The Last Equation of Isaac Severy(24)
He needed his pills, but the only movement he could manage was to turn off the bedside lamp and lean back against the headboard. He would just rest a minute. In the dark, he could see one of Sybil’s creations on the wall above the bureau: Broken Shoe #1. However much he disliked the piece, however much it conjured up the creaking meat rotisserie of his daughter’s mind, for some reason he couldn’t look away. Philip had little sense of how much time had passed when Jane appeared in the room. He could just make out her disciplined runner’s figure against the light from the hall. She held out a single pill and a glass of water. “How long have you been sitting here?”
He gulped it down. “No idea.”
He put down the glass and pushed his face into her stomach. The thought of pulling down her spandex was less a solid desire than the memory of desire. He was still able to enjoy her beauty and admire her graceful shape, but lately he found it difficult to locate his own lust. He wondered if anything was capable of inspiring strong feelings in him ever again. It was as if his work and sex drive were in collusion.
“Oh, I can’t make your lecture today,” she said, as she moved to the closet. “I promised I’d take Drew to the zoo.”
“You don’t have to come to my lectures, you know.”
“I do like to keep up with what you’re doing,” she said faintly. Philip knew that his wife’s interest in his work had become generalized long ago. She still enjoyed the idea of it, still took pride in informing strangers that her husband was a hotshot string theorist, but she no longer cared about the details. Maybe she sensed there was very little to know these days, because all his work worth knowing about had been completed more than a decade ago. He was now an aging professor whose best ideas were behind him, whose office was being eyed daily by younger and younger theorists.
Intelligence fades. Sex fades. The thrill fades. Where is all the wisdom that is supposed to compensate for the loss? But if his father’s death had taught him anything, it was that there was no real wisdom with age, only forced compliance.
*
As Philip strode to the overhead projector to begin his talk on “New Non-Perturbative Results for Non-BPS Black Hole M-Brane Constructions in M-Theory,” he took in the practically empty room. Putting on his best arch smile, he quipped, “I hear John Britton is giving a lecture next door.”
The small audience erupted in laughter, knowing full well that Britton—the closest the world currently had to an Albert Einstein—was ensconced in his turret office somewhere in Princeton. Whenever Philip heard the man’s name (or uttered it himself), he would sink a little. It was hard enough to have an actual father you could let down without also having a string theory father to remind you that you weren’t nearly as brilliant as you thought you were. In addition to Britton, there seemed to be a growing file of these monster minds, all shaking their heads in Philip’s direction. You vere such a clever boy. You vere going to solve the mysteries of the universe, remember?—Was that a German accent? Was his imagination really falling back on Einstein as a taunt? Though it could just as easily have been Erwin Schr?dinger or Werner Heisenberg. Maybe this is where he would have his meltdown, at last. Right here at this decrepit overhead projector. You should have seen it! Professor Severy just sort of disintegrated in 151 Sloan.
With the apparition of dead geniuses hovering, he took a deep breath and focused on the black-hole mathematics scribbled in front of him. There was comfort in his black holes. These sinkholes in space-time were plentiful in the observable universe, commonplace even to astronomers. But for string theorists like him, they were precious hives of higher-dimensional objects—branes—that could help solve the quantum mysteries of the cosmos. After ten minutes, he found a comfortable rhythm, glancing up once in a while between equations to catch his colleagues Kuchek and Kato scrunching their brows and taking spasmodic notes. The only person without a pen in hand was Anitka. She wore a tight, fuzzy peach sweater and watched him with a small smile that seemed to say, “Your determination is adorable, but you’re making fatal assumptions. There’s going to be a revolution, you’ll see, and I’ll be leading it.” Maybe she was right, and this was just some giddy mathematical game they’d all agreed to play. Beautiful math signifying nothing.
There were no follow-up questions, and after an uneven round of applause, the hall emptied. Philip left the room, expecting Anitka to jump him when he reached the door, but when he stepped into the hallway, he was greeted instead by a woman balancing on a towering pair of heels and gripping a shiny black case. Clearly not a student, though not faculty, either. She crinkled her eyes in an attempt at a smile.
“I apologize for barging in late like that.”
“Quite all right. I didn’t notice.”
The woman’s dark red hair spiraled to her shoulders, and she wore a slightly militaristic navy suit, the kind that made Philip imagine she had a dozen more like it in her closet at home. He saw that she was attractive in a pointy, secretarial sort of way, but she had blunted any middle-aged prettiness with a large pair of harlequin glasses.
“It’s fascinating, this idea that everything is made up of tiny vibrating strings of energy,” she said, head pitched slightly to one side.
“Well, yes, that’s what we’re hoping to prove.”
“Funny, I didn’t hear you say the word string once in there—just a lot about branes, branes, branes.”