A Person of Interest

by Susan Choi

  The ceiling of this room, like the ceilings of all the rooms, was done in that same textured plaster that resembled acne. Lee stared at the irregular bumps as if he might find a pattern.

  Through the thin walls, he heard Agent Morrison say, “Dr. Lee is a Person of Interest to this investigation. He is not a suspect. It’s as simple as that. We have never said he’s a suspect. If we ever do say it, you’ll know.”

  “But what exactly do you mean by that, Agent? Is there some legal difference between the two terms?”

  “Dr. Lee is a Person we’ve been talking to and who’s fully cooperating—”

  “Is he going to face charges?”

  “Look, this isn’t a briefing. You people aren’t even supposed to be here.”

  “Can we expect him to be upgraded from a Person of Interest into a suspect pretty soon?”

  Lee rolled his head back and forth, almost writhed in torment. In the kitchen his phone began ringing. He had been so swiftly dispossessed he felt a moment of childlike dismay that no one of the agents or TV reporters took the trouble to answer it for him. Who was calling? Was it Esther? He gasped, writhed, clenched into motionlessness suddenly. From where he lay, when he looked to his right, into the dresser’s mirror, he saw reflected the fissure between the edge of the blinds and the frame of the window that lay to his left. The two slivers of view, reflected and real, were entirely different; of course, this was the simplest geometry, the angles of incidence and reflection, but while the leftward view muffled itself in the bosk of a pine Lee had planted for privacy a few years before, the rightward just managed to escape the pine’s boughs and run clear to the street. There a knot of spectators stood talking, one of whom, as Lee watched, suddenly turned and strode straight toward the pine, as if he’d realized, as had Lee at that instant, that the pine tree was protective only in concert with the basic respect neighbors grant to each other, and that today the respect had been breached with remarkable speed, perhaps permanently.

  “I saw him out in the yard once,” he called over his shoulder to his less-bold companions. “I don’t know what the hell he was doing, digging holes in the middle of the night. Maybe burying things.”

  In fact he’d been planting a Japanese maple, at the start of a summer that had been such a hell that he’d waited to dig until sunset. The delicate maple had scorched and expired within days, and then its slight skeleton, almost invisible from a few yards away, had remained memorializing itself for almost a year because Lee couldn’t bear to acknowledge his failure enough to uproot it; and the following spring he’d accidentally run into it with the lawn mower. But he was thinking of none of this now, as in a rush of pure instinct he twisted off the bed and fell hard on the side farthest from the window. Sore and gasping, he crouched out of sight on the carpet as the man crackled past the fat pine—unlike the maple, it had thrived—and presumably pressed his face onto the glass. “Naw, nothing,” the man called toward the street, in a tone of apology. Lee heard the man’s movement in the direction of the backyard but remained where he was, his heart clogging his throat. He’d lain stunned and still when the force of the bomb had thrown him. As if the mnemonic conditions were ideal for the first time in weeks, Lee remembered anew and with unsentimental precision the impact of the floor like a swollen heartbeat in the bones of his face, and the warm tongue of blood sliding over his own, and the inaccurate, passionless thought that he’d lost all his teeth. He had knotted himself automatically, like a fetus, he’d supposed then because he’d been bombed in his youth, and you never forget. But perhaps it was not a learned reflex but a species instinct—every animal curls into a ball when God’s fist thunders down.

  It came to him that he’d been hearing engines departing, the dense babble of voices deflating. Now there was silence. He didn’t know how long he’d been on the floor. He got to all fours with effort and lingered there before standing up, with the feeling of baring his stomach to rows of sharpshooters. His hand lay for a while on the knob before somehow exerting the force that swung open the door.

  He hadn’t imagined that his house, with its bare picture hooks, could look emptier. It looked roughed up and shaken down, raped. Bits of sod were mashed onto the stair treads.

  The front door had been left standing open. When he went to close it, he found his across-the-street neighbor, the young mother of the toddler and hip baby, standing on his stoop, her face recklessly flushed.

  “I just want you to know,” she said, as if they were lines she had practiced, “that I have two little children, and if you so much as think about them, I will make you regret it.”

