by Susan Choi
To his surprise, the same spiky-haired boy whom he’d questioned before was at the window again. “I’m beginning to think you and I are the last people alive on the planet,” he said.
“Um, yeah,” the boy said, scrubbing his hand through his hair in a gesture of defense against the baffling statement. The boy’s scowling, suspicious expression was exactly like past expressions of Esther’s at that same thorny age. Though Esther’s had been a torment, this boy’s prompted in Lee an upwelling of misty benevolence. And the dread he had felt earlier, when he’d thought he would have to teach class, was giving way to a truant’s elation at the prospect of freedom. He felt able to back his car out of its space. If he did have a letter from Gaither, he wouldn’t read it right now, or even today. After three decades, what was the rush? When he got home, he’d brew a pot of green tea and take a very long nap, and when he woke up, he’d drink a cold beer and make a strip steak for dinner. He would skip the all-college assembly, he would soak in the bath with the Emperor Concerto playing, then he’d sleep like a stone, for the first time in weeks, and in the morning—the perfumed light of Tuesday, with no class to teach—he would open the letter.
As he’d expected, the mail cart for Mathematics and Computer Science hadn’t yet departed, although it was loaded and ready to go. “This’ll be the only delivery today,” the boy said as he wrestled the cart forward. “Second delivery’s canceled so everyone can attend the assembly. Um, I need to see a photo ID if you want to take mail from here. It has to be a valid driver’s license or, um, a passport or something like that.”
“You do? Why?”
“It’s just a new policy, for security.”
“But,” Lee said, smiling tolerantly at the boy, “my mailbox in the department doesn’t have to show you my ID for you to give it my mail. Does it? So what sense does this make?”
“If you don’t have ID with you now, we’re just about to fire this cart off, Professor. Your mail’ll be in your mailbox in about half an hour. Maybe forty-five minutes.”
“But I don’t have time to wait,” Lee lied. His aversion to returning to his building had become absolute; he knew that it would ruin his miraculously restored mood.
“And you don’t have ID? Because that’s the only way. I don’t know, you can talk to the guy in charge if you want. It’s not like I make the rules.”
Lee had almost imagined the entire mail-room apparatus under the desultory control of the spiky-haired boy, but of course there were full-time workers, actual United States postal workers, concealed somewhere behind the long wall of student mailboxes, each with its small window to show mail to someone looking in or, as one small aperture in a vast compound eye, to show the station’s patrons, like Lee now, to someone looking out. “No, that’s all right,” he said. “Of course I have my driver’s license. I only question this policy, because it seems very random to me.” He wrested the license from his wallet with clumsy fingers and then proffered it haughtily, because now the boy was looking at him with another of Esther’s former trademark expressions, the undisguised incredulity of a teenager forced to contend with a doddering parent. This time Lee did not feel as nostalgic in response.
“Okay,” the boy said, taking the license. “I’ll be right back.”
But the person who returned with Lee’s license was not the boy, or even one of the thick-legged, dull-eyed, full-time uniformed postal workers. It was a middle-aged man, perhaps in his late forties, casually dressed in loafers and pleat-front khaki pants and a bomber jacket over a button-up shirt with no tie. He was not very much taller than Lee and not even, on close examination, very much heavier, but he somehow denoted a looming presence, seemed to refer to a previous hugeness, like certain aged football players Lee recalled from TV, earnestly endorsing deodorant. This man’s earnestness seemed to arise not just from oversize shoulders, restrained and uncomfortable-looking in the snug bomber jacket, but from his face, which was even more paradoxically striking than his unaverage body. The face was appealingly ugly, sensitively crude, dominated by a shadow-casting shelf of a brow beneath which small yet bright eyes seemed to peer with particular keenness. Lee had the fleeting impression not of an unhandsome man but of an amazingly handsome gorilla, an impression deepened by the man’s helmet of coarse black hair, going gray at the temples, and his matching eyebrows further darkening his shelf-shadowed face, and his arms, as powerful as the shoulders and perhaps very slightly too long; Lee was aware of their length because the man was extending both hands in what seemed an unusually warm show of welcome. The right hand was empty, and instinctively Lee reached to meet it, while his gaze was entranced by the left: it offered Lee what at first seemed to be a small billfold, held open, the interior busy with typescript of various sizes in varying shades of blue, teal, and gray: FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATIONU.S. Department of Justice By Order of the Attorney General the individual pictured herein… The small photo of the man who had now grasped Lee’s hand failed entirely to capture its subject; it was clearly the same man, but at the same time it could have been anyone. An illegible signature climbed up one side, vertical to the rest of the text. “Special Agent Jim Morrison,” he was saying. “Professor Lee? It’s my pleasure to meet you. I have to correct our friend here: I’m not in charge, not at the post office. Your school’s administration and the United States Postal Inspectors are working together to implement changes for all of your safety, and I’m doing my best to help out. Thank your Postal Service; they’re watching out for your welfare. All right,” he added over the bulk of his shoulder to the boy, who was gaping behind him.
