The Last Equation of Isaac Severy(34)
“Let me ask you this: How much did you know about your father’s work?”
He let the question hang there for several seconds. Apart from the fact that Isaac had been cagey in the final years of his life, he and Philip had been very different scientists. They were both fluent in the same mathematical language, could understand what the other was doing, but the nature of particle physics—string theory in particular—was so at odds with Isaac’s very solid, quantifiable world. In the murky depths of chaos theory, his father had found regularity, uniformity, pattern. If Isaac Severy had a motto, it would have been “The universe is knowable.” Philip’s motto, and that of everyone who dealt in the quantum, was “The universe is knowable, up to a point.” In Philip’s view, not everything had been predetermined from the moment the universe sprang into being. In fact, his father’s world and the horrors of determinism were partly why Philip had become a particle physicist. There was safety in a universe underpinned by uncertainty, where not everything could be predicted precisely, where particles were moody, erratic, and strange. Because in that reality, at least, there was room for surprise, room to decide, room to correct error.
Nellie rephrased the question: “Did your father share his latest project with you?”
“Listen, I find it hard to believe—”
“Thank you. You’ve answered my question.”
“If you’ve already met with him,” Philip said, angry now, his voice rising, “and several times—if you’re to be believed—then why are you bothering me about it? You know far more than I do.”
“Because, Mr. Severy, he died before things were finished, before we were able to come to an agreement.”
Philip leaned across the desk and said evenly, “You mean he left your employer empty-handed.”
“Your father divulged just enough to leave us wanting the rest.”
Philip sensed a desperation in her statement that quickened his pulse. It had been a mistake to come here. He stood up. “I’ll be going.”
“I know this must be upsetting for you, but please, if you’ll just wait—”
“Enough.” Philip drew himself up tall to disguise his unease. “If you think you can waste my time here on some power trip while you peddle this garbage about my father’s cooperation, just so that I’ll hand over his supposed research to you and your very weird boss, then you are both out of your deranged”—he gestured at the walls for emphasis—“animal-electrocuting minds.”
Nellie stepped toward him. “So you really have no idea what he was working on?”
Philip thought again of his father’s peculiar reticence about his work. Could it be that Isaac Severy had shown these people what he had refused to share with his own son? He pushed the thought away. It was just too sad.
“I know what he was working on,” he said finally. “He was working on mathematics, and in my world, that doesn’t turn much of a profit.” He walked to the door. “You needn’t bother contacting me again.”
Seconds later he was in the hall searching for the front door. Nellie didn’t pursue him, but he imagined her tracking him via a mesh of lenses and fiber optics. He found what looked to be the same glass-covered entryway, but when he opened it and stepped out, he found himself on the side of the house surrounded by hedges. It was already dark, and the house was encircled in flood lamps. Heading up a stone path in the direction of what he hoped was the street, he found himself looking through a massive, single-pane window at a ground-level office. A young Indian woman sat at a desk near the window, poring over a stack of books. After a few more steps, there was a partition and another desk. Behind it, a silver-haired man in delicate glasses scowled at a tablet computer, but when he noticed Philip walking past, he quickly smiled. It was an easy smile, patient and friendly, but Philip didn’t like it and hurried away.
When he reached the sidewalk, he walked swiftly from the house in the direction from which he had come. What the hell is this place? What else did my father keep from me? He’d walked a couple of blocks when a dark town car turned onto the street and made its way toward him. On instinct, Philip stepped into the nearest driveway and pressed himself along a border fence. When the car had passed, he took out his phone and dialed for a cab.
–?12?–
The Party
To keep herself from spending the entire evening in bed or on the floor, Hazel forced herself to attend Fritz Dornbach’s Halloween party. She needed something to distract herself from the fact that Bennet had broken up with her over the phone for no good reason other than “We’ve always been different—you know that, Hazel.” And although she hadn’t dared confirm it in their very short conversation, she was certain he was already spending long, feverish nights with that assistant designer.
In an attempt to minimize the pain, she asked herself if she loved Bennet as much as she had imagined. She wanted the answer to be no, but aside from her grandfather, he’d been the closest person in her life, and his frank rejection felt like the onset of a terrible illness. It also felt like further proof that she belonged nowhere and with no one, and that she had somehow done this to herself. This idea of self-sabotage had come up in therapy years ago (back when she’d been able to afford it), but it was one thing to acknowledge it in the room and quite another to alter her behavior. Whatever the root cause of their breakup, Hazel was willing to bet that Bennet’s designer friend was a more confident, emotionally grounded version of herself—one of those embrace-life, consequences-be-damned kind of girls who’d been given a steady IV drip of self-worth since infancy. Well, let him have her. Hazel was going to a party. Maybe in loud music and idiotic conversation, she could forget Bennet and Isaac and the intolerable heaviness of recent days.