A Person of Interest

by Susan Choi

  Lee felt helpless to utter his answer, whatever it was. He was still negotiating phlegmy deposits and the peculiar uncertain sensation of the voice after fever when a single knock came at the door. A boyish-looking man entered, not having waited for any response. He wore a dress shirt with dark armpit stains, a tie pulled slack like a noose, and suit pants so crumpled they must at some point have been dampened and crushed into a ball. “He’s awake,” the man noticed, and from his voice Lee understood that this was Wing Tips, now standing upright.

  “Just this instant,” said Morrison.

  “So…you float it?”

  “He’s just come to this instant. He’d just opened his eyes when you came through the door.” Morrison’s face twitched a little, as if in suppression.

  “It’s past noon. We’re gonna screw the pooch here if we don’t make a timely decision.”

  For a moment they faced off, until Morrison said, “There’s no decision to make, Tom. This is not on the table. It’s unacceptable risk.”

  “Not if it works. Besides, what’s on the table? I feel like for the past twenty hours you’ve been saying, ‘No, impossible, Tom. No, it can’t be done, Tom.’”

  Morrison stood. “Let’s keep talking outside. Professor Lee needs his rest.”

  “He looks rested to me. Why not ask him?”

  “No!” Morrison barked startlingly.

  “What’s the harm?”

  “The harm,” Morrison said, but all at once something seemed to obstruct him, as if what he wanted to say weren’t too minor but too vast to compress into words. He looked so depleted that Lee sat up abruptly in bed, thinking to catch Morrison before that man collapsed.

  After the slightest of pauses, the merest gesture toward awaiting the rest of his colleague’s remarks, the agent whose name was apparently Tom said to Lee, “You must already know what we’re driving at, don’t you, Professor?” And before Lee could say he did not, “Our friend on the mountain is homicidally hostile to most everybody but you.”

  “Tom,” Morrison said warningly.

  “You he welcomes,” Tom went on. “You he invites, if you can be believed. You go up there today and call ‘Yoo-hoo,’ I’m thinking he comes out, our guys pounce. It’s all over.”

  “I go back there?” Lee exclaimed huskily.

  “Dr. Lee is not a law-enforcement agent,” Morrison interrupted, his own voice very calm but with such unnerving cords of tension expanding the girth of his neck that he might have swallowed a massive explosion just under his tonsils.

  “And he’s happy to see you,” Tom answered. “His ‘Old Colleague and Friend.’”

  Lee felt goose pimples quicken his skin.

  “He comes out, our guys pounce—”

  “We don’t invite members of the general public to help us execute arrests,” Morrison continued, a viselike pressure in his voice now, as he turned himself fully to Tom, as if to signal that the scorn in his face was directed at one object only, and not at any members of the general public who might happen to be in the room.

  “We take them into our confidence when they’re useful to us,” Tom countered.

  “We don’t put them in harm’s way.”

  “There’s a lot of things we don’t do that we do. It’s called being creative.”

  Another compact, buzzing silence fell here, like a noise of its own, but Lee only remotely heard it. He didn’t disbelieve in the prospect so much as he needed, urgently, to grasp everything perfectly clearly. “I would be alone?” Lee persisted.

  When Morrison turned away from Tom again, it was as if he’d shut a door in that man’s face: only Morrison and Lee now remained. Resuming his place in the chair, Morrison trained his oppressed, weary gaze upon Lee. “Lee, this isn’t an option for you to consider.”

  “I know that,” Lee said. For him it was also as if Tom were no longer there. “I know you want me to feel there is no obligation.” He had not known, until speaking this particular word, what species of word he might try to say next. But “obligation” seemed to offer an anchorage. It pertained in no way to his entanglement with Morrison and Tom—he was not obligated to them—yet despite this he seized hold of it. Obligation fulfilled; had he ever been able to say this? The persons he longed to oblige himself to were all gone, or his chances with them had all passed. He could no longer be Aileen’s comrade or her son’s guardian. He could not restore Hendley to life or assuage Rachel’s pain. He could never erase the charnel of that burned, spattered office, much less the sight of the victim himself, from young Emma Stiles’s mind. A martyrdom here wouldn’t ever make up for the lapses he saw there and there and all those other immutable elsewheres now lost to the past. Perhaps all Lee really felt now was the need to escape from this bed, where a lifetime’s distillate of shame had enrobed him for hours—and, more simply, that as cocksure as Tom might behave, his idea was right. Tom had outlined a logical plan. And Lee, every once in a while, could be logical, too.

