A Person of Interest
Page 9
7.
LEE SPENT SPRING BREAK IMITATING SERENE SOLITUDE, mounting the stairs to his desk every morning and not going back down except for his meals, but finally accomplishing nothing, because his mind couldn’t stop pawing over the letter from Gaither. The mailbox at the end of his driveway suggested a sequel, and so he didn’t set foot out of doors. His desk had conspired in his shamefully feeble reply, and so he sat glaring angrily at it without reading or writing. The telephone commemorated his failure to get Gaither’s address from the operator, and so day after day he did not even call back Fasano, the pleasure of whose conversation was coming to seem like an undeserved gift. But on the last Friday before spring break was over—nineteen days after the bomb—Lee had a respectably studious late afternoon and then sat with a beer while he watched the dusk deepening outside his kitchen. He was actually watching himself, for the more the sky faded, the more sharply emerged his reflection in the sliding glass door, a full-color man in his full-color home, layered over the looming black cones of the five Douglas firs in his yard. The five firs, planted along the property line between his backyard and that of his neighbor at what had once been quite wide intervals, had now grown so tremendously upward and outward that they formed a thick wall that blocked even his neighbor’s house lights. Lee and the neighbor had divided the cost of the trees almost ten years ago, when they’d both bought their homes, and it was one of the very few schemes in his life that had actually worked. He felt a privacy and security in the rear-facing rooms of his house, where he left the curtains open for the sake of his plants, that he never felt in the front rooms or even upstairs—from those vantages he was always aware of his neighbors, power-walking past his neglected front lawn with censure or perhaps even sadness for him in their eyes.
Now night had fallen completely; above the five great serrations of his Douglas-fir wall, he could see the pure blazing pinpoints of stars, and in contrast to them diffuse lamplight had spilled out his windows to spread raggedly over the grass. His stove’s clock read 6:43; that meant 4:43 where Fasano was, in California. Lee was feeling authentically tranquil for the first time in days, perhaps weeks, and this pleasure in being alone made him want conversation.
Fasano answered on the second ring—“Fasano,” he said, nasally—and Lee was certain that Fasano’s not answering on the first ring had been an act of self-restraint. Fasano, too, must spend his days and nights alone. When his phone rang, like Lee he forced himself to stay his hand until it rang again. When his office door opened, he forced himself not to leap to his feet.
“Frank?” Lee said, his voice sounding reluctant to him. But Fasano recognized him at once.
“Lee! Jesus Christ, I was starting to think the goddamn psycho had gotten you. How in the hell are you? Start with bodily harm, we’ll get to intangibles later. Still got all your fingers and toes?”
“Yes, yes,” Lee said, laughing.
“Thank God for life’s little pleasures. And what about the other guy?” Now Fasano’s voice changed. “He gonna make it?”
“They think so,” Lee heard himself saying, realizing as he did that he actually had no idea how Hendley was doing.
“Thank God,” Fasano repeated, but for all the joyous garrulity that had just been their reunion, they fell awkwardly silent. Lee was afraid that Fasano could sense Lee’s neglect of his injured colleague. Lee could almost imagine Fasano, at the other end of the line, still in daylight, subsiding in disappointment.
But the awkward silence didn’t last. It was soon over, and then Lee had the thought that he and Fasano had counted it out together, each instinctively holding his breath for a requisite number of beats, as if they were veterans of the same army and possessed all the same rituals. When Fasano started speaking again, he was audibly relieved to be past the formalities, and both Lee and Fasano were delighted, almost giddy, to be conversing again. Fasano, too, had remarried and redivorced; Fasano, too, invoked Zeno’s paradox when explaining the never-quite-complete state of his book. Fasano, as Lee had guessed, lived alone now, was resisting retirement—“You hate teaching your whole lousy career, you just want to be alone with your books, and when you’re finally old enough to cash in on the Double-A-Cref, you discover if you don’t have a classroom, you die. Left alone with your books—it’s like death”—but all the same was appalled by the state of his students. Couldn’t read! Couldn’t add! And why go on—but there were one or two great ones, two precisely, in fact, they were both foreign students, of course, and each was worth all the rest put together. “I tell them, ‘When you go back to your countries, you’re going to be, what? President? Chief justice? Head of whatever research institution you have over there? How’re you going to choose?’ And they’re both like, ‘What? Go back to our countries, no way!’”
