The Last Equation of Isaac Severy

by Nova Jacobs

  Hazel was no longer looking at him. She was studying the man who stood behind him. “Is that . . .?”

  Gregory turned again to face Tom, who by now held a look of strange clarity. Tom looked back and forth between the siblings. The two of them standing there must have felt like the ambush of his nightmares. He held his head in one hand, the way he did just before a migraine hit. He had already crossed far beyond the yellow line, and was standing at the edge of the platform. The train appeared. He turned to face the void and stepped beyond it. Hazel cried out.

  And where four people had stood, there now stood three.

  – 26 –

  The Room

  Philip awoke in a familiar room. He couldn’t figure out why it was familiar, only that he had been there before. The green curtains were drawn, leaving only a small bedside lamp to light the space. He could hardly move. Heavy bedcovers pinned him down. But wait, he was alive. This meant the equation wasn’t perfect—there were errors in his father’s math. The world wasn’t all gears and mechanics and systems. Uncertainty had won!

  Perhaps his father had known this all along, had known that however well his equation worked, one couldn’t entirely escape a certain degree of uncertainty. Is this why he had been hesitant to show Philip the equation? Had he been afraid that his son would find the flaw in his perfect system? Philip would probably never know, but this answer would have to comfort him for now.

  How long had he been asleep? He was glad to see a glass of water on the nightstand. With some effort, he propped himself up and reached for it. That’s when he heard rustling nearby.

  “Feeling better, I hope,” said a man with a Slavic accent. “Your migraines are getting worse, then?”

  A light went on at a corner desk. There sat Kuchek, of all people, pencil in hand, poised above a notebook. He wore an expression that said he would allow Philip only a cursory moment of his attention.

  “Andrei?”

  “I hope the bedding is comfortable. I’m not very good with that kind of thing.”

  “Wait. You found me?”

  “Someone found you,” he said. “You were lucky.”

  Philip reached for his head.

  “You did overdo it,” Kuchek continued. “You must be more careful.”

  Remembering the pills, Philip’s hand went to his abdomen. “Did they pump my stomach?”

  His colleague’s attention had already wandered back to the notations in front of him.

  “Was I taken to the hospital?” Philip pressed.

  Kuchek held up a finger, frowned, and scribbled something.

  Philip glanced around. “I need to call my wife.”

  Kuchek’s pencil kept moving.

  “Now is not the time for your mirror symmetry, Andrei. I need to call my family.”

  “I’m not working on mirror symmetry.”

  “Then what is so supremely important that you can’t get to it later?”

  Kuchek didn’t answer, but then he never responded to anger or irritation.

  Philip fell back onto the pillow. “By all means, Andrei, let me chatter on while you pretend not to hear me. May as well put one of those confessional screens between us.”

  No response.

  “My father used to take me to confession when I was young,” he continued. “Not because he was trying to indoctrinate me or anything—he just wanted to give me something to push against, to show me the absurd alternative to science. Though I must admit, I found it strangely comforting.”

  More scribbling.

  “So what shall I confess now? How I tried to kill myself in the canyon because the pounding in my brain became unbearable? That I intentionally OD’d because of a goddamn headache?”

  Kuchek didn’t flinch.

  “Or shall I tell you how Jane has been deeply depressed since Sybil’s death, and I’m emotionally incapable of helping her through it? Or maybe I should confess how I’ve been cheating on my wife with one of our doctoral candidates.”

  Kuchek looked up at last. “Don’t flay yourself, Philip. It’s natural.”

  “What is?”

  “I fall in love all the time, have quite a lot of sex in my off-hours. Try not to look so surprised.”

  “You don’t have a wife.”

  “Philip, the passion you have—or had—for your work is the same passion you have now for your lovely doctoral candidate. It’s just all mixed up, confused.”