“No way,” the boy said. “Your name’s Jim Morrison? Are you serious?”
“For the next little while, the post office will be screening your mail on arrival to ensure it contains nothing dangerous,” the agent continued, ignoring the boy’s interruption. “But they’re also concerned no one tampers with your mail, once it’s here. Let’s say someone not you comes here claiming he’s you, gets your mail on the strength of his word, and then tampers with it in a manner that’s dangerous to you. But you’re you, Professor: that’s all we wanted to know. And let me add that I’m sorry for your loss.”
For a moment Lee didn’t know what loss was meant. He had flushed to the roots of his hair, and his overwrought gut had reactivated; the sensation he felt, inapt as he knew that it was, equally mixed apprehension with guilt. He had no reason to feel guilty apart from his being alive; but he’d long known that in the face of a cop, all grown people feel guilt, no matter how spotless their hearts.
By contrast, the boy showed no unease at all. After rooting through the bundles of mail in the cart, he handed one to the agent without a tremor: a large bundle, held together with two rubber bands, which the agent removed. The agent sorted through the bundle swiftly, was satisfied, resecured it, and gave it to Lee. Lee had watched this without seeing; he still did not know if the bundle contained a letter from Gaither. He dimly registered that it was the most mail he’d ever received in one day.
“So much,” he murmured.
“The post office has been holding on to mail while departments install keyed mailboxes. You should have gotten some notification; I apologize on your department’s behalf if you didn’t. They’ve had to come into compliance with a lot of changes in not a whole lot of time, and of course the stresses in your department have been greater than anywhere else. Just to save you some time, Professor, as you’re sorting through all of that mail, let me go ahead and tell you that one item will be a request that you make an appointment to come in and talk, either to me or to one of my colleagues, in the next couple days.”
“About what?”
“We’re speaking to everyone in the math/sci departments, as a matter of routine,” the agent began soothingly, and from his tone Lee realized that his own had been shrill. His benevolent mood, his momentary truant’s elation, had been misfired neurons, a glitch; he was the same trembling wreck he’d been when encountering Sondra. He struggle
d to master himself and wound up sounding brusque.
“Of course,” he interrupted. “I’d be very glad to. I’d be very glad to help.”
“Thank you, Professor. I look forward to speaking with you.” And when the agent extended his hand once again, but with the left hand withheld in a pocket this time, Lee, like a marionette, extended his once again in response, so that they both felt, when their palms made contact, that Lee’s was clammy with sweat.
9.
