A Person of Interest

by Susan Choi

  He was miserly with film and took a long time to use up a roll; he also kept his library books past their due dates; and he grocery-shopped only rarely, and then extensively, for shelf-stable food. Those traits had in common, besides him, only their effect: that he drove to town very infrequently. Yet now, without showering or eating or even changing out of his boots, Mark backed his car down his driveway, with his library books, his shopping list, and even the Canon, though his current roll was only half shot, on the seat beside him. He felt he needed not just one but several excuses for going to town—as if the two agents were watching his movements.

  At the general store, he bought neither groceries nor film but a one-hour phone card, which translated, if he recalled correctly, to just under ten minutes when calling Jakarta. He hadn’t had a phone since the second time a bear pulled down his box and then sharpened its claws on the pole; by a tacit understanding, Mark now called Ruth from the pay phone in town every couple of months, while she wrote him brief, factual letters. When she picked up, she said sharply, “What’s happened?” It was the middle of her night, and she’d last heard from him so recently that he knew she’d assume an emergency.

  “I’m all right. It’s just…something’s been strange.”

  He told her, as concisely as he could, about the FBI’s visit and then was surprised by how long she was silent. It could not have been more than five beats of his heart, but that was a long time if you knew, as they both did, how expensive the call was and how finite his card.

  When she finally did speak, the focus of her interest seemed entirely wrong. “What did they say that this man Lee had done?”

  “Him? They never said.”

  “They didn’t give you any reason for their questions?” She sounded annoyed, less with the incomprehensible manifestation of FBI agents than with Mark, the typically disorganized narrator. “You didn’t ask?”

  “I might have, but it wasn’t my focus. I thought it was a total mix-up. Are you saying Dad did know this guy?”

  “No. I don’t think so. Not unless it was long before I met your father.”

  “Then how can you explain the coincidence?”

  “What coincidence, Mark?”

  “The one I’ve been talking about. That they thought Dad had gone to a grad school for math. Didn’t you say he always wanted to do that?”

  “Mathematics was one of his interests. You know that.”

  “But he never actually went to a grad school for it. That’s true, right? He never actually went?”

  “Not so far as I know. No, he didn’t. He would have liked to, I think, but he didn’t.”

  There was something very tepid in these answers. “Then don’t you think it’s kind of strange, that these FBI agents seem to think that he did go to grad school? They even named the school. U of I—”

  “I think the whole thing is very strange,” she concurred, her tone no longer tepid but interruptingly final. “It’s obviously a mistake. Your father never broke a law in his life.”

  He knew she hadn’t meant to imply a comparison, yet her comment still triggered an ache of remorse, and for a moment he thought not of his father’s strange past but of his own. “I thought it was me they were after—because of that thing.” Although she knew all about it, he still couldn’t say the word “jail.” It seemed crude and aggressive, although on some level he was aware it was more his own feelings he needed to spare.

  “All that’s behind you now, Mark,” she said gently, and there in her voice was her tenderness, that it surprised him to realize he still craved: that beam of enfolding compassion, which as a child he had constantly fought to divert toward himself and which, when he succeeded, was an unstinting dazzlement, like the mercy of God. His father’s attention, by contrast, had pawed over him constantly, but in a spirit of dissatisfaction, which sapped Mark instead of succoring him. “It’s behind you,” she assured him again.

  Then his phone card ran out.

  Everything had bloomed late in the mountains this year. Even the mountain laurel, which every spring startled Mark with its instant appearance—the white froth of its blooms boiling over, the same way in the fall the tree line would abruptly ignite—seemed impeded, the usual process unfolding in syrup. While the buds formed, Mark had time to debate if the laurel would look best from far off, in its froth, or close up, as distinct little stars, and then he still had time left over to feel impatient. He’d often thought, in the spring and the fall, that he must be overly emotional, because of how intolerable he found the change of season—he couldn’t bear to see it start, nor could he bear to see it end. Stalking those ephemeral blooms with his Canon seemed like a fine way to rob them of their power, to assuage his aching heart with the complacent sentiment of possession, as he imagined the lepidopterist meant to in pinning his catch. But he was also aware that all this thinking about his emotions was an emotional smoke screen he’d blown for himself. Behind it squatted the increasingly unpleasant form of his actual preoccupation: the unsettling, unfinished conversation with Ruth.