  This conversation was getting strange. Andrei Kuchek had love affairs? The man didn’t even flirt. As far as Philip had observed, Andrei had yet to realize that spouting facts tends to deflate good conversation—like a human web browser always spoiling the fun with the right answer. But perhaps he had misjudged him.

  Philip pulled himself to sitting, looked around. “This isn’t your apartment, is it?”

  “No, but I’ll be returning there shortly.”

  Philip pictured some gangly math kitten waiting on Kuchek’s sofa.

  “So what is this place?”

  “Don’t you recognize it?”

  Philip glanced around at all the incompatible furniture that somehow seemed to go together. A pine trunk covered with the spillover from an adjacent bookshelf. An antique secretary desk against one wall, a dusty Navajo carpet beneath it. A tacky cupid clock ticking deliberately from a bureau. And then there was a J. M. W. Turner ship-at-sea knockoff that appeared to glow from within.

  “I’ve never seen this room in my life, yet it’s familiar.”

  “You haven’t seen it, Philip, because the lights have always been off. But it is your room.”

  “My room?”

  “I’m not working on my own mathematics, I’m working on yours. I thought you needed some help illuminating the space. So here I am.”

  “Illuminating the space . . . ? Yes—”

  Philip pushed off the covers.

  My room! How did I not know it?

  As he looked wildly about him, a feeling of rapture grew in his chest. He had spent so much time between these four walls, in the dark, blind, crawling on the floor, grasping, in an attempt to put all the furniture and objects in their place. He had done this so that he might map out one more room in the incomprehensibly expansive mansion of string theory. And here he was now, for real. The light was on, at last! But there were still some dark corners, and he wanted desperately to see everything.

  “We have to turn on all the lights, Andrei!” he shouted. “Now! Turn them all on, before I forget—”

  “Shh, slow down. One at a time, one at a time.”

  There was a knock at the door. He looked to Kuchek.

  “Who’s that?”

  “How should I know?”

  “Are you going to answer it?”

  “Can’t. It’s not my room.”

  Philip pulled himself out of bed with newfound energy, but as he approached the door, he hesitated. The knocking continued, except now there seemed to be fists upon the door.

  He knew what was on the other side, but he pressed his ear against it to be sure. He could hear their voices: Jane, Sidney, Silas, Faye. And then two more: Jack and Drew. They were all waiting for him.

  “Is Grandpa going to wake up?” he heard Drew ask.

  “I think so,” Jack told her. “Look at his eyelids.”

  “Philip? Can you hear us?” Jane was pleading. “Someone get the nurse . . .”

  “His fingers are wiggling,” Silas said.

  Then Sidney: “Hey, Dad, wake up . . .”

  Philip was struck by the timbre of his sons’ voices, how each was distinct and separate from the other. How often he let himself overlook that.

  He turned back to the room for one more look. Kuchek gave him a static wave and resumed his work.

  I must remember this space precisely as it is so I can re-create it later. I can’t forget this moment!

  He knew that the finer details of the room would be lost, but he greedily took in what he could. And when he was ready, he put his hand on the knob and
opened the door.

  PART 3

  * * *

  The unpredictable and the predetermined unfold together to make everything the way it is.

  —TOM STOPPARD, ARCADIA, 1993

  – 27 –

  The Assassin

  Hazel picked up the green telephone as Gregory, on the other side of the glass, did the same. He looked oddly well—relaxed, even—in his standard-issue jumpsuit, and his eyes held unmistakable relief.

  “Eggs,” she said into the receiver. In that single name, she tried to inject everything she felt about her brother, in all its affection and complexity.

  The day after the incident at Union Station, Gregory had turned himself in to the LAPD, but not before officially confessing to E. J., who, after all, had deep down already known. Better to get it over with. The two had then gone together to their superiors with the revelation that Gregory had killed many, many people: fourteen in all. He didn’t point out that these were all very bad people; he thought it in poor taste to pat himself on the back. But he did make it clear to the chief of their division that Detective E. J. Kenley had figured out the entire thing and surely deserved a promotion. Maybe, while they were at it, E. J.’s Minority Youth in Peril project could be granted some additional funding. E. J. yelled at Gregory to shut the hell up, but she felt buffeted by so many conflicting emotions that she had to get up and walk out of the room.

