A Person of Interest

by Susan Choi

  He had slippers in the front coat closet. He stowed the dead mailbox, peeled off his wet socks, put on the slippers, and crunched carefully across the living-room carpet to the back of the house. He still gripped the shredded envelope and its contents. In the kitchen he dropped them into his briefcase, where Gaither’s first letter once lay. He removed the French numbers theorist and carried the briefcase into his bedroom. He packed by the light from his digital clock. It said 11:01 as he left the house the way he’d come in, by the sliding glass door.

  His pines touched him again as he left his backyard, their needles clinging a bit in farewell to his bulkier outline—a suitcase added to the briefcase. He encountered no cars on the streets as he hurried. He’d changed the thin-soled loafers for his old running shoes, and he jogged a few steps but was slowed by his cumbersome bags. His car was where he’d left it.

  He didn’t stop to examine the new missive again, because it required no further analysis. Its origin was no less certain than its sender, and the implicit instruction it gave him enraged him not because he was doubtful about it but because of how promptly he moved to obey. The envelope was like its predecessor, a plain business-size 10, neatly typed, except this time it addressed Dr. Lee at his home and claimed to have traveled from “12 Ailanthus Circle, Lumberton, Idaho,” though it was postmarked Pocatello. The address was a fresh fakeness that clearly succeeded “14 Maple Lane, Woodmont, Washington.” The contents comprised just one sheet, creased in thirds. It had been the cavalier violence of those knife folds as much as the scent of the paper that had almost undone him. The page was all dense hieroglyphs of obscure mathematics. Because it was page twenty-four of a typescript, the author’s name didn’t appear, and there were just a few people on earth who might have known, as Lee did, that the author was Lee and the page from Lee’s dissertation.

  One was Aileen, who had typed all those pages of baffling symbols herself, but of course she was dead. One was Gaither, who’d never finished his own dissertation, who’d let the loss of Aileen end his grad-school career; Lee’s dissertation must especially gall him and the chance to deface it provide an especial pleasure. As Lee had told Morrison, Gaither couldn’t be dead. He was clearly alive.

  It was just after four in the morning when Lee entered the town, and though he could see almost nothing of it, he felt abrupt gravitational loss, as if he and the car, any second, were about to be airborne. It had to belong to the past, to the lost and unsalvageable, yet once he’d come through the loose rind of outlying strip malls, just the same as the strip malls he lived among now, the old town, at its core, was the same: the same stalwart frame houses on companionable little lawns and the same brick storefronts and then the same abrupt intake of air, of surprising grandeur, as the campus first came into view. Great temples of limestone and blood-colored brick and the acres of lawn and the wide flagstone walkways. There had always been an all-night diner on the corner of Campus and Church, and it was still there, the diner he’d once gone to for Thanksgiving dinner and into which he crawled now, like a child into bed; he was served harsh black coffee and not bothered again, even after he woke with a start and saw dawn in the windows and the early-bird townies, white and thick and reserved and unchanged by the passage of decades, coming in on their ways to their jobs, at the school and elsewhere.

  Adrenalized by exhaustion, he walked the quad, its perimeter and its dividing diagonals. He sat briefly on a bench as he’d once sat for hours on end, head bent over a book. When the library opened, he went in beneath THE TRUTH SHALL SET YOU FREE.

  Not once in the twenty-six years since he’d submitted it for binding had it ever crossed his mind to seek out the library copy of his dissertation, which lived here and had a permanent address in the card catalog, memorializing a time of his life when it had seemed possible it would be sought by others, his own follower scholars, although by the time he’d defended, he’d known it was far from a Dieckmann solution and himself no Whitehead, let alone an Einstein. It caused him a particularly many-sided pain to conclude that apart from the attending librarian’s, only one set of hands had likely touched this work in the decades it had sat on this shelf. Gaither’s: they might have been grubbing the pages mere days ago. The image repelled him; he stood before his book unable to touch it himself, as if it might have been dusted with some fatal spore. The timed light at the end of the shelf row clicked off, and he was left in the dimness of the aisle fluorescents. He hurried down the row to reignite and, coming back, mittened his hands in his windbreaker pockets and pulled the book off the shelf that way. The pages had turned a sour yellow at their edges but were still white inside. With his fingers groping through windbreaker fabric, he had to make a few clumsy attempts to reach page twenty-four. It was still surprising to see that it was missing, despite the fact that it lay in his briefcase.

