A Person of Interest

by Susan Choi

  Lee sat up, hugging himself. His clothes were drenched. The air pouring into the car felt much colder. His cap was gone; he wasn’t sure when he’d lost it.

  “Okay,” the familiar voice said. “Can you stand up, Professor? Take my arm if you need to. The room’s just this way. You’re going to have a hot shower and put on dry clothes and drink some hot tea and eat dinner. The Woodsman’s food isn’t half bad, but I’m afraid there’s no sushi.” Jim Morrison laughed as he led Lee along. Morrison was wearing crisp camouflage slacks and a sweatshirt that read EDDIE BAUER. He looked every inch the rich dilettante hunter, enjoying a wifeless vacation.

  “It’s reassuring to see you here,” Morrison added. “I bet it’s an interesting story. But first the shower and dry clothes and dinner. I’ll be waiting outside.” He’d steered Lee through the door of a room. There was a made-up bed, western-themed amateur paintings. Lee crept to the bathroom, his mind echoing with the series of tasks that had been laid before him—shower, dry clothes, and dinner—and locked himself in.

  The water pressure was good, and the temperature scalding. Cocooned in a geyser of heat, he had the vague sensation, not unpleasant, that his flesh was being cooked. Donald Whitehead did not recede so much as succumb to suspension, his figure dangling in his roughhewn doorway, his baroque words of greeting unlaunched on his tongue. Somewhere the path forked. Where had Lee stumbled? What wrong turn had he taken?

  A loud thumping. “Professor!” Jim Morrison called. “Doing okay in there?”

  He had fallen asleep, or perhaps he had fainted, tipped against the wet tiles.

  When he was finished, he cracked open the bathroom door as slightly as he could. The room was empty, but some clothes had been left on the bed. Lee drew them onto himself almost unconsciously, like a sleepwalker. The boxer shorts ballooned around his groin. The pants had to be rolled several times at the cuffs. He drew the belt all the way through the buckle, to the innermost hole.

  He was slumped on the end of the bed when a tactful knock came at the door, like the doctor’s when one has been forced to strip naked and put on a stiff paper gown. Morrison entered bearing a plastic tray with a bowl of soup and a hamburger on it, and he was followed by another man bearing a tray with a plastic teapot and two cups on it, and that man was followed by so many additional persons, mostly men but some women, all dressed in brand-new hunting togs, that the room was soon full.

  “I hope you don’t mind company while we talk?” Agent Morrison said.

  25.

  SOMETIME IN THE COURSE OF THE NIGHT, THE RAIN turned to snow. Even during Lee’s ride down the mountain, the change was occurring. The heavy strings of rain that had framed Marjorie had lost speed, devolved into stiff soup, approached ever clumsier, sloppier mire, and then at the apex—or nadir—of this process, as if at the touch of a wand, all began to reverse, to flow up, to become weightless. Snow.

  It wasn’t such an unusual thing at this altitude, a snowstorm in May. It wasn’t usual, no. Not unusual either. It happened. Every once in a while.

  The man who had voiced these laconic analyses was very long and narrow, with huge hands and shaggy white hair, but if not for the hair he might have looked Agent Morrison’s age, even younger. The hair was a strange foreign growth on his head. He must be only in his late thirties, or early forties at most. He wore a plaid work shirt that, unlike Agent Morrison’s, looked soft and faded with washing, although it was still stiffly bulky, because of a thick quilted lining. Lee could see the lining where the man’s cuffs were unbuttoned and turned back at his bony, red wrists. The man was sitting in one of the room’s two mustard-colored chairs, at its brown wood-grain laminate table. Agent Morrison, in his too-new-looking wilderness clothes, sat in the other. A third man, who had not even tried to appear to be rustic, was lying across the end of the other bed, perpendicular to the normal direction. Lee could see only the soles of his wing tips and the limp cuffs of his slacks, darkly stained with moisture.

