No One You Know (29 page)

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 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 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.

W
HAT’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.

“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 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 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?