The Last Equation of Isaac Severy

by Nova Jacobs

  As Philip slowed near the sign for the Eaton Canyon Nature Center, he saw what he’d been hoping not to see: Jane’s green Nissan Pathfinder parked on the road several yards from the park’s entrance, its Caltech sticker in the window and crystal necklace dripping from the rearview mirror. It was the necklace Sybil had been wearing that final night when they had all gone out to dinner—the last piece of jewelry their daughter had worn. Philip wondered why Jane tortured herself by placing it in such conspicuous view, but then, everyone had his or her own peculiar way of dealing with the completely undealable.

  How he wished that Jane’s car were as far from the canyon as possible, far from that little red dot. Assuming the dot meant anything, he reminded himself—assuming it wasn’t just some sci-fi fantasy dreamt up by an old man and applauded by a gun-toting heiress. Despite all his father’s excellent work in chaos theory and predictive mathematical models, Philip rejected the belief that the world unfolded in deterministic clockwork. He had refused to believe it in his own work, and he refused to believe it now. Yet here he was. Nellie, of course, had found the entire idea thrilling: “Can you think of anything more exhilarating than the realization that the future is, in fact, knowable?” Yes, he could. In fact, he couldn’t think of anything less thrilling than knowing what’s about to happen before it happens. What, then, is the point of anything?

  But whether the universe made its decisions by calculation or dice roll, the fact remained: his wife was in the canyon. Find Jane, and everything would be right again. Find her, and everything could be put back the way it was, the way it had been when they’d come here so many years ago.

  Philip parked behind the Nissan and opened his glove box, feeling around for his medication. He had already taken a pill earlier, but the last thing he needed was for an oppressive headache to keep him from thinking clearly on the trail. He slid a second pill into his mouth and forced it back with what saliva he could summon.

  Behind muddy clouds, a low splotch of sun was dropping rapidly. Realizing he was losing light, Philip rushed to the entrance. The place was deserted. The Nature Center building, a one-story hut with some taxidermic novelties, was closed for renovations. Beside the door, a familiar sign read “No Ranger on Duty—Hike at Your Own Risk.” Beneath an illustration of a bad-tempered mountain lion was a list of items hikers were encouraged to carry: water, food, sunblock, flashlight, whistle, walking stick. He had none of these, though he did have a flashlight app on his phone. He took a healthy gulp of water from a drinking fountain before hurrying toward the Eaton Falls trailhead.

  It was four thirty. The trail was three miles round-trip, a course that was familiar to him. If he hurried, he could reach the falls in a half hour, eleven minutes ahead of time.

  He ran easily for the first ten minutes or so, even in his dress shoes, but as he passed beneath the concrete bridge of an old mountain toll road, which marked the halfway point to the falls, Philip started to slow. It was hotter than he’d realized. Without stopping, he removed his light coat and tossed it onto some boulders near the bridge to retrieve later. He had come upon a shallow stream when someone called to him.

  “Hey, man.”

  He looked up and saw a young couple with backpacks approaching, both clearly puzzled to find this man in shirtsleeves hopping across the water.

  “You headed to the falls?” the guy asked, frowning at Philip’s oxfords.

  Philip nodded, trying to catch his breath. “You see a woman up there?”

  The pair looked at each other. The girl spoke first. “Actually, was she like your age? Dark hair?”

  “Yeah.”

  “We saw her a while ago, but I don’t think she was up there when we left.”

  “We did move off the path a couple of times,” her boyfriend added, “so she might have passed us.”

  Philip crossed right into the stream, not caring that his shoes were getting soaked, and hurried past them.

  “This place closes soon, you know,” the guy called back.

