A FEW MINUTES PAST SEVEN THE NEXT MORNING, HE grew aware of a gathering, cars arriving, doors opening, indistinct voices joining together. He hadn’t slept at all that he was aware of, had not even moved from the armchair to bed. As if at a primal signal, he stood up from the chair, his blood surging, and locked himself in his downstairs bathroom. He showered rapidly, scattering soap gobbets onto the walls. He slashed his razor over his face. He stubbed his toe but didn’t feel it, roughly yanked on clean clothes. The tableau of himself and Rachel in the booth at the Wagon Wheel some twelve hours before floated past, isolated and unexplainable. The doorbell rang, and in the action of answering it he had the sense of producing, himself, the procession that bore down on him, the way a magician pulls a colorful handkerchief chain from a hat.
It was Agent Morrison who served him the search warrant. “Professor, for your own privacy I would suggest that you sit in the back of your house, in your bedroom or kitchen, with the blinds drawn, until we’re all finished. Members of the media have accompanied us here, unfortunately.” Morrison’s tone of voice suggested he and Lee had never met except perhaps on the most bureaucratic occasions. A small herd of purposeful adjuncts, in zipped jackets and gloves, were pouring through the door. Lee had the detached, uncertain thought that there were far more purposeful adjuncts than there were household objects, even if they counted his forks and separated his laundry. Outside, he saw his neighbors clustered excitedly at the edge of his lawn, a few of them nodding as they spoke to those reporters who weren’t otherwise preoccupied with shifting and positioning their cameras. So here at last were the TV reporters. It had only been weeks since he’d spoken to them with such facility and passion outside the hospital in which Hendley lay dying, and yet he felt he had never seen anything like them before. Burly, potbellied men looking slightly cycloptic with the lenses of cameras hitched onto their shoulders, and other men probing the air with long poles baited with microphones, and still other men, and a woman, microphone-poking their ways to and fro, trailed by people unfurling long cords, as Lee did every once in a while when he vacuumed his carpet. Lee found himself transfixed in his doorway, his just-showered body a fountain of sweat.
“What are we looking for, Agent?” a reporter was shouting.
“Professor, please get out of the way,” Agent Morrison said from behind him. “I would really suggest you get out of the doorway and sit in your kitchen.”
Lee stared at the cycloptic eyes, which stared patiently back. Several people were asking him questions. He shook his head, stumbling over himself as he groped his way back through his front door and into the living room. When he reached his picture window, he pulled aside the curtain, as if this view might be different.
The cameras seemed to content themselves with his oddly forgotten form, sweating and blinking on the far side of the window screen and otherwise utterly still as behind him the drawers to his telephone table were emptied, then the few shoe boxes of recent miscellanea—disputed bills, replacement batteries not yet replaced—then the single bookshelf on the staircase landing, then even his desk—from his spot he could only have heard this, but he seemed to float upward so that he could see, as the searchers swarmed into that room, their movements eclipsing and revealing and eclipsing the sparse little tableau on the desk’s leather surface, the papier-mâché candy dish and the photograph of Esther in the faux-stained-glass frame. Another photograph of Esther, from a year later, hung on the wall. They were small windows onto the last year before Aileen left. The two Esthers, only slightly different from each other, seemed to gaze at Lee expectantly, and he seemed to gaze back, as the jacketed forms crisscrossed in the foreground, though he still hadn’t moved from his spot in the living-room window.
“Get out of that window and sit in the kitchen; you’ll be more comfortable,” Agent Morrison said, passing by.
There was so little; he could sense them thinking that, pawing over it impatiently like dogs. For a man in his seventh decade, where was all the stuff? Had he hidden it? Driven it out to the country and buried it? The dull truth was, he’d been a thrower-away all his life, and if he hadn’t pitched it, then someone had taken it from him. Everything that most mattered to him could fit in his briefcase. Esther’s pictures and her shoes, and a handful of papers. He had a single, two-drawer filing cabinet in the corner of his study, gray and ugly and almost entirely full of transient items, household records that apart from those concerning his mortgage he’d throw away in a couple of years, bank statements and paid bills and tax stuff, but in the back there was a slim clutch of items concerning Aileen. Their divorce papers, and the letter she’d written, from before they were married.
Time seemed to have stuttered. He had remembered those things, and then, without meaning to, he’d burrowed deep into himself, and now he resurfaced, to see the two-drawer filing cabinet as it was borne downstairs and out the front door.
“Wait—” he said.
