by Susan Choi
Now it was the streetscape in front, not behind, that came to him in disconnected tableaux, while the nose of the baseball-cap car was an ongoing presence. The baseball-cap man betrayed nothing, his eyes hidden behind sunglasses, his jaw clean and impassive. When they stopped at a light, Lee’s eyes darted and his head jerked the same half rotation again and again, to confirm what the mirror told him. He remembered the day he had gotten the letter, and the tears he had shed, driving home.
“You goddamned lousy sonofabitch!” Lee cried out suddenly. “Sonofabitch murderer! So you got what you wanted! You got it!” The light changed, and he stamped on the gas in his rage, as a phantom form passed by his hood—could Gaither have managed this, too? Conjured a mother and baby, or a little old lady, or a Boy Scout and his dog, in the path of Lee’s car? But before Lee had seen that it was just an illusion, he braked, with an inhale of horror, and felt the baseball-cap car hitting him.
He sat stunned, while an echo of impact seemed to pulse from the back of his neck. He had already shifted to park, but he only noticed when he found himself trying to grind the gearshift further into that notch. Perhaps it was the feeling in his neck that made him unable to look behind him; he was even afraid to look into the mirror. His Nissan was running through its repertoire of ill noises while idling, and each gurgle and wheeze sounded slightly more dire than it had in the past. A police car appeared, as if magically summoned. “License and registration?” the policeman asked when Lee had tremblingly rolled down his window.
“He hit me,” Lee said.
“I can see something happened,” the policeman said amiably. “License and registration. Let’s just do first things first.”
The baseball-cap man still had not left his car. Seeking his wallet with trembling fingers, Lee saw, finally daring to look at his mirror, the baseball-cap man with one elbow propped in his car’s window, speaking into the same sort of portable phone Agent Shenkman had used.
An older woman had appeared, lumpy and slow in an aqua sweat-suit. “I saw everything,” Lee heard her say to the policeman. “That first car pulled out, and then all of a sudden it stopped. It’s that car’s fault for sure.”
The baseball-cap man now got out of his car, in the same motion snapping the little phone shut. “My car’s fine if yours is,” he remarked to Lee casually. His gaze captured Lee’s like a snare; Lee couldn’t look away from it. Baseball Cap stared at Lee blankly yet confidently, as if he knew every contour of Lee that there was and at the same time could never have told him apart from the world’s countless other small, brown-skinned old men for whom he did not give a damn.
“That’s him!” the woman said suddenly, following Baseball Cap’s gaze. “That’s the man that they showed on TV!”
“I don’t know,” the agreeable, stupid policeman was saying. “I may have to file a report. This lady says he was braking to create a hazard, and that merits a ticket.”
“It’s him!” the woman repeated, pointing. Lee shrank back in his seat, his laboriously located wallet now clenched in his fist; the rush of detestation he felt for her struck him like nausea. How had he lived in this town, with these people, for so many years?
“Stop pointing at me!” Lee shrieked at her. The policeman looked up in surprise.
“Can I just have a word with you, Officer Patchett?” Baseball Cap said with easy authority, leaning forward to read the man’s badge as he reached toward his own rear pants pocket for something his gesture implied would be a similar object.
In the next moment Lee found himself speeding away.
He’d never broken the speed limit—he’d never broken any law—in all the time he’d lived in this country, and for some reason it was this ghastly perversion, and none of the others, that obsessed him as he raced along in the protesting Nissan. Never in my life, his mind kept dumbly blurting. Never, never in my life! Before he realized where he was he had turned through the entranceway to the state park, where the accelerated onset of spring gave substance to his sense that the last time he’d been here was eons ago, when in fact it was a week ago Tuesday, the day that he’d had his first idiot’s notion about what kind of person the Brain Bomber was. A week of unfurling green leaves and the thorough unraveling of his own life. He parked at the farther side of the empty lot and turned on his car radio, expecting reports of his flight, but no stations had news, only agonized popular music of the kind Esther might have once liked. More than anything he wanted to sleep, to slip free of the waking nightmare by becoming unconscious. The familiar symptoms of insomnial hangover underlay all his panicked attempts at clear thinking. He could not go home, where the five cars had no doubt reassembled, with reinforcements, to pick up his trail. He couldn’t go to the department; he thought of Peter Littell and Emma Stiles and Rachel and even Sondra and their disgusted condemnation of him. He couldn’t go to a pay phone, or anywhere else where a townsperson might recognize him. He did not know Fasano’s address; this deficiency seemed the only obstacle, if an insurmountable one, to driving the two thousand miles to California. He had no idea where Esther was living. But was it possible Esther had heard what was happening to him? Was she on her way here?
