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.
Someone doesn’t feel like sleeping.
WHO could sleep with soo much excitement? Could you, mister? I don’t THINK soo. Nooo. Oh, he’s darling. How old?
This little guy is four months.
Oh, he’s precious. Mine are seven and five.
So where were we? I’m sorry.
I was thinking you could just go on camera with what you were saying. About how he’s always unfriendly, and slammed the door in your face.
On camera? Right now?
In ten minutes. For the ten o’clock news.
Oh, gosh. I mean, looking like this?
He’s always home by this time, a woman from the lawn group volunteered, coming over. Lee strained at the tiny porthole, trying to recognize her—his right-hand neighbor? I mean, this is really unusual. No lights or anything.
Like, maybe he’s there, because it looks like he’s not? asked the woman in jeans.
I’m not saying I saw him come home, but he’s just always home by this time.
Brendon? the jeans wearer called. Could you please try again?
Do it yourself. You saw me do it ten minutes ago. You think he dug a tunnel?
He could have come through the back.
What’d he do with his car? He just made it go poof?
He might have been asleep before.
I’ve come over and rung his bell, continued the woman Lee could not recognize, and I’ve known he was there, and he just didn’t come to the door. One time when we were going to put up the play set we have for the kids, I just wanted to apologize in advance for the noise, and he let me stand there on the porch like a fool. I could hear his TV.
A man was suddenly striding toward Lee’s door, was approaching so quickly Lee found himself looking in the man’s eyes—gasping, Lee dropped to his haunches, as if the man, peering in the wrong end of the peephole, might still somehow see the black O of a pupil, an iris cranked open as wide as it went. Fresh beads of sweat itchily writhed on Lee’s skin. Lee felt the man’s feet landing on the front step, and though he tried to brace himself, he still jerked in alarm when the dissonant chimes of the bell sounded through the dark house.
Dr. Lee? the man shouted. Hello?
The slab of the door jumped against him as the man began pounding on it with his fist. Each blow touched Lee at the base of his spine, where he sat curled with his back to the door, staring into the dark.
Dr. Lee? If you’re there, we’d just like to talk a few minutes, okay? Dr. Lee? Then a scuffing as the man turned around. Dana, there was no one here ten minutes ago, and there’s no one here now.
Could you just walk around to the back, please? Just try the back door?
Lee heard the man curse, his feet leave the front step, and as the man started his circuit, Lee flew up the stairs.
Morrison’s card was where Lee had left it, dropped into the top right-hand drawer of his desk. Less locatable were the upstairs phone jack and phone. Lee had only ever put a phone upstairs for Michiko’s convenience, and after she’d left, he had yanked the cord out of the wall and trussed the handset to the cradle and tossed the entire assemblage somewhere—on all fours he crawled the perimeter of his study, where books and notepads and other detritus were stacked on the carpet, pushed close to the wall. He held his breath and opened the accordion door to the room’s only closet, and though he did it exquisitely slowly, the door still faintly squealed in its track. From downstairs he heard rapping on his sliding glass door, and the man’s voice again.
Dr. Lee? Anybody in there? Dr. Lee?
The phone lay in the corner of the nearly empty closet; Lee’s hand closed around it and squeezed tightly, and he felt the wrapping of cord biting into his palm. He backed out of the closet, the phone held to his chest, and with one hand resumed clumsily crawling the rim of his study, his free hand patting and fluttering, unexpectedly loosing a ping from the baseboard heater on the room’s eastern wall. The carpet was abrading his kneecaps through his thin classroom khakis. He suddenly remembered that the phone jack was for some reason out in the hall; the knowledge came to him in the form of an image, the cord snaking out of its notch and across his unvacuumed hall carpet and under the door of the extra bedroom in which he kept a twin bed in case Esther should visit. The voice faintly leaking beneath the closed door in this flash recollection belonged not to Esther but Michiko, her Japanese unmistakably outraged and yet also confidingly hushed so that Lee couldn’t make out her words as he stood with his hand reaching for the doorknob—as if now making up for that moment of cowardly hesitancy, he charged for the hallway, still scuffing along on his knees, and lost his balance and pitched forward onto his face.
