The Last Equation of Isaac Severy(14)
Dear Isaac,
Are you sure you are of sound mind? (Have to ask.) How am I supposed to help you when you haven’t told me where to look? Room 137? Not helpful. This isn’t exactly a “By the way, can you water my plants now that I’m dead?” type of favor. I am broke and have a business that is failing. Tomorrow, I’m going to have lunch with my brother and then I’m going to get on a plane and resume my life. What else can I do? I hope you’ll forgive me.
Miss you awfully,
Haze
PS: You can’t expect me to destroy the letter. It is the last thing I have from you, and I just can’t do it.
As she was typing this appeal, Hazel noticed something—or rather, she noticed the absence of something. The keys weren’t sticking; the metallic ball stamped away without stutters. How, then, had Isaac’s letter been riddled with the typewriter’s habitual tics? She inspected the casing and found his initials—I.D.S.—scratched into the blue plastic. It certainly was his machine. Had he gotten the thing repaired after he’d typed the letter? She slid open his desk drawers one by one, hoping to find she didn’t know what. A receipt for typewriter repair? She found only mechanical pencils, notebooks of equations, and folders filled with clippings from the obituary pages—a lifelong obsession of his.
Finally, giving up, she pulled her impromptu letter from the roller. She was not a detective, she told herself, and this was not a whodunit. Yet in a final move of genre-inspired panic, Hazel dropped the page and—snip snip—its corresponding piece of ribbon into the trash bin and set a match to it. After the flame swelled and died, she doused the ashes with water from a spider plant and tossed the mess out the window. It was the same window, she noted, that Isaac had mentioned in his letter. Seeing her sleuthing to the end, she pulled out her phone and after a few clicks, pulled up a lunar calendar. Yes, it had indeed been a setting crescent moon the evening of October 15, the night before he posted his letter—two days before his death. As she looked up at the now-dark patch of sky, a string of words began to gather in her mind, where they arranged themselves into yet another puzzling question: Why go twentysome years without fixing your typewriter, only to get it repaired the day before you die?
–?6?–
The University
On the Monday morning following his father’s burial, Philip arrived at his office in the Charles C. Lauritsen Laboratory of High Energy Physics to find two things attached to his door. The first was a stiff envelope sticking out of the jamb at neck level, as if poised for a tracheal paper cut. In neat pen it said: “Please read. Re: Your Father.” Philip pulled it from its crevice. There was no return address, only a strange design in the corner: a tiny spiral with a tail extending downward, like a disembodied brain. He folded the envelope and slipped it into his jacket pocket in exchange for his keys.
The second item was a flyer taped to the door’s frosted glass, featuring a photo of himself staring into the camera with a look of mild digestive discomfort. Right below, a bouncy font announced the talk he would be giving later that week, entitled: “New Non-Perturbative Results for Non-BPS Black Hole M-Brane Constructions in M-Theory.” The lecture was part of a series of dry-run talks to be given in preparation for the International Conference on Particle Physics at the CERN laboratory in Switzerland in the new year. While standing above the world’s largest particle accelerator, men and women like Philip could reveal the brilliant math they had been forging behind closed doors—mathematical physics attempting to answer the only question he and his colleagues found worth asking, the question that had eluded even Einstein: How do we unify the four forces of the universe into one law?
But at that moment, standing in front of his Caltech office of twenty-five years, looking at a photo of his visibly younger self, Philip didn’t feel in a position to be answering questions about anything, let alone the nature of the universe. He squinted to read the small print at the bottom of the flyer, which told him that his lecture was that Wednesday at five fifteen. Yes, right. He would have to scramble to prepare something now, something that didn’t make his research sound as if it had completely stalled. A conversation with his father would have helped spur him on, and the realization that he would never discuss anything with him again—would never pop into his father’s old office in the Sloan Laboratory of Mathematics and Physics, just two buildings over—made him feel unbearably old.
Philip unlocked the door and, avoiding a pile of sympathy letters at his feet, stepped to the window for some air. He cranked open the fourth-story casement to reveal yet another cloudless day in paradise, the sun doggedly illuminating every speck of campus, every leaf on every olive tree. Philip had never quit marveling at how much intellectual power inhabited this 124-acre patch of Southern California. How anyone managed to ignore the swaying palms and raging light outside their windows long enough to have a single intelligent thought still mystified him. Give him a gloomy country—England, Sweden, Russia—and he’d show you a nation of busy scientists. Give him a balmy paradise, and he’d point to people finding every reason not to do theoretical physics. Caltech seemed to be the exception.
Rescuing the envelopes from the floor, he tore into each with a letter opener Jane had given him many years ago as a tenure gift. Ever the sentimentalist, she had had the knife inscribed with a small heart close to the blade, and Philip now found his thumb exploring the heart’s delicate ridges and the sweet, if obvious, inscription: You are my constant.