Britton—all the monster minds who had contributed to two string theory revolutions.
“You’ve been reading.”
“Yes, and I wanted to tell you something,” she said with unusual calm. “I had this moment the other night where I felt like the most intractable problem would have been obvious to me had I cared to solve it.” She walked to a window and pulled open the blind, revealing a view of the grass. “I was in the yard, right here, and I heard whistling from a teapot inside the main house—they always make tea and forget the pot is on the stove—and at that exact moment, it was like someone had just walked up and handed me a telegram.” She turned back to the table. “I was aware right then of bumping my head against my own ceiling. I knew with certainty that I am not a physicist, or at least not an academic. I have never been so certain of anything.”
He had followed her to the window. It occurred to him that for once she did not seem to be putting on an act. The bluster she had been walking around with for as long as he had known her fell away. And that made her even more attractive, nearly irresistible, and he marveled at how she had once meant so little to him.
“It’s best that I figure this out now, right?”
“I think you’re being hard on yourself.”
He realized he was standing very close to her, and he forced himself to return to the bookshelf and the doodles. It had taken immense effort to pull away from her, and he knew it was time to leave. That’s when he noticed something. On the whiteboard, in the middle of all the multicolored donuts and other manifolds, was an alien object: a brain. More accurately, the spiraled brain with the little tail he’d come to know so well. The ink didn’t look quite as faded as the other figures, as if it had been drawn more recently.
“Anitka. What’s this?”
She stepped up beside him, her face achingly close. “I’m not sure what you’re pointing at.”
He turned to face her. “This symbol. Where did you get it?”
She smiled. “Don’t you recognize a Fibonacci spiral when you see one?”
He looked back at the drawing and saw that it was, in fact, the famous spiral based on the Fibonacci sequence—at least, an untidy version of one. His own brain was clearly playing tricks.
“It’s not my best work, I grant you,” she said, blinking up at him with her large, sleepy eyes.
“I should go,” he said.
Without warning, she took a gasp of air and threw her hand up to her face. Philip’s chest tightened, his standard response to watching someone about to cry—his wife, his children—but this time it was a strange, unbearable constriction.
She let her hand fall and looked down at her tea. “Oh God, I’m really sorry. I don’t want to keep you.” She was trying to sound casual, but he saw that her lashes were damp. He didn’t know if he could stand seeing one more sad person in his life right now. He was sick to death of sadness, of responsibility, of the weight of everything, and he longed for just one moment of contentment, if not outright pleasure.
He stepped toward her and, setting her mug aside, put a hand on her waist. He leaned his entire body into her and kissed her. They stumbled sightless to a wall, and he pressed her against it, inhaling the perfume of her: the various lotions and hair products, the faint trace of saline, the stale wool of her cardigan. As he moved his lips over her skin, he began to subtract all the superficial smells in his mind until he was left with the muted fragrance of the skin itself. He thought he had never experienced anything more delicious, this small sensory detail that was Anitka Durov’s scent, and he gave in to it entirely.
– 17 –
The House
On a nearly treeless street in South Los Angeles, Gregory pulled up in front of a sun-blanched Craftsman house. He was supposed to be driving to Culver City, where he had an appointment with one of the victims in a recent sex abuse suit leveled at the LA Unified School District. But afternoon traffic had been surprisingly thin, and he was running early. So when his car had reached the nodding pumpjacks of the Inglewood oil field, he’d veered east. As he made the left turn onto Stocker Street, he could feel the hand of Isaac’s universal computer making the calculations to guide his car past Baldwin Hills, Crenshaw Boulevard, and Arlington Avenue.
It had been almost twenty years since he’d seen the house—that is, up until a few days ago, when he’d followed his onetime foster father here. Tom had gotten off a bus and shuffled several blocks to this spot, where he stared through the fence at his old home before the sun became too much for him. Hands clutching the back of his head, Tom quickly returned to the bus stop to curl up in a tormented ball. Though he still visited the gym and library on most days, Tom’s schedule was becoming increasingly erratic, and Gregory had lost track of him several times. Gregory knew, of course, that this moonlighting of his couldn’t go on indefinitely. He needed to make his presence known to Tom, to push his face into Tom’s and say, “Do you know me?” He should have done it when he had him here at the house. But it was too late for that.
The place was now abandoned and had for some time been tanking the surrounding property values. Garbage ringed the yard, and the grass had turned the color of a soiled mattress. A high chain-link fence discouraged trespassing, but it hadn’t stop
ped Krylon vandals from leaving their mark. Why Tom had felt the need to drag himself to this place—to the scene of his past crimes—Gregory could only guess. Perhaps it was the same reason that Gregory was here now. Maybe they both needed to remind themselves of how and why they’d become the men they were.
After pulling a pair of bolt cutters from the trunk of his car, Gregory paused on the sidewalk, recalling the moment when he and Hazel—ages nine and seven—had first emerged from the caseworker’s van and stepped onto the curb. They had been so happy to have a new home (a house!) that they hadn’t bothered to take in a full 360 of the neighborhood. But then, anything had been better than the endless carousel of foster homes or, worse, “the Hall”: a county holding pen where abused and neglected children went to receive additional helpings of abuse and neglect.
Gregory and his sister had endured the caprices of the foster care system for five years, ever since their mother had gotten sick (“cancer” was all they were told) and died alone and penniless. Their father had given them the surname Dine not long before abandoning the family. And since there were no living relatives—or at least none willing to take them in—Hazel and Gregory Dine became orphans. Having been barely four years old during the transition, Gregory could hardly recall the “before” time, the fuzzy memories soon indistinguishable from the vague motherly images he invented in his head. Only one thing seemed certain as they entered the public school system and began to compare themselves with other children: Hansel and Gretel, as their peers dubbed them, were genetic trash.
Gregory and Hazel’s new foster parents had seemed nice at first. Tom Severy, they were told, was the son of a famous professor and was himself a teacher at a local grade school, while Carla, his wife, was a bartender and freelance decorator. The home showed little evidence of Carla’s latter occupation, but she could certainly make a mean G&T for her guests.