  He gazed at her a moment. Another young woman around the same age as Esther, and Rachel. Twenty-five, twenty-six. She was alone: she’d found someone to tend the two children while she accomplished this mission.

  It was possible to take a step backward, and close the door in her face.

  He stayed in the house just as long as it took him to reach Jeff Trulli at his office, which turned out to be more than an hour, because, first, Jeff had not yet arrived, and then, second, Lee’s phone began ringing. The sound nailed his feet to the floor; he couldn’t brew tea or pour cereal or even go to the toilet but only stand as if being electrocuted; when it stopped, it was just for a beat, as if catching its breath. Finally, in one of these pauses, he lunged for his chance and called Jeff again. “Christ, Lee, why aren’t you picking up? I’ve been calling your place for an hour,” Jeff said. “I think you should come by my office.”

  “I can’t—”

  “When’s a good time for you, then?”

  “I can’t leave my house, Jeff!”

  “If the press is still there, they’re still there, Lee. Just walk past them and get in your car.”

  As the garage door rose up, he shrank into his seat; he expected to see his across-the-street neighbor and her children, and the man who’d peeped into his bedroom window and his less-bold companions, and all the other unfamiliar persons among whom he apparently lived waving pitchforks on the edge of his lawn, but there was only a slight alteration in the smothering tension he already felt, the cause of which he understood once approaching the end of his driveway. There were five cars parked fender to fender on Fearrington Way, where cars were never parked, except perhaps for a holiday party, because every house had a two-car garage. As he moved off, all five smoothly detached from the curb and fell into formation behind him.

  Yesterday had been a bright day, but today was overcast, heavy and humid, the sun suffocated, so that now Lee could easily see the young man at the wheel of the forwardmost car, wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses, resembling any one of Lee’s students, or perhaps the solitary drinker Lee felt sure had eavesdropped on the meeting with Rachel at the Wagon Wheel bar.

  Lee drove achingly slowly, almost at a walk, and the five cars, respectful as a funeral procession, drove slowly also. He increased his speed, and the baseball-cap car jumped magnetically forward, and its fellows jumped with it. Lee could hear his car making a terrible sound, like a handful of marbles thrown onto the engine, which he somehow realized was the sound of his chattering teeth.

  At Jeff Trulli’s office, the five cars assembled themselves on the far side of the street, in a no-parking zone. Lee stumbled into the building with his eyes fixed in front of him, as if avoiding eye contact would make him invisible, but once safely inside he couldn’t tear himself away from Jeff’s window. He cranked closed the blinds and then scissored the tiniest fissure, through which he gazed dizzily, hardly able to breathe, like a furtive voyeur. “I have to urge you,” Jeff Trulli was saying, “especially in light of what’s going on now, that you talk to another attorney. Someone who actually works on this turf.” Lee was staring down at the cars as if he could memorize them, though they were almost aggressively generic—he seared himself with their rounded corners, their rubber bumpers, their unblemished exteriors, then closed his eyes and they melted away. It was with difficulty that he detached his gaze, to accept the neatly
rectangularized sheet of newspaper Jeff Trulli had been trying for the last several moments to give him. Jeff remained there, pointing; Lee followed the line of Jeff’s blue polyester suit jacket, traversed fabric creases that marked the elbow, acknowledged the pale cuff of the shirt and a sprinkling of masculine hairs on the back of Jeff’s hand, picked his way down the forefinger and finally arrived at its base, the flesh pad and the stubby, square nail planted onto the sheet as if the least relaxation of pressure might permit its escape. Lee was reminded, gazing down at the coarse printed surface of his local newspaper, which he hadn’t subscribed to in years, of an ardor of Esther’s from remote childhood. She could not have been older than seven. She had fallen in love—that was the only phrase for it—with a mediocre television actress, a young woman barely out of her teens who starred in some sort of mystery series, forever toting a flashlight into derelict houses and shrinking gaspingly into the walls as some malevolent thing leaped at her. Lee hadn’t thought it was appropriate, but Esther had been smitten, had responded to attempts to limit her viewing with extraordinary intransigence, a startling preview of the storms that would come in her teens. The other six days of the week, when the show wasn’t on, she had to comb through the paper for any mention of the actress’s name, and these, when located, were painstakingly cut out with blunt-ended scissors, the slenderest slivers of paper, almost always from the television schedule; the young actress was not otherwise very newsworthy, but Esther wasn’t deterred. The tiny slivers of paper, each just barely touched with a glue stick, went into an album—she was such a meticulous child! Could any grown person have performed such a fine, useless task without tearing the slivers of newsprint, or letting them mash up like so many hairs on the end of the glue stick? The Name, lifted out of its meager context and accreted on the clean album page, so that the page came to look like the work of a stalking obsessive. The Name The Name The Name The Name The Name (and just once, a PHOTOGRAPH of the actress, with caption, an explosive surprise in the album’s landscape like an earthly appearance by Christ)—it was ironic, of course, that Lee couldn’t remember the girl’s name now. And where was the album, that chronicle of obsession, of heartbreaking self-abnegation? And why was this the sluiceway of his thoughts, so that he just barely glimpsed the ink stain of The Name, saw the image, an imprint from a dream, but could not read the words, before having been carried along, or returned, to his own name, beating faintly at him from the page, a trapped moth beneath Jeff Trulli’s finger?

