The Last Equation of Isaac Severy(23)

At the end of his studies, Tom would take the train back north, sometimes stopping off at a Ralphs grocery before returning to his room by curfew. As far as Gregory could make out, Tom was not looking for a job, and he didn’t imagine that the gate check issued to him at Lancaster State Prison would last him very long. Would Tom eventually contact his brother or sister for money? Or would his pride win out?

The only indication that Tom was conscious of money was his habit of peeking into trash bins along his route and tossing soda cans into a plastic sack. To keep the sack from filling up too quickly, he sometimes lined up the empties in front of the back wheels of an idling city bus. When the bus pulled away, he would crouch at the curb to collect his neatly flattened disks. Gregory often imagined, instead of crushed aluminum, Tom’s flattened skull on the blacktop—or Tom caught under a bus and dragged for miles, the asphalt flaying the skin from his body.

Sometimes Gregory would wince at the brutality of his own imaginings. He would picture Isaac looking down on him, seeing in his omniscience the violent imagery in his grandson’s head. But then Isaac would have to appreciate that these images were out of his control, that they possessed a weight and momentum all their own, like a steel ball gathering speed on a sharp grade. All Gregory could do was stand back and watch the physics in his head play out.

It was already past noon when Gregory settled into a library carrel to keep an eye on Tom. He had just opened a coffee table book on lost LA landmarks when a text came through from the woman who was not his wife:

I need to see you.

His glad heart thumped as he quickly replied:

When.

After he had stared at his phone for several minutes, waiting for her response, he looked back down at a double-page photo spread of the original Brown Derby on Wilshire Boulevard. The now-demolished restaurant had been built in the shape of a colossal bowler hat, and he wondered if he would forever associate this ridiculous building with the joyous anticipation he now felt.

A second text came through, but this one spoiled his mood: it was from E. J., asking where he’d been all morning. She was entering her mother-hen mode at the office, monitoring detectives’ comings and goings, and generally making herself a nuisance—as if she had already promoted herself to captain. He would have to continue his vigil another day. But just as Gregory stood up, he saw Tom close the book he was reading and stride in his direction. Panic coursed through him.

He knows.

There was a dormant need in him to meet Tom halfway, to wrest the Bic from his hand and jam it into an eye cavity, and deeper into the tissue of his brain, until Tom screamed and stopped screaming. Because the man didn’t deserve this untroubled postprison retirement; he deserved upper-limit pain. He deserved to have cheap blue ink bleeding from his awful rabbit eyes. But Gregory remained in his seat and watched Tom head to a neighboring shelf. He let his body relax, and before Tom had a chance to turn around again and possibly get a good look at the person who had been following him for a solid week, Gregory collapsed the image of the Brown Derby and left the library.





–?9?–


The Secretary


On the morning of his advertised lecture, Philip woke with the image of a spiraled brain tumbling through his mind. He sat up, and when he was lucid enough to recall what the image signified, he remembered that he still needed to search his father’s study. The drama yesterday with Drew had prevented him from conducting a thorough search, but now he had a more pressing worry: his lecture. The lecture in which he would reveal to his entire department his profound lack of new ideas. Perhaps he could dislodge some paltry insights from his mind before breakfast. But as he switched on a lamp and reached for a notebook from the night table, he felt a sudden pressure behind his left eye. It was a sensation that would start to unfurl and pulse, and within twenty minutes, if he didn’t take his meds, it would feel as if his brain were being pushed through a juicer. He stood up, the resulting pain forcing him to grab hold of the headboard.

“Jane?”

But he knew Jane was gone. Having dropped the twins at school, she was likely on her morning run, a brutal course of murderous inclines that she enjoyed enough to repeat in the evenings.

Philip sat for a moment and closed his eyes. His migraines were mostly on the livable end of the spectrum—essentially, fierce headaches with the occasional flash of light that presaged the pain. Or like today, the creeping sensation of a phantom hemorrhage. At least his brain responded to the triptans his doctor prescribed. He didn’t suffer as his father had—or, worse, his brother. Poor Tom, afflicted with the kind of pain that made you wish you were dead: the hallucinatory, vomiting, nail-gun-to-the-cortex kind, with medicine offering so little relief. A migraine specialist had once confided to Philip, “When it’s really bad, and the treatments don’t take, I’ve had patients try to kill themselves.” It hadn’t come to that for Tom, but it might as well have.

Smoking yesterday had been a mistake. Philip had fallen back on his old ritual of purchasing a shiny red pack of Dunhills. It wasn’t just the Drew episode that had rattled him but the hostility coming from his daughter. His unfortunate comment about Drew’s toy unicorn had later ruptured into a full-blown argument, though it was really a rerun of a quarrel they’d had before. Philip had tried to apologize, but Sybil made clear that she’d had enough of his and the entire family’s superiority. “So it’s a cute little unicorn and not a chemistry set, so what? Not everything has to be supersmart all the time!” she had cried, threatening to stay in Beachwood Canyon for the rest of their trip. Philip sighed. He would have to make things right with her before they left town.