by Susan Choi
The handshake had taken place, but because Lee had so earnestly labored, fumbling through so many layers of enmeshed meditation, to bring it off carelessly, it had probably lasted too long or broken off too abruptly, and his palm had turned damp after all. “Go ahead and put your car away, Professor,” Jim Morrison said, as if noticing nothing of Lee’s disordered state. “And let me introduce my colleague, Special Agent Shenkman. We had a lunch hour to kill and thought we’d grab a chance to talk now, if it’s all right with you. It would be very helpful. Of course we won’t keep you long. I know the college is holding a memorial service at four.”
“That’s okay,” Lee said. “I wasn’t planning to go to the service. I’m not feeling well. I didn’t sleep well last night.”
“Would another time be better?” The commanding projection of Morrison’s brow was surprisingly mobile; it formed a wrinkle of kindly concern. The woman’s face hadn’t changed.
“No, no,” Lee protested. “Now is fine. Please. I hope I can help….”
They filed into the house through the rarely used front door, Lee apologizing, as he had resolved he would not, for the absence of furniture in the front room. “Redecorating,” he meant to say vaguely, but instead he said, fibbing only in terms of the time frame, “I’ve just been divorced.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Jim Morrison said. “No apologies are needed, Professor. This is a very nice house. We envy you, me and Agent Shenkman. Living out of hotels like we do half the time.”
Something else was the matter now, too: a ball of dread in his gut, the body’s urgent warning, an ache as piercingly narrow as the range of its causes was broad and diffuse. It was as easily the product of fatigue as of Gaither or Michiko, and yet as Lee closed the door, it took the form of the eyes of his neighbors, converging upon him like spokes, following him courtesy of the undraped front-room windows as he led the two agents past the sofa-leg holes in the living-room carpet and the pictureless hooks on the walls, through the untabled dining room into the kitchen, where the blinds were all open. Here were his indoor plants, almost dancing with health in the blazing sunlight. Lee had an impulse to lower the blinds, but doing so at the height of the glittering day was sure to make him seem strange. And so he put on the teapot, his neighbors’ gazes perhaps slicing through him like alarm-system lasers, while Agent Morrison politely quizzed him on the local amenities. The agent imagined there had to be some decent place for a burger. The agent liked jogging, but not on concrete—were there any nice paths? Lee submitted to this interrogation eagerly, for the helpful distraction from the pain in his gut, but then found he was practically mute. Though he had lived here for twenty-five years and spent much of that time eating burgers alone with the paper, he now recalled none of the places he’d dined. Though only hours before, he’d been thinking of his old jogging days on the riverside path with Fasano, it now seemed he had not jogged a stride in his life. He groped blindly in the jumbled-up drawer of short-term memory, seared himself on the teapot, got the pot and the cups to the table with Agent Morrison’s help. All this time Agent Shenkman said nothing.
“You probably know a good sushi place, too,” Agent Morrison said, sitting back in his chair—it was the stiff-jointed one from the set Lee had bought with Aileen—with a satisfied exhalation, as if sinking into a plump-cushioned sofa. Agent Morrison held his teacup between both palms, in front of his face, clearly familiar with the cylindrical Japanese vessel that lacked handle and saucer. Lee knew there was nothing so strange about this. Everyone these days drank Japanese tea out of Japanese cups and ate sushi, even here in the landlocked Midwest. Except for Agent Shenkman, perhaps, who did not touch her tea. She had removed something like a hinged calculator or minuscule video game from her bag and was consulting it and poking it intently. “Not to suggest you’re Japanese,” Morrison continued. “You just seem like a man who knows how to eat well. Of course Lee’s not a Japanese name. Or is it one of the rare ones?” Agent Morrison grinned: he was being facetious.
“It’s impossible to get good sushi out here,” Lee began. “We’re so far from the coast, and the local airport—”
“My God, don’t even tell me. When we were flying in here, I looked down at the airstrip and I thought, ‘Is this really the States?’ You’ve got your egg carton testing the wind, your little patch of concrete with some nice dandelions.”
