A Person of Interest

by Susan Choi

  “I certainly will call if I think of something. I’m very happy to help.”

  “Anything at all, Professor. You might think of something and say to yourself, ‘Oh, that can’t be important.’ Let us decide if it’s important.”

  “I will,” Lee affirmed.

  Finally they were back in his doorway, Shenkman with her glacial expression, Morrison now exhibiting an encouraging one, like the face of the school’s football coach, it remotely struck Lee: superficially robust and open, but beneath that brow somehow more narrow, determined, and grim. Lee didn’t have a great deal of time to refine this impression; he and Morrison had shaken yet again and exchanged their good-byes.

  His life in this country and his life in his native country had so few points of coincidence apart from himself—they had none, actually—that when Lee gazed on his past, it could seem as if he’d been young twice. First in his homeland, where his actual youth was spoiled for him prematurely, and then in his adopted United States, where as if in a grand compensation the uncoiling spring of his life had been rewound several turns. As a newly carefree man of twenty-nine, he’d been electrified by the greed the nineteen-year-old boy might have felt, so that at last came wolfish dealings with girls at the age, in his old life, he’d have long been patriarchically married; and at last there was scholastic pretension: unkempt wallowing in his self-declared genius, with shirttails untucked, hair uncombed, and books strewn on the floor. It was strange but true that university confines in democratic America had finally bestowed on him the vaguely aristocratic European young-manhood he’d expected since childhood. It had helped that he was not just exotic and handsome but in appearance quite young. No one had guessed he was nearer to thirty than he was to nineteen. But now that he was decades past both ages, the events of those times intermixed with each other—because while the break with his homeland should have been the clean epochal line, it was really his volatile heart that doled out the half-lives. Incidents could be psychically early but calendrically late; the young man of the East was in some ways more aged than his Western descendant. The appearance in his driveway of two FBI agents had resurrected for Lee not an episode postemigration, from his first several years in America, but an earlier one from his childhood, a primal scene in its way: he’d come home to find his mother and father submitting to questions from four uniformed army policemen, and as he’d rushed into the room, his lungs dying with dread, all four had wheeled upon him as one and barked at him to stop it or drop it or some such—even then their exact words escaped him—and his boy’s burden of notebooks and textbooks and pencils had gone crashing like so many bricks to the floor.

  But the soul of that boy had been battered and primed, and the incursion had long been expected, and the impression it left was of the sort that is never effaced by the subsequent siltings of life. That long-ago leap of fear had repeated itself many times, while any number of later events—from Lee’s second, superior youth—had been completely forgotten, though they might have had equal significance. To Lee’s own amazement it wasn’t until almost two hours later, when he was finally stretched out in the tub, that he remembered that today’s had not been his first encounter with the FBI but his second. He was listening to the Brandenburg Concertos—the Emperor Concerto in the end had felt too bombastic for midafternoon—and drinking a beer and nearly, finally, nodding off to blessed sleep as the bathwater cooled. Then the memory returned to him, and he set down his beer abruptly. He wished he could turn off the music without leaving the tub. It had been in the summer, perhaps his first summer in this country, although more likely his second. He had taken a long-distance bus trip to visit someone—a roommate? a girl?—and on arrival he’d been met by two men who had asked him to answer some questions. “WE TALKEE,” one of them bellowed at him.

  “You don’t need to shoutee,” he’d remarked. “I’m not deafee.”

  Which had prompted the other to ask him, perhaps a few minutes later, “Where did you learn your English, Mr. Lee?”—as if Lee’s calm, assured grasp of that language were somehow even more suspect than the foreign appearance that had drawn them to him in the first place.

  They had thought he was Chinese, and even after he’d convinced them he was not—a task remarkable both for the length of time it had taken and for the unoffended and unflagging patience that Lee had brought to it—they’d wanted to believe that he had numerous Chinese friends. “You’re precisely the sort of fellow we need,” one of the agents told him, in the confiding tone that overtook the proceedings once Lee’s non-Chineseness was finally established, as if the two men were fraternity brothers trying to win a new pledge. “You certainly see it from our point of view, that we can’t have Chinese in this country who are pledging allegiance to the Communist Party.”