  April gave way to May. The mountain laurel bloomed and submitted to Mark’s Canon, and to his somehow diminished interest in its beauty and brevity. Mark took a job on a small crew erecting a modern-style house, very cheap and enormous with a vaulted living room that would require a fortune to heat. His days became purposeful and repetitive in the way they always were when he was working, and he felt the preoccupation recede from his mind, even as he felt himself scanning the streets of his town for the FBI agents, and scanning his empty mailbox, and passing with an accelerated step the town’s telephone booth. The agents did not return, and he never, in his terse lunch hours with the rest of his crew, heard them mentioned by anyone else. He felt that his rolls of film shooting the laurel had been thoroughly wasted; he knew that the pictures were worthless.

  The Tuesday he drove to town meaning to drop off the film for development, he left the rolls in the glove box instead, where the heat would destroy them, and went to the library. The town library, a minute institution of two rooms, was open just two days a week, on Tuesdays and Saturdays, because the librarian was an unpaid volunteer, who spent Wednesdays and Sundays in a neighboring town, helming their equally unfunded collection. Mark also knew how Dorothy spent her Mondays, Thursdays, and Fridays, doing accounting for a few local businesses, and driving for Meals on Wheels, and striving to inspire her retired husband to a level of activity more like her own. Mark was a favorite of hers, in the way that autodidacts are always beloved by the librarians whose labors they justify. Dorothy often signed books out for Mark from the other library and waved away his fines when he was late, which was often, because apart from funny fiction, which was very hard to find, his taste ran to overlong nonfiction books that took more than two weeks to read. He’d had The Discoverers by Daniel Boorstin for two months and was not even carrying it now, but instead a history of oil called The Prize, which he’d had even longer.

  “There he is!” she said when he came through the door. “And he’s got—oh, it’s hard to see without my glasses, but I think he must have The Discoverers tucked under his cap. No? What’s that big square thing up there, just your brain?” Dorothy was not a librarian on the model of a delicate powdery granny with glasses on a long silver chain. She was a large, robust woman who more often served as a ranger for visiting backpackers, distributing maps and advising on weather conditions.

  “If I needed to find out some things about somebody, how would I do it?”

  “What somebody? Have you finally got a girl?”

  “I’m looking at her.”

  “Shut up, you.” As always when he came to the library, she indicated a small stack of books. “New arrivals. I hit a library sale in Ellenville over the weekend.”

  Mark sat down at the room’s one small table, while Dorothy shuffled trail maps and newspapers out of his way. He knew she must spend her own money, not just on used library copies but on new books she read about in magazines and newspa
pers and then ordered by mail, many of which captured her interest solely because she imagined they might capture his—she was a careful student of his tastes, though she tried to conceal this. “Funny Englishmen?” he asked hopefully.

  “Misters Wodehouse and Waugh. I hear they’re funny. I haven’t tried them myself.”

  “You’re too good to me, Dorothy.”

  “I’m just trying to soften you up to get Boorstin. I’ve actually persuaded a patron at the other library to put down the Time-Life Book of Home Electrical Repairs and try Boorstin instead. Help out a curious mind in its first little efforts, Mark. Maybe you’ll raise up another book lover. You don’t want to be Professor of Pine Hill with nobody to talk to.”

  Mark abruptly put down Vile Bodies. “What made you say that?”

  “What?”

  “‘Professor of Pine Hill.’ You’ve never said that before.”

  “I didn’t mean anything by it. I just meant for all the reading you do, you ought to get a degree.”

  “It’s just strange. The somebody I want to know about is a professor, but that’s all I know. And that he’s called Professor Lee.”

