The Last Equation of Isaac Severy(3)
He unfolded a piece of paper with his long fingers before peering up at the gathering. “As many of you know,” his fragile voice began, “my father had passions that went beyond mathematics. There was almost nothing that did not interest him. He was a devout scientist, but he was also a religious man who grappled with the entire idea of faith.”
He then read Emily Dickinson’s “This World Is Not Conclusion,” a poem Hazel remembered well from college, and one that was now making her feel some real affection for this uncle whom she had seen often while growing up but still barely knew.
After struggling through the final stanza, Philip withdrew quickly, leaving behind a restlessness that lasted several minutes. Hazel shifted in her chair, inadvertently catching the eye of Philip’s younger sister, Paige, seated half a row down, her stout body swathed in black silk. In her prime, Aunt Paige had been a brilliant political statistician, but she’d apparently done little with her talent in recent years, and her standing in the family was now one of a recluse and grump. She had never married, but there was a grown daughter somewhere—Alexis, was it?—whom no one ever saw. Whether Alexis resided north of Napa or east of the Rockies was anyone’s guess, and Hazel didn’t spy any likely candidates here today.
At last, the queue behind the microphone shrank to zero, and a few people stood. But the sound system gave a startling buzz, calling attention to a young man who appeared before them as if by conjuring trick. He didn’t speak right away, taking his time sifting through bits of fuchsia-colored paper. Hazel found something about the man instantly arresting. He sported the beard of a woodsman but was otherwise dressed in the shabby welfare-academic vein. He cleared his throat and spoke in a vaguely British accent.
“Good mathematics is generally impossible to read aloud,” he began, “but why should that stop us?” He laughed nervously, and when no one joined him, he resumed. “A proof, as many of you know, is a number of true statements leading to a logical conclusion. Proofs are the cornerstone of mathematics and are really meant to be seen, not heard. If, for example, I were to read aloud Andrew Wiles’s famous proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem, which is a hundred fifty pages, by the way”—another laugh—“we’d be here for days.”
“Who is this guy?” a woman in Hazel’s row asked.
“However,” the man continued, “what I have here is not a real proof—only fragments scribbled on these cocktail napkins—but what if, as a kind of tribute, I read just a scrap of his work? An everyday bit of fluff floating around his head, so that we might have some idea of what it was like to be Isaac Severy? So I hope you’ll indulge me while I read this bit of ‘ordinary’ mathematics: Let dx over dt equal A times x plus f of x plus epsilon times g of x . . .”
Hazel had a strange urge to laugh. Yet there was something soothing about the cadence of his voice as he delivered this long chain of letters, numbers, and symbols. Isaac would have liked the absurdity of this moment, and she suddenly missed him terribly.
“Is he reading an equation?” someone behind her whispered. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”
Hazel didn’t take her eyes from the man as he continued his recitation, but her hand had wandered to her right pocket. She slid her fingers inside, over the crispness of the envelope, and before she knew it, she was running a fingernail along the lip until she could feel a thin sheet of paper within. Almost without thinking, she had broken the seal, and now there seemed to be no retreating from Isaac’s letter.
–?2?–
The Theorist
Philip Severy had no one left to impress. The full weight of this fact descended upon him as he stood in front of family and strangers, blinking away the lighthouse glare of his father’s coffin. His sister, Paige, had ordered the thing outfitted with white roses and metallic vestments. Had she meant it as some kind of joke? Because if she had intended their father’s death box to be both heinous and comically reflective, well, bang-up job. Philip pushed his sunglasses flat against his face and struggled through some words he had prepared.
When he returned to his seat, his twin sons were wiggling a few chairs down. Their teenage bodies were present, but their minds were no doubt reliving their last tennis match. Silas and Sidney worshipped tennis, lived for it—would probably even die for it in some offshoot universe where one was forced to choose between such things. Death or a world without tennis? “Death!” they would chime in unison, before linking arms and marching off the nearest cliff together. They loved the sport in the purest way that one can love a thing, with the whole of their selves. Philip was not like his sons in this way, not anymore, and it was only now that he knew this with terrible certainty.
As another Isaac Severy fan took the podium, Philip’s attention wandered to a translucent spider making its way over the charcoal dunes of his slacks. At that moment, the dark folds of cotton twill were this tiny spider’s entire known universe—and the sudden intrusion of Philip’s forefinger to flick it into the air must have been an extraordinary phenomenon that the spider would never be able to explain. I was there, and then I wasn’t.
His wife touched his arm. “You were great up there. You all right?”
Philip nodded. Why shouldn’t he be all right? His father had killed himself a week ago. No reason, no warning. Killed himself. It sounded absurd and wrong. Like vicious gossip. Just two weeks ago, they had been sitting together at his sons’ final set in the Junior Tennis Open quarterfinals. His father, relaxed that day, had taken a break from questioning Philip on a recent journal article he’d coauthored and from wondering aloud if the work was up to Philip’s usual standards.