  “I don’t speak a word of Chinese,” Lee had said. “I don’t know any Chinese people, and I certainly don’t know any Communists. Why would I know a Communist? Do you know what they did to my family? It’s like saying a German Jew must have lots of good friends who are Nazis.”

  This had subdued the conversation. Finally one of the agents had asked Lee to please be in touch if he did ever meet Chinese Communists hatching plots in America. But Lee’s memory of the incident was perhaps comprised less of the incident itself than of the way he’d described it to the few friends he’d made by that time in the days afterward. It had been a hilarious anecdote, scornfully told. Lee had enjoyed his immigrant’s luxury of knowing what real danger felt like, while his listeners had enjoyed the American luxury of never having known danger at all.

  But perhaps the encounter had excited real fear, which Lee had willfully purged—perhaps he had not been so witty and calm after all. Was this possible? There was no telling now; almost forty years had gone by. Unlike the earlier moment, long buried but intact when unearthed, this had started dissolving the instant Lee stumbled upon it. Only one thing remained beyond doubt: Lee really had closed the door not just on native country and language and culture but on kin, all of them, said good-bye to all that and stepped over a threshold of ocean to never look back. There had never been a divided allegiance, a pang of nostalgia, not even a yen for the food, so that only months into his life in the States, when faced by two FBI agents in an American bus station, he could almost have laughed—not to be thought Chinese but anything whatsoever, apart from American.

  He took a thoughtful pull from his beer can. Now the sloshed inch of beer in its bottom and the delathered water in the tub were the same tepid temperature. With the absence of the carbonated cold on his tongue and the heat in his skin came a generalized clarification; all the dreary imperfections of the bathroom were revealed to him. The misaligned squares of linoleum, the ancient toilet-seat fissure, the mysterious discoloration on the edge of the tub. And the ephemeral blots: toothpaste spray on the mirror, and urine dashes and dots on the bowl, and shed hairs of all tones—translucent like fishing line, solid white, whitish gray, and the rare lengths of black that despite youthful hue had let go of the scalp anyway. This was Lee’s private bath, accessed via his bedroom, not the “public” half bath—distinguished by the absence of dotted toothpaste and urine and the presence of dust—Agent Morrison had pretended to visit. Like Lee’s bedroom, and kitchen, and study, the only rooms in the house that he used, the bathroom had reverted to its pre-Michiko state without any effort of Lee’s. There had been no denuded hooks and square, picturesize fadings, no furniture-leg holes punched into the carpet. Michiko had reserved her considerable efforts for the public rooms of the house, where she had aggressively furnished and defurnished, hung and unhung, while in the bedroom she’d lived like a hotel guest, all her things in a couple of drawers and in a toiletry case, as if she expected to leave for the airport at a moment’s notice; and in fact in their four years of marriage, she’d been back to Japan seven times. Lee had gone with her just once, although that he’d recrossed the Pacific at all, planning beforehand for months and reading numerous guidebooks and making copi
ous notes, and then during the journey itself becoming almost insane with his desire to see everything while Michiko only wanted to have lunch with her friends, made this period seem like one of unending effort, of a great struggle all come to naught.

  Lee stood slowly out of the tub, hunched with cold, and dislodged the plug with a toe as he reached for a towel; then he dressed in pajamas, though outside was still gleaming with sun. In decades of life with insomnia, he’d found that bedtime preparations at inappropriate hours sometimes slipped him under the radar; a long soak and pajamas at lunchtime, a too-heavy hot meal and several bottles of beer. Every miraculous once in a while, he’d drop hard out of consciousness and eerily wake more than eight hours later, then feel like the mighty conquistador of the night hush around him. On those occasions three A.M. wakefulness was a rare delectation. He would pad up to his study with a pot of green tea and work with a focused serenity he associated, perhaps wrongly, with youth. Now he performed his night ritual while trying, as was most effective, not to give it much thought, but once he was in bed with the phone off the hook and the blinds drawn, he felt even further from sleep. His bedside clock said 4:07; the memorial service for Hendley was just under way. He sat up abruptly, his pulse, amplified by his earplugs, like a tom-tom inside his skull. Was he supposed to have been there? By the time the clock read 4:19, he had churned his freshly made bed into the same strangling state he’d escaped from that morning. He got up and plugged the phone in again to call Sondra, but then the dial tone sounded wrong; it clicked once and seemed to yawn open, as if the call had been made, though he hadn’t pressed numbers. And of course Sondra wasn’t in the department. She would be at the service.