“They want to stay here, of course,” Lee put in, taking a sip of his beer. “What opportunity do they have where they come from?”
“Not so much, I suppose. They’re both black Africans. One’s from Ghana and one’s from Nigeria. But they remind me of you, Lee. So bright they seem radioactive. Maybe they’re Kryptonite People from Krypton. And yeah, they want to stay here, like a goddamn free gift to this country, and they’re in danger of losing their visas. Feds treat them like hustlers who want a free ride. It’s unbelievable, Lee. Another reason I haven’t retired. I write letters, get mad. It won’t help. It’s not the same golden welcoming land that it was when you came.”
“I don’t know about that. There were problems then, too.” But he was only dimly aware of having said this; it was a rote response that might have emerged at the touch of a button. His voice had dropped and grown thick, and he needed to swallow but couldn’t—his throat walls were too stiff, or too dry. He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. They remind me of you, Lee. So bright. That kindness of Fasano’s had been so unexpected and at the same time so desperately craved; he was newly and unhappily aware of a longing for just such charitable donations to his dwindling self-regard, and for a panicked moment his gratitude to Fasano was erased by the suspicion that Fasano was pitying him. Fasano had left the department two decades earlier for a job at Cornell, had left there for UCLA; Lee had watched him disappear into the upper echelons of reputation as he’d watched every colleague he’d ever admired, while remaining, himself, where he was. And yet, even bearing the imprint of UCLA, Fasano now seemed to float at Lee’s same unremarkable level, both of them neither the stars they’d aspired to be nor the failures they’d feared they’d become. And Fasano was still talking, as if his vision of Lee as so bright had not been charitably contrived. And just as important, Lee realized, Fasano was uninjured. Alive.
“Frank,” he interrupted. Fasano had been cheerfully detailing the disappointments endured at the hands of his daughters—one was an aspiring-actress waitress and the other was gay and played drums in a band. “Our fault,” said Fasano, “for being such high-minded, defensive elitists that we sent them to crap public schools.”
“Frank,” Lee repeated. “You said you’d had a bombing at UCLA like the one we had here. Who was it? Was it one person in particular targeted, like Hendley, or was it just one person who happened to get hurt?”
“It was one person hurt, but they don’t know if it was one person targeted or, if it was, if it was that person targeted. Your guy’s came in the mail, to him, right? This was different. The guy’s name is Sorin Illich, a colleague of mine, but I don’t even pretend I understand what he works on. He’d only been in the department a semester when this happened; we’d lured him with big money from MIT. He walks out to his car, which is parked in the faculty lot, and sees what he later described as a piece of wood lying behind his front tire, on the driver’s side, where he’d have to roll over it when he backed out. I don’t know what kind of piece of wood, how big, if it really was wood. Apparently it looked enough like any old piece of wood that he picks it up to toss it out of his way, and it explodes in his hand.”
“And he’s…dead?”
“But his career didn’t need help,” Lee pointed out. “He was a hotshot already.”
“True enough. Like your Hendley.”
“So whoever did this dislikes hotshots.” Once he’d said this, they shared another comradely silence. He and Fasano weren’t hotshots. When Fasano spoke again, Lee knew how mistaken he’d been to imagine even briefly that Fasano looked down on him. They were on the same level and of the same mind.
“It’s never good to be the tall poppy,” Fasano remarked. “You get your head snipped off first.”
“Perhaps we should be kinder to our children,” Lee joked. “They’re just keeping their heads down.”
“The short poppy can’t help being short. The tall poppy who folds herself up to look short is contemptible. She’s either lazy or neurotic or both. No offense meant to Esther. I’m talking about my own girls. But you and I, Lee: Are we short and can’t help it? Or are we tall but somehow folded up?”
“I’m a mathematician, not a psychiatrist, Frank.” That got a laugh from Fasano.
