A Person of Interest (7 page)

Now his old building housed the Department of Romance Languages; Mathematical Science had moved to its new building, or “facility,” in 1987. The new building, called contemporary by the school administrators, to the naked eye shockingly cheap, with curved hallways in colors like “shell pink” and “mint green” and strange, unnecessary circular and triangular holes cut into second-story walls to look down on the cold “atrium” full of shivering, leaf-shedding fi cuses, had been built around a vast computer center at its core and intended as the strongest manifestation of the school’s new commitment to computer science. In truth the building had loomed like a folly, by the minute growing grimier and less used and more dated, until the fresh windfall of alumni funding that had enabled the triumphant hiring of Hendley, in 1993. Then the building’s shabbiness and laborious
A P E R S O N O F I N T E R E S T 39

whimsy had been reconstituted as the appropriate background tribute to Hendley’s good-humored self-sacrifice, in consenting to join the department. Lee had never been comfortable in the building, beneath the incessant harsh whine of its arctic fluorescents, along its right-angleless halls, in which, at least for the first year, he was constantly lost. Doors to the outdoors and to restrooms opened only with the swipe of a magnetized card that Lee always forgot in his desk, as if the Mathematical Science Building were top secret, vulnerable to dark espionage. Lee’s new offi ce, where he eventually shared his left-hand wall with Hendley, had an untethered quality to it, each surface seeming not solid but more like the taut skin of a drum. When large delivery trucks passed the building, he would feel his fl oor tremble.

It startled him to see a policeman stationed at the door to Hendley’s office, although he understood it must be to prevent any tampering with the crime scene. Now that he was inside his building, he felt less placid than he had while outdoors. As he passed down the pink hallway, an oc-tagonal window at the far end framed the crown of a tree. Outdoors, spring had been sweetly indifferent to the disasters of man, but from this vantage the budding branches Lee saw appeared frozen in postures of horror. It must be the youth of this building, Lee thought; not enough had transpired here for the palimpsest theory to work. From its cold lobby tile to its dirty skylights, the place was all about Hendley.

Perhaps Lee would just check his mail and then return home. He let himself into the departmental mail room, that claustrophobically windowless chamber, barely more than a truncated hall, with a door at one end to the corridor and a door at the other to the cubicled space of the departmental office, today deserted, a graveyard of inert monitors and cold copy machines. He did not really expect to fi nd anything; the usual ream of irrelevant memos would not have been issued in the two school days after the bomb. He was surprised, then, not just to find he had mail but to find that it was actual mail, an envelope stamped and postmarked and addressed to himself. Instinctively he tore the envelope open and read where he stood.

Dear Lee,

What a bittersweet pleasure to see your face after all of these
years, even if through the mesh of newsprint. You are still a hand-40 S U S A N C H O I

some man. “Princely,” I believe, was the word sometimes used
around campus for you. I know that you, like me, are rational, and
that you won’t be offended when I say that the sight of my grad
school colleague almost seventy years (is that right?) from his start
in this life, was a bracing reminder to one of his peers as to how
many years of his own life have passed. Let me compensate for the
great gaffe of mentioning age by asserting you wear it admirably
well, a lot better than I do. I wonder if you would agree that there
is some relief, in becoming old men. What poet wrote “tender
youth, all a-bruise”? I can admit that you bruised me, that last time
we met.

Lee’s horror was intense and imprecise; like helpless prey, he felt himself the narrow focus of amorphous scrutiny; he was the paralyzed deer in the woods, hub to eyes and gun sights. He felt his bowels loosen.

“Jesus Christ,” he murmured. He straightened and looked around himself quickly, his heart pounding away at the door of his ribs. Of course he was alone. All morning he’d thought about ghosts, and yet here was one to blindside him he had not even deigned to imagine.

The rest of the letter was absorbed in an unremembered instant, during which he also burst out of the mail room and traveled back down the hall toward his office, almost tripping over the feet of the watchful policeman.

“Good morning,” Lee exclaimed.

The policeman nodded to him with brusque courtesy. “How’re you feeling, Professor?”