  Still feeling overheated, Philip took off his shirt and left it in a thicket of trees skirting the stream. If he ran into anyone else, they would just have to deal with the shock of his undefined midsection. As he followed the stream up the sharp ascent of the canyon, it started to drizzle, and the trail darkened with accreting decimal points. He suddenly remembered an equation that he had created as a child, after his father had challenged him to determine at what point raindrops of 0.04-centimeter diameter, falling at a speed of 9 meters per second and at a frequency density of 15 drops per square meter per second, would saturate 25 square kilometers of space—taking into account raindrop overlap, naturally. Philip had created an equation in ten minutes, knowing, of course, that the bait and switch from meters to kilometers was merely a cheap trick. He wasn’t a complete moron, not even at age nine.

  Such rapid stunts of calculation had made his father proud, something that young Philip took for granted. As the years went by, though, he learned that engendering pride in his father was a feat harder and harder to come by. The proud tousles to the hair and pats on the shoulder dropped off in their frequency and enthusiasm. But then, that’s how it had been with his own children. It had been one thing to praise Sybil’s artistic endeavors at age ten, quite another at twenty-five.

  The trail was getting steeper—Philip didn’t remember the climb being this difficult—and his brain was starting to feel constricted. Why was his medication taking so long to kick in? The sound of rushing water grew steadily louder as he approached the trail’s end. Any minute, just around the bend, the falls would appear.

  Something in the brush beside the path fluttered and chirped. Probably some quail hiding from the rain. Jane had once been fond of pointing out such wildlife, along with their group names, always with a wink in her delivery. “Oh look, a bevy of quail . . . a kettle of hawks . . . a scold of jays.” She could always summon these collective nouns so easily. Perhaps this is where Drew had gotten her talent for recall. “A colony of rabbits . . . a cauldron of bats . . .” But what about a group of one? What would he be called? A struggle. A calamity. An embarrassment of Philip.

  Just as he approached the final bend in the trail, something unexpected happened. The rain stopped, and the late-afternoon sun burst from behind the clouds. He was grateful for the extra light, but he hadn’t brought his sunglasses—or were they in his discarded coat?—and the sun pierced his eyes. He shielded his face with one hand, trying not to think about the advancing migraine army. Shade. There would be shade at the falls.

  When he rounded the bend and stepped into the dark shadow of the surrounding rock face, he looked up and saw her. She stood at the top of the falls, at the very edge, looking down. The sun was behind her, feathering the outline of her body. A phrase of hers came back to him: “I would give you the gift of plausible deniability.”

  “Jane!” he shouted.

  She didn’t answer.

  Philip blinked. It must have been an extended blink because when he opened his eyes again, she was no longer there. He glanced around in panic, scanning along the top of the ridge and down at the water.

  “Jane!”

  He kicked off his shoes.

  Just as he reached the water’s edge, she appeared again, this time standing below the falls on the opposite bank. She was smiling at something just behind him. How had she gotten down there so quickly?

  But this second appearance coincided with an urgent stab in his head—a pain more intense than he had ever experienced. That’s when Philip knew that Jane wasn’t standing there at all. He was alone. The auras were hallucinatory now, as Tom’s had been. Oh God, had Jane’s car been imagined, too? And those people on the trail?

  The sun seemed to be getting brighter, which he didn’t understand, not only because of the late hour but also because he was in the shade. Or thought he was. The waterfall seemed to be growing in force, rushing all around and behind his eyes. The rushing was so loud. Why was it so goddamn loud?

&
nbsp; Philip cupped his hands over his ears, but he needed to grab his pills. Were they in his pants pocket? Yes, he had slipped them in there as an afterthought. Good man!

  He sat down at the water’s edge to rest. The bottle was almost full. He had all the relief he would need. He tried to dump a couple of pills into his hand, but ended up with five or six. Screw it. “Take as needed”—that’s what the bottle said, didn’t it, or had he made that up? He dumped them into his mouth, chasing them with a handful of stream water. He seemed to recall that the water from the stream was drinkable, or had been once, but at this point, he didn’t really care. Philip wondered if six pills would be enough.