  Lee himself was rolled up at the head of the other bed, the one nearer the window, at the foot of which were the table and chairs. At some point during his long and confused conversation with the roomful of people, he had grown so light-headed with fever and so incapable of speech from his chattering teeth that eventually he’d been lifted, like a sack of potatoes, and matter-of-factly inserted beneath the bed’s covers, and this was where, after an unrestful dreamscape, people letting themselves in and out, loudly talking, even using the foot of his bed to sit down—he would bounce as if floating on turbulent seas—he had awoken, he didn’t know how much later. A gray light had been struggling into the room. For a long time, he’d listened, not with any intent to eavesdrop but only because he had felt so abraded as to have been made unbearably porous, unable to shield himself from the sounds. The overnight babble of voices reduced to just three, whose owners he saw when with effort, and briefly, his eyes fluttered open. Agent Morrison, the prematurely white-haired man, and the pair of wing tips.

  “EOD flying in…the Team Leader…a tactical entry…bomb techs…damage radius…decent assessment…clear out neighbors…SWAT launch…maintain radio contact…Would we need Hostage Rescue? Your call, but I don’t think there’s time for those people to get here….” The voice of the man wearing wing tips had been rambling and droning eternally; Lee dozed and awoke and dozed again to its unending stream.

  “He’s not going to have anyone in there,” the laconic voice broke in, sounding slightly annoyed. “That place is barely big enough for him to fit. Ask your professor.”

  “He awake?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You’ll need a doctor for him.” Wing Tips yawned.

  “It’s just a fever. He’ll sweat it out.”

  “At that age pneumonia’s a danger. My dad almost died from it two months ago.”

  “I didn’t know that, Tom. I hope he’s doing all right now.” This was Agent Morrison’s voice.

  “Old age is a bitch. If it isn’t one thing, it’s another.”

  “And you don’t need to clear out the neighbors, because there aren’t any neighbors. Just that little log cabin a quarter mile down that your three guys were using.” White Hair again, audibly testy.

  After a few silent moments, Agent Morrison said, “Why don’t you tell us your take on it, Dave? This is your turf. You know him.”

  “I’m just local yokel,” Dave demurred with sarcasm. “I’m not Task Force.”

  Another pause, slightly shorter. “You’re saying we don’t need Hostage Rescue.”

  “I’m not saying what you need and don’t need, I’m saying what you can and can’t do. You can’t launch your SWAT people from the neighboring place because there isn’t a neighboring place. There’s an eight-foot-square cabin where your three guys have been freezing their tails off. The only reason they haven’t got frostbite is because they’ve been sitting on top of each other.”

  “SWAT’ll have to hike in,” Agent Morrison admitted.

  “Crunch, crunch,” Dave replied.

  “This guy can pack a bomb in a matchbox that’ll blow off your head. You need a tactical entry,” Wing Tips said.

  “Have you looked out the window? There’s no fucking leaves on the trees, and there’s a foot and a half of new snow on the ground. Now, the snow has a nice crunchy crust. If he doesn’t see you coming a mile away on the nice white backdrop, then he’ll hear you.”

  “Crunch, crunch,” Agent Morrison echoed.

  “I’m not disagreeing you’ve got to be delicate. He never let me within twenty feet of his door. I always thought he was hiding something. Never dreamed it was this.”

  “What’d you try and run him in for?” This was Wing Tips asking.

  “Game violations. He’s just got a few acres, but his place backs onto Forest Service land. We were pretty sure he’d been poaching for years but never could catch him at it.”

  “Lucky you didn’t,” Wing Tips said after a while.

  “Anytime I
walked near his property line, he came striding right out. He’s got the ears of a dog.”

  “That’s what needs to happen,” said Morrison.

  “What’s that?”

  “We need to lure him out of the house empty-handed. Unarmed. Out of reach of any mechanisms he might have prepared.”

  “I don’t know how you’re going to swing that. He senses danger now. He knows I’m law enforcement: if he sees me, he’ll start throwing grenades. At this point he’ll probably do the same thing if he sees anyone. Your guys made too much fucking noise when they grabbed the professor.”