He lay there a moment, the hard shape of the phone carving into his sternum, and the dusty smell of the carpet winding into his lungs.
Helloooo! Dr. Leeee! Bangbangbang.
Let’s do the stand-up right here in the driveway.
Like this? Could I put on some blush?
Once the phone was plugged in, he could actually see by the fungal green glow of its keypad. He punched the number with such haste he misdialed, hung up, flattened his ear on the handset in search of the restored dial tone, and instead heard the strange hollow click he had noticed before; he rattled the receiver until at last the steady, flat tone emerged, and then he forced himself to try again very slowly, with utter precision, as if reassembling the chain of a complex equation.
“There you are,” Agent Morrison said.
At the sound of that man’s voice, so unsurprised, even slightly admonitory, as if Lee had arrived late for lunch, Lee’s mouth was leached of all juices, and speech suddenly seemed like a muscular impossibility.
“Lee, you’re going to have to speak up. I can barely hear you.”
His mouth was pressed so intimately to the mouthpiece he felt its plastic perforations on his lips and tasted its sour, used smell—Michiko’s left-behind breath and spit. He had the impression that apart from his hot, flattened ear and his mouth, his body had vanished. “I can’t speak up,” he said.
“Where are you?”
“You tell me,” Lee said, after a moment.
“Don’t be paranoid.”
“There are television trucks at my house.”
“I can see for myself. Is that where you are? In the house?”
“Why even ask?”
“Lee, I don’t know where you are. I’m not sitting in some big control room with a Lucite map that shows your current coordinates in blinking red lights. That’s Hollywood stuff. I’m sitting in my crummy motel room, talking to you on my cellular phone and watching the front of your house on the ten o’clock news. If you’re in there, you’re going to have to tell me.”
“I’m not in there.”
“Well, good. I don’t like the thought of you sitting in the dark listening to your neighbors call you a sociopath on TV.”
Lee said nothing a moment, staring into the grainy obscurity that began where the weak phosphorescence that was shed by the telephone ended. The unseen hubbub in his front yard was obscurity also, the incoherent admixture of three live news broadcasts occurring at once. “Why have you done this to me, Jim?” he finally said.
“Why have I done this to you? I might ask you the same question. First of all, who is Jeff Trulli? You never told me you’d hired a lawyer. That seems very combative.”
“Combative? You tore up my house! And you’re having me followed!”
“I’ve taken that tail off you, Lee. Behavioral Science thought it might be a good thing to rattle your cage, but I didn’t care for it. Happily, I’m even starting to think I might no longer need it.”
“You expect me to believe that? You expect me to believe that you’re so nice you told those men to stop following me?”
“Lee, in the short time I’ve known you, I’ve made it a policy not to have any firm expectations about you at all.” This was said almost with the same geniality Lee remembered from their first conversations. Lee felt his chest tighten with longing—to be spoken to kindly again, to be highly regarded, again…. “Please excuse me a minute,” said Morrison, and Lee heard a sound in the background, and then Morrison saying, indistinctly, “Is it here? Yeah, I’m coming right out. Sorry, Lee,” he resumed. “My cab’s here. I can keep talking if you’ll pardon some bumps.”
“Your cab? Where are you going?”
“How about, since I don’t have unlimited time, instead of me telling you where I’m going, you try telling me why you called?”
