A Person of Interest

by Susan Choi

  He was full of a wild optimism, a rising of sap—his grass did grow in, and because it was seed grass, it was that much more lush, a hand-knotted silk carpet to the other yards’ department-store shag. “As thick as your hair,” he told Esther, his palm on her shiny dark head—to celebrate they went and bought a lawn mower, glossy green with black licorice wheels, the same rusted and gasping contraption Lee now extinguished, his mowing complete.

  15.

  LEE WANTED TO FIND THAT THERE WAS SOMETHING even worse—more unnatural, more perverse—about the campus in its post-grieving phase, and the officially sanctioned romance with everyday campus life that was the next phase of the well-staged Grief Plan. And yet he was forced to admit that he too was glad to have his feelings directed, and to in essence be let off the hook. At clearly astronomical expense, the administration had printed up posters that read A NORMAL DAY IS OKAY, each reiteration of this placid idea underscored by a full-color photo: of students in a classroom, their eyes fixed on the chalkboard; of students walking the paths of West Lawn; of students playing Frisbee and jogging; of students slumped at study tables in the library, a few even blithely asleep. A NORMAL DAY IS OKAY, a pert, blond, Emma Stilesesque girl informed Lee from the door to his classroom when he arrived for his usual advanced calculus class that Wednesday, and though Lee, before he could stop himself, yanked down the poster and rolled it into a tube, he was already realizing that the message liberated him, too. He taught class, to a group short by only three students, and A NORMAL DAY IS OKAY seemed to hang in the air like a blessing, as if the nonutterance of Hendley’s name in the building where he had been killed was not an oversight or an out-and-out crime but a rare act of courage. Apart from this quiet subtext, it did feel, strangely enough, like a regular day.

  He had avoided the department office on his way to class, and he avoided it again on the way from class to his own office, thinking mainly of Sondra—and so absorbed by his unpleasant recollection of their last conversation that it was not until he’d unlocked his office door and shut himself inside that he realized it was the first time he’d been there since paramedics had carried him out on the day of the bombing. Had he walked the few feet farther down the hallway, he would have seen that Hendley’s nameplate, with his name and office hours in English and braille, had been removed; the Grief Memo had tactfully warned that this change was impending. The office was slated to be fully renovated during summer vacation, though it was not likely to be occupied for a very long time. For now it was locked. Lee locked his door also, then thought better of it and reopened it, carefully cracking it one or two inches. But after this was done, he found he couldn’t concentrate on anything; the slightest sound, from the far end of the hallway, pricked his ears as if he were a dog. And there was something wrong with every facet of his office to which he gave his attention. His books were disarranged. He remembered the bookcases rippling, and a few scattered tomes raining down, but now as he examined the spines from his chair, it appeared all the books must have fallen, then been reshelved randomly, he supposed by the janitorial staff. Normally Lee didn’t like them to come into his office. A normal day. But Sondra had a key, and he was aware that every couple of months she let the janitors in for stealth dusting and mopping, while forbidding them, as his faithful proxy, to lay a hand on his papers.

  Lee yanked open his desk drawers. Here things also seemed strangely churned up. His own organizational method was haphazard, but it was his haphazardness. He no longer discerned it.

  He tossed aside the journal he’d been riffling and strode out of his office again. Of course his office must have been quietly cleaned, and ineptly restored to someone else’s idea of the way it had been, prior to the disaster. Lee was less interested in reprimanding Sondra for overseeing this intrusion, as she must have, than in using the intrusion as his excuse to speak to her and so escape from the weird atmosphere that surrounded his desk. On normal days Sondra arranged cubes of Entenmann’s coffee cake, or miniature powdered doughnuts, or no-brand pink-and-white sandwich cookies—the leavings of colloquia or her own home pantry—on a plate beside the coffee samovar in the department office, and though normally Lee avoided this watering hole, today he craved it. He would eat whatever stale thing she offered. Coming into the office, he saw Sondra and Jeanette, the lion-maned, overlipsticked, alphabetically challenged assistant administrator, and Susan Bloodhorn, an assistant adjunct professor of computer science so recently hired that Lee had never even sat on a committee with her, and a professor of statistics named George Marcus tightly huddled with their four heads together, not at the cookie plate, which was empty, but around Sondra’s desk. As Lee entered, they sprang apart and stared at him.

