The Last Equation of Isaac Severy(16)

“Uh . . .”

“Look, I don’t mean to be pushy,” she said, “but I need your thoughts on my dissertation.”

“You’ve changed topics, then?”

“You know I haven’t.”

His chest rose and fell. “As I’ve said before, you’d be better served finding someone else—at this point, someone outside the school who might be of actual help to you.”

“I’d like your opinion on some new ideas is all. No strings—” She swallowed the pun.

He was only half listening as he locked up his office. “Well, I can’t talk before Friday.”

After a small nod, he retreated down the hallway, expecting her to call after him, as was her habit. When she didn’t, Philip turned around and was surprised to see her marching in the opposite direction. He watched her for a moment, his eyes involuntarily straying to the curve of a hip as she turned into the stairwell. He looked away, feeling a stitch of guilt as he realized how brusque he’d been with her. But how else to rid himself of a pest?

He checked his watch. In his rush to flee Anitka, he had given himself excess time to make it to class, which didn’t start for another ten minutes. Philip ducked into the faculty lounge. Not being in the mood for departmental chitchat, he was pleased to find the kitchen deserted, but as he crossed the room, he noticed a colleague seated at a corner table, nose to the woodgrain, pencil scribbling. It was only Andrei Kuchek, and chitchat-wise he was harmless.

For as long as Philip had known Kuchek—as many papers as they had coauthored as members of the department’s string theory group—Philip was still made to feel like a stranger whenever he walked into a room where his friend was working. Kuchek was the classic specimen of a nearsighted, socially challenged academic: a man who devoured his work whole and avoided speaking to anyone unless absolutely necessary. For this, he was mercilessly, though affectionately, teased. Kuchek’s own students routinely called him the Asp or Professor Aspy, which Philip had initially assumed was some unkind allusion to Kuchek’s lean, snakelike appearance. Only later did someone inform him that Asp was short for Asperger’s, a syndrome for which Kuchek seemed a strong candidate.

“Morning, Andrei.”

No reply. Typical. It was the little game the two of them played, though Philip could never be sure that it wasn’t entirely one-sided.

“Good to see you at the service, Andrei. Really, it meant a lot.”

Nothing.

“How’s the coffee this morning? . . . What’s that, you say? Extraordinary?”

He was filling his mug with steamless coffee when he realized he was still holding the brain-spiral envelope in his other hand. He set down the coffeepot and, with a butter knife from the rack, slit open the envelope. On a single rectangle of white cardstock, in tidy penmanship, it read:

So sorry to hear of your father’s passing. A truly monumental loss. I had been in touch with him regarding his recent research.

Please call. Whenever is convenient for you, naturally.

P. Booth Lyons

Government-Scholar Relations (GSR)

There was a phone number at the bottom, 703 area code. Wasn’t that Virginia? P. Booth Lyons. Philip stared at the card for a long minute before he realized he had been holding his breath. Why the hell was P. Booth Lyons contacting him? His father had playfully referred to him as either “Phone Booth” or “that spook,” because Lyons had been borderline harassing Isaac for years, dating back to his retirement. But it was all through letters, emails, and persistent voice messages from his secretary, which led Philip to believe that he was probably harmless. Though there had been one night, after Isaac found a note on his front door (that’s why the brain-spiral seemed familiar), that Philip had briefly considered getting a restraining order so that his father might live out his emeritus years in peace.

The last time the subject had come up had been over a father-son lunch at the faculty dining hall, during which Philip had started to wonder about his father’s mental stability. “Mr. Phone Booth is starting up again,” his father had said over a chicken salad. “If I want to start my career as a mathematical spy, I guess now’s my chance.”

“Right.”

“I’d kind of like to know what this Government-Scholar business is while I’m still alive. Should we go meet him?”

“I don’t know, Dad. What happened the last time a bunch of mathematicians and physicists got together to help the government? Oh, right: somewhere in Asia, a quarter million people died because their skin melted off.”

“Yes, yes, but how do we know that the ‘Government’ in ‘Government-Scholar’ is the US? He’s never actually specified which government we’re talking about.”

“A con man hazy on specifics, huh? The man is harassing you. Let’s not indulge him.”

A frown from his father. “Have you always been this way? So staid and unadventurous?” Isaac was not generally a vicious man, but he continued, “I think this tranquilized attitude of yours is enfeebling your mind and your work. I keep up with everything you’re doing, Philip, and frankly . . .”

In that second, he wished his father really were battling senility, because that would hurt less than the alternative.

“Dad, stop with the dramatics, please. We’re allowed to have fallow periods. As you well know.”