  At five o’clock he turned on the television; as he’d expected, Hendley’s service led the local newscast, although the service itself wasn’t shown. “Newscenter 11 was asked, out of respect for the deceased professor, campus leader, and valued mentor to countless students, to refrain from broadcasting the service. At this hour the service is still going on, with a wide range of professors and students expected to speak. We asked a few students to share their feelings with us as they arrived at the stadium earlier this afternoon.” Now the camera cut away from the Newscenter 11 anchor team to a sun-dappled stadium entrance, where a procession of students, clutching piles of books to their chests or backpacks by one strap to their shoulders, shared their distress with a young woman, dressed perhaps to “relate,” in blue jeans and a windbreaker. Lee wondered if she was the same woman to whom he’d given his fiery statement the day of the bombing. That heady moment of near heroism now seemed very distant. Another student had been caught in the frame, the microphone tilted toward him; Lee experienced the oddly poignant, paternal feeling that sometimes overcame him when he spotted students from his advanced calculus or trig classes clowning down the aisles of his supermarket, loading up on bricks of ramen and frozen pizzas, before he realized the boy wasn’t one of his students, but that same spike-haired, sloe-eyed student employee of University Station. “Do you think you’ll be able to put this behind you?” the reporter asked gravely.

  “Maybe if this was the end, but it’s just the beginning,” the boy said with composure, gazing, as many of his fellow students had not, directly into the camera, so that Lee almost felt he and the boy had locked eyes with each other.

  “What do you mean, the beginning?”

  “It was somebody here,” the boy said. “I work in the mail room, so I just have some insights about how it happened.”

  “Could you share them with us?”

  “Not really. But now that they’ve done it once, why wouldn’t they do it again?”

  “Thank you,” the reporter exclaimed.

  “Yeah, no problem,” the boy said.

  Lee turned off the TV, and as if he’d drawn down a blind, the room felt newly lightless, though all the blinds had been drawn down already. He was surprised the newscast would air the groundless speculations of a young college student. It was somebody here. In the darkness of his shrouded room, Lee surprised himself by smiling and heard his chuckle make its minimal dent in the afternoon quiet. He’d been reminded of Esther again, and her keening complaint all her years as a teenager. “Nothing ever happens here!” she would wail, with an accusing glare at him—as if he could make something happen! It never solaced her, or brought them any closer, that he entirely agreed, even if he didn’t share her displeasure. It was true, nothing ever did happen, apart from the seasonal swelling and ebbing of the town’s population. Every May half the humans departed for eventful homelands, and every September like locusts they came back again. But for a disconsolate townie like Esther, the long studentless summer held none of the pleasures Lee savored himself, the deserted library and the drone of the lawn mower laboring over the quad. That irregular college-town heartbeat had been Lee’s for so long that when Esther was born, he had assumed that registration and graduation and winter break in between would tranquilly mark out the wheel of her life, the same way they marked his.

  He flinched with sadness and at the same time felt an opposite movement, a yearning forth from himself that reached searchingly for his daughter. He got up quickly and wrapped himself in a robe, as if he’d heard the doorbell, but he was only going as far as the kitchen for a fresh can of beer. It was just like a young person, he thought, drawing a dry hand over newly damp eyes, to relocate the drama so that the young person him- or herself occupied center stage. First the students had wept self-importantly for the professor the greater number of them hadn’t known. Now they would quiver with thrilled indignation at the mysterious bomber who lurked in their midst. Lee took several long swallows of beer at his dining-room table. Even in the course of his talk with Fasano, he had still been so addled by the letter from Gaither he hadn’t given much thought to who the bomber might actually be. He drew his message pad close to him, the same one that still said FASANO in an emphatic inked box, and wrote in the blank space beneath, recalling that conversation, DOES NOT LIKE HOTSHOTS. A few swallows later, he added, with an acknowledging smile, as if Fasano were with him, OR TALL POPPIES.