“Just fine,” Lee replied, attempting to sound stoic and warm and forgetting all about going into his offi ce. He hurried out of the building, back into the sun, and took a left down the concrete pathway, toward University Station.

The letter must have been delivered either yesterday—Monday—

or today. The postal service kept on implacably regardless of spring breaks or of what deadly freight it might ferry. Its vast, branching, impersonal systematicity revolted him suddenly. Like a poisonous river, it had brought Hendley that bomb, spewed it out on the banks of his life without the least word of warning. Now it had brought Lee this letter. He still held the single sheet of white typewriter paper, bent
A P E R S O N O F I N T E R E S T 41

against the twin folds that had thirded it by the surprising pressure of his hand, which had now left a rippled damp spot in the margin. This proof of his own physical contact with the letter made Lee feel somehow compromised. He refolded the letter quickly and slid it back into the envelope. The envelope was as characterless as the paper: white, business-size, cheap, with no watermark. It was addressed—snidely, Lee felt—to
Dr.
Lee. The italics were Lee’s own, in angry echo of his correspondent. So Gaither had never finished his degree, as Lee had predicted he wouldn’t—this was what the sour fastidiousness of
Dr.

Lee clearly betrayed, if unintentionally. Lee knew Gaither well enough to see through his fraudulent courtesies. The painful and intoxicating brew of shock and fear, of uncertainty and certainty, and of guilt, was now making room for plain anger as well.
Dr.
Lee, Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, all entirely correct down to the esoteric plus-four of the zip code. The return address was 14 Maple Lane, Woodmont, WA, but the letter was postmarked from Spokane.

Gaither could as easily have put it in the mail during a layover between Bangkok and Boston.

Of course I was laughably innocent then, of the workings of human
relations. But I am not a sentimental man—nor are you, I’ve long assumed and admired. I only press on the point (on the bruise!) to impress
how I’d like to revive faded fellowship now. Now you are probably angry
with me, as I once was with you. Please don’t be. There’s a reason my arrow grazed you. I can learn what my long-ago colleague has done in the
long years since we last had contact.

My long-ago colleague. Long assumed and admired.

Long years.

There was only one kid in the mail room, a fi dgety undergraduate with sticky black hair and a pierced ear, the kind of boy who prided himself on never going home to his parents, not even at Christmas.

But he was anxious to leave now for his dorm; he’d probably taken the spring-break shifts in the building’s mail room not for lack of friends or activities but to make extra money. “I’m about to take off,” he told Lee. “There’s no afternoon delivery today. All the mail that comes in now, they’re keeping here extra time to go through it. Cops and stuff.

So I’m sorry if you got something late, Professor, but I’m giving as fast as I’m getting.”

42 S U S A N C H O I

“Nothing was late,” Lee assured him, raking a hand over his scalp, which had gone slick with sweat. “I just wanted to know where this came from.”

“Postmark says Washington.”

“I mean . . . well, that’s all right, that’s all right,” Lee said, gesturing in dismissal. What was he asking? This envelope had come to the departmental mail room from where he now stood, University Station; to University Station, via postal circuits unknown to Lee, from Spokane, Washington. And to the mailbox in Spokane from nowhere this boy, or anyone else on this campus, could tell him.

“Cops’re screening everything now,” the boy added, perhaps regretting his smart-aleck tone. “So you don’t need to worry, Professor. I guess they’ve got a machine that can check mail for bombs.”

“I’m not
worried,
” Lee said. “Although I’m glad to hear that they’re doing their job.” The police might be able to screen mail for bombs, but not for insidious weapons like this.

I hope to hear from you soon. Until then I remain,
Your Old Colleague and Friend

A slashed, crosshatched mark of some kind filled the rest of the page.

By the time he’d returned to his parking space, the letter was interred at the bottom of his ancient calf briefcase, which had grown spider-webbed with dry cracks in the course of the decades because he had never maintained it.
The sight of you a bracing reminder of years that
have passed.
Lee’s silver Nissan the opposite thing, a disposable tool.

