The Last Equation of Isaac Severy(87)
The passenger door opened, revealing Anitka. She had refused a driver, presumably because she wanted one final good-bye with her lover. And it was indeed good-bye, because Anitka was not going to be working in California but instead would be flown to GSR’s offices in Virginia. Perhaps it was a kind of revenge that Nellie was snatching Philip’s mistress from him and spiriting her three thousand miles away—but then again, Philip himself had arranged it.
Nellie glanced at a neat stack of materials on her desk. She wanted them to be visible when Ms. Durov walked through the door. On top was issue 75 of the European Review of Theoretical Physics, containing Anitka’s bogus article on the early inflationary universe and brane expansion. After reading up on the entire Durov affair, Nellie had come to the conclusion that Ms. Durov, confused PhD candidate though she was, possessed a wild and devious brilliance that could prove useful to GSR. And here Nellie had assumed the girl was merely useful as a spy.
The supplementary materials Philip had provided further convinced her that Anitka was a genuine talent, the most impressive of these materials being the young woman’s corrections of one of Isaac’s papers. After running the corrections by Alex—who confirmed that his grandfather had indeed made a significant error and that Anitka had quite elegantly righted the mistake in the margins—Nellie was convinced that her search was over. With a natural talent for chaotic mathematics, not to mention a solid background in the mental rigors of string theory, Anitka Durov was the perfect candidate to nurse Isaac Severy’s crippled equation back to health. Together, she thought with a smile, they would cast the future into complete transparency. Imagine!
Nellie watched Philip lean against his car and pull Anitka to him, their dark coats merging into a single woolly mass. He put his mouth to her ear, and then, as a parting gesture, kissed her forehead, as if seeing a child off to school. Without so much as a glance back at the car, Anitka strode with great intention toward the building. Philip watched until she had gained admittance before driving away.
She could hear Anitka being ushered up the stairs by Cavet, who was trying hard to suppress the pleasure in his voice at the sight of their new hire. Nellie sat on the edge of her desk and picked up a pen, trying to locate a convincingly occupied air. When she found it, there was a knock at the door.
“Yes, come in.”
The door opened, and Anitka Durov, now coatless, stepped into the room, wearing a pressed navy suit and heels—a near mirror of Nellie herself. Her new protégée looked outwardly confident, yet her face bore the unmistakable traces of romantic torment. Oh, you will learn, dear girl You will learn to divert all of that into a far more useful place.
Seeing that Anitka was about to apologize for her lateness, Nellie quickly interrupted.
“Ms. Durov!” she said, extending her arms. “Welcome back.”
–?31?–
The Gift
Philip returned to campus with a conflicted heart. He had just come from ferrying Anitka to Malibu, where in turn Nellie would send her east—the idea being that he was sending her to a place where he would likely never see her again. He desperately needed her gone because where does a person draw the line with betrayal?
But his motives weren’t entirely in the interest of morality or even his family; he had also done this for her. Anitka was not suited to the world of academia. She knew this. Yet when they said good-bye that morning, and she looked up at him with doubting eyes, he had nearly pulled her back into the car and asked her to forget the whole thing.
The sting of her absence, both in his chest and in the passageways of the physics building, would remain for a while and then fade, to be replaced with a different kind of desire. He thought of his room again, the one he had glimpsed during his coma, and his brain started to ignite with newfound purpose. There was much to do. His room was waiting.
But before Philip could get back to work, there was something he couldn’t put off any longer. He unlocked his office. Hidden away in a desk drawer sat a flat package covered in brown paper. It had been given to him on his last birthday, but he had neglected to unwrap it, and there it had sat for almost a year. It was only when Jane recently asked about it that he remembered where it was. “I’ll hang it in my office,” he assured her. “Try not to hide it behind the door,” she replied.
Philip set down the hammer and nails he’d borrowed from a custodian and opened the drawer. He tossed aside the forgotten envelopes from the Department of Corrections and pulled out the package. He tore off its wrapping and, setting the artwork in the chalk tray of his blackboard, stepped back to view it properly. It was a small black frame, exactly a square foot in area, and two inches deep. In the center, caught delicately between two pins like a rare butterfly, hung one of Sybil’s found objects. He knew the artifact immediately: a scrap of paper, slightly yellowed and ripped along one edge. It was very old—twenty years, at least. Penciled on its surface was a series of squiggly arrows and small circles. He recognized it as one of his re-creations of a Feynman diagram: an illustration of the strange behavior of quantum particles, as described by Richard Feynman. The circles represented virtual particles, and the arrows, a particle of light’s possible trajectories. It had been Philip’s attempt to illustrate the behavior of light to his then-young daughter, of how photons “choose” their paths when bouncing off a mirror. He never thought that Sybil had cared for these things or had even retained these small lessons, yet she had kept this relic all these years.