  FBI Questions Local Professor. FBI officials in charge of the investigation into the bombing death of Dr. Richard Hendley earlier this month confirm that they have questioned Hendley’s colleague

  Lee’s name occurred on the page as a thin stripe of superreality, as if the ink had been mixed from a dense interstellar material and then finely tattooed with a needle:

  “Dr. Lee is a Person of Interest to this investigation. We’ve had discussions with him and expect to continue to do so. This is a routine aspect of the investigation, and it is ongoing,” an FBI source confirmed. At the time of the bombing, Dr. Lee was working in a room right next door to the room where the bombing occurred

  “You haven’t seen this yet?” Jeff Trulli said.

  Lee failed to register the question; he heard words and could have repeated them, but only to the depth of penetration at which he saw the words of the brief article, and could have repeated them, but still had not managed to read them, as if his mind were a phonograph needle that kept slipping out of the groove, so that a snatch of the music was heard here and there while the melody never cohered. Dr. Lee is a Person of Interest.

  “You didn’t know this was in today’s paper?” Jeff Trulli persisted.

  It seemed a strange lapse to fix on, and Lee ignored it, his mind for the moment still pawing the words. A Person of Interest. He leaped at a vague reminiscence, as if this might prove that the strange label was something familiar, a normal if infrequent part of his life. Then he realized he’d heard it before, just an hour ago, as the FBI ransacked his home.

  Dr. Lee is a Person of Interest to this investigation.

  When his gaze stumbled back to was working in a room right next door to the room, the contrast was jarring. If the Person of Interest was an alien notion he strove to draw into the realm of the known, working in a room right next door was a sad, well-worn fact that now seemed to recede toward exotic frontiers of insinuation. Even he felt a sick-making upsurge of doubt; he had been in a room right next door, and the merciless truth of these words seemed to press on him lurid ideas that were not true at all. Was he a sleepwalking bomber? A servant of Satan? Why was his own innocence not a plain fact for him, but elusive and fragile, a condition requiring caretaking he couldn’t provide? “He knew all this would happen,” he said as Jeff looked at him blankly. “He planned everything!” His voice climbed, but his mind had stalled out. His voice was scaling, ascending, barely corresponding any longer to an inner condition. Inwardly he was strangely inert. He was aware of the theatricality of his voice and in this awareness had his first intimation of the theatricality of innocence in general: all the protestations and endurances its enactment required. Write a letter to the paper, confront Jim Morrison, ask for meetings with Peter Littell and the dean, finish landscaping his yard, perhaps finally put in azalea bushes, whistling all the while, make daily visits to the grocery store, be friendly to neighbors who had already decided to hate him while he’d still never found out their names, because until now there had not been the need, another advantage of living an invisible life—there were drawbacks to adoration, he had told himself back in the days he’d been pained by his envy of Hendley: all the maintainance, the handshaking and smiling and small-talking and dinner-party attending and squiring of Rachel and laughing with students, a grown man playing Ultimate Frisbee, wowing over the wicked new software, the line of waiting students in the hallway outside his door at all hours, not just office hours, while Lee’s door, cracked invitingly open, was never approached. And now Hendley was dead, and Gaither somehow had made the world think Lee had done it.

