“Then I met you. That night with you in your hotel room was almost unreal. The combination of the rum, and the darkness, and the sheer strangeness of it all, had an almost hallucinatory effect on me. I found that if I narrowed my eyes just so, slightly blurring my vision, and tuned down my ears a notch, kind of halfway listening, it was very much like being in a room with her. On my long walk home through the rain that night, I re-created her voice in my head, her face, the way she moved her hands when she spoke. It was more than strange; it was, without doubt, the closest I have ever come to a spiritual revelation, and for the first time I understood Ramanujan’s claims of divine inspiration. Because as I made my way through the wet streets that night, I saw, in a sort of grainy, movie-reel vision, Lila forming the phrase with her lips. I actually heard her speaking. And I realized I’d been remembering it incorrectly all along. She’d actually been smiling when she said it, this quiet, mischievous smile. Her exact words were not ‘an unusual but perfectly elegant third piece.’ They were more lyrical than that. She had said, I became certain, ‘an unusual but perfectly elegant third element.’”
“I don’t understand.”
“Don’t you see? It was a riddle. I’m sure she planned to explain the riddle to me before long if I didn’t figure it out, but she never got the chance. That night, after I met you, arriving home drenched and halfway drunk, I sat down at my desk and placed a diagram of Brun’s sieve to my left, a statement of the Vinogradov Theorem to my right, and between them I placed my worn-out, hand-me-down copy of Euclid’s Elements—‘an unusual but perfectly elegant third element,’ she had said. A clue. It had been there all along, if I’d only paid closer attention. Elements comprises thirteen books, and, rather than risk missing something, I began with book one, page one. I parsed it page by page, stopping only to grab something to eat or to crash on my bed for a few hours, or to fetch water from the well. I did this for forty-three days straight. I went through dozens of pencils, reams of paper. And in the end, in a place where it never would have occurred to me to look, I found the key that Lila had been pointing to, the key that unlocked the whole thing.”
The sun shone down through the wet branches of the trees, making everything shine with a crazy kind of light. Large drops of water collected at the tips of McConnell’s hair and plopped down on his face, his shirt collar. He looked manic and inspired, and I knew exactly, without any doubt or reservation, why Lila, who swore she would never waste her time on love, had fallen in love with him.
“What will you do with it?” I asked.
“I’m giving it to you. It’s yours to decide. It’s not important to me anymore. I only did it for Lila.”
“You can’t mean that.”
He looked at me as though I’d missed the whole point, as if I hadn’t understood a thing he’d said to me. “But I do. An enormous burden has been lifted. I’ve done the biggest thing I could ever have imagined doing in my lifetime, and I did it just the way I planned to twenty years ago—in collaboration with Lila.”
Back in my hotel room, I had stared at the pages for hours, trying to understand even a few lines of the dense, impenetrable mass of numbers and symbols. But it was no use. It was Lila’s language, not mine.
I had made a copy for myself—a misplaced archival instinct, I suppose, a desire to have a record, even of something I would never begin to understand—and taken the original to Don Carroll, who received it with astonishment. He would get it published, he said, jointly, under McConnell’s name, and my sister’s. It would take some finagling, some calling in of a favor or two—after all, McConnell had been absent from the math world for twenty years, and his claim of having proved one of the most difficult problems in the history of mathematics would be met with intense skepticism—but it could be done. There would be a peer review. And if the proof was found to be accurate—Carroll had faith that it would—the world would take notice. Once again, I realized, my sister would be famous. But this time, she would become known for her talent, her mind. Not for what had been done to her, but rather for what she had done.
Now I took one last look at the photograph of Lila at the dining-room table with her notebook. Then I placed it on the altar. Lila at her best, in a moment of discovery.
