A Person of Interest

by Susan Choi

  “Do you know what a hemlock is?” Dave was asking. “Like a feathery pine?” Lee managed to show that he did. “Once you’ve climbed to that big hemlock there, that’s about fifty yards, you have a clear line of sight to the cabin. But go slow. Me and Jim’ll go the long way to come out at the back of his woodpile, but we need time to get in position.”

  No admonition had ever been less necessary. Watching the other two men hunker off, Lee experienced a sudden inversion, all the alarming sensations of being knocked off his feet, as he sometimes did when nodding off to sleep. Perhaps he had actually fainted. But when he jerked back to awareness, his heart rampaging, his limbs turned to rubber, he was upright. This was the form defeat took. He might have been a dead piece of tree that had fallen upright in the snow. He would stand here forever, immobile, and not even rot.

  And yet he must have clawed his way somehow, from the place they’d left him to the hemlock and from the hemlock to the cabin’s little clearing, which drew him miragelike, alternately appearing and fading, assembling and dissolving, through the snow and the trees. When he was a young man, he’d walked from his invaded, fallen city all the way to the sea. He’d walked, amid corpses and stragglers, completely alone, his family swept untraceably from him as if by a tsunami. And that had happened to a separate man’s body, perhaps even a separate man’s soul: he retained only the dry knowledge of it, as if acquired from history books, the same way this ordeal was being swiftly excised, so that even as he endured, he diligently forgot.

  He didn’t so much bravely enter as fall into the clearing.

  The snow here was almost two feet deep. Exhausted, he sank into it, his knees buckling, the tangled snowshoes partly under his buttocks, his left hip canted out so that it quickly grew wet. Gaither was dead, he remembered. His own Aileen was dead. Brilliant, unbearable Hendley was dead. Lee was alive, but in a moment he, too, might be dead, just another condition, the boundary of his life a mere membrane through which he would pass. He was aware of the cabin’s door opening; the snowflakes had grown larger and lighter, and the wind had died down, so that the whine of the cabin door’s hinges was as audible to him as if he stood just on the threshold, though he was possibly ten yards away, a few pickup-truck lengths. Marjorie had turned around in this space; she’d had to squeeze, but she’d done it. Now came Whitehead’s boots scraping onto the threshold; if in the snow hush Lee could hear their abrasions this clearly, wouldn’t Whitehead hear two other men creeping past his woodpile? But Lee wasn’t thinking of this. He was remembering instead something Whitehead once said in a class they had taken. They’d both been interested in simple group classification, which held that of those phenomena known as multiply transitive permutation groups, only four existed. That was a given; it was not controversial; but Donald Whitehead had once scoffed at it, and when their professor had asked what he meant, he’d replied, with strange heat, “I don’t like to be told there are only so many of something. I don’t like to be told things like that,” and Lee had been both disturbed and impressed by that peculiar, self-certain outburst.

  “I must admit I am less overjoyed,” Whitehead said now, from his doorway, his voice sounding very different, wary and thick, as if congested with feeling it fought to suppress. “I’ve assumed, since our strange reunion, that your trustworthiness went without saying. But perhaps I’m sentimental after all, and deceived. Who fetched you last night? And how did you get back here now?” Lee saw Whitehead reaching for something, brushing fingertips over some item to be assured it was there. From behind Whitehead’s bulk, a white plume of misvented woodsmoke escaped out the door, and Lee remembered the stench of the cabin, or smelled it again, as it made its way across the cold to him. Whitehead’s attire, as well as his manner, had changed since the previous night. Lee realized he was wearing the old houndstooth jacket. He must have ventured outside to retrieve it from where Lee had dropped it in the course of his flight. And then dried it, perhaps carefully draped on the smoking woodstove. It was true that the decades had made it too small for his frame. It barely stretched shoulder to shoulder and winged out on both sides from a gap where it should have been buttoned. Even the sleeves ended short of the thick, hairy wrists. Now Lee knew, from Agent Morrison and Dave and Tom, that Whitehead had never been the scion of a moneyed and lettered East Coast family, as Lee once romantically thought. He was the midwestern son of a husbandless mother, who had raised him in sooty brick houses against a background of smokestacks. The jacket must have come from a secondhand store, like Lee’s briefcase. Perhaps it had never quite fit.