  “He awake?” Wing Tips asked again.

  “It doesn’t matter if he is,” Agent Morrison said. “He’s not leaving this room till we’re done.”

  And why not? Lee wondered as he subsided back under the waves. Because he might rush to warn Whitehead? Because he might tip off the press? Morrison constantly seemed to mistake him, this time for a person within reach of the wild-spinning wheel that was steering the course of events. While Lee was still just tangled in the chassis, more mangled the farther it dragged him along. For a short time, the previous night, he had harbored the terrible thought that he himself, in his flight to find Gaither, had led the agents to Whitehead’s front door—the thought terrible not because it meant capture for Whitehead but because it meant Lee, all those miles, had never been undetected, never free of the Furies, never outside a gaze that was that much more awful for being unfelt. But soon he’d realized that his appearance in Sippston had been just as surprising to Morrison and his colleagues as theirs was to him. It hadn’t been Lee who had led them to Whitehead. Their breakthrough had been an unemployed poet and soapbox orator who’d befriended Whitehead in his brief time at Berkeley and then exchanged philosophical letters with him for three decades. An old man himself, one of the unchanging “characters” left from the sixties well known to the students on Telegraph Avenue, the poet had first followed the Brain Bomber story with anarchic glee and had then read the whole manifesto when it ran in the papers. It was easy to imagine his vertiginous doubt at this point of his own sanity, the same doubt he might feel if a specter of his poet’s invention had materialized. Whitehead’s repertoire of metaphor and allusion was vast, but not so vast as to avoid repetition in thirty years’ worth of letters, let alone in a manifesto of thirty-five thousand words. The poet’s proud exultation—he knew the Brain Bomber!—was brief; he’d then suffered intense paranoia and called the police.

  He’d also, just after his first lengthy interview with local FBI agents—and just before the Berkeley police, at the FBI’s request, took him into custody on vagrancy charges to prevent precisely such an indiscretion—called a San Francisco network news affiliate. The national network had prepared a story on a Brain Bomber suspect in the Idaho mountains and, as a courtesy, informed the FBI and offered a one-day delay before broadcasting. This was why the three men had been talking all night in Lee’s room, about how to seize Whitehead, without Whitehead’s exploding himself or his cabin—in which the evidence against him must be—or any number of arresting agents, and it was also why no one could wait for the new snow to melt.

  “Fuck these people!” exclaimed Morrison, of the network news show, in a tone of exhaustion. Lee remembered the first time he’d heard the generally courteous agent use the same expletive. Then, exhausted himself from his fever, he went back to sleep.

  Lee had absorbed the conversation between the three men as thoroughly and indifferently as a lifetime prisoner might absorb the game of chess being played by his captors outside his cell door. He was aware of every move and countermove, in possession of complete understanding of the contest so far, but his soul was elsewhere, in a furnace of fury and shame. He viewed his fever as the outward expression of the fire in his brain, which, having been so diseased, was consuming itself to clear ground for fresh growth, like a scorched mountainside. In their shallow penetration, the roots of his reason had at least knitted tightly together, like a mat of crabgrass, so that everything baffled and wrong came away in one piece. Lewis Gaither’s death wasn’t some sort of trick being played by Agent Morrison on Lee or by Gaither on both of them. It was simply itself, the ungraspable fact of a canceled existence. Lewis Gaither was dead. He had been dead for years. There was a wholeness to Lee’s brokenness, as there was strange love in his old, worn-out hatred: Lewis Gaither was dead, and Lee was surprised by real grief. He knew he wasn’t noble enough to grieve Lewis for Lewis’s sake. And yet he felt grief, perhaps for their brief, awkward friendship or perhaps for an ardent believer in God who could still be as clumsy and mean as a sinner when his love was repulsed and his pride was destroyed—but who was far from a monster of vengeance or a killer of men.