I made my way through the writhing park, out into the darkened street. Once again, there was the crush of bodies. Dozens, hundreds, a river of the dead flowing through the city, dispersing slowly through the side streets into the neighborhoods. I kept trying to find my way out, but there appeared to be no exit. Every painted face led to another, and another, so that it felt as if I was going deeper into the crowd. After a while I came upon four men in black capes, carrying a wooden gazebo draped with skeletons. The gazebo was fitted with handles, and they carried it low to the ground, walking slowly. I was stuck behind them, unable to go around. Then the gazebo began to rise into the air, and one of the men caught my eye. He signaled me with his eyes, and I realized they were lifting it so that I could pass underneath. But as I moved ahead, they lowered it again, and I was trapped inside the moving structure. It was lit from within by three small battery-powered lights. The walls were painted white, and plastered with photographs. All I could see was the interior of the box, and the feet of the men who carried it, marching along. After a few seconds, it was impossible to tell the feet of the four men from the others swirling around us. I knocked on the walls, but no one heard me; if they did, it made no difference. I could hear the crowd pressing against the side of the gazebo, and the dull throb of drums in the distance. The smell of fresh paint made me dizzy. But to my surprise, I felt no sense of panic. After perhaps a minute I gave in to the moment. As long as I kept pace with the men, it was not uncomfortable. As I walked, I studied the photographs. Men, women, children, different ages, different settings. In one I thought I recognized the cloud forests of Guatemala; in another, the garlic fields of Gilroy; in yet another, the windswept beach at the western edge of the city. The smell of the paint grew thicker, and my head began to feel heavy. It was like a dream, one over which my rational mind held no jurisdiction. I would simply wait for it to end.
I don’t know how many minutes had passed—five, ten, fifteen?—when the structure began, slowly, to rise. When the bottom of the gazebo was level with my shoulders, I ducked my head and emerged. I breathed deeply, filling my lungs with the cool night air. The men stumbled drunkenly to the left, seemingly oblivious to me, and I realized they probably had not even known I was there.
I looked around to get my bearings. The sound of drums was distant now. The crowd had all but disappeared. I found myself alone, on an unfamiliar block. There were no signs, no landmarks, no points of reference. The street was really no more than a sliver of an alley, lined with trees and home to a row of old Victorians, each one of them marked in its own way by a kind of graceful disrepair. A cat wailed in the distance. In a second-floor apartment, a girl in a yellow nightgown walked slowly past the window. A tall figure moved toward her. A slender arm reached out to turn off a lamp, and the room went dark. Everything about the moment was stunningly familiar. Had I been here before? Had someone described this very scene to me? Or, maybe, I had simply read it all in a book. Sometimes it felt as if books and life formed a strange origami, the intricate folds and secret shadows so inextricably connected, it was impossible to tell one from the other.
At the end of the street, by instinct, I went right. The Victorians gave way to apartment houses and taquerias, bars and burger joints. I don’t know how many minutes passed before I came to Dolores. Left, and up the hill, past a small park littered with the evening’s debris—empty bottles, a discarded red cape, a string of paper skeletons hanging from a lamppost, lifting and lowering in the breeze. My legs were sore, but I kept walking. It wasn’t until I reached Twenty-eighth Street that I realized where I had been headed all along. By the time I began the steep uphill climb, I felt as if I’d been walking for hours. It was quiet on my old block. Even though it was less than a mile from the h
eart of the Mission, it seemed like a different city. Halfway up, I stopped beside the familiar bottlebrush tree, turned, and looked up. The light in my old bedroom was on. The birdhouse on the windowsill cast a strange shadow on the sidewalk. I checked my watch—half past midnight. I sat on the bottom step of the house and waited. The breeze picked up, carrying with it the scents of my mother’s old garden—peppermint, lavender, sage.
At 12:43 I stood and faced the house, looking up at my bedroom window. At 12:45, just as Thorpe had said, the shade came down, and the light went off. I glanced up the hill toward Diamond Heights. There was Thorpe’s big house, jutting over the cliff like a spaceship, its modern angles oddly in tune with the hill and the trees. Now. I don’t know if I said the word aloud, or if I merely thought it, but just then, the light in Thorpe’s office went on.
I thought of Diriomo, where objects and moments seemed to obey the laws of some hidden symmetry, where the most mundane moments seemed ordered, orchestrated, nothing truly left up to chance. I had long believed that Diriomo was an exceptional place, where the ordinary laws of randomness did not apply. But maybe I had been wrong. Maybe there was symmetry everywhere, and the patterns of our days held no less certainty than the mathematical patterns of the universe. Maybe, in order to see the patterns, one simply needed to take a few steps back, turn the page upside down, approach everything from a different angle.