  The bottle was soon close to empty. Maybe he should save it for Sybil to put in one of her pieces. But, no, Sybil was dead. He had actually forgotten for a second that his daughter was pulverized and in the ground. A memory of her floated up before him: Sybil standing in front of one of her gallery pieces, an expectant look sent his direction. Then an image of himself, stifling his own disappointment while ladling out spoonfuls of feeble praise. There was nothing more sickening than realizing how much you had hurt your own child. How you hadn’t bothered to understand her at all. But then, hadn’t this been a Severy family custom? Upholding scholarly achievement to the point of self-erasure? His father had judged him the instant his research had flagged, had dropped hints of “brain rot” and “irrelevance.” And suddenly, in a confusion of self-admonition and self-pity, Philip couldn’t separate Sybil’s heartache from his own.

  His head now thrummed in a full orchestra of pain. He sometimes wished it were possible to relocate the pain in all its intensity to another section of his body—stomach, chest, arm, knee, where it might take on less significance—because there was something singularly cruel about an ache in one’s head. It assaulted one’s very being. How had his brother ever endured it? Tom would have taken the whole bottle. It would have been nothing to him, like popping an aspirin. Philip looked back at his prescription. Maybe a couple more. He scooped more pills and water into his mouth, though he knew this wasn’t wise. You’re poisoning yourself, Philip Killing yourself.

  I know, he answered, but anything is better than this.

  He blinked out at the water and thought he saw a red dot floating in front of him. It was the dot he had seen on the map, now growing to envelop him. He looked at his watch: 5:04. In seven minutes, someone was going to die in the canyon.

  He let his hand drop to his side. He was very tired.

  The red dot. What about it had seemed so important? What had Nellie said? Murder and suicide—when it comes to a distinction between the two, the equation is blind.

  His head suddenly cleared, the incessant pounding replaced by an overwhelming sense of calm. He looked down at the now-empty bottle as it fell away from his hand.

  “Oh, I see . . .” he said aloud. His eyes closed, and he gave in to gravity, his forehead smacking the cool canyon floor.

  – 25 –

  The Event

  When Gregory entered the lobby of Union Station, a wedding reception was in full, frowzy swing. Tom was already on the other side of the crowd, past the bar and halfway into the passenger waiting area. It would be impossible for Gregory to lose him now. He could practically feel Isaac’s mathematics pushing him (cheering him?) to the predetermined end point. Once it was finished, he would feel the release he needed so badly—the antidote to his fury.

  He had been tracking Tom for the past two hours through deserted downtown streets, fantasy-killing him many times over. First, he fed Tom into the rotating steel wires of a street sweeper. Next, he forced him at gunpoint to the observation deck of city hall, folded him over the railing, and watched him scatter on the sidewalk below. Later, he invited Tom to take a ride on the Angels Flight funicular. He tied his feet to a railroad tie, his hands to an axle, and as the funicular ascended, sat back to observe the man’s body split open.

  When Tom had crossed a bridge overlooking the 101 Freeway, Gregory had briefly considered pushing him into the twinkling red stream of taillights. But the overpass wasn’t far enough from the ground to ensure that Tom would die instantly. He might only injure himself, in which case a passing vehicle would need to finish the job. It had worked for Rhoda Burgess, the woman who thought she could willfully ignore her husband’s basement hobby of child captivity and get away with it. A similar method had worked for an Echo Park woman who thought she’d convinced police that her six-year-old’s third-degree burns were accidental. It was Gregory who decided that the woman’s parking brake should fail one day as she was lifting groceries from the back of her car. Her skull, much like Rhoda Burgess’s, had succumbed under the weight of a Firestone tire.

  Gregory wanted to do something different for Tom, not a repeat performance. He wished he had a few more weeks to think of something on the level of his usual work, but he had run out of time. Besides, if Isaac’s universal computer was leading him here, how could it be wrong?

  Union Station would be a first for him. They were here only because Tom’s usual subway stop had been closed that night for maintenance, and passengers were rerouted to the main hub. Gregory’s phone buzzed again. He had a message waiting from his sister, which he was choosing to ignore. There was also a text from E. J.: You coming in tomorrow morning? People are asking. Apparently he could no longer be relied on to show up for work. But it didn’t matter anymore.