  He stared at the broken page sequence, twenty-three, twenty-five, an upwelling of steam from his scalp forming worms of cold sweat down his neck. A much smaller sheet, from a notepad, occupied twenty-four’s former place. This bore a message in English, not math.

  The row light again turned itself off. With one hand Lee unclasped his briefcase and edged the intruder sheet toward its dark mouth. Catching the air, the sheet bucked very slightly, fell in. Lee shut his dissertation and returned it to its notch. He closed his briefcase, clasped it to his chest, and made his way back down the darkened row.

  PART III

  21.

  MARK’S FATHER’S DEATH HAD BEEN SUDDEN, BUT IT had been anticipated ever since the British doctor in Calcutta had made the diagnosis of congenital heart-valve defect and told them that death was not just impending but long overdue. In the end, the impending event took another six years to occur—perhaps, as some in the household maintained, due to divine intervention; perhaps, as others (well…just Mark) theorized, because the doctor had been a sadistic, fearmongering jerk. Either way, Mark and his mother had each grown exhausted by waiting, and as a result both were caught by surprise. Mark’s mother had no longer been armored by stoic acceptance. Mark himself had no longer even shared with his parents the same hemisphere. Because Mark’s parents had called every materially and spiritually undernourished corner of the planet—and so no place—their home, and because Mark had been a two days’ journey from his father’s body even after the three days it took his mother to reach him by phone, his father had been cremated. It would have been arbitrary to bury him in Indonesia, sentimental and expensive to fly him to the States, just as expensive and perhaps as arbitrary to take him to Sri Lanka—where he’d seemed happiest, but that was only a guess: who really knew? not his son; did his wife?—and the weather had been very hot, and the electrical grid overstrained, and the morgue’s refrigeration undergoing occasional brown-out. The decision to cremate had been unavoidable and yet completely haphazardly made, and it showed how little all the years of expectation had assisted in preparing for the actual event. Mark knew that his father would have wanted his body intact in the earth, against a nearing day of resurrection. Of their trio it was only Mark’s mother who shared the convictions that underlay this desire, but Mark felt his father’s desire as importunately. When he arrived in Jakarta, where his father had been pronounced dead in the Catholic hospital five days earlier of the heart failure that had finally struck as he walked with a young Christian convert to inspect the bore hole for a well that was under construction, Mark had scarcely been able to look at his mother. She hadn’t been able to look at him, either. All the painful, cleaving differences between them, the fruits of two decades of quarrels on every subject from peeling bananas to thrice-daily prayer, seemed as nothing compared to the severing power possessed by that moment of perfect agreement. Mark and Ruth had both known that the box of gray ash represented an inexpiable blunder. If relations between mother and son had not improved, as Mark had hoped they would, when he left home to live on his own, their sensation of shared failure showed signs of providing the final rupture. After Mark left Jakarta, he a
nd Ruth did not speak for a year.

  That had been nine years ago, the summer before Mark had turned twenty-one. Since then he and Ruth, after the one-year hiatus, had in fact seen each other four times—more than often enough, considering the distances involved, to let Mark conclude that the death of his father had not provided the final rupture after all, but the beginning of a gentle, and surprising, and to him desperately needed—that had been the main surprise—rapprochement. His father’s death, at the time, had appeared as a climactic catastrophe perhaps because it had come at the end of a period of Mark’s life that had been exceptionally eventful and, as he saw it now, miserable. Mark’s difficulties with his parents had at last driven him out of their house, then in Ghana, at the age of nineteen. The time between then and Mark’s reunion with his mother and his father’s dead body had been the most tumultuous and lonely of a short life that, up to then, had consisted mostly of tumult and loneliness. In the States, Mark had lived largely as he’d been taught, like a penniless vagabond, but without the ennobling purpose of service to God. He had lived with a series of girls, some actually girls, even younger than he, still in the homes of their spaced-out or drug-dealing parents; some more accurately women, who were parents themselves, of children nearer Mark’s age than was Mark to the woman with whom he was sleeping. One girl had taught Mark to cook heroin and then watched him turn blue on her living-room floor because she thought if she called for an ambulance, she would wind up in prison; and Mark had been saved by her neighbor, who was allergic to peanuts, and who came and stabbed Mark with her Adrenalin auto-injector, so that Mark came to life in convulsions, with his teeth chattering and his frozen blood screaming the length of his veins; later he’d prayed, secretly, and phoned his mother in Ghana. And there had been sufficient moments like that, of a helpless and harrowing sadness while lost in the wilds of his childhood’s end (which he mistakenly thought was the start of his life as a man), when he had needed his mother, and called her, and so put in her hands a crumb trail of his wide wanderings, though it still was a small miracle (not that Mark liked this word) that she had managed to find him at all when the heart attack happened.

