The Last Equation of Isaac Severy(22)
Hazel closed her eyes and riffled the pages with her thumb, as if the book were a deck of cards. It was an old trick of hers; whenever she felt stuck, she would use any available book as a kind of oracle. It was a game, but one she played with a straight face. She stopped her thumb and let the volume fall open. She slid her finger down the left page, stopped, and opened her eyes, ready to take the given words as prophecy. But there were no words under her finger, only one of the many crosshatched pencil illustrations scattered throughout the book. The image was so dramatic, she almost laughed. A man lay dead on a train platform, his luggage piled around him. At the edge of the frame, an anonymous gloved hand gripped a still-smoking revolver.
–?8?–
The Other Severy
The next day, the sun shone garish and bright in a cloudless sky. From his car parked down the street, Gregory monitored the guests trickling out the front door of Hollywood’s Harvard Hotel. As he watched dreary faces pass under a faded letter H, he thought back to Hazel’s strange behavior the previous day. There had always been something slightly impulsive about his sister, as if she were obeying a set of irrational edicts given only to her. He wasn’t entirely surprised, for instance, that she couldn’t keep a business afloat. But yesterday she’d seemed particularly off, almost as if she sensed something was bothering him, and that the something was Tom. But even if she had somehow guessed—she could be alarmingly perceptive, it was true—she could never envision what Gregory might be planning.
He returned his attention to the hotel, remembering something Fritz had said about one of Isaac’s metaphors: the universe as massive computer, continuously determining its next moves. It had been Isaac’s life ambition to tap into this computer, and Gregory imagined his grandfather’s mathematics now calculating the entire rhythm of Los Angeles—who would live, who would fall ill, and who would step out the front door of a hotel and meet his demise. What if Isaac’s universe-sized analogy was, in fact, a true description of how the world worked? Didn’t this giant mainframe relieve the burden of calculation from the individual? If so, would Gregory ever be responsible for what he did next?
The double doors of the hotel opened again, and two men emerged. The first was of no interest to him: Hispanic, inked barbwire curling up his limbs. The second man was the object of Gregory’s surveillance: tidy in a white T-shirt and jeans, cloaked behind dark wayfarer sunglasses. He gripped a small duffel, which Gregory knew held gym clothes, a thermos, a water-logged notebook, and a blue Bic pen. There would also be a plastic lunch sack and a migraine medication of fickle efficacy.
The Harvard Hotel on Harvard Boulevard was not a hotel, of course, but a halfway house for former inmates. Like most residences of its kind, it maintained a low profile in order to keep families in the neighborhood from coalescing into pesky committees bent on their banishment. Criminals have to live somewhere, but why did Tom Severy have to live within five miles of Gregory’s house?
As he had done on the previous five days, he held his breath when Tom came into view. His former foster dad was pale and light-eyed like Philip and Paige, and when blasted with the autumn sun, he squinted in the familiar way. He was remarkably toned—by Severy standards, anyway—and his once emaciated body had a wiry compactness. The stress of a twenty-year prison term, however, was apparent. His hair had gone white, and his skin clung red and tired to his face. His entire body pitched forward, with a slight hitch to his stride. It wasn’t quite a limp, but it was on its way.
Gregory stepped from his car and into the shade of a ficus tree, though he needn’t have worried about being seen. Tom’s eyesight was terrible. Yet he couldn’t rid himself of the idea that the man he had once called his father somehow detected his presence, was expecting him even. Tom had been wise enough not to make an appearance at his own father’s funeral—Gregory had dutifully monitored the crowd that day, prepared for such an occurrence—and as far as he could figure, Tom had no way of knowing what he and Hazel currently looked like. Gregory was vigilant about keeping images of himself and his family off the internet. Even if Tom did notice that he was being watched or got close enough to make out his face, he would hardly recognize his onetime foster son. The last time they had seen each other had been in a courtroom. Gregory had just turned twelve.
Tom made his way east to the Metro station at Hollywood and Western. Gregory tailed him into the tunnel below, and when Tom boarded the Red Line for downtown, Gregory chose a seat one car over. Given the immediate surroundings, he might have been in New York or London, except that the LA Metro felt oddly sanitary; there simply weren’t enough freaks and foul smells to put it at the level of a thoroughly used rail system. At Pershing Square Station, Tom exited the train and emerged into the sun.
His first stop was a nonprofit health club a few blocks from the station, where he would spend an hour on the second floor while Gregory waited at a deli across the street. Under his watch, Tom hadn’t missed a day at this miserable little gym. Gregory supposed that aerobic and weight-bearing exercise was a carryover from prison—a healthy alternative, perhaps, to Tom’s self-medicating of years past.
After his workout, hair slick from the shower, Tom would walk a block to the Central Library. There, he would make his way through the grand rotunda to the reference section, where he would pore over medical textbooks, face inches from the page, scribbling notes until closing. The two times Gregory had managed to walk behind Tom unnoticed, he caught sight of bizarre photographs: all varieties of screwdrivers and chopsticks being thrust into patients’ eye sockets. Gregory wondered if it was the lobotomy’s potential for pain alleviation that interested Tom. Had the pain really gotten to the point where an ice pick through the head was the only option left? But then if Gregory had found himself in the tiny minority of migraine sufferers for whom medication was useless, wouldn’t he, too, fantasize about extreme prefrontal surgery?