“Either way we’d please Darwin. We won’t get our heads snipped. You know, Lee, it’s hasn’t only been Hendley and Illich. For a while after Illich’s thing, I was researching this all the time, going through the old papers. It began to seem morbid, and I made myself quit. But I read about five or six other weird bombings. Sometimes in the mail, sometimes an object just sitting around. The guy who gets it is always a mathematician or computer scientist or a computer programmer. All relatively prominent in their fields. All guys. And all over. Another one in California, two in the Midwest, one all the way out in Connecticut, one I think in New Jersey. No one’s died yet. They’ve all lost some fingers, some vision, not that that isn’t awful. But knock wood, so far no one’s dead.”
“And you think they’re connected.”
“I don’t think. I’m no sleuth. The cops think, the cops have theories. But it always fades out of the news pretty soon, and then it’s years before another one happens. These ones that I’ve mentioned, the first happened all the way back in the late seventies. Then it’s years in between. If it’s one guy, he must keep on losing his nerve. Or he’s not in a hurry.”
Eventually Fasano’s commute and Lee’s hunger for dinner forced them to say their reluctant good-byes. “Lee, the telephone is a wonderful instrument, easy to master and not even very expensive. Let’s not let it be another twenty years, all right?”
“All right,” Lee agreed happily. “It’s a deal.”
“Give me a call next week sometime. Let me know how Hendley is doing.”
It was not quite the one note from their glad conversation Lee had most wanted echoing in his bright kitchen once he’d hung up the phone. Cooking his dinner and pouring himself a new beer, he tried to determine whether it constituted a lapse and, if so, just how glaring a one, that he hadn’t yet been back to the hospital to pay a visit to Hendley. It wasn’t, he decided, that he was averse to expressing his sympathy—after all, who had been more Hendley’s comrade in the disaster than he? It was perhaps that he’d assumed that he would only be an unneeded addition to the crowd of well-wishers. There would be the generically worshipful students and the exceptional Emma. There would be Sondra, the departmental secretary and self-appointed den mother, who had found in Hendley’s vibrantly chaotic life the most exalted arena so far for her tireless drive to perform the sorts of thankless, unnoticed, laborious tasks she performed for all the members of the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, all of them incompetents in the science of everyday life. Moving briskly among them, perhaps constantly shooing them out of the room, would be Hendley’s girlfriend, Rachel. Rachel was slender, urban, sardonic; arrestingly beautiful in the severe, offhand way in which the very few overtly sexual intellectual women Lee had known in his life always were. She had reminded him, when he’d first glimpsed her passing the door to his office on her way to Hendley’s, of a sort of Aileen; a later edition, as if it had been possible to take Aileen, so out of sync with the frame of her life, and reissue her just a few decades later with far better results. Rachel had given Lee an unsettling shock, as briefly as she’d passed through his field of vision; the thought had entered his mind that he had possessed Aileen only as the result of a colossal temporal mistake, some cosmic snafu that had marooned her on the plane of existence ahead of her time. Now here she was again, or here was her close likeness. That day, about two years ago, Rachel passed Lee’s doorway without even a flick of dismissal, he was so far beneath notice, entered Hendley’s instead, and with the brusqueness of ownership banged the door shut.
Setting his usual place at the table, along the side nearest the stove, with his Corelle breakproof plate and his Tupperware tumbler—items Aileen had left when she’d left him—Lee relived that moment of Rachel’s indifference as if she had meant to insult him, and all his doubts about a hospital visit were nicely resolved. If he went, he would be greeted with the same cool indifference. He wouldn’t get from her the courtesy due to a senior colleague, let alone the warmth anybody might feel toward the bomb’s almost-victim. Nevertheless, he would go anyway. Dignity required it. He would say he had been out of town on a spring-break vacation he’d planned long before and that in fact he’d arrived home just now, Friday night, around nine.
He was still so abstracted by his thoughts that his movements were rough as he spooned white rice onto his plate and poured beer into his tumbler, and when the telephone rang, he forgot about the menace of Gaither and snatched it up right away. “Hello!” he exclaimed.