  There had been the year of silence, then, and then the start of the slow rapprochement, which Mark only dared see in these terms as he crept close to thirty. His life after his father’s death had not changed abruptly, but it had incrementally steadied itself. It had moved the balance toward legality, threadbare solvency, and monklike isolation. Mark was still, in his essence, a chaotic, disorderly person; he didn’t know why it was so, but he recognized the fact now, which he felt was the fragile beginning of authentic self-knowledge. By twenty-five he had sworn off all drugs, cigarettes, and hard liquor, though he drank microbrewed beer with the obsessive connoisseurship of the sublimating addict. He suspected he might enjoy wine but did not feel educated enough to try to buy a nice bottle. He grew chary in his encounters with women to the point of seeming strange and virginal, so that though he still drew attention in bars, where he would nurse a beer and read, the women who spoke to him always grew uneasy and eventually sidled away.

  Ruth had broken the silence, by visiting Mark, while he was living in Ashland, Oregon, and working on a flower farm, hauling hoses and hefting bags of fertilizer. Their encounter had been awkward and brief and unexceptional until Mark realized, once she was gone, that her stated reason for coming—a conference of Christian NGOs being held in Portland—must have been a pride-preserving subterfuge. Ruth had always scorned conferences, rooms of self-loving people who spent their time talking instead of just doing. The following year Mark went back to Jakarta to see her. After having spent more than two decades, Mark’s entire lifetime, moving annually—if not even more often—from one benighted locale to another, Ruth had remained in Jakarta for almost four years. Mark suddenly felt that he understood why: The box of his father’s ashes sat alone on a shelf in Ruth’s small, barren room, in the home for impoverished and mentally ill women at which Ruth now worked. She had neither housed the ashes in a crypt nor scattered them; she had made one mistake and did not want to make another; and so she remained in Jakarta, Mark was sure, to be in the place where her husband had last taken breath, in the hope of some guidance from him. Seeing the box there pierced Mark. Ruth must have gazed on it all her nonworking hours. Perhaps she chastened herself before it, begged forgiveness from it, solaced it as she could. Mark had been an unpeaceful child, angry at he knew not what, wayward toward he knew not what, rebellious against God, he had claimed, but this had just been, in his family, the most incendiary thing to seize on. Yet he had never suffered parents who did not love each other; he had never known anything less than their flawless devotion. At the time he’d only seen it as another force ranged against him, a unified front he could not hope to conquer. He’d had to go far from them and live too close to—and sometimes inside of—some of the most miserable unions ever forged, to understand the rarity of their marriage, within which they’d tried so hard to shelter him, with so little success.

  By the time Ruth reciprocated his visit, to join him for his twenty-sixth birthday, Mark had found something he liked, even loved. He’d found hiking. He had also been thinking, since the last time he’d been to Jakarta, of where his father’s ashes should rest. The mortifying fact of the ashes themselves had been blunted by time. Mark could take them as a given fact now, and work forward from there. He had moved again, from West Coast to East, and when his mother came, he took her on a two-and-a-half-hour hike he had specifically reconnoitered for a woman of fifty-five, forgetting, somehow, that his mother, for all that her stride was very short against his, was as hardy and quick as a goat and could easily have hiked four times as long on a grade twice as steep. But he’d had another reason for choosing this hike. Though seemingly tucked in unremarkable central New York, amid nameless hills and generically pretty farmland, the trail, after gently ascending through fern beds and second-growth woods, emerged suddenly at the top of a thousand-foot drop at the bottom of which was a lake that appeared to be perfectly round. The hills rose straight out of the lakeshore on three sides, like a horseshoe-shaped fortress, but the fourth wall was open and gave a view of the quilted farmland, rolling into infinity. It was a kettle lake, formed when a glacier had pushed its load of scraped boulders and dirt to this site and no farther—this was the horseshoe-shaped rampart—and then started melting. A great chunk had sunk into the ground, like an ice cube in sand, and once melted became the round lake, a strange eye gazing into the sky.