  “I know that,” Lee reiterated, “but I’ll do it,” he finished, almost winded by what he had said.

  “I’ll get moving,” said Tom, startling them both with his ongoing presence and punching keys on a phone he’d snatched out of his pocket.

  “Just hang on a goddamn minute!” Morrison said. “Lee, I think I can understand, better than anyone else, why you might feel under pressure to do this—”

  “Jim, what Tom says makes sense,” Lee put forth, his voice a rattling tea tray that was certain to scatter its cups. His resolve felt so precious and frail; he knew that the stronger, authentically brave man could dash it to bits without ever realizing.

  “If you’d never been here, we’d still be where we are, and we’d still move ahead.”

  “Into a shitstorm,” Tom said.

  “You’ll have a shitstorm when Professor Lee is injured or dead.”

  “I never said it was ideal. Ideal is no network news yanking our pants down, we get to wander around in our mountain-man clothes while we nail down probable cause, I do some skiing, the jerk finally gets hungry, and we cuff him in front of the grocery store—”

  “He really did invite me,” Lee murmured as the two men resumed arguing. “He went to so much trouble. He must have taken a bus all the way to our school, so he could put that note inside my book.”

  “You’re gonna have to let me kick it upstairs,” Tom was saying to Morrison. “He’s volunteered. It’s not my call or yours.”

  “It is a logical plan,” Lee whispered, less to the other men than to himself. I know that you, like me, are rational. He heard those words again in his mind and cringed from them. Now they were spoken by Whitehead’s stentorian voice.

  He scarcely noticed when the two men banged out of the room. Once the noise of the door ceased to echo and the fluorescent’s flat buzz filled his ears, he might have waited three minutes or thirty. His Seiko seemed unreachable, on the farther nightstand. He lay on the chemical-scented motel pillows and felt the drifting movement of the mattress over calm, windless seas and realized that his body and not the mattress was the source of the feeling. He grew aware of voices outside his door, both raised and suppressed—high emotion, low volume. He couldn’t pick out distinct words. When he heard the door open again, he jerked upright, his gut sick with dread. He’d wanted this limbo to last, and perhaps never end.

  Morrison reseated himself in the chair. For another long time, another three minutes or thirty, he didn’t speak, until he finally did. “We’re off the map here. This is not the way I like to work.”

  “I know,” Lee said in a rush of compassion, for a moment forgetting himself. “You like to have all the i’s dotted and all the t’s crossed.”

  “SWAT will have to do a wide perimeter. A big loose circle, several hundred yards from the house so he doesn’t detect them. But they’re the best shots in the world. You’ll be protected if he tries anything.”

  “I know,” Lee said, by which he didn’t mean, I know SWAT is the best in the world, so much
as, My personal safety does not matter now. He didn’t mean he didn’t care if he died; he did not want to die. But the shock of what he’d offered to do had transformed him somehow. He felt weird imperviousness, as if a spell had been cast.

  “You’ll be wearing a bulletproof vest. Dave and I will drive you up to within about five hundred yards on a snowmobile; then we’ll have to hike up. But once we get to the clearing, you step out on your own. No closer to the house than necessary. Think of the cabin like it’s radioactive. You can’t approach it. Can’t touch it. Persuade him to come out to you. And you can’t let him know that you’re with us. You have to talk to him just like you would, Lee. He has to think you’re alone.”

  “I know,” Lee said.

  “And if you get killed or hurt, I will make you regret it.” This said not in jest but almost in anger, as if he expected to have to make good on his threat.

  “I know,” Lee said a last time, though he wasn’t confident or courageous. He was just the one person to do it, the one way that the thing could be done. As if the whole misbegotten equation added up after all.

