A Person of Interest (12 page)

A P E R S O N O F I N T E R E S T 73

“And he’s . . . dead?”

“No, no. This bomb was nothing like yours. It was a much smaller deal, if you can say that a bomb’s a small deal. He’s down three fi ngers and the thumb, wears a sort of robotic glove with prostheses that he invented himself. That’s what was so strange, in the end, apart from the whole thing being psycho. Illich does some kind of hotshot research in robotics, and now he himself is part robot. You’d almost think he staged the bombing to help his career.” Fasano gave a dry laugh. “You know I’m joking. I’m not that bad a bastard.”

“But his career didn’t need help,” Lee pointed out. “He was a hotshot already.”

“True enough. Like your Hendley.”

“So whoever did this dislikes hotshots.” Once he’d said this, they shared another comradely silence. He and Fasano weren’t hotshots.

When Fasano spoke again, Lee knew how mistaken he’d been to imagine even briefly that Fasano looked down on him. They were on the same level and of the same mind.

“It’s never good to be the tall poppy,” Fasano remarked. “You get your head snipped off fi rst.”

“Perhaps we should be kinder to our children,” Lee joked. “They’re just keeping their heads down.”

“The short poppy can’t help being short. The tall poppy who folds herself up to
look
short is contemptible. She’s either lazy or neurotic or both. No offense meant to Esther. I’m talking about my own girls.

But you and I, Lee: Are we short and can’t help it? Or are we tall but somehow folded up?”

“I’m a mathematician, not a psychiatrist, Frank.” That got a laugh from Fasano.

“Either way we’d please Darwin. We won’t get our heads snipped.

You know, Lee, it’s hasn’t only been Hendley and Illich. For a while after Illich’s thing, I was researching this all the time, going through the old papers. It began to seem morbid, and I made myself quit. But I read about five or six other weird bombings. Sometimes in the mail, sometimes an object just sitting around. The guy who gets it is always a mathematician or computer scientist or a computer programmer.

All relatively prominent in their fi elds. All guys. And all over. Another
74 S U S A N C H O I

one in California, two in the Midwest, one all the way out in Connecti-cut, one I think in New Jersey. No one’s died yet. They’ve all lost some fingers, some vision, not that that isn’t awful. But knock wood, so far no one’s dead.”

“And you think they’re connected.”

“
I
don’t think. I’m no sleuth. The cops think, the cops have theories.

But it always fades out of the news pretty soon, and then it’s years before another one happens. These ones that I’ve mentioned, the fi rst happened all the way back in the late seventies. Then it’s years in between. If it’s one guy, he must keep on losing his nerve. Or he’s not in a hurry.” Eventually Fasano’s commute and Lee’s hunger for dinner forced them to say their reluctant good-byes. “Lee, the telephone is a wonderful instrument, easy to master and not even very expensive. Let’s not let it be another twenty years, all right?”

“All right,” Lee agreed happily. “It’s a deal.”

“Give me a call next week sometime. Let me know how Hendley is doing.”

It was not quite the one note from their glad conversation Lee had most wanted echoing in his bright kitchen once he’d hung up the phone. Cooking his dinner and pouring himself a new beer, he tried to determine whether it constituted a lapse and, if so, just how glaring a one, that he hadn’t yet been back to the hospital to pay a visit to Hendley. It wasn’t, he decided, that he was averse to expressing his sympathy—after all, who had been more Hendley’s comrade in the disaster than he? It was perhaps that he’d assumed that he would only be an unneeded addition to the crowd of well-wishers. There would be the generically worshipful students and the exceptional Emma. There would be Sondra, the departmental secretary and self-appointed den mother, who had found in Hendley’s vibrantly chaotic life the most exalted arena so far for her tireless drive to perform the sorts of thank-less, unnoticed, laborious tasks she performed for all the members of the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, all of them incompetents in the science of everyday life. Moving briskly among them, perhaps constantly shooing them out of the room, would be Hendley’s girlfriend, Rachel. Rachel was slender, urban, sardonic; arrestingly beautiful in the severe, offhand way in which the very few
A P E R S O N O F I N T E R E S T 75

overtly sexual intellectual women Lee had known in his life always were. She had reminded him, when he’d first glimpsed her passing the door to his offi ce on her way to Hendley’s, of a sort of Aileen; a later edition, as if it had been possible to take Aileen, so out of sync with the frame of her life, and reissue her just a few decades later with far better results. Rachel had given Lee an unsettling shock, as briefl y as she’d passed through his field of vision; the thought had entered his mind that he had possessed Aileen only as the result of a colossal temporal mistake, some cosmic snafu that had marooned her on the plane of existence ahead of her time. Now here she was again, or here was her close likeness. That day, about two years ago, Rachel passed Lee’s doorway without even a flick of dismissal, he was so far beneath notice, entered Hendley’s instead, and with the brusqueness of ownership banged the door shut.