  He could only ignore Whitehead’s questions and accusing assumptions. “Donald,” he said instead, hoarsely, around chattering teeth. “Did you ever do it? Did you ever manage to prove a fifth group?”

  Lee was not near enough, but he sensed something disrupt Whitehead’s threatening face. An impulse of eagerness: it made a tentative showing, lingering in the background of the forbidding expression, as Whitehead lingered in the doorway of his cabin. “You mean a quintuply transitive permutation group?” Whitehead finally said.

  “Yes. Like we discussed in seminar.”

  “Well, Mathieu says that the problem is settled,” Whitehead countered, a note of irony lifting his voice.

  “You didn’t think that it was.”

  “I still don’t. I think Mathieu’s approach lacked generality. It’s very strange you should remember I said that.”

  “I remember very well,” Lee said, although he hadn’t remembered, not for thirty-one years, until now. But now he did remember very well. Now it came to him envelopingly, as memory often did.

  “Your memory didn’t serve you so well yesterday. You seemed taken aback. I notice you still haven’t explained how you got here alone.”

  Lee stabbed his spindly, flexible poles through the snow until they struck solid ground and then began struggling to pull himself upright, although he remembered Dave saying to use them for balance, not leverage. “Maybe that’s because,” he managed, heaving breaths, “I remember you differently. To me you were like an aristocrat.”

  He saw Whitehead start forward to help him and stop short. Whitehead stepped back into his doorway and made a brusque noise of scorn. “The prince saw me as princely.”

  “I was no prince,” Lee said, giving up for the moment and sitting back heavily, his legs splayed in front of him now, his rear soaking and numb.

  “Nor was I.”

  “You were the best of us,” Lee rebuked. “You were brilliant.” He remembered Fasano’s words to him: So bright they seem radioactive. “All my life all I wanted was what you threw away.”

  “All you wanted was the chance to work on weapons contracts, or build supercomputers? I doubt you wanted that, Lee.”

  “Is that what you were doing? Those aren’t the only choices. When we studied together, we did pure mathematics. We ignored applications.”

  “Certain applications I’ve found interesting.” Whitehead cocked his head slightly. “These are things that I was very much looking forward to discussing with you. Come in, Lee. Cross over this untouched snowfield, on your surprising snowshoes, and come into my home. But perhaps some misgiving is making you pause.”

  “You could have done brilliant work,” Lee persisted. “You were given such gifts, and you wasted them. It’s awful to someone like me, who never had them at all.”

  “Or perhaps you are tired, or hurt, and you need my assistance,” Whitehead added. “You wonder why I don’t come to you, with my own hand extended. Are my misgivings a mirror of yours? Or do I misjudge my friend?”

  Whitehead had not contradicted Lee’s own claim to lack scholarly gifts. After a moment Lee said, not to wound the other man but from an opposite impulse, an authentic concern for his soul, “You could have used your own mind, instead of trying to get rid of others.”

  Now Lee saw, for the first time, Whitehead’s inchoate suspicion coalesce into anger. “Is that your assessment of me? If so, it’s sentimental, not ratio
nal. Every human life is not sacrosanct. I hold this is true. I think you do. I know our society does. It will want to remove me for my so-called crimes, and if you agree with that punishment’s premise, then you agree with me, Lee. Some humans must be removed, for the good of the whole. We all concur on the principle. We only disagree on how it’s put into practice. Society will condone my removal, to avenge the removals I’ve accomplished myself, which had far greater value. How can one judge? You’ll be lucky not to. If the atom bomb hadn’t existed, would the people of Hiroshima have been able to judge the superior outcome, on August sixth, 1945, when nothing particular happened?”