  “The one they think is the bomber,” Dorothy said easily, as if this were another of their ongoing discussions, warmly but intermittently pursued, for example their debate on the books of Tom Clancy, which Dorothy was “hooked on” and Mark found despicable. “The Brain Bomber,” she supplied helpfully. “The guy who says he’s going to kill the Great Minds to save the world from war? Earth to Mark? Come on now, don’t be looking so pale. I don’t think you’re on his hit list just yet.”

  “The Brain Bomber? What the hell is the Brain Bomber?”

  “You can’t be serious, Mark.”

  “I don’t read People, Dorothy.”

  “It’s not in People. It’s in Time and Newsweek and USA Today. He sends bombs in the mail to brilliant professors on the argument that it’s better to kill them before they invent something that kills all of us.” Dorothy riffled through the piles on her desk and then through the pages of a copy of Time before handing it to him. “Now the police seem to think it’s this Oriental fellow named Lee, but he says that he’s not, and very frankly I don’t see it myself. He just looks like a little old Chinaman.”

  Mark winced at her comment; he never could get over how narrow even the best-intentioned Americans were. Yet the man did, as she’d said, appear little, and old. Narrow-shouldered, a slight stoop from age that perhaps only Mark would have noticed, with his keen hiker’s interest in posture and gait. A complicated, weathered brown face, eyes concealed beneath the bill of an old baseball cap that appeared to have gone through the wash. A professor of math. Mark closed the magazine and returned it to Dorothy. “You want to know about him, but you’ve never heard of him,” she said.

  “I just…I thought he might have known my father, a long time ago.”

  “What would make you think that?”

  Dorothy was the only person Mark could have called a friend in this town, yet he found he did not want to tell her about the FBI’s visit, though he wasn’t sure why. “My mother. She just mentioned this person, like he’s someone I’d heard of before.”

  “Is she here for a visit?” Dorothy harbored a keen and poorly hidden curiosity about Mark’s life before he’d come to Pine Hill. She’d once said, “You never tell me about yourself, Mark.”

  “No, Dorothy. She’s in Indonesia.”

  “Well, excuse me. There are airplanes, Mark.”

  “And there also are telephones, Dorothy.”

  “There wouldn’t be either if the Brain Bomber had his way. He’s against all technology’s marvels.” Dorothy was filling a brown bag with Newsweek and Time. “If your dad really knew that man Lee, I want to hear all about it.”

  “You said you don’t think Lee’s the bomber.”

  “Well, what do I know? Sometimes it’s the least likely people. In Mount Olive about ten years ago, there was a mother who was a registered nurse who kept losing her babies in crib deaths, and everyone felt awful for her because she was such a nice woman, and she’d nursed people’s relatives and was involved with her church and all that, and it turned out she’d smothered every one of them. She did five in a row.”

  For some reason this anecdote made him want to escape her, though it was no more gothic than any number of others she’d told him, being also a fan of true crime. Now he said good-bye to her with such haste he was more than halfway home before he realized he’d left the Waugh and Wodehouse books behind. If he didn’t turn back, he’d have to wait almost a week, until Saturday, and he was out of light reading at home. Yet the paper sack of slightly stale newsmagazines had the greater hold over him. Once in his living room, he read through them quickly but carefully. Most of the articles were devoted to the so-called Brain Bomber, who seemed not so unlike Mark’s childhood hero the yeti, composed as he was almost entirely of hearsay and speculation. Investigators opined that he was “a male,” of “between forty and seventy years of age;” that he was “fit” if “reclusive,” “with strong attachments to the West or Midwest.” No evidence was offered as the basis for this portrait, perhaps because it wasn’t a portrait at all. A member of a group comprising just under one-half of humans, the males; the same age as any one of over a third of them, the forty-to seventy-year-olds; uncrippled, unsocial, with a tendency to wander the region defined by the exclusion of East and West coasts? (The yeti hunts alone, Mark remembered. The last of his kind, he has no friend, no mate….) One eyewitness was sure she had seen him, a big, “fleeing” man with wild hair and long beard. Another eyewitness was sure he had seen him, a small, “furtive” man in a cap and sunglasses. That at least didn’t flatly contradict the image of Professor Lee, whom the newsmagazines seemed to treat with a gingerly bafflement. He was always outside the main story, inside his own one-column box, usually under a headline like WHO IS THIS MAN? He was a Person of Interest, whatever that meant, a professor of math, colleague of the man who’d most recently died, unmarried, near retirement age, lived alone, “kept to himself.” “We’ve never gotten to know him. He’s not very outgoing,” complained one of his neighbors. Mark examined the picture again: the slight, wary brown man with his eyes concealed under his hat. Mark couldn’t even tell if he was wearing sunglasses. That was the first thing the professor should change: he should take off that hat, get a haircut, and gaze frankly into the camera. Mark could better sense the motives of the unseen photographer than those of the captured professor. The photographer must have wanted the subject to appear evasive, hiding under his cap. And Mark thought of his Morro Bay mug shot, an opposite portraiture style but with much the same outcome. Anyone—trapped by that pallorous light, slightly cringing away from the necklace of numbers, forbidden the plea of a smile—appeared not just guilty of crime but grotesquely depraved.

