No One You Know Part 21

"That night in Guatemala," he said. "I guess I just got scared off. I didn't want to fight anymore. We were always fighting."

"I know," I said. "I'm sorry."

A series of loud pops erupted outside, followed by shouts and laughter. I turned to see a group of teenage girls heading toward Mission, setting off firecrackers in the street. They wore identical black dresses and dark red lipstick, their hair slicked back in pony-tails. At that moment, as if she could sense my gaze, one of the girls turned, met my eyes, and slowed down. I waved at her, and she waved back.

Henry sipped his coffee. "You seem different."

"Different how?"

"You were always so nervous, fidgety, always looking over your shoulder."

"And now?"

"I don't know. You've relaxed."

"That's another thing I'd forgotten about you."

"Hmm?"

"You could always see right into me. It made me uncomfortable. You knew me too well."

"That's a bad thing?" Henry asked.

"At the time, I thought it was."

We sat for a minute or two in silence, watching the police set up barricades for the parade.

"Remember that time?"

"Yes." I knew that he was talking about the night, several years ago, when we took part in the Day of the Dead procession-his idea.

"You looked good in your skeleton suit," he said.

"Did I?" I laughed.

I remembered that the white makeup made my face feel tight. And I had carried a picture of Lila in my pocket. I'd taken the photo with a little point-and-shoot camera at the stable in Montara, not long after she got Dorothy. I'd forgotten to turn off the flash, and in the photograph, Dorothy is startled by the light, rearing up. Lila is leaning forward, hanging on, but she doesn't seem the least bit scared. She looks as if she's having the time of her life.

"Do you remember that picture?" I asked.

"Of course. You put it on the altar. And then, as we were walking away, you took it back."

"You saw that?"

Henry nodded.

"Why didn't you say anything?"

"I figured you had your reasons."

"After I put the photograph there, I changed my mind. I didn't want to give her up, even if it was just a picture."

Through the open door, I could feel the evening growing cooler. The light was fading. "You were right," he said finally. "This should be my trademark coffee. It's amazing."

I reached across the table and took his hand. He seemed startled, but he didn't pull away. His blue eyes were so unusual, so beautiful. It was the first thing I'd noticed when I met him; I imagined it was the first thing everyone noticed. How could they not? In certain kinds of light, his eyes were so pale they appeared almost clear. Sitting there, I considered the unlikely genetics, the strange combination of his parents' chromosomes that conspired to give him his most striking feature. For my entire adult life, I had believed what Miss Wood, my high school biology teacher, had told me: that one day such eyes would be gone, a distant memory of a faded civilization. Blue eyes resulted from recessive genes, Miss Wood had said; because of this, one day they would no longer exist. One day, the world would be filled with nothing but brown-eyed people, the dominant gene running its course, taking over the planet. It was the doom of mediocrity, she said, dominant genes battling the recessive genes until one day every human would be the same.

I had never really questioned Ms. Wood's reasoning, accepting it like so many other wrong things I learned in high school. And so, for years, with Henry, I always looked into his eyes with a bit of melancholy, a.s.suming that our children would have no chance of inheriting his eyes. They were like a beautiful, pale light coming from a star that had died many years earlier.

Only recently had I discovered that Miss Wood had misunderstood one of the most basic and most important tenets of biology. It was McConnell who explained this to me, during that conversation in his room in Diriomo a couple of weeks before. "You look so much like her," he had said. "Except for your red hair, of course." And in response, I had said something about how, one hundred years from now, red hair would be obsolete.

"Not true," McConnell had said. And he'd gone on to tell me the story of the biologist Reginald Punnett, who believed that recessive genes would continue to recur in the population at a steady rate, indefinitely. Unable to come up with any science by which to prove his theory, Punnett turned to his friend, G. H. Hardy. According to Punnett, Hardy thought about it for a few minutes, and then quickly scribbled a simple, elegant equation which proved Punnett's theory beyond doubt. Punnett was amazed. He immediately suggested that Hardy submit his work for publication. Hardy was hesitant at first, believing that such a problem must have already been solved and that it was not his place, as a mathematician, to propose work in a field so completely foreign to him.

