The Last Equation of Isaac Severy(51)

“You’re lucky to live and work here, with your family so close,” Anitka said.

“Yours is in Ukraine?”

She nodded. “I haven’t seen my parents and brothers in two years. I tell myself I can’t afford the travel, but the truth is, I can’t stand the look on their faces when they see me—sort of this desperate pride. I’m the only one who really aspired to anything, and now they expect me to be this sensation, to get rich off science.” She laughed. “It’s idiotic fantasy.”

“You’re in the right place for what you’re doing.”

“But what percentage of PhDs go on to make any kind of living? There are a few slots at Caltech for tenured string theorists and, what, a handful at a few other schools?”

He gave her a sidelong smile. “Remember, those positions are for people who don’t despise the reigning theory.”

She waved her hand with an annoyed flourish. “That’s exactly my point. Think of the few people, like you, who are able to make their livelihood from it. How can I possibly make a life out of introducing a rival to the dominant ideology? And even if I do finish my thesis and graduate, what then? Maybe I get a job teaching F = ma to morons? Or I can hope for an ad: ‘Wanted. Unemployed Theoretical Physicist with No Marketable Skills Outside Pondering the Nature of the Universe.’?”

He had never heard her talk with such self-effacement.

“You were right, what you said that night,” she continued.

“I’m just one person,” he protested. “Don’t go—”

“Please. I realized last week, you’ve been right this entire time.” She came to an abrupt stop in front of a ranch-style house. “This is me.”

She turned and stepped up the drive, slipping through a wooden gate to the backyard. He didn’t move. How about leaving right now, Philip?

“Are you coming?” she called over the fence.

He briefly closed his eyes, and followed. Just visiting is all. He walked alongside the house to the back, where a small guest cottage dominated the yard. Anitka stood facing him, her figure framed by a charming ivied trestle. She turned up the stone path to her door and unlocked it.

Inside, she pulled off her scarf and left him alone to survey the place. There were a few sparkly cushions on the couch to indicate that a woman lived here, but little else. The chipboard shelving along one wall bowed under the weight of books and academic papers. Next to it was a dry-erase board, doodled with the mathematical objects that populated the landscape of their discipline. In the center hovered a playful verse from a dead physicist:

Age is of course a fever chill

That every physicist must fear

He’s better dead than living still

When he’s past his thirtieth year

–Paul Dirac, 1926, age 23

“I’ve always hated this rhyme.”

She laughed from the kitchenette. “I guess I like to live my life in a state of perpetual horror.”

Shifting his attention back to the books, Philip noticed an entire section of shelving devoted to chaos theory and nonlinear dynamics—not her area of study—including a collection of his father’s bound papers, flagged with sticky notes. He pulled one off the shelf and looked through its curled and dog-eared pages.

“You’re a fan of my father’s.”

“What did I tell you?”

“Everyone says that, but this is serious.”

She returned with two mugs of tea and handed him one.

“I find his mathematics enjoyable. Don’t you?”

“Sure, but he’s my father.”

“It’s like reading music.”

Philip smiled.

“I once found a mistake,” she said.

“You’re kidding.”

“Oh, a small thing. Nothing, really. I thought of telling him, but then he died.”

But then he died. She had a talent for being blunt while just skirting offense.

Philip wandered to the far side of the room, where an oval table was covered in academic papers and journals. He looked through the titles and saw all the familiar authors: Veneziano, Schwarz and Green, Nambu, Witten, Maldacena, Britton—all the monster minds who had contributed to two string theory revolutions.

“You’ve been reading.”

“Yes, and I wanted to tell you something,” she said with unusual calm. “I had this moment the other night where I felt like the most intractable problem would have been obvious to me had I cared to solve it.” She walked to a window and pulled open the blind, revealing a view of the grass. “I was in the yard, right here, and I heard whistling from a teapot inside the main house—they always make tea and forget the pot is on the stove—and at that exact moment, it was like someone had just walked up and handed me a telegram.” She turned back to the table. “I was aware right then of bumping my head against my own ceiling. I knew with certainty that I am not a physicist, or at least not an academic. I have never been so certain of anything.”

He had followed her to the window. It occurred to him that for once she did not seem to be putting on an act. The bluster she had been walking around with for as long as he had known her fell away. And that made her even more attractive, nearly irresistible, and he marveled at how she had once meant so little to him.