  He wasn’t sure what confirmation he sought until he’d stumbled upon it. The professor had earned his doctorate from U of I in 1969. A year Mark and his father and Ruth had been living an ocean away in Kenya.

  It was just past four when he got back to town. Dorothy, who manned the library from ten until three, had gone home, but the general store was still open. Mark bought two calling cards and, back outside, fully closed the door of the telephone booth, despite the day’s heat. He felt furtive himself, somehow like an impostor, even during the preliminary call to directory assistance to get a general-information number for the campus. Then he was stammering a fractured explanation to the campus operator, although she was just as impassive as operators everywhere. “My father was a student, I think. It was a long time ago. I’m just trying to find out, is there any possible way, he’s been dead a long time—”

  “Undergraduate or graduate?”

  “I think graduate. I think.”

  “What department?”

  “I’m not sure. I think math.”

  “I’ll transfer you to math. I don’t know if there’s anyone there at the moment, it’s summer
vacation, and they keep shorter hours.”

  But there was someone there, someone who answered so promptly and sang out “Math department!” so gaily that Mark’s overheated discomfort now edged into panic. He felt trapped, not just in the booth but in a chain of events that, though slackened briefly since the day that he’d talked to the FBI agents, now seemed to have pulled taut again and was hauling him forward. He could have hung up the phone but felt foolish to even consider it, and at the same time deprived of the strength that would let him accomplish it. The slim box of air had grown stifling around him. He explained himself as minimally and calmly as he could to the secretary, who said, “That’s well before my time, but you’re in luck, because Helen happens to be here today,” as if he should know exactly who Helen was, and so grasp the extent of his luck, and before he could ask, she had called out, “Helen! I’ve got a young man on the phone whose dad was here in the sixties…. No don’t move, dear, I’ll transfer him to you. No, Helen, don’t move! You stay just where you are! I’m transferring him. You just—”

  For a moment Mark floated alone. Then the line opened again.

  “Hello?” inquired a very old voice.

  Perhaps he’d missed a cue; he was sweating, the handset of the phone slipping over his face. It had strangely fallen to him to integrate the person named Helen. “Is this…Helen?” he asked.

  “Yes, dear. How can I help you?”

  “I’m not…sure. I’ll just tell you what I told the other person, is that all right? My father, I think, was a student there, back in the sixties, and I’m wondering if there’s any way I can confirm…You see, I’m not completely sure—”

  “What was his name?” she interrupted, politely, but when he spoke it, her manner decisively changed. “Oh!” she said.

  “You…you recognize—”

  “Oh, my land!” she cried. “You’re Lewis’s little boy? Can I really be that old?” He heard a peal of affectionate laughter, the pert woman, in the background. “You be quiet,” Helen admonished. “You’re Lewis Gaither’s little boy! This is mortifying, dear, but what was your name? I used to brag that I never forgot a student, but I’m eighty-two years old now. I’m so thrilled I came in today! I don’t come in every day anymore. I’m eighty-two now. What was your name, dear?”