"Ultimately," McConnell had said, "Hardy relented and submitted the work that is now known as the Hardy-Weinberg Principle and is taught in all of the more reputable high schools and colleges around the world. Blue eyes, red hair-they'll be around as long as humans are. It's a huge deal in biology, but when he wrote his famous A Mathematician's Apology, he didn't even bother to mention it."

Now, for the first time, I looked into Henry's eyes and felt none of that old melancholy. A hundred years from now, Henry's great-grandchildren might look at photographs of him and understand exactly where they got their beautiful blue eyes.

"Why are you smiling?" Henry said.

"No reason."

For a couple of minutes we just sat there. I remembered what Don Carroll had told me-"a perfect match is almost as rare as a perfect number."

"That day at the office," I said. "You were about to tell me something, and then Mike walked in. Remember? I'd just asked if you could tell, the first time you met me, what exactly would do us in."

He leaned closer, wrapped my hand in both of his. There was no hesitation in his voice, and I wondered if he'd been waiting, all this time, to give me an answer. "When I was a kid I always had this dream where my father finally bought me this bike I'd been desperate for-it was one of those Schwinn five-speeds with the choppers in the front. It was dark green, and it was called the 'Pea Picker.' Anyway, in the dream, whenever I reached out for it, it would start rolling away. I never did catch it. In Guatemala, it occurred to me that you were like that bike. You were there with me, but then you were also just slightly out of reach."

"So, I'm the Pea Picker?"

"Well..."

More noise in the street, more firecrackers, but this time, neither of us turned to look.

"Do you know the story of the constellation Lyra?"

He shook his head.

I told Henry the tale as Lila had told it to me that night thirty years before. I told him about how Orpheus had gone to the Underworld to bring his wife, Eurydice, back from the dead, and how, in the last moments, he had broken his promise to the G.o.ds and turned back to look at her. "When he looked at her, she slipped away," I said. "After Orpheus died, Zeus tossed his lyre into the sky, forming the constellation Lyra."

"Sad story."

"Yes," I said, "but the actual facts are rather unsentimental: Lyra has a right ascension of 19 hours and a declination of 40 degrees. It contains the stars Vega, Sheliak, Sulafat, Aladfar, Alathfar, and the double-double star Epsilon. Four of Lyra's stars are known to have planets. The best time to view the constellation is in August."

Henry smiled. "I'm not sure I follow."

"The whole thing about Orpheus and Eurydice, how he made this crucial error and lost her forever-it's just a story. You can take it or leave it. Stories aren't set in stone. It took me the longest time to realize that."

LATER, I HELPED HENRY WITH SOME LAST-MINUTE details-hanging a mirror in the restroom, putting candles and bud vases on the tables, sweeping the floors. By the time I left, it was dark out, and the streets were crowded with costumed revelers. I walked down Valencia, pressing against the throng. A troupe of scantily clad dancers swirled around me, moving in unison to the spooky beat of the drums. The air reeked of incense. A pair of police officers drove slowly down the street, motorcycles rumbling. I stepped aside to avoid a group of men dressed in tattered suits, carrying an enormous funeral pyre. On top of the pyre was a naked woman, painted head-to-toe in white.

I tried to push my way through the crowd, but I was going the wrong direction. Soon I was swept up in the raucous, swirling ma.s.s moving south down Eighteenth Street. The music, the voices, the bodies, the smell of sweat and alcohol and incense, made me feel as if I had been caught up in some impossible dream. The costumes were dark and ghoulish, but the atmosphere was festive. For several seconds I walked side by side with a tall, gaunt man in a tuxedo and bowler hat, his lips starkly red against the white face paint. He held hands with a small woman in a long white dress, wearing a cloak of purple feathers so heavy she stooped under its weight. A man in skeleton gloves brushed past us, playing a trombone. The tuxedo man broke away, down another street, and I was surrounded by Mexican schoolchildren clad in red, singing a familiar melody to the shush-shush of their maracas. Their teacher, a beautiful twentysomething girl, was also dressed in red; her face was painted white-a skeleton, though a happy, smiling one. As the teacher led them in song, a mariachi band appeared from across the street to accompany them on guitars and ba.s.s.