  Gregory picked up his pace a bit, only glancing at the festivities around him. He had a brief flash of his own wedding: Goldie standing on the beach in a wispy gown, the most irresistible she had ever been. But however much he had tried that day, he hadn’t entirely been able to rid his mind of Sybil. A year before that, his heart had cracked in half at the sight of Sybil dressed in white, binding her fate to that totally average bore of a man just because she was going to have his child. Impossible to believe that in her misery, she would have had a second child with Jack.

  Tom veered from the long-distance train tracks to the subway station below. As expected, he chose the Red Line headed for Hollywood. Gregory followed more closely than he had dared previously—so close that when Tom was at the bottom of the escalator, he was at the top. It would have been so easy for Tom to turn around and see the man who had been following him for weeks, even with his poor eyesight. When Gregory reached the platform, he scanned the ceiling and corners for cameras.

  He turned back to Tom, who stood behind the yellow line, hands shoved in his pockets. There was one person on the opposite end of the platform, a woman, but she looked infirm and certainly incapable of doing anything about an incident on the other side of the terminal.

  Gregory checked the timetable. The train was due in two minutes . . . now one minute. He could just hear a distant rumble moving through the tunnel, very faint. The train was likely at Seventh Street already, or Pershing Square.

  He had, of course, considered that he should let Tom go on living his sad life. Incurable, head-fracturing migraines were punishment enough, and by killing him, Gregory would only end his suffering. But then, Tom had lived his entire life like this, and it had led only to his hurting those around him. The world would be a better place with this man removed from it.

  “Tom,” Gregory said, stepping forward. “Tom Severy.” His voice had come out of his throat without hesitation—confident, even—as if it were about to launch into a sales pitch.

  Tom turned and looked at him. Nothing. No recognition. He pulled his sunglasses from his red face and squinted in Gregory’s direction.

  Gregory approached rapidly, causing Tom to take a step back toward the tracks. Then two steps. Once Tom figured out who was addressing him, once complete confusion had overtaken him, it would be easy. But Gregory needed to make sure Tom knew who he was. This was important.

  “Who—?” mumbled Tom. His voice came out in a whimper. The most pathetic sound Gregory had heard from a man. Frail. Fearful. A voice that said, “Don’t hurt me.”

  “Do you know me?”
Gregory demanded.

  He stepped closer to Tom to let him get a good look at his face. Tom could barely manage a flicker of eye contact, and Gregory wondered how he had ever considered this person a threat to him. To anyone.

  “No, I don’t—” That awful whimper again. Then Tom knew. A veil of awareness fell over his eyes.

  “Do I look familiar, Tom? It’s Gregory. You remember Gregory and Hazel Dine. Look at me, Tom.”

  Tom backed away a couple of steps, ever closer to the tracks. The train was on its way now. They could both hear it.

  “Look at me!” Gregory shouted.

  Tom tried to speak, but his vocal cords failed him.

  For a second, Gregory thought the man was going to collapse right there on the platform, fall to his knees and split his nose open on the concrete. The look on his face was one of such subjugation, a plea for mercy, understanding. It was an expression Gregory had always searched for on the faces of child abusers but had rarely, if ever, found. Yet it was the expression Tom Severy was wearing now, without artifice. A face of complete and wretched openness, a look that said, “I am a pitiful human being. I know that.”

  Gregory was surprised by the dissipation of his own anger, but the train was coming now. He had no time for second thoughts. You know how to do this. Don’t stop now.

  But as he took a hesitant step toward Tom, Gregory heard a sound behind him that was out of place: the distinct snick of a shutter. He turned to find a man about fifteen feet away, pulling a camera from his face. Just as he recognized his cousin Alex, he heard someone call from farther down the platform.

  “Eggs?”

  Gregory’s immediate response to seeing Hazel standing there, besides complete surprise, was bewildered amusement. It was almost funny.