A Person of Interest

by Susan Choi

  “Black Label,” he said to the indistinct bartender who’d materialized from the gloom. When the beer appeared, it was not in the modern deplorable can but in the ancient brown bottle. Perhaps this was the same place.

  “Professor Lee,” he heard a woman’s voice say.

  He knew he couldn’t blame the low illumination, or the one sip of beer, or even his insomnial night for the fact that he failed to see the young woman who had come to stand next to him, was not blind to her but rather misperceived her, drastically and to the point of conviction, twice, each misprision almost simultaneous to the other and to the final, correct apprehension, so that the woman herself would not realize that Lee had taken her first for his dead wife, raised healthy and young from the grave, and second for a heretofore-unencountered identical twin before realizing, finally, that she was neither Aileen nor an uncanny stranger, but Rachel. All Rachel saw in the seconds consumed by this turmoil was Lee staring at her in paralyzed horror and shock.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you. You probably came here to be left alone. We met long ago at the college, at a function or something. I’m Rachel. I’m Rick Hendley’s…I was—”

  “Yes, I know,” Lee said quickly, and in reward for having plucked her from that perilous branch he was graced by a smile, like the furnace door briefly thrown open to show the white suffering heat trapped inside. That undid him; his first spontaneous words had somehow won her favor, and anything deliberate he tried to say now was sure to blow the advantage. He had to get away. Now they had been joined by two more ghosts, a couple akin enough to Hendley and Rachel that, from behind, they might have been taken for them—or for Hendley and the phantom Aileen. The young woman pale, slender, severely melancholic in expression, with smooth classical hair tightly pulled to the nape of her neck, clad in black or in a hue dark enough to be taken for black in these murky surroundings. The young man as carefully disheveled as the women were carefully groomed; by his clothes he seemed to want to imply that he had just been performing repairs to his mobile home before coming to have a drink in this bar. All three had cigarettes pinned fastidiously between middle and index fingers, and now that Lee’s eyes had adjusted, he could see that the table from which they’d all risen to greet him, in the far corner, held an overflowing ashtray and an impressive collection of glasses—short glasses, for booze. Lee could also see now that apart from himself they were the only patrons.

  “…Natasha, and Gordon,” Rachel was saying. “Natasha teaches in the media studies department at Rochester. Gordon is at Santa Cruz. Historiography of science. We’ve all known each other since graduate school. Rick was our token hard scientist.” She turned to Natasha and Gordon. “Professor Lee is one of Rick’s colleagues,” she said. “Was.” Without warning, her face, which had been so composed, balled itself like a fist, and she started to sob. “I’m sorry,” she gasped, making no effort to conceal her streaming eyes or phlegmy nose, to bend over or turn or retreat. Gordon and Natasha watched solemnly, but apart from Natasha’s palm, which placed itself on Rachel’s back, no further intrusion was made, as if, like Lee, Natasha and Gordon were too awestruck by Rachel’s grief to do anything except stare dumbly at her. But then the bartender came down the bar to them, not at all alarmed—they must have been doing this all morning—and in response to his questioning gaze Natasha said, “We’ll have another round. And whatever he’s having. Please join us,” she said to Lee, in a tone that suggested not hospitality but an expectation of something: an overdue explanation, a reparation.

  “You must be hiding out from that ludicrous college assembly, like us,” Rachel said, as if her continued participation in the conversation were a given, despite her undiminished sobs. In her struggle to speak, she produced, drawing breath between words, a noise like a whinny. Lee’s own larynx seemed to have closed. If he had gone to see Hendley even once, he would have also seen Rachel, spoken with her, perhaps come to know her as he never had in the two years that she had been Hendley’s regular visitor from the West Coast. He longed to drench his parched mouth with his beer, but while Rachel sobbed, no one was drinking, although three new glasses, filled to their lips with dark liquor and ice cubes, had been neatly lined up on the bar, along with another Black Label bottle. Lee’s first was still almost untouched.

  “I’m afraid,” he said, greeting the reemergence of his own voice with anxiety, as if it were an unreliable, half-domesticated beast, “I’m afraid I have to go. I do have to go, to this college assembly.”

  “But it’s not until four,” prosecuted Natasha. “You have hours. And we need to talk to someone who’s senior in the department about what the hell’s going on. The authorities won’t tell Rachel anything; they won’t even tell her which authorities won’t tell her anything, in terms of who’s in charge of this investigation. Because Rick and Rachel weren’t married she’s beneath their concern, it’s not even no concern, it’s a negative amount of concern that these assholes show her.”

  “Tasha,” Rachel said.

  “I’m serious!” Natasha cried. As if there were hysterical energy just for one person, Rachel grew calm as Natasha grew frantic. “Not to mention that even if you had married Rick you’re still a woman, nothing’s going to change that.”

  “Hey,” Gordon said quickly. “Here’s our drinks. Let’s go back to our table. At least finish your beer with us,” he tossed over his shoulder to Lee, already walking away and presuming that Lee would follow, as if they were peers, and not merely peers but unequal, Lee the lesser colleague who could make Gordon impatient. Gordon, the fake lumberjack and smug double for Hendley.

