The Last Equation of Isaac Severy(4)

Watching his twin sons face off against each other, Philip had said, “I forget which one I’m rooting for.”

His father had smiled. “Whichever is your favorite.”

As the ball went into the net, Philip let out an ambiguous holler directed at neither son in particular. He didn’t have a favorite son because he harbored identical feelings toward all three of his children: profound dismay at having fathered such unremarkable offspring. He loved them—of course he loved them. Silas, Sidney, and their much older sister, Sybil, were beautiful, glowing things who laughed and smiled like he did, and whose eyes were their mother’s startling green. But how he—a Stanford-MIT-educated particle physicist and professor of theoretical physics at Caltech—and Jane—a Stanford-Harvard molecular biologist by training, if not by profession—had produced three academic mediocrities never ceased to be a source of bewildering disbelief and low-grade depression.

He would periodically unfold the genealogical map in his mind and try to isolate the genetic offender. His own parents certainly weren’t to blame. His father, a distinguished professor at Caltech for forty years, had devoted most of his life to the study of chaos theory and nonlinear dynamics, while his mother had translated Spanish Baroque literature to great acclaim. Jane’s mother and father, both doctors, of course, boasted equally impressive levels of accomplishment. But there were suspect siblings on both sides who pointed to genetic weakness. Jane’s sister, Faye, for one, was clever only when it came to marrying rich men and living off the alimony. His own sister, too, had abundant faults. She had been working on a book on probability for decades, a book some were beginning to suspect didn’t exist: “What’s the ‘probability’ you’ll ever finish that thing, eh, Paige?” But Paige had proven her cleverness in other ways, and her shortcomings were entirely social in nature.

And then there was Tom, the youngest of his siblings, a troubling specter who still hovered over them. He had left behind two now-grown foster children, who’d long ago been adopted into the family. Philip had seen them earlier, hadn’t he? Yes, there were Hazel and Gregory, seated near the front, their dark, angular faces looking nothing like their adoptive clan.

Aside from these two reminders, the family had mostly forgotten how Tom had once moved among them, following his own pained choreography. He had been something to love once—magnetic, even—and at one point could easily have been Philip’s intellectual rival. Philip wanted to remember that Tom, and not the Tom he had last seen in an orange jumpsuit trying to contain his hatred for his older brother from behind bulletproof glass. Yes, Thomas Severy was proof positive that there was decay lurking in the family’s genetic code.

Philip’s daughter, hair spilling down her shoulders like a draft of sunlight, turned in her seat and whispered something to her own daughter, Drew.

“Pa-Pop’s definitely in heaven, sweetie,” Sybil assured her.

“How do you know?” Drew asked. “If you can’t see him, how do you know?”

“Because sometimes you just know,” Sybil explained. “Just like you know my arm is in my sleeve even if you can’t see it.”

The little girl frowned. “But—”

“Shh, it’s quiet time.”

As Philip watched a patch of sun play on Sybil’s beautiful head, he marveled at how nature had not made at least one of his three children dutifully bright. But then, that wasn’t how the coin toss of heredity necessarily worked. “Good things come in threes,” wasn’t it? Of course, it could go the other way, and for Philip and Jane Severy, it had come up three, indeed: dumb, dumb, dumb.

Jane always protested when Philip expressed disappointment in their children. “Sybil has more social intelligence than the both of us. Have you seen her work a crowd? She’s not the twit you imagine.”

In Philip’s view, the extent of their daughter’s effort to prove she wasn’t a twit was getting into Stanford eleven years ago—not without some parental legacy points, naturally—but Sybil had done nothing spectacular during her six listless years there except meet her husband, Jack, get pregnant, and embrace a particularly Jesus-y brand of Christianity. Upon graduation, she had transformed herself into a Sunnyvale wife, mother, and artist—artist of sorts, for her work, which involved slapping a found object to a canvas, was ghastly, and Philip couldn’t see how pieces like Shopping List #15, Pine Cone #2, and Some Garbage I Found #236 were worth getting excited about.

He tried his best to focus on the mourners who were lining up to enumerate his father’s many qualities. Philip would need to recall these sentiments later at the reception. “So kind of you to mention . . .” “So thoughtful of you to say . . .” Etcetera.

Philip wished he could get out of having to talk to the people who would soon invade the family home. In fact, he wished someone had spared him news of his father’s death entirely. He wanted to be told twenty years from now, because without his father, the very important role he had been playing for his entire career—Professor Philip Severy in The Hunt for the Unified Field Theory—now quite suddenly lacked an audience. In the movie house of his life, had there really been only one person sitting out there all this time? It was now apparent to him that he didn’t love his work with the whole of his heart and mind, as he had once believed, but he had loved it for another’s sake. And he needed to find a way to restart the show or be forever regarded as just another annotation in the history of theoretical physics. Forget about Stockholm calling; his days of reliable brain activity were numbered. He was fifty-seven, and in these Wild West days of particle collisions, he was feeling increasingly isolated and immaterial. He was running out of time to wrap up the secrets of the universe in one big elegant bow.