  “What?” Lee said.

  Marcus was the first to move. “So I’ll bring back the copy card when I’m done with it,” he said loudly. “Thanks, Sondra. Lee,” he acknowledged, with a nod, quickly leaving the office.

  Jeanette was following him. “I’m going to the Coke machine,” she bellowed. “Sondra? You want a Coke?”

  Sondra’s gaze was locked, somewhat helplessly, with Lee’s.

  “What?” Lee repeated.

  “Coke? Sondra? Diet Coke? They’ve got Mountain Dew.” Finally Jeanette left, hunched over a palmful of spare change and counting suspensefully. “I think I’ve got eighty-five,” she called. “I’m sure I had a quarter! Oh, shoot.”

  Only Susan Bloodhorn, a tomboyish woman always seemingly dressed to go camping, had greeted Lee’s arrival with no particular explosion of activity. But she was gazing at him as if he were a distant vista, something she had finally attained after a long, grueling hike.

  “What?” Lee said. “Sondra?”

  “I’ve got a quarter,” Susan Bloodhorn said suddenly, leaving also.

  When they were alone, Sondra said, “How was class?” as if there had been nothing strange about the abrupt exodus, but Lee saw unease and even something like misery in her expression.

  “It was fine,” he said after a moment. “A normal day is okay. But what’s wrong? What’s the matter with everyone?”

  “People are just keyed up.”

  “Has something new happened?”

  “Not really.”

  Lee gazed at her; she gazed back. Awkwardly, as if he were the single blind person on the entire campus who needed office nameplates to be printed in braille, he felt his way to the samovar and waggled the lever, belatedly remembering to rush a cup under the spigot. But nothing came out.

  “Sorry,” Sondra said. “Haven’t had time today.”

  “That’s okay.” Had he been a paler man, she would have seen he was blushing, and this made him blush more. It was his absence from the memorial service, he understood now—that on top of his failure to ever show up at the hospital. Sondra, in her dumb loyalty, her ecstatic prostration before professors like Hendley—who’d had not merely a full intellectual life but a lover, while Sondra had nothing, just Hendley, his reflected glory, and his secondhand Xeroxing needs—Sondra was shocked and disappointed with Lee, who might have been all she had left, but she was done with him now. He was heartless, a traitor.

  He retreated to his office, feeling Sondra’s strange gaze on his back.

  He sat there a few minutes, intensely disliking his sense of a foreign disorder and staring into space as a way to avoid staring at concrete things, all of which, the more he thought about it, seemed to have been picked up and set down again a few inches from where they had been. He was remotely aware of the lengthening shadows from the light slanting in through his blinds; at least this was the same. There were still hours and hours of daylight, but his office window was shadowed by the neighboring building such that any hour after two felt like dusk. He could hear the calls of students playing some elaborate game, maybe Ultimate Frisbee, out of sight on the lawn. When the knock came, he cried out “Come in!” expecting someone from that day’s advanced calculus, but it was Sondra. He felt a surge of gratitude, as he sometimes did when Sondra rescue
d him at the copier or surreptitiously moved the worst students to Kalotay’s section of trig. His taking of Sondra for granted was a constant, but then so was the potential for moments like this, at which he could repent.

  “Hi,” he said with emotion. “I didn’t want coffee, Sondra. It’s good you hadn’t made it. I’m supposed to have quit everything with caffeine.”

  Sondra gazed at him searchingly. The sadness that was always implicit in her—the sadness of the heavyset, unmarried, childless, middle-aged woman, the career secretary, the unthanked nurturer of cats and plants and professors—seemed predominant now. “Lee,” she said. “I wanted to talk to you. Just you and me.”

