No One You Know (27 page)

As I was driving home, I thought again about what Thorpe had said all those years ago in class. Life isn’t just about the major characters and the big events. It’s about everyone, everything, in between.

Thirty years from now, would I remember Jesus at the farm, Maria at the café in Nicaragua, my boss Mike? At thirty-eight, I could recollect the names of only three or four of the teachers I’d had in my life, and it wasn’t necessarily the best ones that stuck in my memory. I remembered Mrs. Smith from kindergarten only because she chewed with her mouth open, mean Mrs. Johnson from third grade only because her dresses always rode up too high on the backs of her puffy legs, my P.E. teacher from seventh grade only because she had once shamed me in front of my classmates for failing to catch a fly ball. I remembered the men I had slept with, but only by name; for the most part, details escaped me. I knew in the end that Thorpe would never leave my memory, nor would McConnell, or Frank Boudreaux.

I wished I could go back in time and pose this question to Lila. Her short history was made up primarily of my parents, me, and Peter McConnell. Before that night when she ran into Billy Boudreaux at the Muni station, would she have bothered to mention him in her list of relevant people? It seemed unlikely.

Heading down Clipper and across Castro, I found myself stuck on Thorpe. All through the conversation, I felt as if there was something more he had wanted to say. I put him off, thinking I already knew what it was—something about me, about us. But there, alone in the car, it occurred to me that perhaps it was something else entirely.

“Red herrings,” he had said, “right?” Earlier, when I had first mentioned Billy Boudreaux’s name, he had smiled ever so slightly. Was it possible that he had known, all along, much more than he let on?

I thought of that first address Thorpe gave me as we stood in his garage in the early morning—the innocent janitor, living out his final days in his modest house in Bernal Heights. Did Thorpe know it was a name that would lead nowhere? After that, though, it was Boudreaux and then Strachman. Was Thorpe thanking me for coming back each time? Was he thanking me for giving him a second chance? I was the one who had undertaken the search, but it was Thorpe who gave me the tools.

He was still Thorpe. And yet, I had a hard time admitting to myself, in some essential way, he had changed. It had been twenty years. I’d always thought that people changed only in books, not in real life. But here was Thorpe—this living, breathing person doing something I never would have thought him capable of. After all this time, he had managed to surprise me.

Thirty-nine

I
T WAS
O
CTOBER, THE TAIL END OF THE
rainy season, and Diriomo was cool and wet, the whole town blanketed in orchids. I had arrived on a Tuesday morning, following an uneventful red-eye and a bumpy bus ride from Managua, and checked into my usual hotel. That afternoon, I would go to the co-op to taste some new samples. I had gifts for Jesus’s children—a book of bird illustrations for Rosa, a paint set for Angel. But first, there was someone I wanted to see.

I changed into a sundress and sandals and set out on foot. On the makeshift baseball field, children were playing with sticks and an old tennis ball. Soon I was standing on the familiar doorstep, ringing the familiar copper bell. I heard shuffling from within, and Maria appeared, her gray hair draped over one shoulder in a long braid, tied with a yellow ribbon.

“Welcome,” she said, smiling.

The place smelled the same as it had three months before, when Peter McConnell walked up to my table and said, “Do you know who I am?” Then, as now, there was the salty-rich smell of frying pork, the deep aroma of coffee, the mild scent of cornmeal. But that night the place had been dark, lit only by candles. Now sun flooded in through the windows, illuminating the surprised faces of Maria’s porcelain dolls. The red curtain leading into the kitchen was pulled aside, and through it I could see Maria’s stove, drenched in sunlight.

“What are you serving today?”

“Nacatamal,”
she said.
“Está usted sola?”

“
Sí, señora.
I am alone.”

She shook her head and put a hand to her heart, as if it pained her to see me return, once again, in such a state. I sat at my usual table. Moments later, she brought coffee, then disappeared into the kitchen. I reached into my bag and took out Lila’s notebook.

I had been over the notebook so many times, but each new perusal of it offered up some fresh surprise. This time, it was a tiny line of handwritten text pressed up close to the binding halfway through the notebook, so that the pages had to be forced open to read it. I brought it close to my eyes and struggled to make out the words.
An equation for me has no meaning unless it expresses a thought of God.

Maria brought out the
nacatamal.
It was delicious, as always. When she came to clear away my plate, I asked her in my clumsy Spanish about the gentleman I’d met three months before in her restaurant.

“Ah, sí, Señor Peter!”
she said.

“Sí,”
I said.
“Dónde vive?”

She went to the kitchen and came back with a pen and a piece of paper, on which she drew a map.
“Estamos aquí,”
she said, pointing to a little square box with a stick figure of a woman standing in front of it.
“Él está aquí.”
She drew a circle around another box, which was connected to the first by a series of winding roads.

“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/R
²
, 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.”