Setting his usual place at the table, along the side nearest the stove, with his Corelle breakproof plate and his Tupperware tumbler—

items Aileen had left when she’d left him—Lee relived that moment of Rachel’s indifference as if she had meant to insult him, and all his doubts about a hospital visit were nicely resolved. If he went, he would be greeted with the same cool indifference. He wouldn’t get from her the courtesy due to a senior colleague, let alone the warmth anybody might feel toward the bomb’s almost-victim. Nevertheless, he would go anyway. Dignity required it. He would say he had been out of town on a spring-break vacation he’d planned long before and that in fact he’d arrived home just now, Friday night, around nine.

He was still so abstracted by his thoughts that his movements were rough as he spooned white rice onto his plate and poured beer into his tumbler, and when the telephone rang, he forgot about the menace of Gaither and snatched it up right away. “Hello!” he exclaimed.

“We lost him, Lee,” he heard a woman say hoarsely. The emptiness of her voice was even worse than her tears might have been; he was left to imagine the violence of emotion that had emptied her out. It was Sondra.

“We lost him, Lee,” she repeated.

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“My God,” Lee said, sitting down suddenly. He shoved his plate of rice far away from him. His message pad with Fasano’s number still lay on the counter nearby; he saw
FASANO
printed on it and jauntily framed in a sharp-cornered box and remembered his shameful happiness of just minutes before, when he and Fasano had been reminisc-ing. Of course he should have been at the hospital weeks ago. And of course Rachel’s slighting of him had been purely imagined, his own haughty self-justification to shake off his guilt. Because he was guilty: of profound self-absorption. Somehow, though Hendley’s explosion was the force Lee still felt rumbling through his own body, though Hendley’s impact crater—and the long-buried strata that it had exposed—was the landscape that Lee had been pacing for days, Hendley himself, torn asunder and fighting for life, had lain outside Lee’s thoughts. It wasn’t that Lee had forgotten about him. It was rather that, with so many of the artifacts of Lee’s own life catapulted aloft, with the arbitrary detritus of this era and that, of chapters heretofore held apart, now suspended together in space and demanding Lee gaze on them—and with Gaither’s letter the fiery star at their center—

present time had not seemed to progress. Present time had not seemed to progress, let alone undergo deadly increase in speed, as it must have for Hendley. And now Hendley was dead.

They managed to discuss the details. The time of death, just an hour before. That it wouldn’t be in the newspapers the next day, but on Sunday. The plans for a service and so on were all in progress.

After Lee said good-bye, he pulled a sheet of Saran Wrap—like a shroud, he thought—over his plate of cold rice and put it into the fridge. Then he sat down again in his old wooden chair, sole survivor of the dining-room set he and Aileen had bought at the Salvation Army right after they’d married. The act of purchasing such a solemn species of domestic furniture, and the set itself, “mahogany” dark and with deep grooves and grim feet, had at that time felt very serious, almost pious. The set had already been wobbly then, aged and dry in the joints so that the chairs made rhomboid shapes with their legs if you pushed back too hard getting up from the table. This last chair Lee had wood-glued and bound with twine for drying again and again, like a veterinarian tenderly setting the joints of a completely lame dog, but to no avail; beneath weight the chair still creaked
A P E R S O N O F I N T E R E S T 77

and tilted, refused to maintain its right-angularity, and even when Lee stood up from it—as he did now, restless—the chair groaned with reproach.

There was his reflection in the glass door again, as clearly cast against the night as it would be in a mirror. His lean face, his sharp jaw, his slight leathery jowls of age, not as if he had grown fl eshier but as if his outlines had surrendered to gravity very abruptly. His mouth a little downturned at the corners, his eyes very remote, hiding fear.

