by Susan Choi
Someone doesn’t feel like sleeping.
WHO could sleep with soo much excitement? Could you, mister? I don’t THINK soo. Nooo. Oh, he’s darling. How old?
This little guy is four months.
Oh, he’s precious. Mine are seven and five.
So where were we? I’m sorry.
I was thinking you could just go on camera with what you were saying. About how he’s always unfriendly, and slammed the door in your face.
On camera? Right now?
In ten minutes. For the ten o’clock news.
Oh, gosh. I mean, looking like this?
He’s always home by this time, a woman from the lawn group volunteered, coming over. Lee strained at the tiny porthole, trying to recognize her—his right-hand neighbor? I mean, this is really unusual. No lights or anything.
Like, maybe he’s there, because it looks like he’s not? asked the woman in jeans.
I’m not saying I saw him come home, but he’s just always home by this time.
Brendon? the jeans wearer called. Could you please try again?
Do it yourself. You saw me do it ten minutes ago. You think he dug a tunnel?
He could have come through the back.
What’d he do with his car? He just made it go poof?
He might have been asleep before.
I’ve come over and rung his bell, continued the woman Lee could not recognize, and I’ve known he was there, and he just didn’t come to the door. One time when we were going to put up the play set we have for the kids, I just wanted to apologize in advance for the noise, and he let me stand there on the porch like a fool. I could hear his TV.
A man was suddenly striding toward Lee’s door, was approaching so quickly Lee found himself looking in the man’s eyes—gasping, Lee dropped to his haunches, as if the man, peering in the wrong end of the peephole, might still somehow see the black O of a pupil, an iris cranked open as wide as it went. Fresh beads of sweat itchily writhed on Lee’s skin. Lee felt the man’s feet landing on the front step, and though he tried to brace himself, he still jerked in alarm when the dissonant chimes of the bell sounded through the dark house.
Dr. Lee? the man shouted. Hello?
The slab of the door jumped against him as the man began pounding on it with his fist. Each blow touched Lee at the base of his spine, where he sat curled with his back to the door, staring into the dark.
Dr. Lee? If you’re there, we’d just like to talk a few minutes, okay? Dr. Lee? Then a scuffing as the man turned around. Dana, there was no one here ten minutes ago, and there’s no one here now.
Could you just walk around to the back, please? Just try the back door?
Lee heard the man curse, his feet leave the front step, and as the man started his circuit, Lee flew up the stairs.
Morrison’s card was where Lee had left it, dropped into the top right-hand drawer of his desk. Less locatable were the upstairs phone jack and phone. Lee had only ever put a phone upstairs for Michiko’s convenience, and after she’d left, he had yanked the cord out of the wall and trussed the handset to the cradle and tossed the entire assemblage somewhere—on all fours he crawled the perimeter of his study, where books and notepads and other detritus were stacked on the carpet, pushed close to the wall. He held his breath and opened the accordion door to the room’s only closet, and though he did it exquisitely slowly, the door still faintly squealed in its track. From downstairs he heard rapping on his sliding glass door, and the man’s voice again.
Dr. Lee? Anybody in there? Dr. Lee?
The phone lay in the corner of the nearly empty closet; Lee’s hand closed around it and squeezed tightly, and he felt the wrapping of cord biting into his palm. He backed out of the closet, the phone held to his chest, and with one hand resumed clumsily crawling the rim of his study, his free hand patting and fluttering, unexpectedly loosing a ping from the baseboard heater on the room’s eastern wall. The carpet was abrading his kneecaps through his thin classroom khakis. He suddenly remembered that the phone jack was for some reason out in the hall; the knowledge came to him in the form of an image, the cord snaking out of its notch and across his unvacuumed hall carpet and under the door of the extra bedroom in which he kept a twin bed in case Esther should visit. The voice faintly leaking beneath the closed door in this flash recollection belonged not to Esther but Michiko, her Japanese unmistakably outraged and yet also confidingly hushed so that Lee couldn’t make out her words as he stood with his hand reaching for the doorknob—as if now making up for that moment of cowardly hesitancy, he charged for the hallway, still scuffing along on his knees, and lost his balance and pitched forward onto his face.
He lay there a moment, the hard shape of the phone carving into his sternum, and the dusty smell of the carpet winding into his lungs.
Helloooo! Dr. Leeee! Bangbangbang.
Let’s do the stand-up right here in the driveway.
Like this? Could I put on some blush?
Once the phone was plugged in, he could actually see by the fungal green glow of its keypad. He punched the number with such haste he misdialed, hung up, flattened his ear on the handset in search of the restored dial tone, and instead heard the strange hollow click he had noticed before; he rattled the receiver until at last the steady, flat tone emerged, and then he forced himself to try again very slowly, with utter precision, as if reassembling the chain of a complex equation.
“There you are,” Agent Morrison said.
At the sound of that man’s voice, so unsurprised, even slightly admonitory, as if Lee had arrived late for lunch, Lee’s mouth was leached of all juices, and speech suddenly seemed like a muscular impossibility.
“Lee, you’re going to have to speak up. I can barely hear you.”
