Free No One You Know by Michelle Richmond

chair, a cupboard, and a small table. A narrow doorway opened onto the tiny bathroom. The room was hot. I turned on the overhead fan, and it began to click and hum.
    “I have rum,” I said. “Drink?”
    “Just a little, please.”
    I took out the bottle and two glasses and poured some for both of us. I still had my satchel over my shoulder, the tryer easily accessible.
    “Have a seat,” I said, gesturing toward the chair. The furniture was small by any standards, and when McConnell sat, his knees jutted absurdly in the air. He laid the hat and book beside him on the floor. I sat on the edge of the bed directly across from him, the bag on the mattress beside me.
    He took a sip of his rum, closing his eyes when he swallowed. “This is very good.”
    My mother was always giving me bits of advice gleaned from her experience as an attorney. One point she frequently came back to was that, if you wanted someone to tell you anything of significance, you had to build trust by offering them some personal information about yourself first. “It was a gift,” I said. “From a local coffee farmer. That’s why I’m here. There will be a cupping tomorrow, and I fly back to San Francisco day after that. I always stay here when I visit the farm, and there’s always a bottle of rum waiting for me when I get here.” I took a sip, felt the warmth slide down my throat.
    “A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems,” McConnell said. Then, noticing my look of confusion, “Paul Erdos. There’s some truth in it. I go through nine or ten cups a day.”
    “The book,” I said, glancing at the small volume on the floor beside him. “ The Chemical History of a Candle. What is it?”
    “It’s from a series of lectures delivered during Christmas at London’s Royal Institution in 1860. Faraday writes that ‘there is no more open door by which you can enter into the study of natural philosophy than by considering the physical phenomena of a candle.’ Faraday delivered the lectures to schoolchildren, but there’s quite a lot to them. A great essay is like a mathematical proof in that its argument is elegant, its truth universal.” He took another sip of his rum.
    “You read a lot?” I asked.
    “It passes the time. As you’ve probably noticed, this is a rather quiet little corner of the universe.”
    “You were telling me why you’re in Diriomo.”
    “After my wife kicked me out, I didn’t know where to go. I couldn’t go back to San Francisco, because I’d been vilified there, a walking pariah. I couldn’t go back to Stanford. For several months, I drifted around Ohio, working as a house painter. I figured that if I stayed in the area, then maybe, every now and then, I’d get to see Thomas. But Margaret convinced a judge to give her sole custody, I didn’t even get visitation rights—it all came back to the book. I was devastated. First I lost Lila, and then I lost my son. My work had ground to a halt, and my career was over. At that point it was difficult for me to imagine any reason that I ought to continue living.”
    “Why did you?”
    “Have you heard of Alan Turing?” he asked.
    “Rings a bell.”
    “In 1950 he devised the Turing Test, to determine a machine’s capability to demonstrate intelligence. A human judge engages simultaneously in natural language conversation with a machine and another human being.”
    He must have read the confusion on my face, because he smiled and said, “I apologize. This is exactly why I would make a terrible teacher. When I speak, I follow whatever path my thought processes may be traveling at the moment, but I forget to make the necessary connections for the person I’m speaking to. With Lila, when I went off on a tangent, I always had the feeling that she was following along with me. I never had to write down the steps to a proof; she could connect the dots on her own, as if she were reading my mind. There you go, I’m doing it again.”
    I poured him