A Person of Interest (23 page)

not dispelled but confirmed when the agent returned to the kitchen
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and said, in an attempt to conceal his pity that was even more wounding than pity itself, “I like the layout of your house. It’s very nice. Is this a recent development?”

“About ten years old,” Lee said, lowering his mortified face to his teacup.

“Property taxes killing you?”

“They’re not so bad,” Lee managed.

When Agent Shenkman returned, her magical phone snapping shut in her palm like a squarish black bivalve, Agent Morrison removed a card from his pocket and gave it to Lee. “That’s the number at which you can reach me, any time of day or night. I know it’s very painful to talk about these things, with your colleague having so recently passed away, but if you can think of anything that might be of help to us—even something that seems very minor to you—

please call me. As I said, any time of the day or night. I’ll be glad to hear from you.”

“I certainly will call if I think of something. I’m very happy to help.”

“Anything at all, Professor. You might think of something and say to yourself, ‘Oh, that can’t be important.’ Let us decide if it’s important.”

“I will,” Lee affi rmed.

Finally they were back in his doorway, Shenkman with her glacial expression, Morrison now exhibiting an encouraging one, like the face of the school’s football coach, it remotely struck Lee: superfi cially robust and open, but beneath that brow somehow more narrow, determined, and grim. Lee didn’t have a great deal of time to refi ne this impression; he and Morrison had shaken yet again and exchanged their good-byes.

His life in this country and his life in his native country had so few points of coincidence apart from himself—they had none, actually—

that when Lee gazed on his past, it could seem as if he’d been young twice. First in his homeland, where his actual youth was spoiled for him prematurely, and then in his adopted United States, where as if in a grand compensation the uncoiling spring of his life had been re-wound several turns. As a newly carefree man of twenty-nine, he’d been electrified by the greed the nineteen-year-old boy might have
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felt, so that at last came wolfish dealings with girls at the age, in his old life, he’d have long been patriarchically married; and at last there was scholastic pretension: unkempt wallowing in his self-declared genius, with shirttails untucked, hair uncombed, and books strewn on the floor. It was strange but true that university confines in democratic America had finally bestowed on him the vaguely aristocratic Euro-pean young-manhood he’d expected since childhood. It had helped that he was not just exotic and handsome but in appearance quite young. No one had guessed he was nearer to thirty than he was to nineteen. But now that he was decades past both ages, the events of those times intermixed with each other—because while the break with his homeland should have been the clean epochal line, it was really his volatile heart that doled out the half-lives. Incidents could be psychically early but calendrically late; the young man of the East was in some ways more aged than his Western descendant. The appearance in his driveway of two FBI agents had resurrected for Lee not an episode postemigration, from his first several years in America, but an earlier one from his childhood, a primal scene in its way: he’d come home to find his mother and father submitting to questions from four uniformed army policemen, and as he’d rushed into the room, his lungs dying with dread, all four had wheeled upon him as one and barked at him to stop it or drop it or some such—even then their exact words escaped him—and his boy’s burden of notebooks and textbooks and pencils had gone crashing like so many bricks to the fl oor.

But the soul of that boy had been battered and primed, and the incursion had long been expected, and the impression it left was of the sort that is never effaced by the subsequent siltings of life. That long-ago leap of fear had repeated itself many times, while any number of later events—from Lee’s second, superior youth—had been completely forgotten, though they might have had equal signifi cance. To Lee’s own amazement it wasn’t until almost two hours later, when he was fi nally stretched out in the tub, that he remembered that today’s had not been his first encounter with the FBI but his second. He was listening to the
Brandenburg
Concertos—the
Emperor
Concerto in the end had felt too bombastic for midafternoon—and drinking a beer and nearly, finally, nodding off to blessed sleep as the bathwater cooled. Then the memory returned to him, and he set down his beer
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abruptly. He wished he could turn off the music without leaving the tub. It had been in the summer, perhaps his first summer in this country, although more likely his second. He had taken a long-distance bus trip to visit someone—a roommate? a girl?—and on arrival he’d been met by two men who had asked him to answer some questions. “WE

TALKEE,” one of them bellowed at him.