“I don’t use the airport,” Lee admitted. “I mostly drive—”
“But then there’s a decent-looking Japanese place right on that road from the airport to town. Yokohama? Fujiwara?”
“Sakagura,” Lee said. This was a windowless, dungeon-dark place, once the timid town’s only and underused “gentlemen’s club.” Almost ten years before, it had been taken over by Koreans and relaunched on a Japanese theme. Lee had sought to avoid it, particularly while married to Michiko. The menu was limp, pallid, possibly dangerous sushi flown in secondhand from Chicago, and then a mishmash of Korean-style barbecue, here termed “Asian grill,” and Benihanaesque antics with cleavers performed by foreign-exchange students.
“Sakagura. That’s right. Agent Shenkman and I went last night. A disappointing experience. Every sushi place I’ve ever been to hides the good stuff for the VIP customers, but either I didn’t know how to ask or there was no good stuff. Both, most likely. It’s possible I was rude; I’m no linguist. Tell me what you think, Professor. I said”—and then, in flawless, unhesitant Japanese—“I’m sorry to be so much trouble, but is it possible there are additional items this evening? I’d be honored to try something new, and cost isn’t important. But my Japanese is lousy.” The agent sighed, draining his cup and setting it on the table.
“Your Japanese is perfect,” Lee said after a moment. “But they’re not Japanese. They’re Korean.”
“I guessed that from the food, to be honest.”
Now the conversation faltered. Normally Lee would have asked the other man where he’d learned his Japanese, but he was stymied by a new anxiety, that he couldn’t completely attribute to his unsuccessful hospitality. He was actually relieved when Morrison said, accepting a file folder from Shenkman, “Should we get down to business? We don’t want to take up your whole afternoon. And we have plenty of people to talk to before our day’s done.”
Once Morrison had opened the folder on his side of the table, after carefully moving his teacup, Lee was able to furtively read, upside down, UNITED STATES POSTAL INSPECTION SERVICE and beneath that a short letter beginning, Pursuant to your request, please find attached for your review—. He felt Morrison’s gaze on his face and looked up to meet it. “This shouldn’t take more than a couple of minutes, Professor. We’d just like to review all the pieces of mail you’ve received at your school mailbox since the day of the bombing, just to have you confirm who the senders have been, if you would. In any case like this, where a lethal explosive is mailed to a certain location, we like to look at everything that came to that location, in the days just before and just after. So I have my list here of your mail, we’ll just start at the top—”
“You have a list of my mail?” Lee exclaimed. He felt less intruded upon than astonished, as if this stranger had produced a complete inventory of the contents of his freezer and pantry. The generic lightweight envelopes, almost always impersonal communications from a professional association or a textbook publisher, that Lee received through the regular mail at his campus mailbox seemed both so inconsequential and so intimate—the very absence of personal letters was perhaps the most intimate thing—that he illogically felt that his mail was, to others, invisible.
“Not just your mail,” Morrison was saying. “Professor, I have a full list of every item of mail that’s arrived on your campus in the time span in question, indexed by date and recipient. So you can imagine how much work Agent Shenkman and I have to do!” Morrison exuded delight at his formidable task, so that it was Shenkman’s immobile expression that made Lee realize he was being prodded, very gently, to help them get on with i
t.
“I’m sorry,” Lee said, blushing. He seemed destined to blush every time he conversed with this FBI agent. “I just didn’t realize they did that. Kept a list of my mail.”
“They don’t always do it, or they’d never do anything else. But in an investigation—”
“Of course,” Lee said. But he couldn’t help adding in spite of himself, “They don’t look in the mail.”
Morrison put down the printout he’d just taken up, in a gesture almost of reproach. “Looking inside your mail is illegal, Professor. We’re law enforcers, not lawbreakers.”
