The Last Equation of Isaac Severy(52)
“It’s best that I figure this out now, right?”
“I think you’re being hard on yourself.”
He realized he was standing very close to her, and he forced himself to return to the bookshelf and the doodles. It had taken immense effort to pull away from her, and he knew it was time to leave. That’s when he noticed something. On the whiteboard, in the middle of all the multicolored donuts and other manifolds, was an alien object: a brain. More accurately, the spiraled brain with the little tail he’d come to know so well. The ink didn’t look quite as faded as the other figures, as if it had been drawn more recently.
“Anitka. What’s this?”
She stepped up beside him, her face achingly close. “I’m not sure what you’re pointing at.”
He turned to face her. “This symbol. Where did you get it?”
She smiled. “Don’t you recognize a Fibonacci spiral when you see one?”
He looked back at the drawing and saw that it was, in fact, the famous spiral based on the Fibonacci sequence—at least, an untidy version of one. His own brain was clearly playing tricks.
“It’s not my best work, I grant you,” she said, blinking up at him with her large, sleepy eyes.
“I should go,” he said.
Without warning, she took a gasp of air and threw her hand up to her face. Philip’s chest tightened, his standard response to watching someone about to cry—his wife, his children—but this time it was a strange, unbearable constriction.
She let her hand fall and looked down at her tea. “Oh God, I’m really sorry. I don’t want to keep you.” She was trying to sound casual, but he saw that her lashes were damp. He didn’t know if he could stand seeing one more sad person in his life right now. He was sick to death of sadness, of responsibility, of the weight of everything, and he longed for just one moment of contentment, if not outright pleasure.
He stepped toward her and, setting her mug aside, put a hand on her waist. He leaned his entire body into her and kissed her. They stumbled sightless to a wall, and he pressed her against it, inhaling the perfume of her: the various lotions and hair products, the faint trace of saline, the stale wool of her cardigan. As he moved his lips over her skin, he began to subtract all the superficial smells in his mind until he was left with the muted fragrance of the skin itself. He thought he had never experienced anything more delicious, this small sensory detail that was Anitka Durov’s scent, and he gave in to it entirely.
–?17?–
The House
On a nearly treeless street in South Los Angeles, Gregory pulled up in front of a sun-blanched Craftsman house. He was supposed to be driving to Culver City, where he had an appointment with one of the victims in a recent sex abuse suit leveled at the LA Unified School District. But afternoon traffic had been surprisingly thin, and he was running early. So when his car had reached the nodding pumpjacks of the Inglewood oil field, he’d veered east. As he made the left turn onto Stocker Street, he could feel the hand of Isaac’s universal computer making the calculations to guide his car past Baldwin Hills, Crenshaw Boulevard, and Arlington Avenue.
It had been almost twenty years since he’d seen the house—that is, up until a few days ago, when he’d followed his onetime foster father here. Tom had gotten off a bus and shuffled several blocks to this spot, where he stared through the fence at his old home before the sun became too much for him. Hands clutching the back of his head, Tom quickly returned to the bus stop to curl up in a tormented ball. Though he still visited the gym and library on most days, Tom’s schedule was becoming increasingly erratic, and Gregory had lost track of him several times. Gregory knew, of course, that this moonlighting of his couldn’t go on indefinitely. He needed to make his presence known to Tom, to push his face into Tom’s and say, “Do you know me?” He should have done it when he had him here at the house. But it was too late for that.
The place was now abandoned and had for some time been tanking the surrounding property values. Garbage ringed the yard, and the grass had turned the color of a soiled mattress. A high chain-link fence discouraged trespassing, but it hadn’t stopped Krylon vandals from leaving their mark. Why Tom had felt the need to drag himself to this place—to the scene of his past crimes—Gregory could only guess. Perhaps it was the same reason that Gregory was here now. Maybe they both needed to remind themselves of how and why they’d become the men they were.
After pulling a pair of bolt cutters from the trunk of his car, Gregory paused on the sidewalk, recalling the moment when he and Hazel—ages nine and seven—had first emerged from the caseworker’s van and stepped onto the curb. They had been so happy to have a new home (a house!) that they hadn’t bothered to take in a full 360 of the neighborhood. But then, anything had been better than the endless carousel of foster homes or, worse, “the Hall”: a county holding pen where abused and neglected children went to receive additional helpings of abuse and neglect.
Gregory and his sister had endured the caprices of the foster care system for five years, ever since their mother had gotten sick (“cancer” was all they were told) and died alone and penniless. Their father had given them the surname Dine not long before abandoning the family. And since there were no living relatives—or at least none willing to take them in—Hazel and Gregory Dine became orphans. Having been barely four years old during the transition, Gregory could hardly recall the “before” time, the fuzzy memories soon indistinguishable from the vague motherly images he invented in his head. Only one thing seemed certain as they entered the public school system and began to compare themselves with other children: Hansel and Gretel, as their peers dubbed them, were genetic trash.