It was difficult to distinguish his longings from his practical needs, and both from likelihoods. He knew it was not really likely that Esther was racing to save him, but his chest still kept leaping out hopefully toward that idea. And he knew he should now regard Morrison as his enemy, but he also saw him as a singular arbiter. If his cravings for sleep and for the company of his estranged only child weren’t exactly useful, at least his craving to beg Morrison for mercy touched directly on one of the principal elements of this disaster. He thought resentfully of young Baseball Cap and his portable phone; if he possessed such a thing, he could call Morrison from right here! Now it was the top of the hour, and the music had paused for a news break: “FBI officials this morning searched the Farmfield Estates home of the math professor who was working next door to Dr. Richard Hendley at the time of the bombing that claimed Hendley’s life. FBI officials describe Dr. Lee as a Person of Interest to their investigation. No charges have been filed yet in the case. In local sports news—”
Lee snapped off the radio in horror, not just at what he heard but from the illogical sense that by receiving the radio transmission he was somehow broadcasting his location. In the silence that followed, his tinnitus, a condition he’d temporarily suffered after Michiko’s departure, returned in the form of a low-level shriek in his ears. Across the empty expanse of the parking lot, he saw another car entering, and because there was nowhere to run he sat staring at it, hardly breathing, as it parked far from him, and the young woman driver got out and liberated a huge wolflike dog from the hatchback, clipped the dog to a leash, and strode off with her bounding companion. Lee longed to go walking himself, almost as much as he longed to sleep, but because he was afraid to leave the car, he instead reclined his seat and closed his eyes by an effort of will. Little bugs seemed to jump and squirm under his eyelids. He had to sleep; it would help him to think, and it would make the time pass.
He pressed his hands to his eyes, removed them, and stared up at the lint-colored cloth that lined the roof of his car. He consulted his Seiko and the Nissan’s clock hundreds of times and reconfirmed every time that the two disagreed by just under three minutes. He could hear, beyond his tinnitus shriek, the satisfied chirring of newborn insects in the depths of the park, and a few times, at the ends of long struggles to empty his mind, he felt himself sweetly subsiding in imagining crawling among them, like a primitive man, and lying down on the ground…. Then he startled awake, terrified by the lapse in alertness that at the same time he’d been trying so hard to accomplish. Finally he must have succumbed. When he startled again, the sky was purple and dim, and his wristwatch and clock had skipped forward. And he had a plan, now, for evading the five cars and reaching his phone.
20.
IT WAS DARK BY THE TIME HE WAS NAVIGATING THE asphalt margin of the Street,
or Lane, or Way, or Circle—although not circular, but this wouldn’t have mattered—whose proper name he had never learned in ten years of proximate residency. His subdivision, all oversize beige and blue houses on unfenced sod lawns pierced by spindly saplings, backed onto another development that predated it by around twenty years. This neighborhood was split-levels and ranch-styles in heavy earth tones, on more generous lawns with back fences and even some dignified, columnar trees. A twin of the neighborhood Lee and Aileen and Esther had lived in and that Lee had loathed for its generic cheapness, though the twin neighborhood now was strangely enriched in appearance, perhaps by the passage of time, or by comparison with what had come after. Lee had discovered the connection, the secret seam between worlds, back when he had still jogged and had wanted to get in his run without having to drive. Out his door, left three times to pass the house of his back-facing neighbor, with whom he’d bought the pine trees, then past endless iterations of that house and his house and two other models of house, distinguished by just a few variations in color and siding, until the road dipped and crossed the pasture boundary of a previous era, a line of old, vigilant oaks stretching in both directions. From here, dappled shade and deep lawns and six or eight different models of dwelling instead of just four, and even more in the way of the surface distinctions, the shutters and porches and claddings of brick or wood shingle. It still hadn’t been enough for Lee not to feel crushed by its sameness, whether its sameness to itself or its sameness to that other farm tract–become–suburb he’d lived in with Aileen and Esther, he couldn’t have said. After just a few tries, he’d stopped jogging those streets, and his own, and returned to the twenty-minute drive to the riverside path, so that on this night, in this darkness, he hadn’t been here in years.