  Gaither could never have been such a thing, yet Lee knew he’d seen him this way long before Hendley’s bomb, and the letter. Lee’s thoughts of Gaither had taken their shape from his thoughts of Aileen, which had gouged him for years with sharp edges of blame and regret. Without the deep channel they’d carved, all his torrents of hatred for Gaither might have spread themselves thin and evaporated. But Lee had never cured himself of the shame that he felt toward his wife, which had causes as stark as his gladness her child had vanished and as nebulous as the mistrust that had poisoned their marriage. He’d needed Gaither’s villainy to excuse his own ignoble acts, and perhaps just to feel comparatively like an adequate husband.

  That Lee could have imagined it all, that he’d housed such unruly emotion as had made him extrude—like the spider he’d thought Gaither was!—a delusional web that enmeshed the two men in a decades-old dance of revenge, compared only to Donald Whitehead’s astounding misprision of Lee. How could Lee ever have known, while he thrashed through a past that revolved around Aileen and Gaither, that he of all people loomed large in Whitehead’s memories? How could he have realized that for all the loneliness and pain he’d endured in his days as a student, his life—which had included not merely a friend to betray and a lover with whom to effect the betrayal but so many other quotidian ties, to persons who’d had him to dinner or with whom he’d drunk beer and shared warm conversation, that until now he’d so far taken them for granted as not to recall them—had in fact been as normal and varied and full as Donald Whitehead’s had been irregular and narrow and empty? He’d known Donald Whitehead so little he’d never suspected that their glancing acquaintance, for Whitehead, qualified as a singular friendship. He’d been so quick to assume that Whitehead’s social unease was aloofness that he’d acted aloof in return—to Whitehead’s eyes seeming “princely,” as Whitehead admiringly recalled in his letter. All those decades ago, Lee had been so impressed by Whitehead’s brilliance and promise and stature as the rarest of students that he had never perceived it might be Whitehead who trailed after the Byrons, unwanted, and not the reverse. Perhaps it showed something touchingly innocent in Lee’s thinking that he had assumed Whitehead’s genius must be an elevating, not an isolating, force. Lee had associated with that blessing of genius a large number of other, unrelated conditions he had longed to possess for himself—like wealth and taste and self-confidence—that he now understood Donald Whitehead had not possessed either. In severely jarred retrospect, Lee could admit that Whitehead had been not aristocratically eccentric but awkward, not proudly aloof but alone. Perhaps it helped explain why, after Whitehead’s departure from grad school to his plum teaching job, Lee had never heard of him again. Something in Berkeley had been unbearable, or perhaps something had always been unbearable. A few years after taking his job, Whitehead had resigned with no explanation and effectively vanished. At around the same time, “Dr. Burt” had appeared in the Idaho mountains.

  Now the very few people who shared that vast wildness with him, whose POSTED: NO TRESPASSING signs came in contact with his, were to be astonished by sharpshooters noiselessly trespassing over their property, with computerized guns and headsets sprouting out of their ears. At least this was the hopeful idea that Wing Tips entertained. Bu
t even Lee, as he came to again in the unwholesome fug of the room, knew that this had been Wing Tips’ attempt to constructively rile his colleagues, to produce the argumentative heat that might forge a real option. He must not have succeeded. The lanky, irate, white-haired man had departed. Even Wing Tips had finally departed. An abrasive silence pained Lee’s ears that he realized was the drone from a fluorescent lightbulb. Agent Morrison had pulled his chair close to Lee’s bedside and met Lee’s awakening gaze thoughtfully. Morrison’s square, solid face, at its best like something knocked from granite with a hammer, was in a worse condition than Lee would have imagined this face could achieve: the ruddy skin had gone green with fatigue and seemed pitted all over, made spongy by some cellular breakdown that a bristling, half-gray, day-old beard only partly concealed. If this was how the younger man looked, Lee himself must be gruesome. The thought wasn’t dismaying, as it would usually be. All vanity, all shame, all fear seemed steamed out of the husk of his body.

  “Feeling better?” Morrison asked at length.