  “Well, Frank, we can take it easy,” he said, voicing the thought they had before left unspoken. “We never got very tall.”

  And what would have comprised height for Lee anyway? He remembered his twenty-sixth birthday, an occasion on which the idea of catching up with Einstein could still be entertained, if only by means of narcissistic delusion, or noble and ludicrous hope. Other young men might have hoped they could still be James Dean; Lee had entered his twenty-sixth year with a picture of Einstein taped over his desk in his family home, and the idea that mathematical genius might appear in his brain like an unheralded tumor. If such a thing happened at all, it could certainly happen inside of twelve months…and then Lee had turned twenty-seven and let go of another small part of his dream for himself. No Einsteinian annus mirabilis, no spearheading of revolution. Of course it had been laughable, at best childishly naïve, for him ever to have harbored such outsize ambitions. As it became laughable and naïve in later years, along the steadily corroded downslope of the possible, that he might have at least been a lesser-known Gödel if not an iconic Einstein; a respected professor at Princeton, if not a singular Gödel; all right, at Harvard: his preference for Princeton was sentimental; any ivy at all; Michigan or Chicago or Berkeley; was it too much to simply want tenure someplace not too awful? This at least he had gotten. He still stood a chance of seeing his textbook adopted; he still published, every once in a while; he still attended the rare conference he could get to by car. And the truth was, nowadays he was less prone to measure how far he fell short of his wildest dreams than the tiny circumference in which even those dreams were contained. Not how short a poppy he was but how small the whole field. He had not been an Einstein, but neither had anyone else, and much as he’d envied poor Hendley while Hendley still lived, both Hendley and Fasano’s Illich were tall poppies—hotshots—only to a marginal, small group of people. The shorter
poppies competing for sun in the same little patch, like Fasano, Lee thought, and himself.

  It felt peculiar to recognize, as he took a last draining sip of his beer, that his mind, with these thoughts of poppies, was performing a Holmesian act of deduction. Although Lee was a mathematician, logic wasn’t a habit ingrained into his daily life. Or at least this had been Aileen’s grievance, after her death taken up by their daughter. It was true that Lee usually failed to discern the shortest route between points A and B. Household storage was for the most part the same as irretrievable loss: he had no system either for the safeguard of critical items or for the management of trivial clutter. In Aileen’s time there was always a place for rubber bands, twisty-ties, mason jar lids, spare keys to the car and his office; there was a rigorous ordering of the linens and everyone’s socks; but for all his (never-spoken) admiration of her instinct for order, Lee did nothing but disorder that order, because he didn’t even slightly comprehend how it worked. That it was logical meant no more to him than if it were Hindi. But now he wrote ONE OF US and, beneath this, MATHEMATICIAN/COMPUTER SCIENTIST. He put the pen down. For the moment this felt like the end of concrete, concise points to set down in black ink. Yet his mind, parched from sleeplessness, drenched with beer, continued to glide along the tracks with remarkable ease. By “one of us,” of course he meant not just a colleague in the field but a frustrated, unaccomplished colleague, a short poppy—yet not a short poppy like himself or Fasano. Fasano had admitted he scarcely understood Illich’s work. Lee’s relation to Hendley was similar. Certainly, he had envied Hendley’s popularity with students, resented the toadying Hendley enjoyed from even senior colleagues, coveted his youth and vitality and publication record and, of course, his salary, and above all his Rachel—Lee surprised himself, realizing this. Yet why be surprised? The woman was a compact denotation of all of the rest. A man like Hendley stripped to his essence—an unremarkable physical presence and the abashed, gawking heart of a nerd—would never have won a woman like Rachel without all the rest. So yes, certainly Lee had envied. But his envy was idle and almost reflexive, the envy of all older for all younger men. It wasn’t the combustible fury that could be sparked only in a peer.