No One You Know

by Michelle Richmond

  “Thank you.”

  Laughing, she made a gesture as if to shoo me out the door. “Señor McConnell, él es muy guapo!”

  “He is,” I agreed.

  On my way out, I stopped to examine a Venus flytrap on the windowsill. Its pale green leaves were open, split down the middle like fruit. A fly buzzed just inches above the plant. Finally, the insect landed on the needles. The leaf snapped shut. I wondered whether Lila had ever seen a Venus flytrap. I seemed to remember there being one in a classroom at our grade school, but I wasn’t sure. It was a habit I couldn’t quite break, even now—when I saw or experienced something new, I often wondered whether Lila had had a chance to experience it, too. Sometimes I felt as if I was experiencing each new thing twice—once for me, and once for her. Over the years, that sensation tapered off exponentially. There are only so many new things in the world, and the older you get, the harder it is to find them.

  Though the roads of Diriomo were weblike, folding over on themselves in inexplicable ways, Maria’s map was excellent. I marked it with my pen as I walked, drawing in landmarks—a mailbox, a donkey tied to a post, an old tire swing hanging from a tree—so that I’d be able to find my way back afterward.

  After half an hour, I came to a white house at the end of a deserted road. From the outside it looked as though it couldn’t contain more than a couple of rooms. Behind the house, and to both sides of it, was forest. The dirt yard was tidy, dotted with banana palms and prickly-looking foliage. A series of circular paving stones, each inscribed with a number—1-12-9-12-1-12-9-12—led from the dirt road to the concrete porch. I had just lifted my hand to knock when I heard a voice behind me.

  “Ellie?”

  I turned. It was Peter, clad in a sweat-drenched shirt, carrying two large metal buckets filled with water. He walked up the path of stones and set the buckets on the porch. “Well water,” he said, breathing heavily. “When I first moved out here, I thought I wouldn’t last. I couldn’t imagine life without plumbing. But you get used to it. There’s something satisfying about using exactly what you need, nothing more.”

  “Where’s the well?”

  “A half mile that way,” he said, pointing into the woods. “It’s good water. Would you like a taste?”

  “That would be nice.”

  McConnell opened the door and motioned for me to go ahead of him. Inside, it was warm and dark. We were standing in a large, simple room. He pulled the curtains aside to let in light. To the left, running lengthwise along the wall, was a bed, and beside it a nightstand. On the nightstand was a legal pad, a wind-up clock, and a large, unlit candle. I was surprised by the size of the bed given the meager surroundings—it was a queen, with crisp green sheets and two plump pillows sheathed in bright white pillow-cases. A couple of feet from the foot of the bed, a large desk was pushed against the wall. Above the desk was a window framed by yellow curtains. Beside the desk, a built-in bookcase strained under the weight of several dozen books. I recognized some of the titles from Lila’s own collection: Whitehead and Russell’s Principia Mathematica, Euclid’s Elements, Kline’s Mathematical Thought from Ancient to Modern Times, Gauss’s Disquisitiones Arithmeticae. And there, lying on its side on top of a series of yellow-covered reproductions of Ramanujan’s lost notebooks, was the one book with which I was very familiar—Hardy’s A Mathematician’s Apology. I’d taken Lila’s copy after she died.

  Although the room was spartan, there was something undeniably cheerful about the color scheme. Even the concrete floor had been painted a pale shade of blue, and beside the bed there was a woven rug in bright reds and yellows. In the far right corner stood a round table and a single wooden chair. Behind that, against the wall, was a makeshift kitchenette: antique icebox, Bunsen burner, and a copper washbasin on a stand.

  “There wasn’t any electricity when I moved in,” McConnell said. “I lived here for several years without it.”

  I spotted a cell phone on the table. “You’re modernizing.”

  “I gave in under duress. The company I contract for insists that they be able to reach me. Go figure. They keep trying to sell me on e-mail, but I’ve managed to hold my ground.”