IT FELT IMPERATIVE TO HIM THAT HE GET HOME BEFORE encountering anyone else, that he get home, drink tea, nap, rise refreshed…but the sequence of restorative acts that had so logically presented itself a few minutes before was now incoherent. Bathe the Emperor Concerto, put beer to bed for a nap, strip steak like a stone—with the unlikely physical genius he otherwise only sometimes possessed after drinking too much, he had shot his car backward from its dangerous confines without any abrasions, and he exited the cramped parking lot as successfully. But once he’d left campus and merged into thin traffic, he knew he didn’t want to go home, to the vaulted and drafty expanse of his “cathedral” front room, with its wall scuffs where the furniture Michiko had taken once stood, above the ghostly round furniture footprints still marking the carpet. The exposed picture hooks on finely penciled crosshairs and the soil-coated plates in the corners on which had stood potted plants made the décor complete. He avoided that room so assiduously that the cheap hollow-core front door with its faux brass knocker, which he never used and apparently never locked, had once somehow swung open and remained that way a whole day and night, showing his arid front room to anyone who drove by while he, in the back of the house, put another sweater on his body and then another blanket on his bed against the unprecedentedly powerful draft. He’d seen the door standing open only the following morning, backing out of his driveway, and almost hadn’t bothered to shut it. If there were thieves, they had already seen he had nothing to lose—besides his desk, which he challenged the world to try to separate from him. Even Michiko, the shameless freebooter, had not dared ask for it. What a woman! From this distance, Lee was tempted to admire her, for having so thoroughly demolished one of his least examined and, as it developed, most unfounded beliefs, in the refinement and pure-heartedness of the Japanese woman. Of course she would turn out to be a dissembling, self-serving opportunist par excellence; she’d charmed Lee with her fears that by marrying him she might “cease to be Japanese,” because he, Lee, was always insisting he was purely American. And so he was, Lee had acknowledged: he had been a United States citizen for twenty-eight years, a number, unlike his age, about which he was always precise. But he’d had no desire to remain what he’d been. She did: that was noble, and lovely. She need not fear losing her “Japaneseness”—she would always have that! So it had gone, Lee reassuring her all through the process of getting her green card, a process upon which she’d embarked with such apparent reluctance and which, as soon as it was concluded, inspired her to divorce him.
He was passing Mashtamowtahpa Park, a homely, tree-scattered scrubland centered on a small pond, which had once also featured a petting zoo, through which a little train wended its way. The train’s miniaturized cars had been painted to replicate those of the freight trains that used to rumble through town, at so many points and so often that Lee suddenly had the sensation that Esther’s whole childhood was comprised of their waiting together at a railroad crossing, the same moment repeated again and again like the train cars they’d counted. Illinois Central. Union Pacific. When had those freight trains stopped coming? The petting-zoo freight-train facsimile had in fact carried passengers, each open-topped car holding three tiny benches faced forward, each bench potentially holding two children or, more snugly, a child and an adult. The first time he and Esther had gone to the zoo, she had been as uneasy as he, although he’d tried to hide it: “Look, Esther, a sheep! Like the rhyme!” But Esther had seen no less clearly than Lee that the sheep’s wool was dingy, and caked with sawdust, and stank, and that the sheep was quite stupid; only four years old, Esther had not run away or begun crying, but she had stood as if glued there, her brow dark with suspicion and blame. After this they had confined themselves to the train, which she loved. No matter that it struggled with much metal shrieking and trembling along a circuit that lasted barely ten minutes, even at minimal speed, and took in for sights the same sheep, the same unnerving goat, and the same pungent enclosure of chickens. Esther could not pass the park without riding it, could never ride only once, her small form warmly pressed to his rib cage, the glossy crown of her head very still as she gazed. They were sometimes the only ones riding, and when this was the case, the “conductor,” a parks employee who remained at the “station” to turn the train on and off, would raise his eyebrows in question as the train reached the end of its circuit and, if Lee nodded back, would twirl his forefinger over his head in a “one more time” gesture and let them keep going.
Like the real freight trains, the petting-zoo train had vanished, and the petting zoo with it. The very half of the park that once housed zoo and train had passed out of existence. Beginning a few years earlier, after some small amount of outcry, the land had been converted into playing fields for John Adams High School. Lee remembered walking with Esther across tramped, dusty grass and beneath tall pines that left rust-colored needles thick under their feet; it had seemed like a poor excuse for a park to him then, and he’d regretted he had nothing better to share with his daughter. Now that abused grass, and the scent of those pines, and even the colorful American debris Esther loved to examine—the Bazooka Joe comics, the plastic charms from the gumball machines—were as potent in recollection as that orchard in bloom, rolling down to the sea. He’d once thought this was such a diminished landscape; he’d had no idea how far diminishment went. Even the trees were gone. The little plot of land, which had once seemed, if not expansive or beautiful, at least possessed of some texture and depth, was exposed to have been a mere lot where one might have parked cars. Instead the school had erected klieg lights and laid out Astroturf. As Lee passed the far side of the new playing fields, he saw that someone had put up a sign: SHAME ON YOU JOHN ADAMS HIGH SCHOOL FOR SHORTCHANGING OUR CHILDREN.