  “Hendley never would have harmed other people,” Lee protested, meaning to continue, and even if he had, it’s not your place to judge any more than it’s mine: you’re not God, but the rest of the sentence was stuck in his throat. For the first time since Hendley had died, his death pierced Lee with intimate force. Lee was as stunned by the taste of his tears as if from the top of this mountain he’d found himself thrashing around in the sea.

  “Hendley’s world of computer junk food for the brain would have been, and probably still will be, despite my best efforts, even worse than the atom bomb was, because it will come on by stealth, like a cancer, and be fatal before it’s detected. Oh, my friend,” Whitehead said in remorse, crunching down the two steps and plowing powerfully through the deep crust of snow, arm outstretched, toward where Lee found himself not just crumpled on spent legs but weeping. “Oh, my friend, I’ve been touchy and rude. I’ve been pacing all day like a cat in a cage, your departure last night made me think—”

  Lee’s tears had seized hold of him so ruthlessly, were wringing him so unrelentingly, he discerned even less than Whitehead the approach of the two hidden men; he was equally shocked, more afraid, as they came flying clumsily forth, wallowing through the snow, leaping on Whitehead like cooperative ambushing beasts. Whitehead was a singular beast of his own, for a moment majestic and doomed, his leonine hair standing out as he fought to twist free of his captors, who had snared him ignobly, with handcuffs snapped open like giant fishhooks, and with guns. It seemed to Lee that despite all the roared imprecations to Get down! and Hands up! and Lie still! and Don’t move! the event was silent, a wild mute tornado before which he cowered, but perhaps this was only because Whitehead in his fury was silent, never looking at Lee, never calling to him, not with threats nor with supplications. By the time Lee was lifted back up to his feet, the little clearing was teeming with people and bristling with guns, but Whitehead himself, the caught beast, had been carried away.

  26.

  IN THEIR FIRST EXAMINATION OF THE CABIN, EOD—THE explosives ordnance detonation team, or bomb squad (but Lee now felt it very important to use the professional term, as he would want any interested outsider to say “quadruply transitive permutation group” in discussing that aspect of his field, rather than something approximate and for that reason useless)—found, with the help of a robot, a fully armed bomb, just inside the front door. Lee must have seen it, perhaps even brushed it, as he’d entered and fled. It took the form of a beautifully made wooden box, its trigger mechanism attached to the lid. It would have blown up the cabin, and the bomb-making workshop squeezed into the cellar below, and anyone to a distance of about twenty feet, leaving only a crater, if its lid had been lifted. Once the explosive interior had been disarmed and separated from the exquisite encasement, Morrison got to handle the box and to study, on the lid’s underside, the Japanese characters calligraphed there as if with a tattoo needle. That had been Whitehead’s “signature,” Morrison said. Every bomber, whether he or she means to or not, has a signature, a characteristic manner of building a bomb, that a good analyst can detect. But Whitehead, whether because he desired recognition or merely to please his own sense of aesthetics, had elaborated his bombs with intentional signatures, little captions or titles, always in Japanese. Enigmatic things like “reliance” or “stones in a field.” “This one translated as ‘divine wind.’” Morrison smiled, already pleased by the quick understanding he knew Lee would show.

  “Kamikaze,” Lee said.

  “A rare case where the Japanese word is required, for us Americans to get Whitehead’s meaning. He was saving that one, in case enemies came to the door.”

