The Last Equation of Isaac Severy(49)
“Turing.”
“Right. Do you think every time Alan Turing looked at an apple, there was a shiver of recognition?”
Turing, after breaking Nazi Germany’s Enigma code during the war, had been harassed by the British government for being gay—or at least for not bothering to hide it. When given the choice of a prison sentence or chemical castration, he chose the latter, presumably because prison would have hampered the possibility of yet a third option, one he chose to exercise in his home laboratory one day with only his appetite and a cyanide-laced apple. In this case, Jane was likely right. Philip could imagine Turing having watched the poisoned-apple scene from Disney’s Snow White—the mathematician’s favorite movie—and experiencing a moment of intense recognition, as if remembering an event that had already happened.
“Isn’t it amazing,” she continued, “how he could be so unhappy, yet considerate enough to make it look like an accident? So he could spare his poor mother the heartache? I would do the same for you and the twins: give you the gift of plausible deniability.”
“Can we not do this, please?”
“For Godsake, allow me my morbid fantasy, would you?”
Philip was quiet for a moment. He stared out at the canyon, where the late-afternoon sun turned the rock a fierce orange. “Well, we’re not recreational chemists, for one thing,” he said finally. “The poisoned apple worked only because it was semicredible that he spilled cyanide on his lunch.”
“All right, so where’s our semicredible accident?”
“I don’t know. I think I feel a shiver of recognition every time I look at your sister’s lasagna.”
In his desperation for levity, Philip had wanted to make her laugh, but the attempt misfired. She pulled away, wicking the moisture from her eyes with the ends of her sleeves.
“I don’t understand,” she choked. “How can you be so cool? Where’s your breakdown?”
“I have to stay sane for you. You want me to go to pieces like Jack? End up in the psych ward at Cedars?”
“At least I’d have company.”
“What do you want me to say, Jane? Our child is dead, and I’m heartbroken. I cry every day. I’ve taken leave from work.”
“I guess the meaning of the universe is just going to have to take a back seat to the death of your daughter—your very unremarkable daughter.”
Philip didn’t know how to respond to this. Where had she gotten that word, unremarkable? It had been confined to his head, yet somehow Jane had intuited it.
She turned back to the precipice. The sun hit the side of her face, throwing it into a frightening motif of shadow and fire-orange. It was at that moment that he saw his wife’s grief turn to rage, toward the world and toward him.
*
It was true that Philip had taken an immediate leave from Caltech for the rest of the term; his colleagues had insisted. Professor Kato agreed to take on Philip’s graduate seminar and supersymmetry class, while Kuchek temporarily absorbed Philip’s graduate advisees. Still, the next morning, Philip got up and went to school, if only to sit in his office and stare at neglected equations on his blackboard, or walk a purposeless route through campus, even at the risk of running into people who would wonder why he wasn’t at home. But he could feel Jane’s anger becoming dark and heavy, and being of no use or solace to her, he didn’t know what else to do with himself.
Late fall was Philip’s favorite time of year on campus, and despite his misery, he could still appreciate the season. People back east liked to insist that Southern California didn’t really have seasons and that autumn in particular failed to have any real meaning. There was some truth in this, but Philip enjoyed the subtle indicators that the Northern Hemisphere was tipping away from the sun. Besides the sweaters and light jackets that appeared in November, the olive trees slowly surrendered their crop to the pavement, and the few campus oaks changed color in revolt against the prevailing evergreenery.
That morning, as he passed the Sloan Laboratory of Mathematics and Physics, Enid Elderberg—spiky grapefruit-colored hair, stud in her nose—waved to him from the steps, a pair of file boxes balanced in one arm. Philip found Elderberg’s fashion sense a transparent stab at making pure mathematics look hip, but then he’d heard she was quite brilliant, so why the hell not.
“Philip, hi.” She fumbled with her boxes before setting them on the pavement. “We were all very sorry to hear about your daughter. If there’s anything—”
“Thank you, I’m fine. Really.” He didn’t think he could handle any more pity.
He was about to move on, when she said, “You heard about our breakin?”
“Breakin?”
“Someone forced open several offices on the top floor last week, including mine.”
Philip only now remembered that Elderberg had been the one to move into his father’s old office. His father had rarely used the space since his retirement, but he had never entirely moved out of it, either.
“These boxes belonged to Isaac,” she continued. “I had them locked away in a cabinet, so I doubt anything was taken.”
Philip peered up at his father’s old window. “Student mischief?”
Elderberg shrugged. “Who knows? Unsettling all the same. I was about to drop these at your office, actually.”