  “Thank you, but I can’t,” Lee said, seizing his opening—they had taken their fresh drinks and were moving off. Rachel stopped when he spoke, then reversed direction, coming swiftly toward him, her drink splashing. “I can’t,” he repeated, seizing his briefcase with one arm and upsetting both bottles of beer. On impulse he took hold of her hand—that was how near she’d come, her crimson eyes imploring something of his. “I’m sorry!” he cried, and before she could speak, he had turned and rushed out of the bar. Back in the sun, he was blinded again, but he plunged to his car nonetheless and was most of the way to the park before his vision had cleared. Her hand had felt very cool and smooth, like a riverbed stone. At the park he dropped onto the first bench he found and sat a moment allowing the shapes of the Wagon Wheel’s darkness and of his utter fatigue to swarm like petri-dish germs in his vision. Then, perhaps because it seemed the punishment that he deserved, he removed the bundle of mail from his briefcase, stripped off its rubber bands, and sorted through it as swiftly as Jim Morrison had. There was much junk, many departmental declamations—in other words, nothing unusual except for a white number-10 envelope, hand-addressed by a clearly meticulous person. It was his letter, to Gaither, Returned to sender: addressee unknown.

  10.

  NEITHER GAITHER NOR LEE SOLVED THE DIECKMANN problem; Lee hadn’t expected either one of them would. The scholarly contest presented an elegant metaphor; it was a cryptic expression of the uglier, intimate struggle and at the same time that struggle’s concealment; it was a genteel arena within which Lee could lay waste to Gaither without having to see him; and at the same time was no contest at all. Even if Lee had the talent, he now lacked the mental composure; he could not even read a newspaper. And even if Gaither was a sheer Christ of mental composure in the face of all woes, he still lacked the talent. Lee expected Gaither to continue earnestly, and himself to make a cynical start, and them both to eventually fail. What he didn’t expect was for Whitehead to solve it, when no one had known that he meant to attempt it. Whitehead solved the Dieckmann problem and a second, celebrated enigma called the Gorence equation, completed and defended his dissertation three years ahead of the most optimistic prognosis and was offered and accepted the best job in the field to have appeared in anyone’s memory, all by the end of October. Lee hadn’t seen Whitehead since that day on the quad and never saw him again. He did s
ee his picture—the fresh haircut and tight smile together producing an almost martial expression of triumph—in the campus newspaper.

  By then, standing on the front porch of his rooming house receiving notification of his own obsolescence from the week-old broadside—he’d found it shucked to the floor in the foyer, another tenant’s garbage—he almost could spare fellow feeling for his heretofore rival. He and Gaither had both been made fools of. Since taking his leave of absence, he had lived not like an independent scholar but like an exile, and now he felt this had been subtly encouraged by his department. He had heard nothing about Whitehead from his adviser, although his adviser must have known weeks ago; he had heard nothing from his adviser the entire semester. Though it was true that he had avoided his department and even the library since the beginning of classes, living like a monk in his room in the “town” part of town, far from the school’s monarchical hill, he also knew that every graduate program was a Darwinian struggle. More doctoral students were admitted than would ever find jobs, and they were expected to winnow each other. He recalled the sensation he’d had long ago, before meeting Aileen, that he and Gaither were fated to be tied together—by their age, by their shared friendlessness. Now they weren’t merely tied but entombed with each other. They both meant to possess the same woman, and in their fleshly struggles, in their thrashing and panting, they both seemed to have exiled themselves to the irrelevant margins of their shared discipline. There was a moment, standing on that sagging front porch, the paper flapping in his stunned and limp hand, his own sense of himself as a scholar—he might have once said “achiever”; he had traveled so far, hadn’t he?—strewn at his feet as incoherently as his landlady’s rubbish, that he felt a greater brotherhood to Lewis Gaither than he had ever been capable of at the height of their friendship. Lee’s desire for Aileen had seduced him from scholarly work, the only marriage he’d ever purely desired, with his rational self. And so at that moment, with the prospect of failure before him, he was a brother to Gaither. He felt he could stave off that failure and give Aileen up. He could let Gaither have her.

  Although it was the tenth of November, it was unusually warm; a front had blown in from the South, bringing not just the warmth but a strange, gusting wind whose combination of mildness and force felt to Lee somehow sinister. The wind had torn open the house’s trash cans and was even now carrying their contents from place to place in the front yard; it was to remedy this that he’d come outside, at the request of his landlady. His discovery of Whitehead’s triumph, his understanding that he would not be a failure but would give up Aileen and seize Whitehead’s position as the dominant student now that Whitehead was gone, his condescension to Gaither—all this had taken him just a few moments, as the wind and a weird, eerie light surged and flickered around him. The light was eerie because it was winter light, dying at just four P.M., yet its sideways beams fell through a hurricane aura of August. He crumpled the campus newspaper into a ball with one hand and strode quickly down the porch steps to herd up the lost garbage. The past months of hiding and waiting, of furtive calls to Aileen and then strange nondiscussions, as if the telephone line were congested; of passing out at his desk in his clothes and then waking at noon to discover a blank notepad stained by saliva supporting his face; of anguish, and anger, and lust, and complete solitude; all dissolved now like the gauze of a dream that intrudes very slightly upon the fresh light of morning but is then blinked away. He began to gather the renegade garbage despite the ongoing work of the wind; dragging one of the metal cans after himself, he traced an endless, complicated pattern all over the lot as the surviving debris leaped and dodged him. It was a Sisyphean task, but he pursued it with a ruthless patience he was aware, beneath the blank of his mind, was unusual for him. He did not know how long he’d been working like this, sweating freely, the smell of last night’s cheap bottle of wine steaming out of his skin, when his landlady called to him. She’d come out on the porch, and when Lee straightened to look at her, he saw the last lurid ember of sun slip beneath the horizon, and at the same instant the wind suddenly ceased, as if a switch had been thrown.

