The Last Equation of Isaac Severy(78)

His head now thrummed in a full orchestra of pain. He sometimes wished it were possible to relocate the pain in all its intensity to another section of his body—stomach, chest, arm, knee, where it might take on less significance—because there was something singularly cruel about an ache in one’s head. It assaulted one’s very being. How had his brother ever endured it? Tom would have taken the whole bottle. It would have been nothing to him, like popping an aspirin. Philip looked back at his prescription. Maybe a couple more. He scooped more pills and water into his mouth, though he knew this wasn’t wise. You’re poisoning yourself, Philip Killing yourself.

I know, he answered, but anything is better than this.

He blinked out at the water and thought he saw a red dot floating in front of him. It was the dot he had seen on the map, now growing to envelop him. He looked at his watch: 5:04. In seven minutes, someone was going to die in the canyon.

He let his hand drop to his side. He was very tired.

The red dot. What about it had seemed so important? What had Nellie said? Murder and suicide—when it comes to a distinction between the two, the equation is blind.

His head suddenly cleared, the incessant pounding replaced by an overwhelming sense of calm. He looked down at the now-empty bottle as it fell away from his hand.

“Oh, I see . . .” he said aloud. His eyes closed, and he gave in to gravity, his forehead smacking the cool canyon floor.





–?25?–


The Event


When Gregory entered the lobby of Union Station, a wedding reception was in full, frowzy swing. Tom was already on the other side of the crowd, past the bar and halfway into the passenger waiting area. It would be impossible for Gregory to lose him now. He could practically feel Isaac’s mathematics pushing him (cheering him?) to the predetermined end point. Once it was finished, he would feel the release he needed so badly—the antidote to his fury.

He had been tracking Tom for the past two hours through deserted downtown streets, fantasy-killing him many times over. First, he fed Tom into the rotating steel wires of a street sweeper. Next, he forced him at gunpoint to the observation deck of city hall, folded him over the railing, and watched him scatter on the sidewalk below. Later, he invited Tom to take a ride on the Angels Flight funicular. He tied his feet to a railroad tie, his hands to an axle, and as the funicular ascended, sat back to observe the man’s body split open.

When Tom had crossed a bridge overlooking the 101 Freeway, Gregory had briefly considered pushing him into the twinkling red stream of taillights. But the overpass wasn’t far enough from the ground to ensure that Tom would die instantly. He might only injure himself, in which case a passing vehicle would need to finish the job. It had worked for Rhoda Burgess, the woman who thought she could willfully ignore her husband’s basement hobby of child captivity and get away with it. A similar method had worked for an Echo Park woman who thought she’d convinced police that her six-year-old’s third-degree burns were accidental. It was Gregory who decided that the woman’s parking brake should fail one day as she was lifting groceries from the back of her car. Her skull, much like Rhoda Burgess’s, had succumbed under the weight of a Firestone tire.

Gregory wanted to do something different for Tom, not a repeat performance. He wished he had a few more weeks to think of something on the level of his usual work, but he had run out of time. Besides, if Isaac’s universal computer was leading him here, how could it be wrong?

Union Station would be a first for him. They were here only because Tom’s usual subway stop had been closed that night for maintenance, and passengers were rerouted to the main hub. Gregory’s phone buzzed again. He had a message waiting from his sister, which he was choosing to ignore. There was also a text from E. J.: You coming in tomorrow morning? People are asking. Apparently he could no longer be relied on to show up for work. But it didn’t matter anymore.

Gregory picked up his pace a bit, only glancing at the festivities around him. He had a brief flash of his own wedding: Goldie standing on the beach in a wispy gown, the most irresistible she had ever been. But however much he had tried that day, he hadn’t entirely been able to rid his mind of Sybil. A year before that, his heart had cracked in half at the sight of Sybil dressed in white, binding her fate to that totally average bore of a man just because she was going to have his child. Impossible to believe that in her misery, she would have had a second child with Jack.

Tom veered from the long-distance train tracks to the subway station below. As expected, he chose the Red Line headed for Hollywood. Gregory followed more closely than he had dared previously—so close that when Tom was at the bottom of the escalator, he was at the top. It would have been so easy for Tom to turn around and see the man who had been following him for weeks, even with his poor eyesight. When Gregory reached the platform, he scanned the ceiling and corners for cameras.

He turned back to Tom, who stood behind the yellow line, hands shoved in his pockets. There was one person on the opposite end of the platform, a woman, but she looked infirm and certainly incapable of doing anything about an incident on the other side of the terminal.

Gregory checked the timetable. The train was due in two minutes . . . now one minute. He could just hear a distant rumble moving through the tunnel, very faint. The train was likely at Seventh Street already, or Pershing Square.

He had, of course, considered that he should let Tom go on living his sad life. Incurable, head-fracturing migraines were punishment enough, and by killing him, Gregory would only end his suffering. But then, Tom had lived his entire life like this, and it had led only to his hurting those around him. The world would be a better place with this man removed from it.