  Jeff Trulli was saying, “In a way this is better, to have it in print, this is really concrete, but it adds to my point that you really do need someone else. This is out of my league.”

  “You won’t help me,” Lee said, but he was barely listening, and at least in regard to this aspect of things—how badly Jeff Trulli wanted him gone—he did not feel surprised.

  “I’m helping you by telling you I’m not the right lawyer. I’m a divorce lawyer, Lee. I’ve made some phone calls for you, there’s a few names you might want to try, but if you really want to retain someone, I’d drive up to the city. I’d look for someone who’s familiar with this kind of thing.”

  “I can’t go to the city,” Lee said angrily. “I’m being followed, Jeff. Look. Look outside!”

  “In terms of your movements, I’m assured you can still go wherever you want. I called that guy Morrison and told him a white lie, I said you’re my client. Listen: You’re not facing any charges, Lee. You’re not a suspect. You’re just a Person of Interest. It’s two different things. What he said to me is, you should just go about your business. Do what they ask you to do when they ask you to do it, and for the rest of it lead your everyday life. What I think is, and I say this as a friend, not as a lawyer, but what I think is, these people are just being thorough. They’re covering their butts. And if you have nothing to hide—I mean, given that you have nothing to hide, you should cooperate with them. Breathe easy, and this will blow over.”

  “How can I cooperate more than I have? I talked to them, I told them everything I knew. Then they come and tear apart my house—”

  “I know that must not have felt good, but what you have to realize is, you didn’t look good. The way you reacted, in front of the cameras. You’ve got to try to let it slide off.”

  Lee had not thought he could be shocked again. “You saw me?”

  “You’re big news, Lee. They c
ut into the morning talk shows.” This attempt at a humorous tone was a failure. Jeff Trulli’s expression now bore relation to Rachel’s, in the Wagon Wheel lot: uneasy with pity, but crimped by imperfectly hidden disgust. After a moment Jeff went on, as if he and Lee were discussing meter maids, “These are people just doing their job. Do your job. Go to school, teach your classes. What is it, advanced calc? I mean: yikes! I never made it past circles and squares.” Jeff Trulli laughed nervously.

  “They’ve asked me not to come back,” Lee said. “Until this is resolved.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.” When this brought no immediate response, Jeff added, but without eagerness, “If you’re saying this was an unlawful dismissal, then that’s something you should talk to someone about.”

  “I don’t know if it’s that. I don’t know if I’m…dismissed,” Lee said, blindly struggling into his jacket, feeling he couldn’t leave the office too quickly, even with the five cars keeping vigil outside. Now it was close to noon, and, amazing as it was, all the self-satisfied bustle of a normal weekday was in progress throughout the few modest blocks of downtown where Jeff Trulli kept his office, not far from Penney’s and Sears and the rest of the town’s somehow changeless attractions, which persevered despite two shopping malls and the strips of cheap commerce along the highway. The five cars, if they were still there, were camouflaged now amid identical cars parked the length of the street, and the traffic was as congested as it ever got, without losing any of its Sunday gentility, and as he groped his way into its lazy current, Lee dared to wonder if the five cars were actually gone. Almost as soon as he’d parted from Jeff, his eyes had sprung a leak, and he wiped at them with alternate hands, impatiently and ineffectively, smearing wet down his cheeks. Despite the gray weather, old people and young mothers with strollers were ambling through the crosswalks. He compulsively rechecked his mirrors, glimpsing drivers who might have gasped and jumped out of their cars if they’d seen him, the day’s breaking news, in return. He emerged from the small traffic snarl into the emptier streets on the edge of downtown. Then he saw, in the heartbeat between his quick glances, the car with the baseball-cap man reappear behind him.