“You don’t need to shoutee,” he’d remarked. “I’m not deafee.” Which had prompted the other to ask him, perhaps a few minutes later, “Where did you learn your English, Mr. Lee?”—as if Lee’s calm, assured grasp of that language were somehow even more suspect than the foreign appearance that had drawn them to him in the fi rst place.

They had thought he was Chinese, and even after he’d convinced them he was not—a task remarkable both for the length of time it had taken and for the unoffended and unflagging patience that Lee had brought to it—they’d wanted to believe that he had numerous Chinese friends. “You’re precisely the sort of fellow we need,” one of the agents told him, in the confiding tone that overtook the proceedings once Lee’s non-Chineseness was finally established, as if the two men were fraternity brothers trying to win a new pledge. “You certainly see it from our point of view, that we can’t have Chinese in this country who are pledging allegiance to the Communist Party.”

“I don’t speak a word of Chinese,” Lee had said. “I don’t know any Chinese people, and I certainly don’t know any Communists. Why would I know a Communist? Do you know what they did to my family? It’s like saying a German Jew must have lots of good friends who are Nazis.”

This had subdued the conversation. Finally one of the agents had asked Lee to please be in touch if he did ever meet Chinese Communists hatching plots in America. But Lee’s memory of the incident was perhaps comprised less of the incident itself than of the way he’d described it to the few friends he’d made by that time in the days afterward. It had been a hilarious anecdote, scornfully told. Lee had enjoyed his immigrant’s luxury of knowing what real danger felt like, while his listeners had enjoyed the American luxury of never having known danger at all.

But perhaps the encounter had excited real fear, which Lee had willfully purged—perhaps he had not been so witty and calm after all.

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Was this possible? There was no telling now; almost forty years had gone by. Unlike the earlier moment, long buried but intact when un-earthed, this had started dissolving the instant Lee stumbled upon it.

Only one thing remained beyond doubt: Lee really had closed the door not just on native country and language and culture but on kin, all of them, said good-bye to all that and stepped over a threshold of ocean to never look back. There had never been a divided allegiance, a pang of nostalgia, not even a yen for the food, so that only months into his life in the States, when faced by two FBI agents in an American bus station, he could almost have laughed—not to be thought Chinese but anything whatsoever, apart from American.

He took a thoughtful pull from his beer can. Now the sloshed inch of beer in its bottom and the delathered water in the tub were the same tepid temperature. With the absence of the carbonated cold on his tongue and the heat in his skin came a generalized clarifi cation; all the dreary imperfections of the bathroom were revealed to him. The misaligned squares of linoleum, the ancient toilet-seat fissure, the mysterious discoloration on the edge of the tub. And the ephemeral blots: toothpaste spray on the mirror, and urine dashes and dots on the bowl, and shed hairs of all tones—translucent like fi shing line, solid white, whitish gray, and the rare lengths of black that despite youthful hue had let go of the scalp anyway. This was Lee’s private bath, accessed via his bedroom, not the “public” half bath—distinguished by the absence of dotted toothpaste and urine and the presence of dust—Agent Morrison had pretended to visit. Like Lee’s bedroom, and kitchen, and study, the only rooms in the house that he used, the bathroom had reverted to its pre-Michiko state without any effort of Lee’s. There had been no denuded hooks and square, picture-size fadings, no furniture-leg holes punched into the carpet. Michiko had reserved her considerable efforts for the public rooms of the house, where she had aggressively furnished and defurnished, hung and unhung, while in the bedroom she’d lived like a hotel guest, all her things in a couple of drawers and in a toiletry case, as if she expected to leave for the airport at a moment’s notice; and in fact in their four years of marriage, she’d been back to Japan seven times. Lee had gone with her just once, although that he’d recrossed the Pacific at all, planning beforehand for months and reading numerous guidebooks and making copious notes,
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and then during the journey itself becoming almost insane with his desire to see everything while Michiko only wanted to have lunch with her friends, made this period seem like one of unending effort, of a great struggle all come to naught.