  The cabin in fact was so wondrously full of evidence against Whitehead—Lee remembered its dizzying riot of objects, its stacks of containers of the jagged and shiny, the disassembled and coiled, a mad magpie’s overstuffed nest—that Morrison and his colleagues had decided to peel the whole thing from foundation to shingles off the lot in one piece, and to scoop out the cellar in its bowl of dirt, and ship them east to the FBI lab without a mote of dust altered. Lee thought of his lost cap, entombed with the evidence, traveling on a flatbed truck thousands of miles under state police escort. Another scrap of his life that was forever entangled, through error and chance. Since the announcement of Whitehead’s arrest, thirty-six hours before, Sippston had been overtaken by press, by fleets of TV trucks with satellite stalks straining toward the gray sky, by reporters in unbroken-in snow boots running races on foot or in the rental cars that a shortage produced by demand had obliged them to share with their fiercest competitors, rushing from one spurious, self-declared Marjorie-like intimate to another (but not to the only authentic one, Marjorie; she wasn’t talking, on the advice of a lawyer), from the federal building four counties away to the foot of the road Lee had turned down with Marjorie eons before, and which now was a sentries’ encampment, protecting the evidence mother lode being mined from that small snowy clearing to which Lee had somehow ascended, not just once but twice. Their frantic movements interested Lee only insofar as they meant that the roads were clear enough for him to leave. All the roads weren’t just plowed but restored to wet asphalt by warm temperatures. Lee had persuaded two of Morrison’s lesser colleagues to drive to the library—staked out by reporters who still hoped for Marjorie—and caravan back with his Nissan. And there it sat now, in the slush-streaming lot, some vestigial snow crust still adhered to its roof like a crown in reward for its valiance. It had waited for Lee through his amazing ordeal, and would now take him home.

  When Morrison heard he was leaving, he’d come to have room-service breakfast with him. It was a lively, enjoyable breakfast, despite the overcooked eggs in their oil slick of grease, and as he and Morrison talked, Lee almost felt he’d been reunited with a countryman, or a soldier with whom he had served, or a colleague with whom he’d been students, a long time ago. “I can think of a lot of reporters who’d give their right arms to hear how you helped nab him,” Morrison added as he scraped his plate clean. Then his gaze met Lee’s with new gravity. “Lee, I realize you might want to talk to the press, but I’m asking you please to hold off. Wait until he’s been tried. Understand, it’s not over, it’s only beginning. It’s critical we not jeopardize our case against Whitehead—”

  “I don’t want my name mixed up in it at all,” Lee broke in, scraping his own plate. He was unusually hungry. “Please don’t ever mention me in this case again, Jim, if I could ask you this favor. Never say I was here.”

  Morrison put down his fork. “You helped capture the Brain Bomber, Lee. You’d never want people to know that?”

  Lee remembered his peroration on the hospital sidewalk, the day Hendley was bombed. “I’ve learned my lesson, with TV and these things. I’m really not interested. I’d rather stay a short poppy, if you know what I mean.” He felt Morrison’s thoughtful eyes on him as he peeled back the plastic membrane on his last jelly packet and applied the clear purple substance to his last piece of toast. Then Morrison pushed himself away from the table.

  “Before you go, I’ve got something for you,” he said. “Back in a minute.”

  When he returned, he was holding a manila file folder, like the one from which he’d taken the list of Lee’s mail the first time he’d come to Lee’s home. “Of everything from your house, this was the only item that contained the n
ame Gaither, back when we thought the name Gaither might be a real lead. So I had it with me because it seemed like it might be important, and then I still had it with me when we realized it was completely unimportant, and I’ve been on the move ever since.” Morrison paused, and Lee put down his toast and met the other man’s gaze, and for the first time in their acquaintanceship—could Lee call it a friendship?—he saw Morrison’s eyes seem to search, beneath the noble Neanderthal shelf of his brow, for some place of concealment, some refuge in which to recompose the generally unwavering beam that they cast. But in the next instant, the recomposure was effected, and Morrison looked at Lee without hesitation, but also with acknowledgment. “There’s a bureaucratic process you go through, a formal process, to reclaim possessions. It can be slow. And since we happen to be here together…” He finished the sentence by holding out the file folder. Lee cleared aside his plate and cutlery and wiped his hands on a napkin before taking it. He didn’t need to open it to know what it contained, but he did anyway. Aileen’s letter to him.

  “Thank you, Jim,” he said, and found that though he’d meant to go on, a sort of valve in his throat seemed to close, a physical punctuation mark that didn’t allow for additional words, and so he didn’t attempt any.