by Susan Choi
He thought again of the letter from Gaither, now surrendered to Morrison. Gaither was the only human being who had ever moved Lee to duplicity: witness not only Lee’s affair with Aileen but his absurd fibs to Morrison three decades later, when he couldn’t admit that Gaither’s arrow had been dipped in hate. “An inquiring letter from a caring old friend”: more like a sop to his own tender ego. And a rare veer from blunt honesty, although it was more honest to say he had spent his life not so much in pursuit of occasions for honesty as in wincing avoidance of lies that might get him in trouble. Perhaps it was the immigrant’s sense of hopeless illegitimacy and impending exposure, but he probably would have been the same man had he never left home: less fastidious than loath to be faulted, even by people he didn’t respect. The one time he’d been spurred to deceive, in pursuit of Aileen, he had still been a faltering liar, who had blushed, and felt burned by his secret, so that he fled Gaither’s gaze. Another man might have used passion to lay claim to righteousness, but Lee had been ashamed of the passion as well, startled by its animal strength and its adverse relation to scholarship. He had given in to it as he imagined an addict must give in to a drug, and even after Gaither had married Ruth, and engineered custody of the child, and then snatched the child away, Lee had been hampered in his response by the sense that he’d stained his own character. Who was he, with his lust and poor discipline, to harp on another man’s faults? It might have even been true that Lee’s difficulty in condemning Gaither’s acts was aggravated by Gaither’s piousness, despite Lee’s own stark atheism. Lee had mocked that piousness, but because he feared it, as any person who entertains doubts has to fear the undoubting. All of which meant that Lee was never able to muster quite as much solidarity with his new wife, against her old husband, as that new wife required. It was only once she had left him also that he became positively outraged, yet by then Gaither had been gone for years. There was nothing to do but hate him, aimlessly, to maintain dormant heat without planning to tap it—that wasn’t required. His hatred of Gaither became a form of fidelity, to himself just as much as Aileen, and until the surprise of the letter this had been satisfying and in fact inexplicably peaceful.
“The test will take place in two parts,” Gerry was explaining. “The first part isn’t part of the actual test, it’s preliminary, and I won’t be recording responses. During this part I’ll explain what my questions will be, and if you have any questions about them, you’ll ask, so we both understand what we’re talking about. The second part is the actual test. During this part your only response to my questions should be yes or no. For example, I’m going to ask you about a letter. I will say, for example, ‘Did you receive a letter in your campus mailbox with a return address of 14 Maple Lane in Woodmont, Washington?’ And you’ll—”
“Yes,” Lee broke in.
“—and you’ll either say yes or no, depending on which is your answer. Or, for example, I’ll say, ‘Is your birth date March ninth, 1930? And you’ll either say—”
“Yes,” Lee repeated. He knew he should not be surprised that they had his birth date.
“Then I’ll ask, ‘Was the author of the letter from 14 Maple Lane an individual named Lewis Gaither?’ And you’ll either say yes…”
His train of thought about Gaither had absorbed him so deeply that despite its undiminished woundingness, its status as worst episode of his life, beside which the debacle with Michiko was a mere triviality, Lee experienced a sedative effect, as if he’d finally outflanked his emotions. For a moment he savored the sense of self-mastery and felt complacent and even slightly heroic in the machine’s rubber clutches. He was doing his duty for justice. He was not merely seeking to prove he was honest. He was seeking to free Morrison, from the pointless distraction he himself had become. He was helping a good man fight evil, the one way he could.
“And now, if you understand fully, we’re going to begin. I’ll ask the questions I’ve already mentioned. Please only respond yes or no. Is your birth date March ninth, 1930?”
“Yes,” Lee said. Somewhere a needle, delicate as a hair, traced a river of calm on a rotating roll of paper.
It was like this for the first several minutes: factual, straightforward statements Lee was not merely willing but surprisingly happy to affirm. It was a relief, to feel himself verified by a machine. He eagerly confirmed his name, his position at the college, his whereabouts on the day of the bombing, the year of his emigration, the triumphantly dull history of his citizenship. His college routine was rehashed. Did he hold office hours for his students in the afternoon three days a week? Yes. Was one such afternoon the same day that the bomb had gone off? Yes. Did Lee feel lucky to have escaped injury, Gerry asked, in a sudden departure from the tone of the rest of the questions? The query seemed so spontaneous, so artlessly revealing of Gerry’s own gladness that Lee hadn’t been hurt, Lee felt the further surprise of tears filling his eyes.