Lee stood slowly out of the tub, hunched with cold, and dislodged the plug with a toe as he reached for a towel; then he dressed in pajamas, though outside was still gleaming with sun. In decades of life with insomnia, he’d found that bedtime preparations at inappropriate hours sometimes slipped him under the radar; a long soak and pajamas at lunchtime, a too-heavy hot meal and several bottles of beer. Every miraculous once in a while, he’d drop hard out of consciousness and eerily wake more than eight hours later, then feel like the mighty con-quistador of the night hush around him. On those occasions three a.m.

wakefulness was a rare delectation. He would pad up to his study with a pot of green tea and work with a focused serenity he associated, perhaps wrongly, with youth. Now he performed his night ritual while trying, as was most effective, not to give it much thought, but once he was in bed with the phone off the hook and the blinds drawn, he felt even further from sleep. His bedside clock said 4:07; the memorial service for Hendley was just under way. He sat up abruptly, his pulse, amplified by his earplugs, like a tom-tom inside his skull. Was he supposed to have been there? By the time the clock read 4:19, he had churned his freshly made bed into the same strangling state he’d escaped from that morning. He got up and plugged the phone in again to call Sondra, but then the dial tone sounded wrong; it clicked once and seemed to yawn open, as if the call had been made, though he hadn’t pressed numbers. And of course Sondra wasn’t in the department. She would be at the service.

At five o’clock he turned on the television; as he’d expected, Hendley’s service led the local newscast, although the service itself wasn’t shown. “Newscenter 11 was asked, out of respect for the deceased professor, campus leader, and valued mentor to countless students, to refrain from broadcasting the service. At this hour the service is still going on, with a wide range of professors and students expected to speak. We asked a few students to share their feelings with us as they arrived at the stadium earlier this afternoon.” Now the camera cut away from the Newscenter 11 anchor team to a sun-dappled
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stadium entrance, where a procession of students, clutching piles of books to their chests or backpacks by one strap to their shoulders, shared their distress with a young woman, dressed perhaps to “relate,” in blue jeans and a windbreaker. Lee wondered if she was the same woman to whom he’d given his fiery statement the day of the bombing. That heady moment of near heroism now seemed very distant.

Another student had been caught in the frame, the microphone tilted toward him; Lee experienced the oddly poignant, paternal feeling that sometimes overcame him when he spotted students from his advanced calculus or trig classes clowning down the aisles of his supermarket, loading up on bricks of ramen and frozen pizzas, before he realized the boy wasn’t one of his students, but that same spike-haired, sloe-eyed student employee of University Station. “Do you think you’ll be able to put this behind you?” the reporter asked gravely.

“Maybe if this was the end, but it’s just the beginning,” the boy said with composure, gazing, as many of his fellow students had not, directly into the camera, so that Lee almost felt he and the boy had locked eyes with each other.

“What do you mean, the beginning?”

“It was somebody here,” the boy said. “I work in the mail room, so I just have some insights about how it happened.”

“Could you share them with us?”

“Not really. But now that they’ve done it once, why wouldn’t they do it again?”

“
Thank you
,” the reporter exclaimed.

“Yeah, no problem,” the boy said.

Lee turned off the TV, and as if he’d drawn down a blind, the room felt newly lightless, though all the blinds had been drawn down already. He was surprised the newscast would air the groundless speculations of a young college student.
It was somebody here
. In the darkness of his shrouded room, Lee surprised himself by smiling and heard his chuckle make its minimal dent in the afternoon quiet. He’d been reminded of Esther again, and her keening complaint all her years as a teenager. “
Nothing
ever happens here!” she would wail, with an accusing glare at him—as if he could make something happen! It never solaced her, or brought them any closer, that he entirely agreed, even if he didn’t share her displeasure. It was true, nothing ever did
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