“We lost him, Lee,” he heard a woman say hoarsely. The emptiness of her voice was even worse than her tears might have been; he was left to imagine the violence of emotion that had emptied her out. It was Sondra.
“We lost him, Lee,” she repeated.
“My God,” Lee said, sitting down suddenly. He shoved his plate of rice far away from him. His message pad with Fasano’s number still lay on the counter nearby; he saw FASANO printed on it and jauntily framed in a sharp-cornered box and remembered his shameful happiness of just minutes before, when he and Fasano had been reminiscing. Of course he should have been at the hospital weeks ago. And of course Rachel’s slighting of him had been purely imagined, his own haughty self-justification to shake off his guilt. Because he was guilty: of profound self-absorption. Somehow, though Hendley’s explosion was the force Lee still felt rumbling through his own body, though Hendley’s impact crater—and the long-buried strata that it had exposed—was the landscape that Lee had been pacing for days, Hendley himself, torn asunder and fighting for life, had lain outside Lee’s thoughts. It wasn’t that Lee had forgotten about him. It was rather that, with so many of the artifacts of Lee’s own life catapulted aloft, with the arbitrary detritus of this era and that, of chapters heretofore held apart, now suspended together in space and demanding Lee gaze on them—and with Gaither’s letter the fiery star at their center—present time had not seemed to progress. Present time had not seemed to progress, let alone undergo deadly increase in speed, as it must have for Hendley. And now Hendley was dead.
They managed to discuss the details. The time of death, just an hour before. That it wouldn’t be in the newspapers the next day, but on Sunday. The plans for a service and so on were all in progress. After Lee said good-bye, he pulled a sheet of Saran Wrap—like a shroud, he thought—over his plate of cold rice and put it into the fridge. Then he sat down again in his old wooden chair, sole survivor of the dining-room set h
e and Aileen had bought at the Salvation Army right after they’d married. The act of purchasing such a solemn species of domestic furniture, and the set itself, “mahogany” dark and with deep grooves and grim feet, had at that time felt very serious, almost pious. The set had already been wobbly then, aged and dry in the joints so that the chairs made rhomboid shapes with their legs if you pushed back too hard getting up from the table. This last chair Lee had wood-glued and bound with twine for drying again and again, like a veterinarian tenderly setting the joints of a completely lame dog, but to no avail; beneath weight the chair still creaked and tilted, refused to maintain its right-angularity, and even when Lee stood up from it—as he did now, restless—the chair groaned with reproach.
There was his reflection in the glass door again, as clearly cast against the night as it would be in a mirror. His lean face, his sharp jaw, his slight leathery jowls of age, not as if he had grown fleshier but as if his outlines had surrendered to gravity very abruptly. His mouth a little downturned at the corners, his eyes very remote, hiding fear. Every kind of death frightened him, whether of one he had loved or of one he had loathed. And it was that fear, anyone’s fear of death, that now sat anxiously at his sternum, a pressuring fist—though it felt similar to remorse.
8.
LEE RETURNED IN DREAD TO CAMPUS THAT MONDAY, to launch those last downslope weeks of the term that in previous years he would have bounded ecstatically through, as if his sixty-five-year-old chest held the heart of a freshman. This time he had writhed without sleep the whole night before, and sliced into his face while attempting to shave, and then drunk a pot of coffee, a vice he’d given up several years earlier for the sake of his bladder, and though the coffee he’d brewed had been stale, it still burned in his gut as if he’d swallowed ammonia. He was going to be scrutinized—as the survivor, or as the hospital nonvisitor, or perhaps simply as the most senior member of the department who still foolishly taught and showed up for meetings. Whichever role had been pressed upon him, he was sure it was somehow ignoble. He pulled in to his space in the faculty lot doubled over his acid-gnawed stomach, shoulders hunched to his ears, his ragged margin of platinum hair prickling into his eyes. It was remarkable he didn’t lock the keys in the car, that he’d remembered his briefcase; as he gathered these objects carefully, tremblingly, to himself, he seemed to watch from aloft, as if he were the dead man. He forgot that the last time he’d been in this space he’d been holding the letter, dotting it with his tears.