  He went to the porch and brought the buckets inside, hefting them up onto the table. He took two glasses from a cupboard and dipped water into them with a ladle. The water was cool and good, with a slight metallic taste and a faint smell of grass.

  “Please,” McConnell said. “Sit down.”

  I looked around the room. There was only the one wicker chair by the table. “Sorry,” he said. “I rarely have company.” He picked up the chair, carried it across the room, and placed it a couple of feet from the bed. I sat down, the wicker creaking beneath me. McConnell sat on the bed, so that we were facing one another. “In fact, you’re the first person who has visited me in four years.”

  “Who was the last?”

  He hesitated. “A woman from the village.”

  “May I ask what happened?”

  “She wanted children. I told her I was too old for that.”

  “You’re only fifty,” I said.

  “I already have a son.”

  “One is enough?”

  “There was a time I dreamt of having three or four. But I rather failed on the fatherhood front, didn’t I? Some errors don’t bear repeating.” He smiled sadly. “Technically speaking, one is a beautiful number. One is its own factorial, its own square, its own cube. It is neither a prime number nor a composite number. It is the first two numbers of the Fibonacci Sequence. It is the empty product: any number raised to the zero power is one. It might be argued that one is the most independent number known to man. It can do things that no other number is capable of.”

  “A sequence of natural numbers always ends with one,” I said.

  “You’ve been doing your homework.”

  “It was in Lila’s notebook. The Collatz Conjecture. According to Erdos, ‘Mathematics is not yet ready for such a problem.’”

  He took a sip of water, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “You went to see an old friend of mine.”

  “Yes, Don Carroll. He spoke very highly of your work.”

  McConnell glanced at the floor, embarrassed. “He always was in my corner.”

  “In his office I saw a book with a double torus on the cover. I wanted to ask you about Lila’s tattoo. Why did she choose the double torus?”

  “She had a thing for topology. In topology, you can bend and stretch shapes and they remain essentially the same—a sphere is identical to any sphere or cube, or in fact any solid shape, such as the bed you’re sitting on, or the rug beneath our feet. But the moment you put a hole in a shape, it is no longer equivalent. So a double torus, which looks like two doughnuts stuck together, is equivalent to anything else with two holes, say a trophy with two handles. Lila liked the idea that a thing could be dramatically transformed while remaining, in every way that really mattered, the same. The double torus is a particularly rich form in that respect.”

  “In the notebook,” I said, “Lila had a quote: ‘An equation for me has no meaning unless it expresses a thought of God.’”

  Peter smiled. “Ramanujan. He believed his inspiration came from Namagiri, his kuldevta, family deity.”

  “Do you see God in the numbers?” I asked.

  “An equation isn’t necessarily about numbers. It’s about patterns. The universe is governed by mathematical patterns. Gravity, string theory, chaos theory, quantum mechanics—all of it can be expressed in terms of equations. F = GMm/R2, for example, one of the most basic equations of our universe. There’s an argument that if you can create an equation for anything, that thing exists. Because one can write an equation that represents a vast, empty, three-dimensional space, such a space exists. If the essence of God is creation, then yes, a beautiful equation can be said to express a thought of God.”

  He looked away, and smiled to himself. “I was always a bit low-brow compared to Lila. My favorite Ramanujan story is
about when Hardy was visiting him in the hospital, and Hardy said: ‘I rode here today in a taxicab whose number was 1729. This is a dull number,’ to which Ramanujan replied, ‘No, it is a very interesting number; it is the smallest number expressible as a sum of two cubes in two different ways.’” He paused. “But you didn’t come here for a math lesson.”

  “Lila’s notebook,” I said, hesitating. “Why did you have it?”

  “She gave it to me that night at dinner. She had come up with a new idea—a ‘brain flash,’ she called it—regarding an approach to the Goldbach Conjecture, and she wanted my opinion. But, unfortunately, I told her I didn’t want to talk about math. For one night, I wanted to put work aside and talk about other things, personal things. We needed to address the issue of my marriage, what we would do in the long term. I also felt there was still so much I didn’t know about her, so many questions I wanted to ask. Ultimately, she consented, on the condition that I take her notebook home and examine her new work, so that we could discuss it the next day.”

