The Last Equation of Isaac Severy(39)
After an agonizing eight minutes, she responded, Our old spot. 45 min.
Gregory immediately erased the conversation (one couldn’t get nostalgic with digital exchanges) and began to gather items for a romantic evening. He bagged a bottle of wine, two glasses, some crackers and cheese, an old blanket from the linen closet, and—in case the rain returned—two umbrellas. He stole out of the house, buoyed by desire. Her reference to their old spot made him smile, and he felt that familiar surge of momentum, not like the rolling steel ball but like an unstoppable wave moving farther and farther from land. As with his stakeouts of Tom, he could feel an inevitability about their meetings—a force that had been set in motion long ago, and there was a thrill in letting it take him over.
He might have suggested a hotel that night, but meeting out of doors carried an undeniable charm. It was also cleaner, with less risk of a data trail. But soon they wouldn’t have to worry about any of that. She had made him a promise last week, a promise he held folded in his pocket. He would have hardly believed it had she not written it down. But as he parked his car on the hill he knew so well, high above Los Angeles, and made his way to a secluded spot beneath a sprawling sycamore tree, surrounded by a carpet of grass and city lights, he knew that he needed her to say it. He needed to hear the promise from her own lips tonight.
After fifteen minutes, he saw her approaching, winding her way toward him across the moonlit grass as if it were a stage. When she was a few yards away, he couldn’t stand it anymore. He rushed to meet her, drawing her graceful body to his, slipping his hands under her coat to feel the satiny fabric beneath. He kissed her face, but she looked around suddenly, as if fearing discovery, and moved to the tree.
She laughed at her own paranoia and tried to smile, but he could see that she was more nervous than usual. He pulled her to the blanket, and they fell onto the soft wool, where they would soon play out a familiar scene under the branches. Still, Gregory couldn’t dismiss the sadness and fear he had just seen in her face. So he told her that he agreed with her, that they should leave their spouses, that they should start the process now so that in the new year they could finally be together. When he had finished, she nodded slowly and sat up. But what she said next, he could hardly believe. As she turned her eyes to the ground and said what she had to say, he shut his eyes tight, as if to block out the words. He tried instead to focus on the crickets, listening for the beat of insect wings in the background. He wanted to isolate everything that was not her voice and turn up its volume, so that he didn’t have to listen to the thing he feared more than anything in the world.
–?14?–
The Map
For the past hour, Alex’s password attempts had come in rhythmic bursts, as if he were composing music instead of trying to hack into a computer. From her place in the kitchenette, where she was preparing a pot of coffee, Hazel could almost imagine the modulations of the keyboard as a sonata for the tone deaf, with Alex’s singsongy muttering as harmonic counterpoint.
As she returned to the living room and set a cup of coffee next to him on the desk, she thought of how Alex’s fingertips had grazed hers briefly after they’d entered the room. But when he spied the computer, he had pulled away and rushed to the desk. Now, shirtsleeves stuffed up past his elbows and his Twain wig and mustache discarded, he hummed and muttered to himself, oblivious to her presence.
She took a seat on the couch behind him and stared at the back of his head, wanting him to crack the password, yet fearing he would—fearing she had made a serious mistake letting him in.
Then, loud enough for her to hear, he said, “It has to be numeric.”
“How do you know?”
“It just has to be.”
“You’re forgetting. He left this to me.”
He frowned at her, as if entertaining this. “We do have one thing going for us,” he said. “The computer doesn’t lock us out after too many failed attempts, which means he wanted someone to crack it.”
“Can you tell me at least what your strategy is?”
“No strategy, just every number combination I can summon.” He began to list aloud the mathematical series and constants he was trying, most named after people Hazel had never heard of.
Euler’s constant (.57721 . . .)
Planck’s constant (6.626 x 10-34)
Fermat numbers (3, 5, 17, 257, 65537 . . .)
Ramanujan’s number (1729)
Mersenne primes (2, 3, 5, 7, 13, 17, 19, 31 . . .)
The largest prime known to man (257,885,161–1)
Natural base of logarithms: e (2.71828 . . .)
The golden ratio (1.61803398 . . .)
As midnight approached, Hazel had a second cup of coffee and scrutinized the giant map of LA. She peered at the cryptically numbered dots, sitting in fertile clumps in various neighborhoods—Atwater Village, Lincoln Heights, Inglewood—in plots of irregularly shaped land defined by this or that freeway. Hazel didn’t find maps of Los Angeles particularly compelling, because a map of LA wasn’t really about place. When Angelenos looked at a rendering of their city, it wasn’t to trace the shape of the land or to locate one’s favorite park or body of water. Seattleites did that. San Franciscans and New Yorkers did that. Hazel would bet that if you picked a random woman living in Manhattan and handed her a sketch pad, she could draw her little island by heart, affectionately dropping in Central Park, the Met, the West Village, that fountain she likes. But Los Angeles residents didn’t care where the Getty Museum was in relation to Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, Dodger Stadium, or their apartment. A Los Angeles map wasn’t there to reveal how the places you loved were arranged in two-dimensional space. It was there to tell you which one-dimensional arteries you were going to take to get there.