  The prematurely white-haired man, Dave, was a law-enforcement agent of the United States Forest Service, and it was he who fitted Lee, from his own closet, with snowshoes and a winter coat, the coat reaching almost to Lee’s knees but cut narrow, so that it fit somewhat better than Morrison’s clothes. The snowshoes were not the rustic wooden tennis rackets that Lee had envisioned. They were ungainly rectangular frameworks of aluminum pipe with a welter of buckles and straps with which Dave struggled while Lee sat sideways in the passenger seat of an SUV, either the same one that had plucked him off Whitehead’s mountain or its identical twin, the car door standing open and the chill air, ominous with moisture, probing Dave’s coat, seeking points of entry. Dave squatted on the icy asphalt while he worked, in the same plaid shirt he’d been wearing before, cuffs rolled back, his only concession to being outdoors a thin black knitted cap on his head. When he had finished, he helped Lee to his feet, and Lee, leaning hard on Dave as if he were an old woman and Dave were a Boy Scout, scraped with a horrible noise across the asphalt to a vast, pristine stretch of meringue at the parking lot’s border. Dave had to roughly hoist Lee, holding him under the armpits, to get him over the filthy bulwark of plowed snow that hemmed the lot on all sides. When Lee touched down on the level meringue, he clung to Dave across the bulwark, certain he’d sink to his knees, and felt Dave’s fingers matter-of-factly prying his loose from the sleeve of Dave’s shirt. Morrison watched from the lot’s farther side. Dave pushed Lee, the stronger animal calmly imposing its will on the weaker, until Lee stopped bendingly reaching for Dave and stood straight, miraculously afloat on the bright crust of snow.

  Dave handed Lee a pair of spindly flexible sticks made of plastic and rubber. “Use them for balance, not leverage,” he said. “Pretend you’re walking on water. Go light. You’ll have to put your feet wider,” he added, as Lee, confused by the width of the shoes, almost fell on his face.

  There wasn’t much time to practice, or rather there was no time at all. It was one-thirty; Lee had done his best to eat a ham sandwich and a cup of chicken noodle soup with Morrison at the wood-laminate table in his motel room, but the sandwich bread had stuck in his windpipe and the smell of the ham made him nauseous; he’d gotten the soup down his throat at the rate of an eyedropper. The national network would air their story, blowing Morrison’s and all his colleagues’ cover, at six-thirty. But dusk would have already fallen an hour before—SWAT had to work with just visual contact between the team members, because radios were too loud. And really, visual conditions would already be hopelessly lousy an hour before that, given how shoehorned in mountains Donald Whitehead’s place was. And to cap it, the forecast was calling for even more snow. At best they had three hours remaining; at worst it was already over—

  This overheard information impressed itself upon Lee about as well as might a discussion of wind speed if he was about to be pushed from a plane. He knew it impinged upon him, but he couldn’t digest it. He took a step, swayed, waved his sticks like a flailing insect, felt the protest in the small of his back and his groin and his calves. He had to spread his feet wider. And up there he’d be climbing: that same final ascent that felt grueling enough from the inside of Marjorie’s truck.

  Now another huge SUV, which gleamed like new despite radial spatters of road salt and mud, drove into the slush-flooded lot with a trailer in hitch that had a snowmobile on it, and at the same time Agent Morrison came striding as fast as he could through the slop. “We’ve got it,” he told Dave, “so let’s go,” and because Lee understood all the prerequisites of their mission, like a rank-and-file soldier whose sheer petrifaction has paradoxically honed his perceptions, he knew this meant that the warrants had now been obtained from the district court judge, and the next instant Dave had boosted him back to the parking-lot side of the bulwark of snow and then boosted him again, a clumsy and clattering scarecrow in his overlarge coat and aluminum shoes, into the SUV’s passenger seat, and with an angry slamming of doors all around they had “launched,” as had the SWAT team already; Lee and Morrison and Dave would drive as far as a defunct wood mill and wait there for confirmation that the SWAT team had formed their “loose ring,” and then the three men would continue on the snowmobile and then on their snowshoes, and then came the point when the smallest and last rocket stage tumbled off all alone.

  Lee’s bulletproof vest seemed too long for his torso; it dug painfully into his armpits. He struggled to bring into his mind all the parts of his life he would have hoped might enfold him and solace him now. He was disappointed; his life did not “pass before him,” although he could feel, when he closed his eyes, when he let the cement-grinder noise of the tires drown out the terse exchanges between the other men in the car, Esther’s small, glossy head, beaming warmth, in the cup of his palm…. He did not mean to be melodramatic, only as acknowledging, as undeceived, as Agent Morrison was. Before, over lunch in the room, Lee had said to him, “Jim, are you nervous?” and Morrison had said, “I always am.”