“Yes,” he said feelingly. “Yes.”
The questions about the letter had been so rehearsed beforehand that when Gerry reached them, they were comfortingly catechistic. Lee felt the certitude, almost the joy, of repeating a credo. “Did you receive a letter addressed to yourself, with a return address of 14 Maple Lane, in Woodmont, Washington?”
“Yes.”
“Was the author of this letter an acquaintance of yours named Lewis Gaither?”
“Yes.”
“Is this the only such letter or communication you’ve received from this person in the past thirty years?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know where this person resides currently?”
“No.”
“Lee, please listen to this question very carefully. Have you ever been aware of terroristic or violent tendencies in this man, Lewis Gaither?”
Lee was just able to stop himself blurting out, “What?” Not only had this question not been rehearsed, it was completely fantastical—and yet it also conformed to Lee’s most puerile ideas of Gaither. Since stealing Aileen, Lee had preferred to think of Gaither as an obsessed religious nut, the man who had stolen a child from its mother (so much worse than the theft of a wife!). Sometimes Lee was obliged to admit that Gaither had been a gentle enough proselytizer, at least while they were friends. But even this gentleness could take on a sinister character, with decades’ retrospect. A wild idea, that Gaither had killed Hendley by accident, aiming for Lee, flashed past with a glitter of scales, and a hysterical disturbance escaped Lee, a shocked gasp of laughter. “No,” he said, recovering himself. And then remembering the format of the test, he repeated even more firmly, “No.”
He was startled by Gerry’s crisp knock, on the wall against which the desk sat. “We’re all finished, Professor,” Gerry said. “If you can just lift your arms, I’ll detach you.”
“I did all right, didn’t I?” Lee asked eagerly, knowing he must have. He felt entirely different than he had when he’d entered this room. Adrenaline had drained out of his limbs; he felt clean and reborn.
Before Gerry could answer, Morrison had returned, and Lee thought he saw mirrored in Morrison’s face the same eager desire for clarity Lee also felt. “Was it as we discussed, Gerry?” Morrison asked. “You can leave him there, I’ll finish unsticking him once I’ve done follow-up. I’ll take over from here.”
“Actually, I’ve had no problem,” said Gerry, leaving off disentangling Lee. He reached over Lee’s shoulder to tear off a tail of paper that hung from the machine. Lee craned around to look at it.
“I passed, didn’t I?” Lee said. “You see, Jim?”
Both men had their backs to him now. “I don’t have a problem with these charts at all,” Lee heard Gerry remarking. “There’s no evidence here of deception.”
“You see, Jim,” Lee exclaimed with relief, and so happy he started to laugh. “Can I…how do I undo these things—”
“Please go out to the lobby,” said Morrison curtly as Gerry bent down to release him. “Please wait for me out in the lobby, Profe
ssor, if you’d be so kind.” Lee had scarcely tucked his shirt into his pants when the door slammed behind him.
Returning down the hallway alone, he took a chair in the lobby, like a dentist’s waiting room in its cramped size and cheap, ugly furnishings. He was so anxious for Morrison to return and perform absolution that the few minutes he waited seemed static and endless, but at last he saw the agent approaching him down the hallway and stood quickly to meet him.
“I passed, didn’t I, Jim?” he repeated. The elation of just a few moments before had been swallowed again by anxiety. Too late he realized that the question itself might cast doubt on his honesty.
Morrison was regarding him not with the resumed friendliness Lee had hoped for, nor with the waxen remoteness of an hour before. He seemed wary, uneasily neutral.
“We don’t actually say ‘pass’ or ‘fail,’ the way you might in school,” Morrison said at last. “Your test showed no evidence of deception.”
“And that means I passed,” Lee persisted.
“No evidence of deception,” Morrison repeated, and then put out his hand. The gesture held no renewed warmth; it was only cordial, the least gesture required for good-bye.
17.