He had also been remembering, somewhere in the midst of that temporal glitch, the first of Aileen’s collapses, when they hadn’t had any idea what was gathering in her. The paramedic had been shouting out her blood pressure as it nosedove, numbers plummeting second by second, and Lee had been screaming incoherent imprecations and wrenching Aileen’s bloodless hands, and all around them had been the sort of pandemonium no sane person associates with the salvation of life. It had looked like life’s utter unraveling, as this present scene did: the very last things roughly yanked from their moorings, Aileen falling from him, white as ash, while syringes and tubes flew around. But Aileen shuddered suddenly, and the oxygen mask dropped off her face, and she said to Lee, with a sort of amazement, “I’m not scared at all.” It hadn’t been the beatific acceptance of death; later she’d told him it was just that the worst had arrived, and she wasn’t afraid. “You know: ‘the only thing to fear is fear itself.’” I’m not scared at all. For his part, Lee had been so terrorized it was surprising his heart hadn’t stopped. Yet now he thought he might understand, as he watched his house being dismantled: when disaster’s thumb bears down on you, there’s a peace to that pressure. The worst isn’t coming, it’s here. And there’s nothing left to fear.
Except this loss. “Wait,” he cried, plunging out the front door in pursuit. He felt a hand grip his wrist, like a cuff.
“Professor,” Morrison said. “I really think you’d be more comfortable if you sat in the kitchen.”
It disappeared, that downpressing thumb, Aileen’s fearless peace—why couldn’t he keep hold of the least goddamned thing?—“I need something out of there,” he gasped, making for the cabinet as it was borne across his freshly mowed lawn. His free arm pinwheeled ridiculously—Morrison had him firmly by the other wrist. “Get your hands off me!” Lee shrieked.
Herky-jerky they danced with each other on Lee’s welcome mat for the avid cameras, straying perhaps five steps from where they had started before moving back, the big agent with the filing cabinet having turned to give a glance to the scuffle, turned away, resumed his steady, laden steps toward a truck at the curb like a professional mover; he paused again at a fresh cry from Lee and met Morrison’s eyes, so that now the three of them stood on the lawn in an oval of news cameramen, the fish-eyes of the lenses turned on them and the long fishing poles—the booms, Lee would learn—following with their microphone bait, while at the same time the petty procession of old-bill-filled shoe boxes and calculus textbooks and much of the basement—cardboard evidence boxes into which had been whatever-way hastily dumped crescent wrenches and pliers and hammers and drill bits and C-clamps and random scrap ends of lumber from a shelf-building project of ten years ago and slivers of balsa and dowel from a dollhouse-building project of twenty years ago and coffee cans of loose nails and a four-fifths-full sack of lawn fertilizer and countless other things he never could never have named, staring at the stripped space, until he read the newspapers—continued, the steady annoyance of the box-bearing agents and the steady obstructiveness of the unmoving newspeople a happy symbiosis despite the pro forma shouts of, “Please move, you are on private property, move to the curb,” despite the stubborn evasive response of, “What are we looking for, Agent? Is this what we’re looking for?” A gray filing cabinet of telephone bills and the voice of a woman long dead?
Lee’s previous TV appearance had been on its surface entirely different, but perhaps at some more basic level exactly the same. The first time he’d been a Hendley-envying, rattled bomb victim transformed into selfless and eloquent hero. This second time he was even more simply himself, and turned into a criminal.
Restrained by Jim Morrison’s hands, he watched the gray filing cabinet vanish into the truck. The cameras watched it also, as they’d watched other items, although when the breaking news aired in a couple of hours, the clearly mundane things—the school textbooks, the can opener—would be edited in favor of the opaque evidence boxes, the opaque filing cabinet. Also not to be shown was Lee shaking his head very slightly, in acquiescence, so that Morrison unhanded him. Lee walked back into his house, and then into his bedroom, where the agents were done, and observed the tawdry appearance of his ungarnished bed, a mattress and box spring on bare metal frame with four scuffed plastic casters clawed into the carpet. His armchair appeared to have been reupholstered with threadbare dish rags. His dark wood dresser and his antique floor lamp did not elevate the generic cheapness of the room so much as suggest they’d been burglarized from more tasteful surroundings. The dresser’s drawers were yanked out, dripping unfolded clothes. A basket of laundry was dumped on the floor. A dizzying shame overwhelmed him, that so many strangers had seen the squalor of his bathroom.
Lee closed the door and crept onto his bed. He hadn’t pressed the button of the lock; he was afraid he might be reprimanded. He heard the thump of feet and the shifting of objects. No one pursued him, to put a camera and microphone close to his face. No one needed to, having already captured him lunging and twisting in Morrison’s grasp and then crazily yelling, “It’s none of your goddamned business!”
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 cut 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.
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.