  “Of course, Sondra. We’re talking. Please, sit in the chair.”

  Instead she’d taken the back of the chair in both hands and kept standing. “It’s so weird,” she resumed finally, with an obvious effort. “There’s these FBI people.”

  “Agent Morrison,” Lee supplied. “He seems excellent.”

  “You’ve been talking to him?”

  “Of course.” Lee was glad for this chance to show Sondra that he, too, was involved in the effort to find Hendley’s killer—it should more than make up for his absence from hospital and memorial. It also crossed his mind that she might not be angry at all; she might not even realize he’d skipped the memorial. The whole school had been there. Who would notice that he had been absent? “All of us have to tell him as much as we can. He needs to know about mail. Hasn’t he talked to you?”

  “I talked to a woman. Somebody he works with. But, Lee, it isn’t just mail they’ve been asking about.”

  “I’m sure you talked to Agent Shenkman. So what else did they ask? Sondra, I wish you’d sit down.”

  She wasn’t quite addressing his question when she said, with an air of confession, “Last week Peter gave them access to our files. Peter says that they told him they’re looking for…maybe a student whose app we rejected or that flunked Hendley’s class—”

  “The lowest grade Hendley ever gave was A-minus,” Lee pointed out.

  “—but they also got minutes. Of department meetings. Like the ones about Kalotay’s tenure—”

  “Why would they care about that?”

  “—and they’ve been asking about it,” she persisted. “Asking people to try and remember if there was any…dispute, any really hard feelings—”

  He was reminded again of her dramatic idea that he and Hendley had once “butted heads.” “I’ve never known a tenure decision that wasn’t divisive,” he said, a bit testily.

  “One thing everybody remembers is you and Hendley at each other’s throats.”

  “What?” Lee said. “Now we were at each other’s throats?”

  “Well, you were. You were really in conflict.”

  “Everyone in this department argues!”

  “Lee, all I’m trying to say is…” But she seemed to have misplaced that singular thing she had wanted to tell him. She turned her face toward his bookshelves, as if the thing had slipped between those spines. Lee was trying to remember, in detail, the fight over Kalotay’s tenure, only the most recent in a series of similar squabbles in which he’d been forced to take part. He and Hendley had disagreed, sharply, but once the battle was over—Lee accepting defeat—by the gentlemanly protocols that to some extent still ruled their field, it had all been forgotten. Lee had once again listened to Hendley’s long, smug monologues at the Thursday colloquia. Hendley had once again carelessly waved as he passed by Lee’s door.

  By that circular route—Hendley’s ghost passing Lee’s door—Lee was reminded of the irritating disarrangement of his office by the cleaning crew. And for nothing, he confirmed, gazing down at the dust and gray hairs evident on his floor. His office was just as dirty as it usually was. “Sondra,” he said, breaking into her reverie, “I know you’re just trying to help, but I wish you would tell me before you let the cleaning crew in. They’ve messed up my papers, and the office is not even clean.”

  “I didn’t let in the cleaners. I haven’t done that in years. I got tired of you yelling at me.”

  “I’ve never yelled at you,” Lee protested.

  But now she’d somehow recalled her objective. “Lee, all I want to say is—is it true you weren’t at the memorial?” She didn’t wait for his answer—his face must have told her. “You know, all of us in the department, we all sat together. And no one could find you.”

  “I was feeling sick,” Lee began.

  “Of course you were, and of course you should, it’s just that…it didn’t look right. And after you were on TV, speaking so well. And then not at the service at all. And these FBI people are asking about the department, and sometimes they just ask about you. And everybody remembers those fights you and Hendley would have—”

  “Sondra, that is really ridiculous!” Lee shouted, banging his fist on his desk without quite meaning to, so that Sondra abruptly turned red—and Lee could feel flames in his own face and over his scalp. For a frightening instant, he thought Sondra might cry. But the flush of her face didn’t melt into tears, as it usually would.

