A Person of Interest

by Susan Choi

  Mark was aware that a crisis of unprecedented type and degree was fomenting in him. His lifelong habits of near solitude, of having very few friends at any one time and never keeping any for long, of speaking little of himself even when he was given the chance, were due only to a distance between him and others, not between him and himself. Hence his distaste for self-centered religion. Such believers, Mark felt sure, did not know themselves; they viewed themselves with a mix of fascination and dread; they made their business their own redemption as a way of avoiding any real confrontation with the stuff of their souls. Mark’s father had been one of these: his aloofness from others was a function of his aloofness from self. But Mark felt he was more like his mother: tight-lipped toward others because all too aware of the unruliness of himself. Of course, Mark had never confirmed this with her; the members of the Taciturn Tribe don’t jaw on about how they don’t talk. But little as he understood Ruth, the one thing he’d felt sure of was that she understood herself and was just keeping quiet about it, the way that Mark did.

  That Mark was aware of the fomenting crisis did not mean he knew when or how it would break. This wasn’t due to insufficient self-knowledge but to insufficient time. The crisis was on the horizon, making steady advance, but at a speed that could not be determined.

  Mark stopped crying, broke a pom-pom of blooms from a branch, and stuck it into his chest strap. He started climbing again. Right away the terrain grew so steep he really was climbing stairs, jagged blocks piled up on each other, the slim trunks of the laurel growing almost straight out, so that Mark could use them as handholds to pull himself up, which loosed a snowfall of petals.

  Gene would have known what to do about the circle of chairs, by which thought Mark meant that Gene would have known what attitude to take, and what manners to use. Gene would have known whether it was an honorable or a dishonorable thing to have colonized the woods in this way. Gene might have known, just from examining the logs, if they’d been deadwood or a live tree cut down for that purpose. Gene would have known whether to treat the chairs as a public amenity, to which all had rights and for which all were responsible, or as a private vandalism—the circle to be broken, the chairs scattered, the fire pit filled in, covered over, so as not to be used.

  But the object Mark really pursued by this indirect train was that Gene would have known what to do about Mark’s brewing crisis. As little as he’d let Gene know him, and as little as he’d known Gene himself, Mark had mourned him as if somehow realizing that a time would arrive in his future when he’d need a priest. And given that Mark had dodged priests all his life, Gene was as close to a priest as Mark had.

  Still, it was because of his solitude, and the undisciplined, off-trail wanderings of his mind—and not because he thought such an exercise in hokum would do any good—that Mark found himself narrating for Gene the events of the past several weeks, as if they were sitting across from each other at Gene’s card table, with the bottle of Jim Beam and a bowl of ice, while Gene cut and shuffled the cards and Mark refilled their glasses. They were not on the trail, where no serious hiker enjoyed conversation; the trail was for hiking, not talking. So that as he climbed through the clouds of white laurel, until they slowly thinned out and he had come to a place of stunted chestnut and black gum and oak and longer grass and an opening sky, Mark was two places at once and two times at once: with Gene both before him and lost to him, and his mother both as she had been all his life and as she was now—for which Mark had no words.

  We’re all mysteries to our kids. That’s the way it should be. Those two—Gene gestured toward the bathroom, from which came sounds of squealing and splashing—they’ll never know who I was. And they shouldn’t. I knew too much about my old man, and just enough about my mom. I loved her, and I hated his guts.

  If we don’t know the people we came from, Mark said, how do we know who we are?

  I can’t agree with you there. You’re not those people. Lighting a fresh cigarette, Gene added, I struck the match, but that flame isn’t part of me. It doesn’t need to ask me, “What is fire?”

  That, Mark said, is a stoned thought if ever I heard one. They both laughed.

  I’m not stoned, Gene remarked, but I sure wish I was. Just another thing my boys don’t need to know. Gene went to get Wesley and Drew out of the bathtub and into pajamas. Mark listened to their easy rough-housing, the boys’ protests and Gene’s admonitions, small wet feet slapping down the hallway, water sucked down the drain.