He might have been trying to keep up with Morrison’s taxi, on foot, he felt that breathless suddenly, with how urgent it was that he finally be understood. “Please, Jim, listen to me. The man you want really is Lewis Gaither. I know you haven’t been satisfied with this answer, and I understand now! He must have changed his name years ago. Why else would he write to me? Why else would he expose himself to me? I told you this man is my enemy, Jim. He’s hated me for thirty years, since I was a young man like you and you were just a little boy. And he is—let me tell you some more about him—he is a religious fanatic; he does not believe he is capable of anything wrong, even of thinking something that’s wrong. I’ve been thinking about it, my God, I’ve been thinking about nothing else: How could this happen? Why should Lewis change in this way? But the truth is that it’s not such a change. Jim, we get older. And the parts of ourselves that are the most rigid, the most extreme, the most difficult, sometimes these are the parts that come more and more to the top. When we’re young, they’re just an aspect, but if we’re unlucky, they grow and expand and crowd out everything else. And this is what’s happened…this is what’s happened to Lewis….” He had been speaking urgently, passionately, unfettered by any restraints of protest from his listener, and in the course of his speech he knew, from the awful elation he felt, that these were right ideas, true ideas, that had been long assembling like the dust in the voids between stars, awaiting the confluence needed to join in a mass. But the awful elation he felt was also the effect of another void, lying inside the phone line. His voice had poured forth, uncollected—the phone must have gone dead.
Just as he’d been on the point of whispering anxiously, Jim?, Agent Morrison sighed. “Maybe you really are the great actor, and I’m the big sucker.”
“Jim, I’m no actor.”
“So tell me the rest of this story. You want to tell me, don’t you? About how he’s trying to frame you and ruin your life.”
“And he’s done it,” Lee said. “Even you think I’m guilty. You gave my name to the newspaper!”
“No, I did not. I’m going to tell you something right now, and I want you to listen to me. I did not leak your name to Eager Beaver at your piece-of-crap newspaper. Nor do I know who, on this little town’s little police force or on your little school’s little administration, might have done it. But let me explain it to you, the same way I explained it to Trulli. The Bureau has acknowledged that you are a Person of Interest. No one’s calling you a suspect, except maybe your idiot neighbors. A Person of Interest, Lee, is all you have been called. It shouldn’t be news to you, or to anyone, really. A Person of Interest is a person we think may know something of interest to us. A suspect is a suspect. You’re a Person of Interest, and you’ll stop being that if you’ll stop being so interesting.”
“But I’ve explained everything.” Lee was trembling, his voice guttering as if he’d just been on a jog. “I’ve explained everything about Gaither.”
Morrison let the slightest pause follow this return to the subject of Gaither. “Lewis Gaither never changed his name, Lee. He was born Lewis Gaither and died Lewis Gaither, and he’s been dead for almost ten years.”
These words hung in the air with a weird singularity. In the course of their whispered and hissed conversation, and outside Lee’s notice, the dense percolation of engines and voices had diminished by steady degrees. Now all that remained was a last van door slamming, and then a last acceleration receding down Fearrington Way.
“It can’t be true,” Lee whispered, almost to himself.
Morrison let the shocked murmur pass by, a featherweight rag carried off on the breeze the night slipped through Lee’s open windows. Like a seer Morrison said, in the same musing tone, “Now they’ll leave you alone until morning. They’ve done their stand-ups, wagged their tongues. No one wants to lose sleep on you yet. But in the morning maybe they’re here from the twenty-four-hour cable news. And from the regional bureau of the Times. A big break in the Brain Bomber story. And don’t forget Eager Beaver from your local newspaper. He’ll be back, with a sleeping bag this time, unless he’s already bunking with one of your neighbors. They seemed pretty happy to help.”
“He can’t be dead, Jim,” Lee whispered. “He wrote me that letter.”
“But you’ll go on and do what you do every day. Eat your breakfast. Teach class. Go about your business. You’re an innocent man, aren’t you, Lee?”
“Yes,” Lee said, the phone seeming to slip from his hand.
“I can only tell you the facts, Lee. Your Gaither is dead. Is this really a big shock to you? Most of my colleagues don’t think so. They think that you’re toying with us. But, happily, it now seems there’s another old friend of your friend, who’s more willing to talk. So if things go my way, I’ll soon know what you know. Perhaps more.” Their conversation had become strangely languid, dreamlike, a hushed game with no purpose beyond killing time. From downstairs came the roar of an engine and a loud, compact crack, as of an ax striking wood or a gun going off, and then a more diffuse noise of scattered explosion. Voices, the engine departing again, Lee’s body abruptly returned to him, crouched in the dark pouring sweat, the handset of the phone wetly pressed to his face, magnifying his terrified pulse as it beat in his temple. Agent Morrison sharply said, “What was that? Somebody toss a brick through your front window?”
