No One You Know

by Michelle Richmond

  He went into the house and came out seconds later with a white poncho, just like the one he’d been wearing in the photograph in Carroll’s office. “Lift your arms,” he said. I did, and he pulled the poncho over my head. It reached all the way to my ankles. “You look like a ghost,” he said, smiling.

  We hugged, a complete hug this time, and I breathed in the pencils-and-rain smell of his skin. I thanked him and stepped out into the downpour. I took my time following the path of stones—12-9-12-1-12-9-12-1—from his porch through the rain-soaked yard. When I got to the end, he called out to me—“Wait!”

  He ducked into the house. A couple of minutes later he came out again, plodding across the wet paving stones. His shirt and pants immediately became drenched, clinging to his body. His hair stuck to his head. He handed me a package, something hefty and book-like, wrapped in layers of plastic bags.

  “What’s this?”

  The rain stopped, just as suddenly as it had begun. I reached into the bags and pulled out a large manila envelope. Inside the envelope, a sheaf of paper, two inches thick, covered in numbers and symbols.

  Forty

  THE NEW CAFE WAS ON TWENTY-FIRST Street between Mission and Valencia, tucked between a used bookstore and a clothing boutique. When I arrived at three in the afternoon, the neighborhood was gearing up for the Día de los Muertos procession. As I rounded the corner, I could see Henry down the block, standing on a ladder in front of the café. When I got closer I saw that he had a paintbrush in hand, and was touching up a smudge on the signage above the storefront. The letters were pale green, lowercase.

  “Great name,” I said.

  “You like it?”

  “Shade,” I read. “It’s perfect.”

  “I’d hug you, but I’m covered in paint and sawdust.”

  “All set for opening day?”

  “Getting there. Have time for a cup of coffee?”

  “Always.”

  Inside, he showed me the beautiful chrome espresso maker, the antique roasting machine. A series of framed photographs depicted the coffee farmers whose co-ops would supply the beans for the café.

  “Everything is reclaimed or recycled,” Henry said proudly. “These are the original light fixtures from the Coronet movie theater. The bar and tables are made out of redwood from an old Doelger house they tore down last year in the Sunset. The chairs are from the old U.S. Mint.”

  “It’s beautiful.” I pulled a small paper bag out of my purse. “Here, I brought you something. A new blend from Jesus.”

  He opened the bag and sniffed. “Mmmm, chocolate and toasted hazelnut.”

  “Wait until you taste it,” I said. “Cayenne and citrus. A lovely vanilla bourbon note in the end. I think it should be your signature coffee.”

  He went behind the counter and fed the beans into the grinder. The noise of the machine was a welcome distraction. I’d seen Henry half a dozen times since our aborted conversation in the cupping room at Golden Gate Coffee, but each time, there were other people around. “I don’t know if Mike told you,” he said, “but I requested that you handle my account. Nobody else.”

  I nodded.

  “How was the Nicaragua trip?”

  “Really good. I would have asked you to come along, but—”

  He stood with his hands in his pockets. He looked tired. When he smiled, I noticed that crow’s-feet had begun to form around his eyes. When I’d met him, he looked so young. He had been young, I reminded myself; so had I.

  “Funny,” he said, “when Mike suggested that I go with you, I had this whole picture in my mind of how it would play out—me and you down there, eating at little hole-in-the-wall restaurants, running back to our hotel in the rain—the way we used to. I kept waiting for you to give me the go-ahead. Every time I saw you at the office, I hoped that would be the day you’d change your mind. At the very least, I thought you’d let me take you to dinner, catch up.”

  I hesitated. “There was someone I needed to see down there.”

  “I know. I heard. It’s all pretty amazing.”

  A burst of music drifted through the door as a group of old men with trumpets passed by.

  “We never really talked about what happened in Guatemala,” he said.

  “It’s okay, Henry. It was a long time ago.”

  “Not that long.” He spooned the grounds into a coffee press and poured in the steaming water.

  “I’d forgotten that about you. You’re still devoted to the French press.”

  “It’s the only civilized way.”

  I watched the street while he waited for the coffee to steep. He brought two porcelain cups—one blue, one yellow—over to the table.

  “Pretty.”

  “An estate sale. I thought it would be nice if all of the dishes were sort of random.” The 21 Valencia bus went by, and the chandelier above our table rattled. He poured the coffee and sat down.

  “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, assuming 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 gods 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 mass 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 bass.

  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 glasses 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, hoarding 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 ang
le 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 tortoiseshell 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 assumed 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.