“Of course.” Lee grinned wincingly in contrition and then flushed anew at the obsequiousness of the gesture. “Please, go ahead. You must have a lot of people to get through,” he interrupted, just as Morrison started to read. “If you’re doing everybody on campus.”
“Quite a lot,” Morrison said.
As was always the case with his mail, piece after piece was so impersonal and obvious that Lee found himself only confirming, again and again, what Morrison clearly saw for himself. “And this looks like the American Association of Mathematical Science. Some kind of newsletter.” “Yes, that’s right,” “Here’s a flyer from Wiley. That’s a publisher, right? They bring out math textbooks?” “Yes, that’s right.” “This looks like something from a union. A teachers’ union? Bill for dues?” “Yes, that’s the union,” Lee said as Morrison made another small check at the edge of his printout. “And here’s—okay, there’s no sender’s name here, this is just from14 Maple Lane, Woodmont, Washington, and postmarked in Spokane. Who is this letter from?”
Somehow, in the immediate barrage of unfamiliar stimuli that comprised this encounter with FBI agents—in the consistently puzzling contrast between Morrison’s warmth and the other one’s chill, in the prefatory talk about sushi and the subsequent sudden unveiling of Lee’s campus junk mail to the eyes of the law, in the three cups of tea now gone cold and the plain novelty of having guests in his home—the unbearable letter from Gaither, and his own in reply that had now been returned, had slipped out of his mind. For all that Gaither’s letter had been prompted by the same incident—Hendley’s bombing—that was the reason for this interview, it, and the unreceived answer, and the crisis of emotion that both had provoked, felt entirely separate, irretrievably lodged in the most wounded part of himself. When he realized that Morrison, reading off the computer printout in his genial way, was referring to this very soul sickness, this dart at the core of himself, Lee at first couldn’t credit his ears. Then he blushed to the highest notch yet. Though he heard himself saying, with remarkable calm, “That’s a letter from an old friend of mine. He was writing to see how I was. He’d read about the bombing.”
“I’ll bet.” Morrison nodded with sympathy. “I’ll bet anybody who knew you was very alarmed for your welfare.”
“Yes, he was,” Lee agreed helplessly. That he had characterized Gaither’s letter as expressive of tender concern mortified him, not just because the idea was ludicrous but because he now found he had fibbed to an FBI agent. It couldn’t matter, though; it was a personal letter, the only personal item of mail on the tedious list. He was so distracted he didn’t hear Morrison’s question until the agent had asked it again.
“What’s his name? What’s the name of this friend?”
“Why?” Lee said, startled.
“I’m just doing my job, Professor. There’s no name on the envelope. Can you tell me the name of the sender?”
“Lewis Gaither,” Lee said after a moment. At the agent’s request, he spelled it, and Morrison wrote it down.
“I realize it’s a personal letter, but would you mind if we took a look at it?”
“Why?” Lee burst out again, his heart galloping now. As if Gaither sat closely behind him, he heard again that elegant, perfidious voice, its sarcasm so skillfully pitched as to be felt only by its target. What a bittersweet pleasure to see your face after all of these years. You are still a handsome man. “Princely,” I believe, was the word sometimes used around campus for you. “You”: the malignant intruder, about whom “we”—around campus—all spoke. Lee was starting to feel he’d never been without the inflicted tattoo of this letter, inked onto his memory bank, beaten out word by word on his eardrum, and at the same time he was constantly grasping new shades of its meaning he had not seen before. The word sometimes used around campus for you: Gaither dared style himself as ensconced in some great campus “we” that had gazed upon Lee, at the best, with ironical scorn. “Prince” Lee. What a gas! With that crappy old briefcase of his. Lee didn’t need to look at the letter to hear its interleaved insinuations, but he knew that anyone who did see it would know that he’d lied. It was no friendly letter. It expressed no authentic concern. He had lied because he was ashamed. Ashamed that his one piece of personal mail was an arrow of hate.