  Mark was crossing a meadow, all long golden grass lying flat in the wind and huge lichen-stained boulders left there by some thundering glacier; thigh-high blueberry bushes just forming the first sour green fruits. He was on the summit: no dramatic triangular point, but a vast tableland swept by wind and pressed upon by the sun. He knew he was high from the neighboring peaks he could see, dark ever-greened masses like motionless waves, or the spines of humped beasts, bursting up from the edge of the prospect. He’d chosen this peak for its openness, as described in his book; the other summits were higher, but entirely forested. Blind.

  Only God can give you knowledge of yourself, said Mark’s father. He made you.

  I don’t believe in Him, Mark said again.

  You love Creation. Look at this place you’ve sought out! You must love the Creator.

  It’s not math, Dad. It’s not “if P, then Q.”

  So says my atheist son who flunked math, Mark’s father observed, not without bemusement.

  Your mom’s hiding something from you, Gene observed, coming back. That’s a reason to be pissed off, sure. But it’s really her problem, not yours. You don’t need your mom to be honest. You have your own life.

  I don’t know who I am.

  Sure you do. You’re the kid who always went his own way, always rogue of the herd. Climbed out of your crib at ten months and walked out the front door. Tanzania.

  I never told you that shit.

  You could have.

  They were silent.

  Though I have to say, Gene added after a moment, ten months is pretty early for walking. You must have been crazy.

  I have a feeling I was older, Mark said. I have a feeling I am older.

  Yeah? How do you mean?

  Like something’s missing. Some part of my life.

  Mark kept moving across the meadow, pushing through the tall grass and the islands of high-bush blueberry, passing groves of little gnarled hardwoods that gripped their scant leaves against the strong wind. It was a summer wind, warm in his face. He was drawn on by his sense that the meadow’s exact center point lay just beyond, and again just beyond where he was. The dark, distant neighboring peaks shifted slightly. He’d lost the trail long ago, upon coming out into the open.

  Gene’s house now felt brighter, and smaller, and less comfortable; and those parts of it Mark noticed were entirely different, as if a lens had been placed on his memory that enhanced, for some reason, the woodwork, the plush velvet leaves of small plants with impossibly dark, purple flowers, like pinches of night sky brought cringing and puckering into the day. (Mark closed his eyes now and knew: these were African violets. But where? Not Africa. These flowers he saw were in little round pots, beneath long lightbulb rods that were casting a harsh, bluish glow.) The doorframes, the legs of a piano, the legs of a chair were all shiny and brown, as if coated in syrup. A hooded lamp on the piano he’s told not to touch. He’s no longer with Gene. He is younger, even, than Gene’s sons. The quality of the light at a sliding glass door fascinates him. Somewhere a door slams, and then, after a silence, two voices, of women, grow louder and louder, and he slips down the hallway to find them, trailing one hand on the wall.

  His mother and the older woman, the one he’s been told is his grandmother, are standing in a back bedroom, the door not quite closed. “And what about his mother?” his grandmother cries, as he shoves the door open. They turn and look at him.

  And what about his mother? As if she’s not there in the room.

&n
bsp; And then he is older, he is Wesley or Drew’s age, he is ten, perhaps twelve, he and his parents have stopped off in some Asian country, who can guess which one now, but it’s next to an ocean, with steep cliffs that plunge to the surf. Their local hosts are full of pride for a local temple, it is built in the cliffs, it involves a cliff cave with a mouth facing east, some devotional object, and at dawn once a year, when the sun rises out of the ocean, its rays pierce the cave, strike the object in just such a way that the pilgrims and priests climb cliff steps in the four A.M. darkness, to be there and prostrate themselves, and it’s happening during their visit, a great stroke of luck.

  Mark is desperate to go. His father has no interest and even, Mark sees, an aversion, though his father professes to be a Christian with enormous forbearance for those of debased pagan faiths. His mother is afraid it is dangerous, cliff steps in darkness, and Mark never gets up before eight, and they would have to get up at three-thirty, and Mark will be crabby and clumsy and plunge to his death. It is out of the question. The subject is closed. In his fury Mark does not go to sleep until some shocking hour, perhaps midnight, so that he is indeed crabby, cotton-brained and bewildered when his mother, her stern, homely face made bizarre by a flashlight, wakes him with a hand on his cheek. Don’t make noise. We’ll just do it without telling Dad.