I don't know how many minutes I was jostled along by the crowd before I arrived at Garfield Park. The place was crowded with altars that had been erected in honor of the dead. There were dozens of them, ranging from the very simple to the stunningly elaborate. On the altars people had left flowers, toy skeletons and bones, books, shot gla.s.ses filled with tequila, little white skulls made of sugar. And on every altar, stretching through the park and into the dark alleyways beyond, were photographs. Thousands of pairs of eyes staring out from the candlelit altars. Here the crowd had grown less rowdy. People were politely pressing past one another in order to place their photos on the communal altars. As I moved closer, I realized that I had fallen into a long line, marching slowly toward the largest of the altars. In front of me, a young girl dressed in white was clutching a photo with both hands, tears in her eyes. She kept glancing over toward the McDonald's, where her father was waiting for her. Behind me, two older women were holding hands, speaking in Spanish.

For so long I had lived a solitary life, h.o.a.rding my memories of Lila like some secret treasure I couldn't afford to lose, sifting through them, day by day, on my own-as if my sister's death was a thing no one else could understand. Now, everywhere I looked, I met the faces of the dead.

Inside my coat pocket was a photograph of Lila I had taken about a month before she died. In it, she's sitting at the dining room table, head bent slightly over the familiar notebook, pencil poised against the page. From the angle of the photograph, it's clear I must have taken it from the opposite end of the table, just a few feet from her. She's not looking at the camera, but at the notebook, as if completely unaware that there is anyone else with her in the room. Her dark hair is piled on top of her head, fastened with a tortoisesh.e.l.l clip, and on her face is a look of pure concentration. But if you study the set of her mouth, her eyes, something else is clear in her expression. It is a look of delight, as if something has just dawned on her.

For years, I'd kept the photograph in a box, worried that I might bend it, or worse, lose it. Now, standing before the communal altar, I slid it out of my coat pocket and held it up to the candlelight. I thought of Peter McConnell, how he'd never needed photographs of Lila to keep his devotion alive. He'd had the notebook, and his memories of her, and for him that was enough.

WHAT'S THIS?" I HAD ASKED SEVERAL DAYS BEFORE, standing on a stone step in McConnell's soaked yard, holding a thick envelope.

"It's the proof."

"The proof?"

He nodded. I just looked at him for a few moments, uncomprehending. Then I understood. "The proof?" I said, incredulous.

"The proof."

"For the Goldbach Conjecture?"

"Yes." From the expression on his face, I could tell he was almost as astonished as I was.

"I don't understand. I thought you'd given up."

"I had," he said. "And then I met you, talked to you, and everything turned upside down. My memories of the final conversation I had with Lila that night in the restaurant came rushing back. I remembered something she said before I turned the conversation in a more personal direction, something about a combination of Brun's Sieve Method, the Vinogradov Theorem, and what she referred to as an 'unusual but perfectly elegant third piece.' At the time, I thought little of it. We'd been down so many roads in our pursuit of the Goldbach proof, and I a.s.sumed we would go down many, many more. I took it for granted that the sheer complexity of the problem meant that the key we were looking for was years, possibly decades, in the future. A few months after I'd moved here in the early nineties, I finally persuaded myself to open her notebook and search for the 'unusual but perfectly elegant third piece' she had referred to. I went through the notebook with a fine-tooth comb, and over time I considered thousands of different variations, but nothing worked. Still, I continued working, and, as you learned from Carroll, I managed to conceive of a number of interesting results in the process. But I never felt that I was coming anywhere close to a final proof of the Goldbach Conjecture.

"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 pa.r.s.ed 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 ma.s.s 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 pa.s.s 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 pa.s.sed-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 pa.s.sed 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 heart 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 s.p.a.ceship, 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 grat.i.tude 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.

MICh.e.l.lE 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 a.s.sociated Writing Programs Award and the Mississippi Review Prize. A native of Mobile, Alabama, Mich.e.l.le lives with her husband and son in San Francisco, where she is at work on her next novel.

ALSO BY MICh.e.l.lE RICHMOND.