Too late Lee remembered his frayed camouflage. “I told you I wasn’t at home!”
Lee hung up and snatched the cord out of the wall.
He knew that his neighbors were at their windows, in the dark, as he inched his way back down the stairs, leaning hard on the banister to make up for his buckling legs. In the ambient light from outdoors, he could easily see the disorderly blades of glass glinting at him from the carpet. His thin curtains stirred. The temperature had gone down; he felt gooseflesh come up on his neck and his arms. At his front door, he peered through the peephole and saw his mailbox beheaded, its post angled from impact and the black box itself in the street, mouth flung open. Some distance beyond, almost to the lawn of the vengeful young mother, lay an envelope, a long white rectangle, reflecting the light from the streetlamp so that it was starkly aglow, almost blue, like a small sheet of ice.
It felt less like courage than a yielding, an almost grateful surrender, when he opened the door and stepped onto the cool concrete stoop in his socks. The news vans were gone; all was eerily still; yet he would not have been surprised or dismayed to be cut down by bullets. Leaving the stoop, his feet sank into his freshly cut grass, and he felt the night dew instantly soak his socks to the skin. He walked toward the bludgeoned mailbox as if on a high wire. He felt almost pierced by how intently he was watched, and somehow this certainty, the needle pricks of eyes in a loose ring around him, was impelling. He must keep moving. He reached the mailbox, bent down, and picked it up by its door. It was empty. He closed it and put it under his arm. Then, squarely beneath the streetlight, he stopped and surveyed the stillness around him, made a hurried inventory with his eyes even as his head and limbs seemed suspended, motionless as a statue’s; he had the idea that he must limit his actions as much as was possible, that he couldn’t be seen dithering, that this would deplete him, make him more vulnerable. From a distance he must appear calm and resolved. He saw an advertising circular from the grocery store rustling slightly on the young mother’s lawn. This would have been from his mailbox, too, but he didn’t retrieve it. Otherwise he saw nothing but the stark white rectangle. Delivered as the mail always was sometime late in the morning, probably while he’d been leading the five cars to Jeff Trulli’s office.
He went to the envelope and plucked it up quickly and before he could hesitate tore the thing open so that he was ambushed, overpowered, the past’s etherized handkerchief snuffing his face; though he stooped shiveringly in the streetlamp, his nostrils had filled with a fragrance of days when he’d been a young man, the magnolia tree in full bloom and the mustified heap of old books overdue from the library….
He turned quickly and recrossed his lawn, willing himself not to run, the lawn doubling and redoubling in depth. This was what felt like death, these falsely courageous deliberate steps across dew-drenched grass, his socks wetly sucking the soles of his feet, as he gazed at the face of his house, with its ruptured front window and its deserted darkness and no one in her bathrobe waiting on the front step, arms crossed over her chest, mortified but defiant, let the neighbors think what they want, fuck them, the hell with them all.
It was Aileen that he saw there, not Michiko. For an instant the lights flared on, bright little flames springing up on the eaves and the porch and behind the windows, all intact. Then the vision blinked out. He was back on his dark stoop alone, on a pair of wet footprints.
He had slippers in the front coat closet. He stowed the dead mailbox, peeled off his wet socks, put on the slippers, and crunched carefully across the living-room carpet to the back of the house. He still gripped the shredded envelope and its contents. In the kitchen he dropped them into his briefcase, where Gaither’s first letter once lay. He removed the French numbers theorist and carried the briefcase into his bedroom. He packed by the light from his digital clock. It said 11:01 as he left the house the way he’d come in, by the sliding glass door.
His pines touched him again as he left his backyard, their needles clinging a bit in farewell to his bulkier outline—a suitcase added to the briefcase. He encountered no cars on the streets as he hurried. He’d changed the thin-soled loafers for his old running shoes, and he jogged a few steps but was slowed by his cumbersome bags. His car was where he’d left it.