  They go, bleary-eyed, tripping over their practical foreigners’ shoes tightly laced over thick woolen socks. Through the tumbled little streets in pitch-darkness, until they have merged with a firefly parade, old people and toddlers and genderless parents in culottes, every age wearing cheap rubber flip-flops. How can they walk, let alone climb the cliffs, in such footwear? Mark’s mother is afraid they will trip, and the rock is volcanic, its harsh surface can slice up your shoe soles—but here is the whole village, hauling shopping bags heavy with offerings, laboring upward, four-year-olds, ninety-four-year-olds, everyone in between, their huffed breaths audible, all eyes glued to the twinkling and wavering chain of flashlights of which each is a part, and which makes up the sole trail to follow, a lifeline of stars.

  The surf booms invisibly somewhere below. And though it has been years since Mark has willingly held hands with Ruth, he and she are conjoined, fused together by their damp, anxious palms, even as they climb single file, Mark first, Ruth behind stretching up to keep hold and to catch him in case he falls backward.

  He loves her. She is a strange, remote, distracted little woman, but she is all he’s ever known. He doesn’t remember the cave, the miracle of first light. They probably didn’t make it inside at the optimal moment—there were too many other pilgrims—but he is not disappointed.

  By the time Mark had eaten his sandwich and pottered around the meadow for a few hours, thoroughly lost, until he’d spied a faded blaze of paint across the face of a boulder, and then found his way to another, and so to the trail, it was late afternoon. He could get off the trail by nightfall, and yet everything seemed to incline him to spend the night here. Descending again through the cloudburst of fresh mountain laurel, he was surprised by the excitement he felt at the prospect of seeing the circle of chairs from this new angle, headed down-mountain.

  The voices reached him just before he broke out of the trees, into the saddle clearing. A percolation of high notes and low; without seeing the people, he knew that it must be a family. It was clamor without raucousness, perhaps another way of saying it was a large group of campers not narrowly focused on drinking and sex. And then as he entered the clearing, the voices of children rang out from the rest, and he saw them rushing through the trees, skinny legs, bright T-shirts and shorts, whipping hair. Three girls and a boy, in a frantic pursuit where all four were both hunters and prey.

  His refuge of a few hours before, where he had seemed to sit alone at the beginning of time, or in a parallel world, was completely transformed. The clearing and the grass and the trees were still lovely but at the same time mundane, scaled down and reined in. At a glance he saw five tents set up near the circle of chairs, a disorderly scatter of backpacks and bedding, a plastic garbage sack already dangling half full from a tree branch. There were men and women from late middle age to Mark’s age, all of them somehow alike, browned and vigorous and in constant movement, some pulling deadwood toward the fire pit, some sorting through food packages, some striding after the children. “Hey, you imps!” yelled a woman. “Get back here, we’re not done setting up!”

  One of the older men came toward him. “Were you planning on camping?” he asked. “Don’t let us drive you off. There’s plenty of room, and we’ll try to be good neighbors, though I can’t vouch for everyone.” A younger man had joined them, equally affable, and the older man clapped him on the shoulder to demonstrate that he was an element that could not be vouched for, and both laughed.

  Mark was struggling to contain an upwelling of such uncomradely irritation, of such petulant disappointment, he wasn’t sure he could speak. Of course it was all public land—it was theirs; it was everyone’s—and he’d sensed such a coming intrusion when he’d sat here before. But something had happened to him on the summit. It had ruined him for other people, perhaps just for the next several minutes, perhaps for a lifetime.

  “That’s okay,” he rasped, not sure whether he meant, That’s okay, I don’t want to camp anyway or That’s okay, I’d be glad to camp with you. He hadn’t spoken aloud, he realized, since his furious curses when his mother hung up on him, almost four days ago.