DESPITE PASSING THE POLYGRAPH TEST—HE STUBBORNLY clung to that familiar, unambiguous verb—soon every glad feeling he’d had somehow dwindled away. He could feel he was avoided at school. The department was strangely deserted whenever he came to teach class, and while his students seemed mesmerized by him, none of them could respond to his questions. He told himself that this was normal, the way they fixed him with glittering stares, the same way he told himself it was only coincidence that Sondra managed not to be at her desk every morning at precisely that hour when, for all the years they’d worked together, Lee had faithfully come to greet her. The very night of the polygraph test, he had called her, hoping to mend things between them, but she’d hardly allowed him to speak. “This is a bad time,” she’d interrupted. “This isn’t a good time, okay? Let me call you back later.”
“I just wanted—”
“It’s not a good time! Let me call you back later.” But she hadn’t called back, and so Lee stood unhappily in the departmental office each morning, amid silence that was disturbed only by the coffee urn’s comfortable gurgle, as if it were boasting of having been tended by Sondra just moments before she had vanished.
The contrary torment of the polygraph test was that while it had blessed Lee and sent him away, he couldn’t boast of the test’s affirmation to anyone else. He could never reveal that the FBI agents had asked him to do such a thing. An inexplicable sensation of shame had attached itself to the very process that was supposed to have proved his virtue. And, even more strange and frustrating, the one person in whose estimation Lee could assume he’d been raised by the polygraph’s verdict was the same person from whom the verdict now seemed to have severed him. Now that Lee had been proved “not deceptive,” Agent Morrison had no more reason to spend time with him and had brusquely dismissed him.
So he was feeling uneasy and anxious, and unthinkingly sprang for the phone when it rang—and then was delighted to realize that it was Fasano. “I’ve just read it,” Fasano began, without any preamble, as if the conversation they’d ended the previous week had sustained only a brief pause. “Time difference, out-of-the-loopness, whatever. I didn’t have the faintest idea until a colleague here called me, and then it was the goddamn 1849 gold rush to get my own copy. I had to drive to Venice Beach. They sleep late there, I guess. What did you think? Murderous jerk has the world on a string—they ought to get me to write the headlines. Lee? What did you think?”
“About what?” Lee managed, groping behind him, while uncurling the telephone cord to its limit, to locate the teapot. He hadn’t slept well the previous night, or the night before that—or any of the nights since his polygraph triumph had started to curdle.
Fasano was sputtering, asking and answering in the same breath. “About wha—The manifesto, our guy’s manifesto! ‘The Technology Class and the Fate of the Earth’ or some shit—‘Cut the rotten parts out of the flesh’? ‘Sentimental fixation on lives at the expense of all life’? ‘Innovation is regress, not progress’? ‘Collaboration of the ignorant masses in their own enslavement by the techno-elite’?”
“Where does this come from?” said Lee, stopping short in his search for the teapot. Since his boyhood he’d abhorred every species of fist-shaking speech. But the zeal of these words filled him less with his lifelong disdain than with a sense of foreboding.
“From our tall-poppy hater,” Fasano was saying. “From whoever took Illich’s fingers and your guy Hendley’s life.”
Of course Fasano had heard without Lee’s telling him; it had been in the papers. Lee sat down on his rickety chair, the receiver unsteadily pinned between ear and shoulder. The teapot was now in his hands; he gazed down in surprise, not remembering how it had gotten there.
“He thinks he’s the messiah,” Fasano went on. “A reluctant messiah! He didn’t want to be savior, you know. It’s just that no other ‘sufficiently intelligent, capable person’ came forward. What a stuck-up shit-for-brains. Here’s small justice: the tabloids have started to call him the Brain Bomber. As noms de guerre go, he was probably hoping for something a little more suave. He says if he’d been around to kill Einstein, we would never have figured out nuclear war.”
“Kill Einstein!” Lee said, the teapot falling to the floor.
