The Last Equation of Isaac Severy(67)
“I thought he had an accident.”
“Right, his so-called brain damage from that autobahn incident. Horseshit. The real story of his failure is far more spectacular.” When Hazel didn’t respond, Paige said, “Don’t pretend like you don’t want to know.”
Hazel sat down again while her aunt dumped more sugar in her tea.
“There is a group of twenty-three problems in mathematics, called Hilbert’s problems—intellectual puzzles more than anything, though mathematicians take them very seriously. Most have been solved, but there are a few remaining. One particularly stubborn problem was solved by my son many years ago while he was at the Max Planck Institute.” Paige looked up to measure her guest’s reaction. “Wondering why you haven’t heard about such a triumph? Why Isaac never mentioned it?”
Hazel nodded.
“You’ve never heard about it because someone else beat my son to the proof. By a couple of weeks.” Paige appeared amused by this. “An unassuming Russian, who’d been working in his mother’s basement for years, quietly published his proof. No fanfare, just mailed it off. And in our world, publishing is everything.”
Hazel assigned this new information to her previous image of Alex. Now that she thought about it, beneath all the bluster, there had been an air of defeat about him.
“But that’s not his fault,” she said. “It’s just bad luck.”
Paige smiled. “Maybe. But it’s what he did afterward that revealed his true character. He did nothing. Zero. Completely gave up mathematics. He blamed it all on this supposed car wreck, of course. But I knew.”
“Is that why you don’t speak to him?”
She shrugged. “He doesn’t speak to me because he knows I disapprove of his vagrant lifestyle. Bumming around Paris, going to parties, sleeping around, God knows what else. How he affords all this laziness, don’t ask me.”
“Maybe he has another source of income,” Hazel suggested pointedly.
“Well, obviously. Though I don’t buy this AP photographer nonsense.” Paige snorted and swiveled back to her desk. “Now you’ll really have to excuse me. I’m attacking a particularly difficult section on the odds of succeeding as a jazz musician.”
Hazel stood up, unsure how to transition out of the room. “I’ll find my own way out.”
“Wait!” Paige practically shouted.
Hazel paused at the door.
“I made an agreement with myself long ago that I would leave the warmth to warm people. But tell them that I let you in, won’t you? That I didn’t turn a relative away? No one in this family gives me any credit.”
“I will,” Hazel said, suddenly overcome with sadness for this aunt she had never liked.
She started down the hall, glancing back just as Paige splashed something from a bottle into her teacup. When she reached the front door, she could hear her aunt muttering something to her dogs.
Outside, Hazel closed the gate to the yard and, for lack of a better idea, turned in the direction of the beach, guided by the light of the surrounding bungalows. After removing her shoes and socks at the edge of the concrete, she stepped onto the cool sand and kept walking.
When she reached the shoreline, she let the incoming tide engulf her feet. How long had it been since she’d touched the Pacific? Living on Puget Sound for so many years, surrounded by water on all sides, it was easy to lose track of the last time you set eyes on the actual ocean. It was easy to forget how this boundless expanse seemed to exist for moments like this, when you are rigidly stuck, with nowhere left to go.
Hazel closed her eyes. In a very literal interpretation of Raspanti’s doomsday prediction, she imagined herself opening her laptop one morning, clicking through her usual news sites, and finding variations on the same headline, her mistake writ large: “Powerful People Do Irretrievably Terrible Thing.” Had she really inflicted such a grave injury onto the future? Was her mistake irreversible?
She stepped backward and collapsed onto dry sand. Below the crash of the surf, she could just make out an alien sound, a pinging coming from her purse. She fished out her phone and discovered she had a text from Bennet. She considered deleting it but didn’t have the willpower not to read it first:
H, Hope you can make the opening. xB
She clicked on the attached link, and up popped a website for a Seattle art gallery. Bennet’s show, the one he had been working on for years, had arrived:
New Exhibition—Bennet Hewes
This Is My Sad Face: The Shock of Human Emotion
Below it, a mixed-media likeness of her own face stared out at the viewer with a flash of irritation. The photo underlying the image had been taken near the beginning of her relationship with Bennet, the light of a setting sun glancing off one cheek. But the details of her skin were gone, smeared over with paint, wax, and paper. It wasn’t a bad piece, and she knew this exhibition was a big deal for him, but she could only bring herself to reply, Nice title.
He must have taken some perverse pleasure in naming his show after her last message to him. Hazel scrolled up until her previous text and accompanying selfie filled the screen: This is my sad face. She could hardly stand to look at it and was about to tuck away her phone when she noticed something about the image: behind her unhappy head was a fragment of Isaac’s map—evidently, the single shot of the map that had escaped erasure. She zoomed in on it, and to her astonishment, the resolution was sharp all the way in. Having spent little time exploring her own phone, she was still mystified by its capabilities. Hazel pulled in close enough to make out the names of downtown streets and to read the dots Isaac had placed there. There were a few dots sitting in a cluster, one reading 101515013122—or October 15, 2015, 1:31 a.m. and 22 seconds. If the dot was accurate, just a month ago, near the corner of Maple Avenue and East Sixth Street, some poor soul had breathed his or her last. But then, that was to be expected on Skid Row. A couple of blocks away were two more dots, near the historic district, where two people had apparently died in August within minutes of each other. “Your grandfather wasn’t predicting just any kind of death,” she remembered Raspanti saying. Okay, if not just death, then what?