He almost missed the entrance, a modest pair of stone walls, bracket-shaped, each adorned with a lantern and barely discernible curving black letters: Mashtamowtahpa Trails Estates. A single miles-across square of once-farmland contained Mashtamowtahpa Trails and Farmfield, Mashtamowtahpa’s gate on the square’s western side, State Road 28, while Farmfield’s (ostentatiously huge and floodlit) gateway lay on the north, along Route 19. This meant that the membrane dividing the two neighborhoods was somewhere to Lee’s left, now that he’d cautiously passed through the brackets. He advanced the car slowly, scarcely touched the gas pedal, almost noiselessly rolled through the waxing and waning of widely spaced streetlamps, each sifting its light down like pale orange snow; he was struck by the depth of the darkness in which the neighborhood lay. Single porch lights and even wide panes of curtained house glow seemed to snuff out as soon as he saw them. His own headlights a weak stain just ahead that was always retreating. He turned and turned along the dim involutions, found himself in a cul-de-sac, ringed by six houses, and felt his panic returning, as if the houses together would sense his intrusion and tighten on him like a noose…. He quickly rotated the Nissan and retraced himself. A left turn off the cul-de-sac street and he was mounting a crest and then dipping, and he remembered the attenuated version of that quick rise and fall, the signal it beat in his calves, his footfalls on the road, the unremarkable conjunction of place and sensation he’d possessed perhaps three times in all, although it came to him powerfully now, as a precious lost thing. Against an opening of night sky, he sensed the shapes of the oaks, black on black, angling off from the road. He had entered his own neighborhood. He turned the Nissan sharply and bumped off the asphalt and into the weeds. No one seemed to own the oaks or the ribbon of land that they stood on. There was a drainage ditch here and some mounds of dead leaves that had clearly been dumped. The nearest house was a half lot away. Lee turned off his lights and his engine and got out of the car, realizing he was standing lined up with the oaks, when he had always passed through them. For all their superior height, he had an uneasy notion of subterranean passage, as if on this spring night he’d smelled the chill, damp-earth breath of a cave.
The Nissan wasn’t hidden, but in the narrow no-man’s-land beneath the oaks, far from the streetlights of either development, it would be inconspicuous, at least while it was night.
It took him far longer to get home than it had in the days when he’d jogged, though he was half jogging now, huffing clumsily, the loose gravel at the margin of the road skidding under the flat leather soles of his shoes. So the briefcase wouldn’t bang against his thigh, he held it pressed to his ribs. He hardly realized until the handle cuffed him under his chin, but he’d tucked his head low, to evade recognition. Luckily there was no one. He skirted zones of cold light and stark shadow where his neighbors had floodlit their shrubs. And he stumbled with alarm when he heard a strange, ascending gurgle and a then a long, hissing sigh, before he realized it was an automated sprinkler, a premature sign of summer.
He had passed his back-facing neighbor’s, hypnotized by the scrape of his shoes, before realizing he was starting to make the hairpin, take the two curving rights, that would have landed him in his front yard. He felt suddenly frail with his own carelessness and almost dropped his briefcase. His back-facing neighbor’s, as always, showed a huge SUV in the driveway, a basketball-size azalea floodlit like the tomb of a king, a light on the front steps and at the base of the drive, blinds down, lights on deep in the house. Looking over the roofline, toward his own house, Lee couldn’t see anything strange, and this was even more awful, that the curtain of night had been hung in its usual way.