His mouth was pressed so intimately to the mouthpiece he felt its plastic perforations on his lips and tasted its sour, used smell—Michiko’s left-behind breath and spit. He had the impression that apart from his hot, flattened ear and his mouth, his body had vanished. “I can’t speak up,” he said.
“Where are you?”
“You tell me,” Lee said, after a moment.
“Don’t be paranoid.”
“There are television trucks at my house.”
“I can see for myself. Is that where you are? In the house?”
“Why even ask?”
“Lee, I don’t know where you are. I’m not sitting in some big control room with a Lucite map that shows your current coordinates in blinking red lights. That’s Hollywood stuff. I’m sitting in my crummy motel room, talking to you on my cellular phone and watching the front of your house on the ten o’clock news. If you’re in there, you’re going to have to tell me.”
“I’m not in there.”
“Well, good. I don’t like the thought of you sitting in the dark listening to your neighbors call you a sociopath on TV.”
Lee said nothing a moment, staring into the grainy obscurity that began where the weak phosphorescence that was shed by the telephone ended. The unseen hubbub in his front yard was obscurity also, the incoherent admixture of three live news broadcasts occurring at once. “Why have you done this to me, Jim?” he finally said.
“Why have I done this to you? I might ask you the same question. First of all, who is Jeff Trulli? You never told me you’d hired a lawyer. That seems very combative.”
“Combative? You tore up my house! And you’re having me followed!”
“I’ve taken that tail off you, Lee. Behavioral Science thought it might be a good thing to rattle your cage, but I didn’t care for it. Happily, I’m even starting to think I might no longer need it.”
“You expect me to believe that? You expect me to believe that you’re so nice you told those men to stop following me?”
“Lee, in the short time I’ve known you, I’ve made it a policy not to have any firm expectations about you at all.” This was said almost with the same geniality Lee remembered from their first conversations. Lee felt his chest tighten with
longing—to be spoken to kindly again, to be highly regarded, again…. “Please excuse me a minute,” said Morrison, and Lee heard a sound in the background, and then Morrison saying, indistinctly, “Is it here? Yeah, I’m coming right out. Sorry, Lee,” he resumed. “My cab’s here. I can keep talking if you’ll pardon some bumps.”
“Your cab? Where are you going?”
“How about, since I don’t have unlimited time, instead of me telling you where I’m going, you try telling me why you called?”
He might have been trying to keep up with Morrison’s taxi, on foot, he felt that breathless suddenly, with how urgent it was that he finally be understood. “Please, Jim, listen to me. The man you want really is Lewis Gaither. I know you haven’t been satisfied with this answer, and I understand now! He must have changed his name years ago. Why else would he write to me? Why else would he expose himself to me? I told you this man is my enemy, Jim. He’s hated me for thirty years, since I was a young man like you and you were just a little boy. And he is—let me tell you some more about him—he is a religious fanatic; he does not believe he is capable of anything wrong, even of thinking something that’s wrong. I’ve been thinking about it, my God, I’ve been thinking about nothing else: How could this happen? Why should Lewis change in this way? But the truth is that it’s not such a change. Jim, we get older. And the parts of ourselves that are the most rigid, the most extreme, the most difficult, sometimes these are the parts that come more and more to the top. When we’re young, they’re just an aspect, but if we’re unlucky, they grow and expand and crowd out everything else. And this is what’s happened…this is what’s happened to Lewis….” He had been speaking urgently, passionately, unfettered by any restraints of protest from his listener, and in the course of his speech he knew, from the awful elation he felt, that these were right ideas, true ideas, that had been long assembling like the dust in the voids between stars, awaiting the confluence needed to join in a mass. But the awful elation he felt was also the effect of another void, lying inside the phone line. His voice had poured forth, uncollected—the phone must have gone dead.
Just as he’d been on the point of whispering anxiously, Jim?, Agent Morrison sighed. “Maybe you really are the great actor, and I’m the big sucker.”
“Jim, I’m no actor.”
“So tell me the rest of this story. You want to tell me, don’t you? About how he’s trying to frame you and ruin your life.”
“And he’s done it,” Lee said. “Even you think I’m guilty. You gave my name to the newspaper!”
“No, I did not. I’m going to tell you something right now, and I want you to listen to me. I did not leak your name to Eager Beaver at your piece-of-crap newspaper. Nor do I know who, on this little town’s little police force or on your little school’s little administration, might have done it. But let me explain it to you, the same way I explained it to Trulli. The Bureau has acknowledged that you are a Person of Interest. No one’s calling you a suspect, except maybe your idiot neighbors. A Person of Interest, Lee, is all you have been called. It shouldn’t be news to you, or to anyone, really. A Person of Interest is a person we think may know something of interest to us. A suspect is a suspect. You’re a Person of Interest, and you’ll stop being that if you’ll stop being so interesting.”
“But I’ve explained everything.” Lee was trembling, his voice guttering as if he’d just been on a jog. “I’ve explained everything about Gaither.”
Morrison let the slightest pause follow this return to the subject of Gaither. “Lewis Gaither never changed his name, Lee. He was born Lewis Gaither and died Lewis Gaither, and he’s been dead for almost ten years.”