  Within hours, the story had hit the national news. Hazel felt nauseated by what her brother had done, but she forced herself to listen, read, and watch whatever was available, if only so that it might reveal the part of him she did not know or hadn’t wanted to know. She thought she would never hear an end to the phrases cranked out for the occasion—vigilante justice, renegade cop—as well as all the predictable allusions to fictional characters who had taken the law into their own hands. A few of the headlines betrayed a certain misty-eyed awe for the detective-gone-bad, with labels like “Abuse Avenger,” “Southland Renegade,” and “Lone-Wolf Cop.” But there had been an immediate backlash against such characterizations, and much online scolding of the media for Gregory’s portrayal as some kind of modern-day Zorro or Count of Monte Cristo.

  His story elicited plenty of screaming on both sides. One celebrity attorney went on national news and shouted, “If Greg Severy wants to be a Wild West vigilante, let him die like one: at the gallows tree.”

  Hazel knew that she was supposed to feel some kind of outrage at her brother’s actions, something closer to what her sister-in-law was going through: “How could he do this? How could that monster do this to us?” But when Hazel’s initial nausea had passed, a curious sense of wonder set in at her brother’s hidden motivations, his complete dedication to his crimes, and his ability to conceal his parallel life so effectively. How much mental exertion must it have taken to manufacture these accidents, each one tailored to its unlucky recipient? Her brother may not have been blessed with a mathematical brain, but he had a frighteningly methodical one.

  She wondered if Tom would have been his most recent victim had Gregory not been interrupted, and had their former foster father not finished the job for him. Or would the outcome have been the same, regardless of her and Alex’s interference? Tom’s death had deeply rattled her, not least of all because the instant she had recognized him on the train platform, some ancient anger had risen within her to wish him over the edge. She wanted to punish him for everything he had done and not done, for all the injuries that would never heal, no matter how many years of therapy she and Gregory paid for. And when he had fallen onto those tracks, it was as if she had actually pushed him. A part of her had wanted him to die, yes, but Hazel also knew it was just another of her involuntary mental projections, and when the train screeched to a stop, she felt only horror and pity.

  “So here I am,” Gregory said flatly. “In the onesie I’ll be wearing every day for the rest of my life.”

  It now occurred to Hazel that the comic violence she had been mentally conjuring for years had been reflected in her brother’s mind. But with him, the dark wishes had transformed into action. She smiled sadly.

  “E. J. called me before it hit the news. You’re like this psycho hero now.”

  “I wasn’t sure you’d come.”

  Hazel leaned forward, as if they were seated at a café table instead of separated by bulletproof glass.

  “I’ll visit you as much as I can. I will.”

  Gregory glanced away. “It’s weird,” he said. “After so many years of fantasizing about his death, I was actually sorry to see him go over the edge.”

  “Would you have pushed him?”

  He shook his head. “Something happened this time. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t do any of it anymore.”

  Her throat constricted. “I never thought he would look so—”

  “Defeated?”

  She nodded.

  A few seconds passed before either of them spoke.

  “Haze? You never said why you were at the station. Don’t tell me: the concurrence of events?”

  She shook her head. “I only knew that something would happen at that spot. Isaac’s math told me.”

  His eyes flickered with far-off understanding. “So the equation is real.”

  “Wait, you knew about it?”

  Gregory’s face twitched, betraying a surfacing memory. “He called me two days before he died, told me he had an equation that revealed the city’s murders—including what I was doing. I told him I didn’t know what he was talking about, that he’d finally lost it, but somehow I knew it was true. I knew that he saw me.”

  Hazel was still trying hard to process this. “What do you mean, he saw you?”