“You know,” he resumed, his heart’s wild locomotion almost tumbling his words, “I threw that letter away.” He almost wept with relief that he’d thought of this.
Morrison cocked his head slightly, and then he closed the file folder, with the air of a man who has finished a tiresome duty. “That’s it, then,” he said. “I’d like to thank you, Professor.”
“Not at all,” Lee said. For the first time since the encounter began he could imagine himself left alone in his house, and he newly broke into a cold sweat of longing and rediscovered exhaustion.
And yet the agents still didn’t seem ready to go. With an indistinct mutter and a toss of her head, Shenkman excused herself to the front steps to place a call from what Lee was now told was her cellular phone. “Not the best reception in these parts,” Morrison apologized, after she had gone.
They sat another awkward moment until Lee compulsively reached for the teapot.
“I’m good, thanks,” said Morrison, guarding his cup with his hand. Lee had clasped this hand twice, but only now that it was propped on the teacup, as if on a pedestal, was he presented with all its minutiae: wiry black and gray hairs, gnarled veins, knuckles like smashed bits of boulder trapped under the skin. The hand was alarming; it had all the face’s crudities with none of the ameliorations supplied by expressiveness. The hand pushed the cup a few inches farther away, a subtle gesture of dismissal that Lee felt, or hoped, was directed at him. Lee heard the indistinct drone of Agent Shenkman’s voice drifting through the front door.
“Can I bother you for a restroom?” Agent Morrison asked.
“Please.” Lee stood up, then sat again as Agent Morrison waved him away.
“I saw it as I came in,” Agent Morrison said, disappearing.
Lee didn’t know how many minutes he sat alone in his kitchen, confined by invisible tethers to his rickety chair. If he stood, Agent Morrison would hear the unburdened wood creak; Lee felt, senselessly, that he must remain glued to this spot so that when Agent Morrison returned, he would appear to be pleasantly adrift in his thoughts. The agent was experiencing no such restraint. Lee could hear him roaming the length, breadth, and height of the house. Every square foot of floor space, upstairs and down and in the finished basement, was muffled beneath thick beige carpeting, but Lee knew his house: it was cheaply constructed, or one might say sensitive to itself, so that near-silent footsteps at one end produced an odd squeaking sound at the other, and the basement door’s being smoothly swung open unleashed a wave that, many feet from its source and close to where Lee was sitting, emerged with a soda can’s pop! And yet amid all this, Lee had not heard the torrential, Pharaoh’s-men-obliterated-by-God-in-the-trench-of-the-sea dissonant symphony that was unleashed every time any one of his house’s three toilets was flushed. Agent Morrison seemed not to have gone to the bathroom at all. Lee sat motionless, translating small noises of structural strain into the agent’s rambling trajectory, up, down, out the front door for a conference with Shenkman, by which time Lee was ready to confess, insanely, that the letter was not in the garbage but still in his briefcase—as if it possibly could have been this,
and not the pathetic, impoverished state of Lee’s home, that was propelling the curious agent. Of course the man wondered at Lee, even probably pitied him, this the most awful thought—not dispelled but confirmed when the agent returned to the kitchen and said, in an attempt to conceal his pity that was even more wounding than pity itself, “I like the layout of your house. It’s very nice. Is this a recent development?”
“About ten years old,” Lee said, lowering his mortified face to his teacup.
“Property taxes killing you?”
“They’re not so bad,” Lee managed.
When Agent Shenkman returned, her magical phone snapping shut in her palm like a squarish black bivalve, Agent Morrison removed a card from his pocket and gave it to Lee. “That’s the number at which you can reach me, any time of day or night. I know it’s very painful to talk about these things, with your colleague having so recently passed away, but if you can think of anything that might be of help to us—even something that seems very minor to you—please call me. As I said, any time of the day or night. I’ll be glad to hear from you.”