I imagined the woman in my old bedroom climbing into bed. Did she fall asleep as soon as she rested her head on the pillow, or did she lie awake making plans, brooding over the events of the day? How much did she know about the family who lived here before? At this very moment, unbeknownst to her, she was becoming a character in Thorpe’s new novel. What would she do in that novel, I wondered, that she would not do in real life? What decisions would be made for her that she would never make for herself? What name would Thorpe give her, and what words would he put in her mouth? Would she read the book one day, and recognize herself?
This was a city of windows. Behind every window were enough stories to fill a book. I thought of the photographs inside the white gazebo, how each face was the starting point of a thousand different stories. Some of them were true, and some were not. I thought of my family’s story—how, for so long, we let it be told by someone else.
I closed my eyes. If I concentrated hard enough, I could almost hear my parents’ voices coming from within. Of course they were not there, but there was something to be said for reinvention. In the world as I reordered it, at that moment, standing on the steps of my childhood home, my parents had never divorced, never moved away. They sat at the kitchen table, talking. My father was telling my mother a story about a business trip he’d recently taken to Sweden, some chance encounter with an old college friend in the airport in Stockholm. My mother met his story with her own, about a decade-old guilty verdict against one of her clients that had recently been overturned. Each one of these stories had indeed been told to me by my parents in recent weeks, but separately. My mother told me hers as we sat in her new garden in Santa Cruz, among the bright bougainvillea and soft, silvery lamb’s ear. My father told me his over the phone from London—another business trip. In reality, they were thousands of miles apart. Only in my imagination did my parents come together, talking with their old ease, as if nothing had ever happened to split their world apart. I realized I could have stood there for hours, listening, inventing.
“There was only one perfect ending,” Thorpe had said of his first book. “Once I understood what it was, writing the story was like following a map.” At the time, he was sitting at the table in his house at the top of the hill, and he was staring at me, as though he was trying to decide if I was really there, or if he had only imagined me.
Even then, I knew he had been wrong. There is no such thing as a perfect ending, no such thing as an infallible narrative map. “Arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.” Every story is flawed, every story is subject to change. Even after it is set down in print, between the covers of a book, a story is not immune to alteration. People can go on telling it in their own way, remembering it the way they want. And in each telling the ending may change, or even the beginning. Inevitably, in some cases it will be worse, and in others it just might be better. A story, after all, does not only belong to the one who is telling it. It belongs, in equal measure, to the one who is listening.
Acknowledgments
I wish to thank my wonderful agent, Valerie Borchardt, and my excellent, insightful, and very patient editor, Caitlin Alexander.
Many thanks to Lauren Mountanos at Mountanos Bros. Coffee for the eye-opening tour and for her wealth of coffee knowledge. Thanks to Dora for demystifying the art of cupping.
My gratitude to Susan MacTavish-Best and Jim Buckmaster for giving me the keys to the house on the hill when I needed a warm, quiet place to write. Thanks to Ben Fong-Torres for being Ben Fong-Torres.
Thanks also to Katie Rudkin, Madeline Hopkins, Chris Jones, Brenda Orozco, Jay Phelan, Erin, and, as always, Bill U’Ren.
Above all, thanks to Kevin, where all of my stories begin and end.
About the Author
MICHELLE RICHMOND is the author of The Year of Fog, Dream of the Blue Room, and The Girl in the Fall-Away Dress. Her stories and essays have appeared in Glimmer Train, Playboy, The Oxford American, and elsewhere. She has been a James Michener Fellow, and her fiction has received the Associated Writing Programs Award and the Mississippi Review Prize. A native of Mobile, Alabama, Michelle lives with her husband and son in San Francisco, where she is at work on her next novel.
ALSO BY MICHELLE RICHMOND
The Year of Fog
NO ONE YOU KNOW
A Delacorte Press Book / July 2008
Published by
Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved
Copyright © 2008 by Michelle Richmond
Delacorte Press is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Richmond, Michelle, 1970–
No one you know / Michelle Richmond.
p. cm.
1. Sisters—Death—Fiction. 2. Murder—Investigation—Fiction. 3. Domestic fiction. I. Title.
PS3618.I35N6 2008
813'.6—dc22
2008013508
www.bantamdell.com
eISBN: 978-0-440-33781-2
v3.0
No One You Know Page 28