He and Fasano kept talking, or rather Fasano kept talking while Lee went on struggling to listen. There was an unfortunate coherence of reason to the mad savior’s rantings, Fasano complained, which meant that, of course, overnight there were jaded and self-righteous students swanning into the classroom in BRAIN BOMBER FOR PRESIDENT T-shirts. They never would have dreamed of it four years ago when Sorin Illich had just been dismembered—they were too busy holding candlelight vigils and expressing themselves—but Lee knew as well as Fasano that four years was a full generation in undergraduate life, and this current crop ruthlessly cheered for their anarchic hero. “Who doesn’t hate computers sometimes? Who doesn’t hate the hydrogen bomb all the time? It doesn’t mean you start serial-killing the best minds in the country.” But even the lunatic’s manifesto was a model of clear argument when compared to the specious self-justifications for publishing it that the newspapers gave. “The L.A. Times and the New York Times,” Fasano said. “Apparently this thing lands in both of their mail rooms sometime last week—typescript, both copies, of course the messiah won’t Xerox—with a note that says if they don’t publish the whole thing by Monday, someone else gets blown up. So they do! The whole thing! In a supplement, Lee, like it’s the State of the Union Address. And here’s their explanation for why this is ethically fine, giving the greatest public platform in the world to a homicidal maniac: because lives might hang in the balance. As if his word is good as gold that he really won’t kill if they print it. And besides that, they say, ‘We cannot discount the chance that the publication of this work might lead to the apprehension of its author.’ Yeah, or maybe just the formation of Brain Bomber Fan Clubs. Oh, and before I forget: ‘The Times condemns terrorism in every form.’ Except the form that sells papers. They act like they’re heroes, for turning this creep into some kind of hero himself….”
For all the decades Lee had lived in this town, there had been just one place where the New York Times could be bought on the day it came out: Klaussen’s Delicatessen, the same deli Aileen had discovered the first year of their marriage. But even if one of the five or six copies of the Times that Klaussen’s carried each day still remained at this hour, Lee found himself failing to get into the car. He could have called, but he refrained from this also. After talking so long to Fasano, he ought to leave the line open, in case Morrison called. It was only after having this thought that Lee grew aware of his pitiful urge to converse with the agent, as if, having heard about the Brain Bomber’s manifesto from Fasano, who’d read it in th
at day’s newspaper, Lee finally had exclusive information that might crack the case.
By five that evening, Lee understood that Klaussen’s was closed. He didn’t turn on the television evening news, as he usually did, while preparing his dinner. He had the sense of a respite, a featureless pause, that seemed somehow endangered. It was nothing so precious as tranquillity, yet he still felt provisional peace, and he went to bed early, as if to conserve it. A few times Gaither’s letter flashed the length of his mind, like a bat slicing arcs through the dusk. I wonder if you would agree that there is some relief, in becoming old men. What poet wrote “tender youth, all a-bruise”? He could still see it perfectly clearly, as if it remained in his hands and was not in a clear plastic bag in the FBI’s files. For some reason Lee thought of its typescript, each letter a minuscule brand on the skin of the page.
Shuttling to and from campus the next several days to teach class to his hypnotized students, and avoiding the departmental office to avoid the sensation that he was avoided, Lee sensed the manifesto’s having thickened the air like a pollen. The students huddled on the quad, who went silent upon his approach, must be buzzing about it. The vans from Newscenter 11, sometimes brazenly parked in the handicapped spots, must be egging them on. But Lee found that because he saw no one—because he avoided or was being avoided, whichever it was—the fragile sensation of respite remained like a cloak. The unpurchased newspaper from Klaussen’s drifted further and further away, became garbage, perhaps was already interred at the dump. Lee arrived at the conclusion, which now seemed so simple, that not only did he not want to read the vile words of the man who’d killed Hendley but, more important, he had no obligation to read them. Perhaps his obligation was not to—why should he honor the thoughts of a killer? This conclusion seemed less a conclusion than the discovery of a sound principle that had always been his, and it lifted his mood. He wondered whether Morrison was under tremendous new pressure to get a break in the case. Lee felt anxious on the agent’s behalf, and hoped for his success. For his own part, he wanted to further discover the best way to savor the precious respite. Every other day he had no class at all, no office hours until two and even then they were really for him, to give him someplace to go; and lately there was nothing to grade, as in tacit recognition of Hendley’s death for three weeks in a row he had given no tests. Somehow, in the course of the most recent decade, all the extra pursuits he’d once had—the jogging and the furniture fixing and the light carpentry, the occasional drives to the city to wander museums, the subscriptions to newsmagazines and the viewings of films—one by one had slipped out of rotation, become foreign, even onerous. He was finally left with his work as his sole consolation. He had abandoned those other diversions, but because he could not recall quite when or why, he instead felt abandoned by them. He dreaded a similar loss of his work, though in fact with tenure he could never be forced to retire. He could teach trig to bored freshmen until he dropped dead with the chalk in his hand. That was the one luxury he had earned.