From a distance he heard a car approaching, and without further hesitation plunged across his back-facing neighbor’s front lawn, skirting the SUV and the garage, his feet silent on a trampoline of sod. Past the garage and into the backyard, with its cedar deck and deck furniture, its aboveground swimming pool still covered and trussed like a tom-tom, light spreading from the back eaves but guttering and failing before reaching the pine sentinels. Lee pushed through them, felt their needles graze over his arms and their boreal scent shock his nostrils, confuse him a moment with pleasure, and then he was in his own yard, with its absence of floodlights and even house lights—his house was utterly dark in and out, clearly empty, as if abandoned.
The sliding glass door that led from his kitchen to his back patio—or to the slab of concrete that could have been the foundation for a back patio, if Lee had bothered to build one—had been open for days, since Lee had first been beguiled by the fragrance of spring. The screen door was closed and locked, pointlessly. Lee put the heel of his hand against the screen and pressed hard, and the screen broke, simply zippered away from its frame in precisely the way Lee had often imagined it might. Reaching in, he pushed the cheap plastic lever that locked the screen door, slid it open, and stepped into his house.
The digital clock on his stove read 9:40. He slid the glass door shut, and the noise of the pines slightly ruffling their needles, and the almost inaudible sigh of the sprinkler, and the rasps of the newborn insects—the conglomerate whisper of night, comforting and impervious—died away with the click of the latch, and he felt his chest tighten.
But the windows at the front of the house were still open, and with the sounds of the backyard removed he now heard something else: idling engines. And a murmur of voices. Baseball Cap and his colleagues, waiting.
Very slowly, as if its small metal feet might thunder on contact with the floor, Lee set down his briefcase, and his emptied arms, which had been clutching the briefcase so tightly, seemed to float into the air from the loss of their burden. He pulled his shoes off, wrenching impatiently, without undoing the laces.
Because his blinds were still raised, as he’d left them that morning when he’d rushed out to Jeff Trulli’s office, he had to crawl and slink, hewing to the core of the house, and even then he imagined himself visible from outside, though his rooms were so dark he could scarcely see where he was going. He felt his way down the brief corridor, closely rounded the corner so that he was glued to the flank of the staircase, then followed it forward—steps invisibly descending beside him—until the banister had come
to his level and his hand closed around it. A fat upright dowel, like the bar of a cage made of wood. The engine noise had unbraided itself into layers, and at the same time the murmur resolved into snatches of words. The foot of Lee’s staircase delivered itself to a point just inside his front door; the house was so poorly designed that if the front door stood open when someone descended the stairs, that person had to first shut the door to step off the staircase. The door was shut now, and locked. Lee got himself to its threshold as if leaving dry land for a small, pitching boat and pressed himself against the door’s surface. His eye found the tiny peephole, and then a cone of night opened before him.
It wasn’t the five cars, but the news vans, each with its periscope neck straining up as if trying to see past his roof. Had he rounded the hairpin after passing his back-facing neighbor’s front yard, he would have run squarely into their headlights—an old man in the “nice” outfit he’d been wearing since meeting with Rachel, cheap blue oxford now soaked through with sweat, baggy slacks belted somewhat too high, the shabby briefcase clutched to his chest as if he thought it stopped bullets, half-white ragged hair—when had he last had a haircut? his hair looked as bad as his house—standing shocked off his forehead. His eyes bright with terror, his trotting feet stalled in their tracks. He felt his bowels soften, a spongy sensation as if the floor of his gut might fall out. He saw that other Lee, his almost-self, as clearly as the rest of the moonlit tableau: two men sitting and smoking in the drivers’ seats of two of the vans, and then a small, milling crowd of as many as twelve, moving in and out of view from where they stood indistinctly conversing, on the far side of the wall of three vans, in the middle of the street. For all their numerousness, the scene was strangely hushed and lethargic. Several people paced, their ears pressed to portable phones. One man said, I did already, you know? Yeah, we are. We’re set up. Lee’s neighbors had gathered again; they stood deep in conversation on the lawn of the mother and toddler and hip baby. Then as Lee watched, the young mother herself made her entrance, scarcely dressed in a tank top and shorts and flip-flops, with the baby weeping loudly on her hip, but with an air of authority over the scene despite her dishevelment. She walked up to a woman in jeans who’d come to stand at the end of Lee’s driveway.