Every kind of death frightened him, whether of one he had loved or of one he had loathed. And it was that fear, anyone’s fear of death, that now sat anxiously at his sternum, a pressuring fist—though it felt similar to remorse.

8.

LEE RETURNED IN DREAD TO CAMPUS THAT MONDAY,
to launch those last downslope weeks of the term that in previous years he would have bounded ecstatically through, as if his sixty-fi ve-year-old chest held the heart of a freshman. This time he had writhed without sleep the whole night before, and sliced into his face while attempting to shave, and then drunk a pot of coffee, a vice he’d given up several years earlier for the sake of his bladder, and though the coffee he’d brewed had been stale, it still burned in his gut as if he’d swallowed ammonia. He was going to be scrutinized—as the survivor, or as the hospital nonvisitor, or perhaps simply as the most senior member of the department who still foolishly taught and showed up for meetings. Whichever role had been pressed upon him, he was sure it was somehow ignoble. He pulled in to his space in the faculty lot doubled over his acid-gnawed stomach, shoulders hunched to his ears, his ragged margin of platinum hair prickling into his eyes. It was remarkable he didn’t lock the keys in the car, that he’d remembered his briefcase; as he gathered these objects carefully, tremblingly, to himself, he seemed to watch from aloft, as if he were the dead man. He forgot that the last time he’d been in this space he’d been holding the letter, dotting it with his tears.

78 S U S A N C H O I

And so he felt, if not relief, at least a sense of reprieve when he arrived finally in his department and learned that the college was implementing a hastily drafted Grief Plan. It must have been the result of all-night, frantic effort, of committees swiftly cobbled together along the branches of the telephone tree, of the news relayed—no time for tears—Friday night, the plan drafted—no time for dissent—Saturday, its components amazingly hauled into place on Sunday, so that now, Monday morning, the campus was hushed and composed, like a church. Or perhaps it had been in the works for three weeks; perhaps only Lee had been naïve or selfish enough to make no preparations for Hendley’s demise. In the course of his short drive to campus, Lee had struggled, with rising panic, to compose a few remarks appropriate to the disaster for his ten-thirty class; now he learned that all instructors were to preempt their original plans and instead read a brief text, imparting the news and directing the students to an unprecedented all-college assembly that afternoon in the stadium. In the meantime professional “grief counselors,” scores of them, were holding casual “talk-outs” with students in groups, and meeting “one-on-one” with grieving students in private.

“Who did all this?” Lee murmured when he had finished the memo.

He was only just managing audible words, in the same way that his knees were only just managing, with much wobbling and strain, to hold him upright. When he had inched into view in the department doorway, holding his briefcase by both ends as if he expected to need it as a shield, though in truth he’d forgotten in the course of his tunnel-like walk from his car that it had a handle, Sondra had rushed toward him from the place where she’d already been standing, beside her desk—she had not been sitting in her chair, a chair to which she’d been fused, in Lee’s mind’s eye, for the fifteen-odd years he’d known her.

Sondra took the briefcase from his hands and tried to press him into the chair that sat under the bulletin board, for visitors waiting to see the head of the department, but he bullishly resisted her efforts. Little worms of light swarmed in his vision, from exhaustion. The department, he finally noticed, was silent and empty. All four secretarial desks were abandoned. Emma Stiles’s computer, which in repose usually showed a continually morphing geometrical figure of colorful lines, was dead gray, not asleep but extinguished.

A P E R S O N O F I N T E R E S T 79

“. . . emergency committee,” Sondra was saying, in response to his question. “Lee, I’ll say it again. Please sit down. You look the way we all feel, terrible.”

“But why?” he said, looking into her face for the first time. Her eyes were horribly swollen—their rims were almost like pink lips—from weeping. “Why didn’t anyone ask me to help? I could have helped, I could have helped make this plan—”

“Don’t you think that you’ve been through enough? Sit down, Lee, I want to tell you—”

All this while, since rushing toward him and prying loose his briefcase and failing to seat him in the chair, she’d been holding his arm, attempting, through what she might have thought was a subtly constant application of downward pressure, to sneak him into the chair anyway. He knew she was in the grip of bereaved mania, that she’d been standing when he entered the department not because on the lookout for him but because she couldn’t force her own body to sit, and that she was trying to force him to sit for the very same reason.