  Lee knew he was nervous also, so nervous that the word seemed absurd when proposed as the name of his inner condition. If he had felt this before, he could not recall it, in the way that some say one cannot recall physical pain, so that pain is always brand-new, lacking all precedent, laying siege to a body unsuspecting of it and so that much more vulnerable. Lee only knew that his feeling was entirely different this time up the mountain. In the truck with Marjorie, his awareness of the impending encounter had been so acute he’d felt bruised on all sides, as if by an onslaught of sensory hail. Now a featureless pad seemed to muffle him from his surroundings, even silence his breath in his throat. When he did choose to listen to Morrison and Dave and the third agent, whose job was to drive, the substance of their conversation was received by his mind with the indifference of a pond stretched beneath a light rain. Explosives ordnance detonation, command post, device signature—Lee might already have been on his own, already climbing the mountain, wizened and hunched and impervious, like the monks he remembered from boyhood: serene with indifference, their life in this world and their life in the next mere conditions, marked off by the slightest of membranes, through which one might pass anytime, no big drama, no tears, no regrets….

  At the defunct wood mill, they unloaded the snowmobile, put on their snowshoes, watched the SUV leave them behind. The SWAT team was in place, too far away to give alarm and so too far away also to give comfort. At least four separate law-enforcement agencies, represented by more than two dozen persons, with countless more en route, from East Coast and West, from a nearby army base, were secreted in Sippston; yet it was really just three mismatched men, in the sighing near silence of a pine mountainside. Two of the men hadn’t slept for two days, and one was sick with the flu, underweight, over sixty, and his cold-weather clothes did not fit. Two were armed, and one could barely stay upright in snowshoes and while supporting the weight,
which seemed to double and double again, of his bulletproof vest. It seemed to Lee, every moment, that in the next moment they would sit and discuss in detail what was going to happen, but they never did, because they never could have; future time had taken on a strange, truncated quality, and there was only the immediate moment, in which shoes and sidearms were adjusted, and the subsequent immediate moment, in which they awkwardly climbed on the snowmobile—Lee in the middle, Morrison behind him, and Dave at the controls—and the subsequent immediate moment, in which this physical intimacy felt almost comical, but the comedy was remote, out of reach, like the V-shaped black bird drifting far overhead, and then the subsequent immediate moment when the snowmobile came to life with a racket like that of Lee’s ancient lawn mower, and then Lee was no longer aware of immediate moments.

  Nothing looked as it had the night before, in the darkness and rain. At every bend and ascent in the track, Lee expected the cabin to leap onto them, a devouring monster of shingles and boards. They roared and whined, throwing snow divots, seeming to fissure the earth with their noise, his terror that Whitehead would hear them endurable only because demolished by the even greater terror he’d be pitched from the bucking machine—but after they’d abruptly stopped, and dismounted, and started to slog on their own, he understood that they’d never been anywhere close to the cabin, that in fact they would never come close. It was Zeno’s snow hike. Lee felt, within ten or twelve marshy, upstraining steps, that he’d been pushed to the limits of his body’s endurance, that now he’d passed into the dissociated state of a victim of torture, that the vest, which seemed made of lead plates, was sawing his arms from his shoulders, and the shoes, which seemed glued to the snow, were uprooting the tops of his thighs from his hip joints, and that feverish unconsciousness was about to submerge him. He seemed to see himself, and Agent Morrison and Dave, from some swirl-inscribed distance, across which their three forms, bent in effort, appeared scored by a swarming of little white worms. It was snowing again, he realized: tiny featureless pellets this time instead of feathery flakes. The sky seemed to have closed like a lid. It was harder to see. Beside him, their gasping breaths drowned out by his, Agent Morrison and Dave were lumpen blocks of dull color, of browns and sickly army greens, camouflage tones that made them not less visible but more inexplicable against the backdrop of whitish gray soup. What were these shuddering, khaki-clad lumps? Lee was no less visible in his borrowed parka, which was navy blue, with an edging of mangy fake fur on the hood that had clotted with snow and his own frozen spit. And he remembered, suddenly, that the Communist soldiers had worn white cotton clothes in the winter and crawled through the snow while invading his country, and this was why no one had seen them in time to repel them.