When had the freight trains stopped coming? Those trains that, he had explained to Esther, carried grain, like amber waves of grain, and fruits, like from the fruited plain, and anything else anybody might want, the whole sea-polished length of the country. He had wanted to teach her the wonder he felt, for Great Plains and grocery-store lettuce, for all the breathtaking grandeur and everyday comfort the unlikely conjunction of which was their life in this country. Had he only succeeded in making her realize how far she could run? Everywhere in this town, the streets rose over tracks or ducked under them, and wherever you crossed the town’s river, an out-of-use railroad bridge ghosted your route, clamorous with graffiti. He remembered the first time he’d heard, from the mother of one of Esther’s spurned friends, that Esther had begun hanging out on the river with townies, probably to do drugs. This in the year after Aileen had died. Fasano had left town by then, and Lee had felt terrorized by the prospect of Esther’s delinquency and so had hidden from it and done nothing.
These thoughts had carried him over the river into a part of town he’d once feared he would never forget and that he now hadn’t seen in a decade, though it was minutes from campus. This town was too small to spend four years in, let alone four decades, but Lee’s habit of rigid habitualness, coupled with a habit of periodically smashing all habits and erecting new ones that are entirely different but equally rigid, had made of the small town several smaller ones, which shared almost no points in common. The town he’d just entered was the one where he’d lived after separating from Aileen. There was nothing here for him—except, he realized when he passed it, the gloomy western-themed restaurant/bar he’d once frequented, after riverside jogs, with Fasano. The Cowpoke or Horseshoe or Split Rail—the Wagon Wheel, as it turned out. He was amazed to see th
at it was no more or less derelict than he remembered. He pulled in to the small, cratered lot. It wasn’t even noon, but the Black Label sign in the window was lit, and there were two other cars.
All this time the bundle of mail had remained out of sight in his briefcase, keeping company with the letter from Gaither and a half page of insomniac notes for his now-canceled class and a number of pens, some depleted and some leaking, which lived in the briefcase year-round. There was nothing else there, not even the semester’s textbook, which he had years ago ceased to need and of which, in any case, he had multiple copies, kept at school and at home and—tossed there in a fit of car cleaning and now forgotten for years—in the trunk, beneath the tire jack and shovel. On most days his briefcase hung from his hand virtually empty, but its purpose had never been as a means of conveyance. It was his keystone of self as projected by wardrobe, his version of the businessman’s tie—though, unlike the tie, which denotes a whole species, that briefcase meant Lee and was as good as his double. So that when his colleagues at school saw the briefcase perched somewhere alone, looking back they would think they’d seen him. And so that Lee himself, having forced the mail down that unprotesting throat, now felt the lump indigestibly in his own stomach. While driving he’d allowed himself only the thought that until the right moment presented itself, he would give no more thought to the mail. Now he hugged the briefcase with one arm as he approached the dim entrance—weathered boards, suggestive of a barn—feeling almost relieved at how promptly fate had made the appointment.
The dim entrance was no preparation for the interior darkness, which stopped Lee in his tracks, briefly blind from the lingering stain of the dazzling spring sunshine. When he and Fasano had come here, it had always been dusk, and he recalled the room gently aglow, lit by hearth or by candles, with a warm scent of steak in the air. It was nothing like that. The still air was colder than the stiff breeze outside, as if this air had been trapped in the room since the previous winter. And the smell, of cigarettes and concrete and mildew, underscored that impression. There was no hearth that Lee could make out, although there were candles, in squat globes the golden brown hue of day’s first, darkest urine. He immediately wanted to leave, to be outdoors again, perhaps on one of the fragile, termite-ravaged benches still holding their ground in Mashtamowtahpa Park. But he could feel himself being examined by the bar’s other patrons, the few miserable persons like him who had wanted to exile themselves from the first beautiful day of the year. He would drink one beer and leave, and he’d open the mail in Mashtamowtahpa Park. Unhappily, he felt his way onto a vinyl barstool that was chill to the touch and so tall his legs swung short of the metal footrest. Perhaps this wasn’t the same place at all. The Barn Door? The Hayloft? At least it gave him a light opener for his call to Fasano. I thought I was losing my mind. Could we have liked such a dump? Then, after they’d laughed and resolved the enigma, he’d have to say that at the very same time they’d been talking last Friday, Hendley was already dead.