  “He said that his mathematics had led him to me. He wouldn’t say how, but all I can think of is that he was testing out his equation and by coincidence saw me at the exact time and place of one of the so-called accidents. Once he’d connected me to that crime, he kept tabs on me. After he died, I found a tracking device on my car.”

  “If he knew what you were doing,” she asked in a low voice, “why didn’t he turn you in?”

  Her brother leaned close to the glass. “He mailed me a letter just before he died. I left it for you, in our old hiding place. It’s quite a read.”

  This surprised her. But then why should she be surprised that Isaac had written more than one letter? She thought of telling Gregory about her own letter from him but realized they were short on time. She still had so many questions, including one she was afraid to ask.

  “What about Sybil?”

  He bit down on his lip. “What about her?”

  “Isaac predicted her death, too. I found these on a map he left behind.” She reached into her coat pocket, where she had kept the two identical dots. She held them up for him to see. “It’s the date and time of Sybil’s death. Twice.”

  She detected a disturbance pass over her brother’s face, one that for a moment made him look like a boy again. Hazel desperately wanted to embrace him as she had done when they were small, when one of them had been sad and they huddled together on a single mattress—an isle in a sea of hurt. Then the look was gone, and the man was there once again.

  “She was pregnant,” he said, as if it were a confession.

  She frowned. “How do you know? Are you sure?”

  “I saw the autopsy.”

  Hazel pulled the dots from the glass and stared at them in her hand. She saw them now not as redundancies, but twin deaths occurring at the same instant. Is that what Isaac had meant when he wrote Three will die?

  For one wild moment, she almost asked Gregory where he had been that night. But no. Her brother had adored Sybil. Her next thought was to ask who the father was, but she put this notion out of her mind, too, and said simply, “No wonder Jack was so messed up.”

  “I don’t think he knew.”

  “How could he not know his wife was pregnant?”

  “Autopsy said she was only a couple months along. Maybe she
was undecided about telling him.”

  “Well, he must know now.”

  He shook his head. “The coroner’s office owed me a favor, so I asked them not to disclose it to the family. Least I could do.”

  “Least you could do?”

  “I’m telling you, okay? No one else. There’s been enough pain.”

  She nodded in understanding. A door opened behind him, and a guard appeared.

  “What’s it like in there, anyway?” she asked.

  “They keep me busy with dumb work, though I have plenty of time alone to think. I’ve been writing a lot, just so there’s a record of what I’ve done and why. Maybe someday Lewis can read it, I don’t know . . .” He let the rest fall away. “Reflection, I guess that’s what my life is now.”

  He turned to the guard and held up a finger. “Be an aunt to Lewis. He’ll love you if you let him.”

  It wasn’t a final good-bye, but tears pooled in her eyes. “Wait,” she said, voice breaking. “How’s the food?”

  He smiled. “Good as any. It’s all the same to me.”

  At the guard’s prompt, Gregory hung up the receiver and blew his sister a kiss.

  * * *

  No longer seeing any reason to avoid Beachwood Canyon, Hazel paid her first visit to the house in weeks. She let herself in with a key hidden in a potted palm, stopped off at the kitchen for a butter knife, and climbed the stairs. Outside Isaac’s study, she knelt on the floor and pried up the chronically loose plank to reveal a narrow space. Their childhood hiding place was mustier than she’d remembered, with fresh termite trails in the wood. At the bottom sat the letter her brother had promised. After replacing the board, she sat back against the wall to read it. There were two envelopes: a larger one addressed to Gregory at his house and a smaller one folded within, scrawled with the single word Proof. She set aside the letter and opened the smaller envelope. In it she found a stack of photocopied clippings, a few of which fell to the floor. She had only to glimpse the headlines to see that these were news briefs detailing unusual deaths throughout LA County: “Family Car Rolls Backward onto Mother,” “Man Drowns in Own Bathtub,” “Film Producer Dies in Freak Yard Accident.” She set these aside and unfolded the handwritten letter, its script shaky.