  The two men, and now a pair of women who were also approaching, seemed as accustomed to solitary, unwashed, unshaven, shell-shocked solo hikers as they were to this campsite. “Were you just on High Peak?” called the older of the two women. She had smooth gray hair cut in a pageboy and the antic eyes of a person much younger. When Mark nodded wordlessly, she added, with vehemence, “It must be spectacular up there right now. Don’t try hiking with kids! We meant to get there, but we reached camp so late we won’t make it. We’ll have to drag them up there in the morning.”

  “Is it your camp?” Mark managed as they all began walking back toward the fire pit. He didn’t know how he’d fallen in with them.

  “We live as if it were ours, but of course it’s the state’s. We try to camp here at least once a year.”

  “Did you make the chairs?”

  “Oh, no. We don’t know how those got there. But we like them. We old folks need our lumbar support.”

  “Like you’re such an invalid, Mom,” razzed the younger woman affectionately.

  Once they had absorbed him, they scarcely noticed him any longer. They were building a fire in the pit, which they’d freshly redug and expanded, and this beacon drew the four children out of the trees and kept them hovering just clear of the flames, eyes gleaming, like oversize moths. The makings of a camp dinner were being assembled, Coleman lanterns were being rewicked and lit, sleeping bags unfurled in tents in preparation for nightfall. The brighter the fire grew, the more quickly the indigo light sifting down through the trees seemed to lose all its color, so that the forest grew murky with shadow and the gaudy encampment stood out like a stage. Mark had put down his pack at a slight distance from them, outside the circle of chairs and the comforting beacon of flame, but not so far away that he couldn’t hear the murmur of their voices, the outbursts of their laughter. He was part of the dim margin now; perhaps he’d pick up his pack, turn on his flashlight, and go, and they’d never remember he’d been there.

  He had time to count them, as they drew toward the fire and each other. The four children, all long-legged but not yet teenagers. Maybe the youngest was six and the eldest was twelve. Seven adults: the noticeably older man and woman with whom Mark had spoken, three younger women within a decade of Mark’s age who were probably sisters, and two men who were presumably husbands to two of the women and fathers to the children, in some combination that Mark couldn’t parse. The third young woman had a baby bundled to herself in something like a snug hammock that tied over one shoulder; at first Mark had thought
it was a side pack she inexplicably hadn’t removed, until he saw the bundle erupt in a struggle and a small head pop out.

  The light was failing and failing, and he still hadn’t crawled off to make his own den in the darkness. Nor had he gone forward to reciprocate their welcome with some friendly act of his own. They were clearly experienced campers, if not in Mark’s style. They knew protocols. They had opened themselves up to him, but they weren’t going to hound him. The next move, if any, was his.

  He watched the woman with the baby pacing slowly in the dim space between where the firelight expired and where he was sitting. She had the baby still confined to its bundle and was bouncing it gently, but its displeased exclamations grew louder and louder, or perhaps it was that she drew closer and closer to Mark. On an impulse he stood up and crossed the few yards that still lay between them and, as he did, felt the night dew that had weighted the tips of the long grass, brushing over his calves.

  “Hi,” he said. “I’m over there. I didn’t want you to stumble on me and get scared.”

  “I knew you were there,” she said. “You’re the poor solo hiker whose peace we’ve destroyed.”

  “No, not at all,” Mark managed, suddenly anxious to dispel this impression. “It’s nice not to be here alone. I just don’t want to intrude. It looks like a family thing.”

  “That it is, but believe me, you wouldn’t be intruding. My mother must be sitting on her hands to keep herself from dragging you up to the fire and making you toast a marshmallow. She’s the original den mother. She and my dad had three girls, but she didn’t let that stop her.” The baby, which had been sounding more and more like a bobcat and thrashing with abandon, gave a last desperate yowl, and the woman took it under the armpits and began to try to liberate it from the tangle of cloth. “Okay, Esme,” she said. “You’re not being strangled, good grief.”

  “Can I help?”

  “You can pull down on the sling, yeah, like that, so I can get her out of it.”