These words hung in the air with a weird singularity. In the course of their whispered and hissed conversation, and outside Lee’s notice, the dense percolation of engines and voices had diminished by steady degrees. Now all that remained was a last van door slamming, and then a last acceleration receding down Fearrington Way.
“It can’t be true,” Lee whispered, almost to himself.
Morrison let the shocked murmur pass by, a featherweight rag carried off on the breeze the night slipped through Lee’s open windows. Like a seer Morrison said, in the same musing tone, “Now they’ll leave you alone until morning. They’ve done their stand-ups, wagged their tongues. No one wants to lose sleep on you yet. But in the morning maybe they’re here from the twenty-four-hour cable news. And from the regional bureau of the Times. A big break in the Brain Bomber story. And don’t forget Eager Beaver from your local newspaper. He’ll be back, with a sleeping bag this time, unless he’s already bunking with one of your neighbors. They seemed pretty happy to help.”
“He can’t be dead, Jim,” Lee whispered. “He wrote me that letter.”
“But you’ll go on and do what you do every day. Eat your breakfast. Teach class. Go about your business. You’re an innocent man, aren’t you, Lee?”
“Yes,” Lee said, the phone seeming to slip from his hand.
“I can only tell you the facts, Lee. Your Gaither is dead. Is this really a big shock to you? Most of my colleagues don’t think so. They think that you’re toying with us. But, happily, it now seems there’s another old friend of your friend, who’s more willing to talk. So if things go my way, I’ll soon know what you know. Perhaps more.” Their conversation had become strangely languid, dreamlike, a hushed game with no purpose beyond killing time. From downstairs came the roar of an engine and a loud, compact crack, as of an ax striking wood or a gun going off, and then a more diffuse noise of scattered explosion. Voices, the engine departing again, Lee’s body abruptly returned to him, crouched in the dark pouring sweat, the handset of the phone wetly pressed to his face, magnifying his terrified pulse as it beat in his temple. Agent Morrison sharply said, “What was that? Somebody toss a brick through your front window?”
Too late Lee remembered his frayed camouflage. “I told you I wasn’t at home!”
Lee hung up and snatched the cord out of the wall.
He knew that his neighbors were at their windows, in the dark, as he inched his way back down the stairs, leaning hard on the banister to make up for his buckling legs. In the ambient light from outdoors, he could easily see the disorderly blades of glass glinting at him from the carpet. His thin curtains stirred. The temperature had gone down; he felt gooseflesh come up on his neck and his arms. At his front door, he peered through the peephole and saw his mailbox beheaded, its post angled from impact and the black box itself in the street, mouth flung open. Some distance beyond, almost to the lawn of the vengeful young mother, lay an envelope, a long white rectangle, reflecting the light from the streetlamp so that it was starkly aglow, almost blue, like a small sheet of ice.
It felt less like courage than a yielding, an almost grateful surrender, when he opened the door and stepped onto the cool concrete stoop in his socks. The news vans were gone; all was eerily still; yet he would not have been surprised or dismayed to be cut down by bullets. Leaving the stoop, his feet sank into his freshly cut grass, and he felt the night dew instantly soak his socks to the skin. He walked toward the bludgeoned mailbox as if on a high wire. He felt almost pierced by how intently he was watched, and somehow this certainty, the needle pricks of eyes in a loose ring around him, was impelling. He must keep moving. He reached the mailbox, bent down, and picked it up by its door. It was empty. He closed it and put it under his arm. Then, squarely beneath the streetlight, he stopped and surveyed the stillness around him, made a hurried inventory with his eyes even as his head and limbs seemed suspended, motionless as a statue’s; he had the idea that he must limit his actions as much as was possible, that he couldn’t be seen dithering, that this would deplete him, make him more vulnerable. From a distance he must appear calm and resolved. He saw an advertising circular from the grocery store rustling slightly on the young mother’s lawn. This would have been from his mailbox, too, but he didn’t retrieve it. Otherwise he saw nothing but the stark white rectangle. Delivered
as the mail always was sometime late in the morning, probably while he’d been leading the five cars to Jeff Trulli’s office.
He went to the envelope and plucked it up quickly and before he could hesitate tore the thing open so that he was ambushed, overpowered, the past’s etherized handkerchief snuffing his face; though he stooped shiveringly in the streetlamp, his nostrils had filled with a fragrance of days when he’d been a young man, the magnolia tree in full bloom and the mustified heap of old books overdue from the library….
He turned quickly and recrossed his lawn, willing himself not to run, the lawn doubling and redoubling in depth. This was what felt like death, these falsely courageous deliberate steps across dew-drenched grass, his socks wetly sucking the soles of his feet, as he gazed at the face of his house, with its ruptured front window and its deserted darkness and no one in her bathrobe waiting on the front step, arms crossed over her chest, mortified but defiant, let the neighbors think what they want, fuck them, the hell with them all.
It was Aileen that he saw there, not Michiko. For an instant the lights flared on, bright little flames springing up on the eaves and the porch and behind the windows, all intact. Then the vision blinked out. He was back on his dark stoop alone, on a pair of wet footprints.