  “Someone’s on my telephone for you,” his landlady repeated, now audible, even loud, in the twilight stillness. “I’ve told you not to give out my number for personal calls.”

  “I didn’t,” Lee said, shouldering past her. He left the can on the porch.

  The wind seemed to have stayed in his ears; once he was inside his landlady’s stale, tatted-lace rooms, his hearing felt muddled in spite of the silence. Holding the receiver, he smelled himself, pungent and sour. A fine grit had coated his skin.

  “This is Nora,” a woman was saying. “Aileen’s sister.”

  “Yes,” he heard himself say.

  “Aileen gave birth a few hours ago. A beautiful baby boy. They’re both healthy. She’s very happy. She wanted me to tell you.”

  “Yes,” he heard himself say.

  His landlady came back in as he put down the phone. “Then how did this girl get my number if it wasn’t from you?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, shouldering past her again.

  He finished collecting the trash as night fell. Having been scoured by the wind, the sky now teemed with stars; it was the sort of rare night on which he might have entertained himself with a wheel of the constellations and an astronomy guide, as he’d done in boyhood.

  Instead he lay stretched on his sofa in his filthy clothes and gritty skin, drinking a bottle of the cheap wine he now bought by the case. The wine was dark as ink, and its acids were destroying his stomach; its label depicted a festivity of small woodland creatures imbibing together on a rotted tree stump. He could see, staring down the slack length of his body, the ribs of dead leaves clinging to him. The day’s strange weather had left an evening so quiet he could hear, every once in a while, the rough and tremulous warble of his landlady’s radio show, and this was another out-of-season sensation, that of barriers having dissolved, so that the most intimate sounds—a child’s cough on the street, the creak of springs as his landlady shifted her hams—were carried without any diminishment to his second-floor room. The acoustics of winter, when the depth of the soundscape mirrors that of the landscape. When the trees drop their leaves, forcing buildings to look at each other, and the air drops its muffling warmth so a snapped twig resounds like a gunshot.

  It came to him that he was so frightened he could not fill his lungs. It wasn’t indolence that kept him stretched on the sofa, but terror. Terror of irreversible, unwanted change of the absolute kind, the kind separating existence from nonexistence, for which both “death” and “birth” are inadequate names.

  He did not want that child to exist, and now the child existed.

  As if the clarity of the idea had increased its reality, he leaped up now, away, seized his bathrobe and kit and strode down the hall to the shower. When he was clean and dressed, he left the house so quickly he forgot his watch and his jacket, but he didn’t need a jacket. The night was still forebodingly warm, beneath its late-autumn sky. He walked with swift purpose but without direction, up one hushed street for blocks, a block over and back down its parallel neighbor, a block over and up, a block over and down, like the shuttle methodically making its way through the loom. This child, this boy child, had been conceived in the previous winter, when Lee lived in the same rooms he still lived in now, when he sat beside Gaither in classrooms and walked beside Gaither on walks and was even—Lee’s face was wet now with anger—eager for that man’s friendship. Lee had been unvigilant, and Gaither had made Aileen pregnant, on a night after which Lee had certainly seen him, tall and doltishly handsome and self-satisfied. Lee had known of Aileen’s existence but then failed to meet her for weeks. But what he was doing was futile: it was not an equation he could meticulously unravel until the flaw was located and fixed, and the outcome transformed.

  He must have walked this way for hours, his footfalls on the sidewalk like gasps interrupting the quiet. Despite the s
trange warmth, or perhaps because of it, because it made people uneasy, no one was out simply walking, like him. Even if there had been other people, he might not have seen them. He had walked these streets so many times they were no less a blank field for his thoughts than the lined yellow notepads he worked problems on. The sky was more present to him, as it gradually shifted its dome. He saw the long side of Boötes edge over the rooftops, like a whale’s back breaking the surface, and knew it was late. He hadn’t forgotten the resolution he’d made on the porch. If his footsteps grew even more rapid, it wasn’t that the resolve was a thing that he hoped to outpace. His relinquishment now seemed ordained. (Not because of the child—the child tumbled away, a footnote, an irrelevancy.) Lee grasped how inevitable and awful the relinquishment was, and he pursued only a last glimpse of the sacrificed object. Then, in surprising response to his will, he felt something like exaltation and realized she’d appeared in his mind as she’d been at the start, with her unhappy beauty, gazing carelessly at him from the back of a car.