  “And what did she tell you?” I asked. “That night, what did you learn about Lila that you didn’t know before?”

  “I asked her to tell me what the best moment of her life had been.”

  “Did she?”

  “Yes. She told me about a trip the two of you had taken to Europe together right after you graduated from high school.”

  “Pascal in Paris,” I said, smiling.

  He gave me a questioning look.

  “It had been a dream of hers,” I said, “to visit Pascal’s grave. On that trip, she finally did. I’d never seen her so excited.”

  “That wasn’t it,” Peter said.

  “It wasn’t?”

  “No, it was in a hostel in Venice. The two of you had been traveling for a couple of weeks, and all of your clothes were filthy. You didn’t mind the dirty clothes very much, Lila said; you were able to roll with the punches, and for you everything about the trip, even the dirty laundry, was a great adventure. But Lila liked things a certain way, and she hated being dirty. That day, she had gone off in search of a Laundromat, but hadn’t been able to find one. You were sleeping in a room with a dozen bunks, women and men together. In the middle of the night Lila woke up, and realized you weren’t in your bed. She thought you must have gone to the bathroom, but after a couple of minutes, when you hadn’t returned, she became worried. She climbed down from her bunk and went to the bathroom to find you. You weren’t there. She wandered up and down the hallways, softly calling your name. A few of the rooms were private, and had the doors closed. As she became increasingly worried, she began putting her ear to those doors, listening for you. Then she heard banging down below. Alarmed, she went down the dark stairwell to the basement. She saw you before you saw her. You were working in the dim light of a single bulb, standing over an old hand-operated washing machine. She asked what you were doing. ‘What does it look like?’ you said, smiling. What Lila remembered from that night was that you actually looked happy to be standing there in the cold basement in the middle of the night, washing clothes by hand. And she knew that you wouldn’t have minded wearing dirty clothes for another week or two. You were doing it for her.”

  “She said that?” I asked. I had a vague memory of a hostel in Venice. But I didn’t remember anything about the midnight trip to the basement to wash our clothes. It amazed me that Lila had remembered, and that it had meant so much to her.

  “Yes. When I asked her what the best moment of her life had been, she told me that story.”

  “But it was nothing,” I said.

  “To her, it was.”

  “Thank you for telling me that.”

  I heard steps on the porch. I glanced out the window. A young boy dropped a small bundle beside the door before pedaling away on an old bike, wheels squeaking.

  “It’s Pedro,” McConnell said. “He brings me pencils each month.”

  “Another question,” I said, as the squeaking of Pedro’s bicycle faded.

  “Hmm?” He reached over and smoothed the pillowcase at the head of the bed. My gaze followed his hand, the gentle movement of his long fingers over the white fabric. For a moment it was as if I had been transported to another place and time, and had been given the gift of seeing into his most private moments—McConnell in the hotel room in Half Moon Bay, running his hand over Lila’s pillowcase after she had left, memorizing the impression of her head against the pillow.

  His voice brought me back. “Ellie? Where are you?”

  I met his eyes again. “Sorry, I was just thinking about something—”

  “Your sister used to do that. Just wander away in the middle of a conversation. At first I was offended, until she explained it to me—”

  “As if she’d stepped into another room,” I said, “and she became so focused on the things in that room that the door shut behind her. You’d have to make physical contact to shake her out of it.”

  “Exactly. The moment I touched her shoulder or held her hand, she’d come right back to me, and explain in the most lucid terms what it was she’d been concentrating on. Every time, it gave me the impression of having performed some strange magic trick, as if my touch was enough to lead her back from another world. Funny, I always assumed I was the only one who could do that.” He paused. “You wanted to ask me something?”

  “Why did you return the notebook to me?”

  “I’ve memorized every page of it, I don’t need the physical object when every figure, every scribble, is stored in my mind. Beyond that, I thought you should have it.”

