The Last Equation of Isaac Severy(15)
He paused for a moment to take in a pair of official-looking goldenrod envelopes. Their strident color and government seals insisted that they be opened immediately, but there was a limit to the information he could take in right now. Philip opened a side drawer and dropped them inside.
Sifting through the sympathy cards, his eyes passed over the words irreplaceable and adored, and over names he knew well and those he recognized only dimly. But the words and phrases were just vacant syllables, incapable of conveying the true nature of any person, let alone his father. “He has left a great blah blah” . . . “If there’s anything I can blah” . . . “He will be truly shut the hell up”. . . “Never have I met a more seriously, fuck off . . .” Philip was trying to decide what to do with the letters when he remembered the envelope in his pocket. He pulled it out and stared at the spiraled brain again. The symbol suddenly seemed familiar. But from where?
He was about to pick up the knife again when Anitka Durov, a fourth-year grad student from Ukraine, appeared at his door. He didn’t have to turn to know she was standing there; her voice was unmistakable. After however many years of living in the United States, she showed no signs of giving up her thick accent.
“Professor Severy, I wanted to say I’m very sorry for your loss,” she said with a peculiar flatness, as if she were holding a tourist’s phrase book just out of sight.
“Thank you,” he managed.
“I was sorry we didn’t get to talk at the service.”
“I didn’t realize you were there,” he said, glancing up.
She smiled. “I met your father once. He was an incredible man.”
“That he was.”
“His exploratory work on highway systems was quite brilliant.”
He started to clear a space in his desk for the letters as she continued. “This idea that traffic is a single, predictable organism rather than a bunch of separate objects?”
He threw her an impatient look. “If you’ll excuse me, Anitka—”
“It’s a bad time?”
“They do make me teach once in a while.”
“Sure, I get it.” She pivoted theatrically out of the room.
But as he gathered his material for the lecture, Philip could sense her lingering outside the door, waiting to ensnare him the instant he crossed the threshold. Anitka Durov was the last person he wanted to see at the moment, and not just because she had the strange power to unnerve him. She had become a departmental pest, an unpopular doctoral candidate who, after having completely rejected her original course of study, was now desperately hunting for a dissertation advisor. Her original advisor, Kimiko Kato, one of the top string theorists in the world, had emphatically refused to work with her, female solidarity aside. And now Philip had become Anitka’s prime target, despite the fact that her intended thesis was in polar opposition to everything he stood for. She had formed a deep attachment to him after he had come to her rescue the previous spring in what became known across campus and the physics blogosphere as “the Durov Affair.” Anitka Durov had, against all odds, pulled off one of the most improbable hoaxes in the history of scientific journals when she submitted a phony, pseudonymous paper on an underexplored question in string theory to the European Review of Theoretical Physics.
When the prank was discovered, as she had taken no real pains to hide its true authorship (apart from a fake author website easily traceable to her IP address), Anitka was promptly suspended. She fought the suspension aggressively, arguing that there had been a noble, twofold purpose to her hoax: first, to expose the flaws in the editorial review process of physics journals, and second, to humorously demonstrate (though none found it funny) the lack of scientific rigor in the string theory community at large. How was it, she asked, that after two weeks, only one reader had noticed anything wrong with her half-nonsensical paper?
It would have been one thing, the department felt, if she had simply submitted her paper to the online arXiv, where it could have been deleted or ignored, but to commit fraud to actual paper, in a real archival journal, was inexcusable. Yet Philip knew that the faculty’s indignation had little to do with “serious scientific fraud,” as the members so condemned it. The truth was far more personal. In nearly any other circumstance, they would have applauded the entire confidence trick, smugly congratulating themselves for being in on the joke. Anitka’s name would have been bandied about at parties, praised at the blackboard, and waggishly cited in academic papers, but because she had lampooned the work of many distinguished theorists—going so far as to copy and paste verbatim from their papers to create a kind of humiliating pastiche—the targeted faculty were less inclined to find her stunt cute or admirable.
Philip was the only professor to come to Anitka’s defense, calling her demonstration “reckless and stupid” but “ultimately carried out in the spirit of academic risk taking.” After a few months of suspension and a warning from the department, Ms. Durov was permitted to continue her studies. But Anitka’s reputation had been blighted by the whole episode, and now, as she was homing in on Philip as an advisor, he was regretting his former heroics.
He stepped into the hallway.
“Maybe we could talk later,” Anitka suggested as he headed off to class.
“Why don’t we catch up over email?”
“Or over a drink?”