Lee’s material world was made up of these two categories, the fl eeting generic and the eternal and iconic. In the first category, his car and his plasterboard home in a suburb the name of which he had forgotten, a home several times too large for him now that the second Mrs. Lee had departed. In the latter category, his briefcase and the desk in his study, a gigantic oak treasure that had happened to live in his fi rst rooming house in grad school; the green-shaded lamp in his offi ce; the Montblanc pen, a gift from his undergraduate adviser, in the pocket of his cheap Penney’s button-down shirt, a type of shirt he bought three
A P E R S O N O F I N T E R E S T 43

to the package, like his briefs and his socks and his undershirts, like his food—cardboard cases of Bud Light, Valu-Saks of white rice, planks of beef framed on Styrofoam mattes. Gaither, he thought, was correct: he was not a sentimental man. He was pragmatic, and cheap.

If he lost the Montblanc, he’d buy a Bic at the drugstore. But somehow he never had lost it, in almost forty years.

In the car he looked at his Seiko, still running, and thought about getting gradually, drowningly drunk on many cans of Bud Light in his La-Z-Boy chair. But he still hadn’t started the engine. He took out the letter again and held it, by its edges: 14 Maple Lane.
Dr.
Lee. He felt a sob choke his throat, saw a single tear fall on the envelope, rippling it.

Another mark that was his. Heat built up in the car from the struggling spring sunshine, but when he rolled down his window, the air came in cool. The most immediate source of his pain was his realization that once again he could not call Aileen. Of course he had thought of her first, when he’d opened the letter. Of calling and the instant she answered, declaring,
I’ve found him.

He finally started the car, rolled the window tightly shut again, and pulled out of the parking lot. The letter was buried again in his suitcase. As he drove, his misery plagued him like a murderous passenger, blocking his airways and blurring his vision, but he blinked and took breaths and kept going, an undeterred stoic. Comporting himself admirably. This was precisely what Gaither must want, Lee’s delayed dissolution, after all these long years. Vengeance not in spite of those years but because of them: it was far too late for every kind of reparation. It was too late for Aileen, and it was too late for Lee. Gaither must know this; Gaither always had seen the long view, a circumstance that had united Lee and Aileen in their absolute refusal to, or inability to, do the same. This must have been another gift of Gaither’s religion: his grasp of their acts’ future consequences, as if they lay before him sketched out on a map.

Lee had always treated his drinking as a casual thing, but at his core he knew that it was something more precious: a lofty plateau; a lush table above glowing desert, beneath pristine skies; a space in his life so defined that it was truly a
place,
and one he relied on returning to regularly. In three decades it had evolved, toward greater cheapness and ease: the twenty-four-can suitcase of Bud Light and the Almaden
44 S U S A N C H O I

box. Almost home, he stopped off at the A&P and bought one of each, and broccoli for his dinner, and these mundane transactions almost let him forget about the letter in his briefcase, locked inside his Nissan, like its own kind of slow-acting bomb. The checkout clerk, a heavy, motherly white woman he probably saw every week, smiled sympathetically at him. As she returned his change, she burst out,

“You’re Professor Lee, aren’t you? From the university.”

“Yes,” Lee said, trying to smile. He’d been recognized many times, at places like the gas station and in the aisles of this store, since his TV

appearance, and he’d always responded with what he was starting to feel was his trademark calm dignity. But now that he’d gotten the letter, this recognition felt somehow menacing, though he knew that it was not.

“I’m so sorry to bother you. I recognized you from your being on TV. Of course you’ve shopped here for years.”

“Yes,” Lee said, feeling strain in his face where his cheeks remained lifted—gruesomely, he was sure—to bare his friendly white teeth.

“Is there any news of that poor man? The other professor?” With relief, Lee let his face fall, back to its usual sternness. “Not yet,” he said.

“We’re all praying for him.”

With alarm, Lee realized that the clerk was near tears.

“I never thought something like that could happen here,” she said miserably.

“No one did—”

“You spoke so well on TV. Someone like me can’t do much, but I’m praying. I pray that he’ll live.” She pulled a pawlike hand over her face, and it came away wet. “Oh, my goodness. And we’ve started a fund for his care, I don’t know if you knew. On behalf of the store.”