  “Lee, last week when I asked you to go to the grief counselor, you said something to me. You were very upset, and you said something I thought was so strange. You said, ‘I’m the last person you ought to be nice to,’ or something like that. Why did you say that, Lee? What did you mean?”

  He had no memory of the disordered comments he might have made on that day and felt almost insulted that she did—was she taking shorthand on every word that came out of his mouth? “How the hell should I know? I was very tired and upset then, and I’m very tired and upset now!”

  Sondra’s lips flattened into a line, perhaps to control their trembling. “All I meant to say was, sometimes you don’t make the ideal impression. You should have gone to Ricky’s memorial—”

  “Sondra, leave me alone!” he burst out, and as she turned away, slamming his door, he remembered to shout, “And don’t let the goddamn cleaning crew in my office again!”

  At home that afternoon, every object seemed to have struck up a posture of combat. The lunch meat in his fridge was rancid. He had used up his tea. He stubbed an untrimmed toe on the leg of a dining-room chair, and the yellowed nail tore; he swore from the pain and knocked everything out of his medicine cabinet while his hands agitatedly groped for the toenail clipper. Upstairs in his study—where he hoped to rise above hunger and thirst, above toenail pain, and most of all above his recollection of what Sondra had said—something was terribly wrong with his desk. The same malevolent interference he had sensed in his office also seemed present here. The whole room was so spare, and the desk’s surface so bare, that a stranger might think no attention had ever been paid to the relative sites of the very few objects involved. But to the person who maintained that desk as a Buddhist priest maintains an altar, one slight alteration could have an enormous effect. Lee sat gripping the arms of his chair and bending a furious gaze on the objects he cherished, as if they’d betrayed him. The picture of Esther in the faux-stained-glass frame, the disintegrating papier-mâché dish for spare change and candy. Had they moved? Traded places? He abruptly yanked open his right-hand desk drawer, as if the disordering poltergeist might be caught in the act—but Esther’s scuffed baby shoe was still there, in the drawer that was otherwise empty.

  Only in the heat of his quarrel with Sondra had he forgotten her claim that she’d never let in the cleaners. Once back in his car driving home, he’d remembered this clearly, and even though he was furious with her for her irrational, hurtful remarks, which made the less sense the more closely he tried to dissect them, he still couldn’t find any reason to think she’d been lying. And even if she had brought in cleaners, and lied to his face, she wouldn’t also bring them to his home.

  Nor pick up his garbage, before that of anyone else on his block.

  A cracked laugh escaped him, of fear and contempt—contempt not just for the notion that had formed in his mind but for hi
s mind, which he once had so cherished and which now was as senseless as Sondra’s, for being able to form such contemptible notions at all.

  He’d imagined that someone was spying on him.

  In the same spastic manner in which he’d opened his desk drawer, he now twisted to look at his carpet, as if, like fresh snow, it might show the intruder’s footprint. It showed him nothing but the faint gray path of his own travel, through several years of indifference to carpet shampoo, between his desk chair and the door. Even so, he pushed back the chair and retraced his habitual route out of the study, across the landing, down the stairs to just inside his front door, where he was standing, unsure of what he sought, when the now-familiar car of Agents Morrison and Shenkman pulled up.

  “Lee,” Morrison acknowledged in his genial way when Lee opened the door. “You remember my colleague, Special Agent Shenkman? Is this a good time for you? Would you mind if we came in a minute?”

  “Please,” Lee said as he moved to make way for them, almost falling backward off the short step at which his “foyer,” really just an interior ledge for a welcome mat, turned into his living room. He was a mathematician, he reminded himself. He attached no mystique to coincidence. And yet the coincidence of his ludicrous thought with the agents’ arrival had robbed him of whatever composure he might have called up. If he was right, he was childishly scared, if wrong, deeply embarrassed, despite the fact that the ludicrous thought went unspoken. He couldn’t possibly say to the man he’d been told to call Jim, “Are you spying on me?”