  “I thought it would provide some clue,” I said. “I thought there would be some key in those pages that would unlock the mystery of what happened to Lila. I was disappointed when I didn’t find it.”

  “You came back because you still aren’t sure, didn’t you? You went home, you looked for answers, and you didn’t find them. But I’ve told you everything I know. I’m sorry, I wish I could help you, but I have nothing more to offer.”

  His gaze came to rest on my throat. He leaned forward, reaching toward me. For a split second, when I felt his warm fingers brushing my neck, I had the strange feeling that he might kiss me. I decided, in that moment, that I would not back away. “It’s hers,” he said, astonished.

  I had misread him. I could feel the slight pressure of the gold chain against my neck as he held the topaz pendant between his fingers. He let go, and the tiny stone fell back against my skin. He touched it again. I looked into his eyes, and he was a million miles away.

  I reached into my bag and pulled out the magazine. I handed it to him.

  He looked at the cover, uncomprehending. “Rolling Stone?”

  “Turn to page sixty-three.”

  He looked at me for a moment more, and he seemed like he was about to say something, but then he started flipping through the pages. The top half of the spread was covered with a photograph of the Potrero Sound Station. The title of the article was “Billy Boudreaux’s Last Act.” In a slightly smaller font was the byline, Ben Fong-Torres. Ben had pulled some strings and managed to get the piece in at the last minute.

  “What’s this?” Peter said.

  “Look at the bass player,” I said. I’d studied the photograph for so long, it was burned into my memory. In the foreground was Kevin Walsh, holding the microphone so close to his mouth it looked as though he might swallow it. Billy was in the shadows, his face barely visible. But the way the stage was lit, you could see his powerful arms, fingers poised on the strings. “That’s Billy Boudreaux.”

  Peter looked up at me. “I don’t understand.”

  “Take your time,” I said. “I’ll go outside.”

  I stood on the porch, waiting. I picked up the bundle of pencils and breathed in the woody, clean smell. I was out there for twenty minutes, watching dogs pass on the dirt road, looking for birds in the branches, before I heard the bedsprings creak. Peter came onto the porch and stood beside me. “Where did this come from?” he asked quiet
ly.

  “It’s a long story.”

  We stood there for a few minutes, looking out at the road. It began to rain. The raindrops were huge, leaving pockmarks in the red dirt yard. I didn’t know what to say. I hoped he knew that I felt responsible, in some way, for what had happened to him. I hoped he understood that this was the best I could do.

  “You could go home now,” I said. “It’s been in the news, you know. I think there are some people who want to apologize to you.”

  “Someday, maybe. For now, this is home.”

  “The numbers,” I said, “on the paving stones. What do they mean?”

  “12-9-12-1,” he said. “L-i-l-a. I used eight stones, spelled it out twice, because eight represents infinity.”

  “She’d like that,” I said.

  He laughed slightly. “Actually, I think she would find it alarmingly sentimental. But then, I’ve had a lot of time on my hands. A guy can become sentimental when he lives at the end of a dirt road for too long.”

  He moved closer and put an arm around my shoulders, just for a moment, and then dropped it. “The first time I saw you in town,” he said, “you were standing beside a fruit stand, your back to me. It was about to start raining. I could tell you were a foreigner, and I wanted to go over and tell you to find somewhere to sit out the storm. Foreigners are always surprised by the rain. It comes down so hard, so fast, you hardly have time to get out of it. Then there was a clap of thunder. It startled you. You turned around and looked up at the sky. And for a second, maybe two, I thought everything they say about Diriomo was true. I believed that it really was a pueblo brujo, bewitched village. Because at that moment, when you looked up at the sky, I thought you were her. And for a fraction of a second, I had this picture in my mind of everything coming together, my whole life reorienting itself, as if the last decade had been a dream.”

  We stood there in silence for another minute or two before I said, “I should go. I’m visiting a farm this afternoon.”

  “Wait. You can’t go out into this rain like that.”