He didn’t stop to examine the new missive again, because it required no further analysis. Its origin was no less certain than its sender, and the implicit instruction it gave him enraged him not because he was doubtful about it but because of how promptly he moved to obey. The envelope was like its predecessor, a plain business-size 10, neatly typed, except this time it addressed Dr. Lee at his home and claimed to have traveled from “12 Ailanthus Circle, Lumberton, Idaho,” though it was postmarked Pocatello. The address was a fresh fakeness that clearly succeeded “14 Maple Lane, Woodmont, Washington.” The contents comprised just one sheet, creased in thirds. It had been the cavalier violence of those knife folds as much as the scent of the paper that had almost undone him. The page was all dense hieroglyphs of obscure mathematics. Because it was page twenty-four of a typescript, the author’s name didn’t appear, and there were just a few people on earth who might have known, as Lee did, that the author was Lee and the page from Lee’s dissertation.
One was Aileen, who had typed all those pages of baffling symbols herself, but of course she was dead. One was Gaither, who’d never finished his own dissertation, who’d let the loss of Aileen end his grad-school career; Lee’s dissertation must especially gall him and the chance to deface it provide an especial pleasure. As Lee had told Morrison, Gaither couldn’t be dead. He was clearly alive.
It was just after four in the morning when Lee entered the town, and though he could see almost nothing of it, he felt abrupt gravitational loss, as if he and the car, any second, were about to be airborne. It had to belong to the past, to the lost and unsalvageable, yet once he’d come through the loose rind of outlying strip malls, just the same as the strip malls he lived among now, the old town, at its core, was the same: the same stalwart frame houses on companionable little lawns and the same brick storefronts and then the same abrupt intake of air, of surprising grandeur, as the campus first came into view. Great temples of limestone and blood-colored brick and the acres of lawn and the wide flagstone walkways. There had always been an all-night diner on the corner of Campus and Church, and it was still there, the diner he’d once gone to for Thanksgiving dinner and into which he crawled now, like a child into bed; he was served harsh black coffee and not bothered again, even after he woke with a start and saw dawn in the windows and the early-bird townies, white and thick and reserved and unchanged by the passage of decades, coming in on their ways to their jobs, at the school and elsewhere.
Adrenalized by exhaustion, he walked the quad, its perimeter and its dividing diagonals. He sat briefly on a bench as he’d once sat for hours on end, head bent over a book. When the library opened, he went in beneath THE TRUTH SHALL SET YOU FREE.
Not once in the twenty-six years since he’d submitted it for binding had it ever crossed his mind to seek out the library copy of his dissertation, which lived here and had a permanent address in the card catalog, memorializing a time of his life when it had seemed possible it would be sought by others, his own follower scholars, although by the time he’d defended, he’d known it was far from a Dieckmann solution and himself no Whitehead, let alone an Einstein. It caused him a particularly many-sided pain to conclude that apart from the attending librarian’s, only one set of hands had likely touched this work in the decades it had sat on this shelf. Gaither’s: they might have been grubbing the pages mere days ago. The image repelled him; he stood before his book unable to touch it himself, as if it might have been dusted with some fatal spore. The timed light at the end of the shelf row clicked off, and he was left in the dimness of the aisle fluorescents. He hurried down the row to reignite and, coming back, mittened his hands in his windbreaker pockets and pulled the book off the shelf that way. The pages had turned a sour yellow at their edges but were still white inside. With his fingers groping through windbreaker fabric, he had to make a few clumsy attempts to reach page twenty-four. It was still surprising to see that it was missing, despite the fact that it lay in his briefcase.
He stared at the broken page sequence, twenty-three, twenty-five, an upwelling of steam from his scalp forming worms of cold sweat down his neck. A much smaller sheet, from a notepad, occupied twenty-four’s former place. This bore a message in English, not math.
The row light again turned itself off. With one hand Lee unclasped his briefcase and edged the intruder sheet toward its dark mouth. Catching the air, the sheet bucked very slightly, fell in. Lee shut his dissertation and returned it to its notch. He closed his briefcase, clasped it to his chest, and made his way back down the darkened row.