  Mark knew that for all his mother’s devout Christianity, she was no science-denying zealot who disavowed the Ice Age. She was, in fact, a practical-minded woman who over the years in the course of her work had taken a keen interest in meteorology, geology, agricultural method, and even electrical engineering. This again had been a point of agreement between herself and her husband: the compatibility of Christian theology with scientific progress. She listened to Mark with clear pleasure. He knew that it had been a long time since he’d shown the sort of ardent interest in the workings of nature that had possessed him when he’d been a young boy. After they had taken in the view and Mark had shown her the direction in which Syracuse, where the airport was, lay—although, thankfully, it was not visible—Mark said, feeling his pulse quicken in trepidation, though he’d been trying to work up to it for the whole of the hike, “Sometimes I think about Dad resting someplace like this.”

  She didn’t reply for so long that he began to feel claustrophobic, at the top of the dazzling cliff, with an hour’s worth of walking back down before they’d be in his van and driving quickly away from the place where he’d made this mistake. But when she did speak, he was startled by how well she’d understood him.

  “Because it’s a beautiful place, and any beautiful place on this earth would be an equally right place for him.”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “You know,” she went on, as if it were a topic they’d discussed on and off for the past half decad
e, “I think the difficulty I’ve had in deciding what to do with his ashes has to do with just that. With beauty. Because all the places your father and I lived, all the places in which we were so grateful to be able to do God’s work—”

  “I know, Mom,” he said, because he could never abide being preached to by her. But she didn’t bristle in return, which was another surprise.

  “All those places were our homes, but they’re not…” She paused, caught between truth and conviction.

  “They’re not restful places,” Mark said.

  She looked up at him, surprised also. He was much taller than she, on top of all the other ways in which he failed to resemble her, both physically and temperamentally, but he could see that he’d spoken her thoughts. “They aren’t,” she admitted.

  Of course they’d made no decision just then, and Mark had even shrunk back from his own idea, perhaps because of how readily Ruth had agreed. If choosing any one of the two dozen places where Mark’s father had lived as his last resting place felt too random, how much more random to choose a place to which he had no connection at all, just because it was pretty? But still, the idea persisted, not as a project requiring completion so much as a prism through which Mark now saw each new place he set foot. He had the sense, sometimes, of hiking alongside his father. There was nothing so certain as a voice in his ear or a second long stride ghosting his on the path. But he felt companioned, if not quite by his father then by a frail sense of purpose regarding his father, and his unhoused remains.

  Meanwhile the odd jobs came and went, the apartments and towns were tried out and discarded, seven pairs of high-quality boots were worn out and replaced. One summer the derelict fire tower on Little Blue Peak, seven miles from his house, was rebuilt with state money, and on a warm day in April when the snow had been thawing for over a week, Mark packed tent and bedroll and three days’ worth of food and made camp at the summit. He surveyed it, as usual, for everlasting sublimity of the sort that would suit Lewis Gaither Senior, and found it lacking, as most places were. It was still a fine place to spend three days alone, eating freeze-dried stew out of a bag and sleeping under the stars. He’d turn thirty this fall and was surprised to realize that in careerless subsistence survival, in apparently purposeless wandering, his twenties had almost expired and he didn’t feel older but lighter. Part of some burden was gone. He still looked twenty-one, perhaps more than he had at the time. He still felt women, and sometimes furtive men, staring at him on the very rare occasions that he still ventured, battered paperback under one arm, into bars, slumping to distort his long-limbed, feline body, wearing a beard to conceal his face. But most men, the sorts of places he lived, far from desiring him, found him too pretty to supply his own woodstove, as he did, and felt compelled to be rude, and most women wanted to devour and mother him; so that, for the past half decade, since he’d given up serious drinking, it felt easiest to have few friends, no lovers, and certainly no one to whom he gave out his address. At the end of three days, he hiked home in the same deeply abstracted, unself-conscious trance by which he was always enveloped coming down from a mountain, scarcely aware of the smell of himself, or the raw spots his boots had chafed onto his feet, or the exhausted but pleasant vibration he felt in his calves. As his house came into view, it took a beat for him to fully perceive the two men, in a brand-new Ford Bronco, parked on the sprinkling of gravel that served as his driveway. He lived at the dead end of a very poor road that needled as far as it could into state-preserve land before giving up at a ROAD ENDS barricade, and people never happened onto his house unless they were lost, in which case they reversed in his yard and drove quickly away.