SOMETIME IN THE COURSE OF THE NIGHT, THE RAIN turned to snow. Even during Lee’s ride down the mountain, the change was occurring. The heavy strings of rain that had framed Marjorie had lost speed, devolved into stiff soup, approached ever clumsier, sloppier mire, and then at the apex—or nadir—of this process, as if at the touch of a wand, all began to reverse, to flow up, to become weightless. Snow.
It wasn’t such an unusual thing at this altitude, a snowstorm in May. It wasn’t usual, no. Not unusual either. It happened. Every once in a while.
The man who had voiced these laconic analyses was very long and narrow, with huge hands and shaggy white hair, but if not for the hair he might have looked Agent Morrison’s age, even younger. The hair was a strange foreign growth on his head. He must be only in his late thirties, or early forties at most. He wore a plaid work shirt that, unlike Agent Morrison’s, looked soft and faded with washing, although it was still stiffly bulky, because of a thick quilted lining. Lee could see the lining where the man’s cuffs were unbuttoned and turned back at his bony, red wrists. The man was sitting in one of the room’s two mustard-colored chairs, at its brown wood-grain laminate table. Agent Morrison, in his too-new-looking wilderness clothes, sat in the other. A third man, who had not even tried to appear to be rustic, was lying across the end of the other bed, perpendicular to the normal direction. Lee could see only the soles of his wing tips and the limp cuffs of his slacks, darkly stained with moisture.
Lee himself was rolled up at the head of the other bed, the one nearer the window, at the foot of which were the table and chairs. At some point during his long and confused conversation with the roomful of people, he had grown so light-headed with fever and so incapable of speech from his chattering teeth that eventually he’d been lifted, like a sack of potatoes, and matter-of-factly inserted beneath the bed’s covers, and this was where, after an unrestful dreamscape, people letting themselves in and out, loudly talking, even using the foot of his bed to sit down—he would bounce as if floating on turbulent seas—he had awoken, he didn’t know how much later. A gray light had been struggling into the room. For a long time, he’d listened, not with any intent to eavesdrop but only because he had felt so abraded as to have been made unbearably porous, unable to shield himself from the sounds. The overnight babble of voices reduced to just three, whose owners he saw when with effort, and briefly, his eyes fluttered open. Agent Morrison, the prematurely white-haired man, and the pair of wing tips.
“EOD flying in…the Team Leader…a tactical entry…bomb techs…damage radius…decent assessment…clear out neighbors…SWAT launch…maintain radio contact…Would we need Hostage Rescue? Your call, but I don’t think there’s time for those people to get here….” The voice of the man wearing wing tips had been rambling and droning eternally; Lee dozed and awoke and dozed again to its unending stream.
“He’s not going to have anyone in there,” the laconic voice broke in, sounding slightly annoyed. “That place is barely big enough for him to fit. Ask your professor.”
“He awake?”
“I don’t think so.”
“You’ll need a doctor for him.” Wing Tips yawned.
“It’s just a fever. He’ll sweat it out.”
“At that age pneumonia’s a danger. My dad almost died from it two months ago.”
“I didn’t know that, Tom. I hope he’s doing all right now.” This was Agent Morrison’s voice.
“Old age is a bitch. If it isn’t one thing, it’s another.”
“And you don’t need to clear out the neighbors, because there aren’t any neighbors. Just that little log cabin a quarter mile down that your three guys were using.” White Hair again, audibly testy.
After a few silent moments, Agent Morrison said, “Why don’t you tell us your take on it, Dave? This is your turf. You know him.”
“I’m just local yokel,” Dave demurred with sarcasm. “I’m not Task Force.”
Another pause, slightly shorter. “You’re saying we don’t need Hostage Rescue.”
“I’m not saying what you need and don’t need, I’m saying what you can and can’t do. You can’t launch your SWAT people from the neighboring place because there isn’t a neighboring place. There’s an eight-foot-square cabin where your three guys have been freezing their tails off. The only reason they haven’t got frostbite is because they’ve been sitting on top of each other.”
“SWAT’ll have to hike in,” Agent Morrison admitted.
“Crunch, crunch,” Dave replied.
“This guy can pack a bomb in a matchbox that’ll blow off your head. You need a tactical entry,” Wing Tips said.
“Have you looked out the window? There’s no fucking leaves on the trees, and there’s a foot and a half of new snow on the ground. Now, the snow has a nice crunchy crust. If he doesn’t see you coming a mile away on the nice white backdrop, then he’ll hear you.”
“Crunch, crunch,” Agent Morrison echoed.
“I’m not disagreeing you’ve got to be delicate. He never let me within twenty feet of his door. I always thought he was hiding something. Never dreamed it was this.”
“What’d you try and run him in for?” This was Wing Tips asking.
“Game violations. He’s just got a few acres, but his place backs onto Forest Service land. We were pretty sure he’d been poaching for years but never could catch him at it.”
“Lucky you didn’t,” Wing Tips said after a while.
“Anytime I walked near his property line, he came striding right out. He’s got the ears of a dog.”
“That’s what needs to happen,” said Morrison.
“What’s that?”
“We need to lure him out of the house empty-handed. Unarmed. Out of reach of any mechanisms he might have prepared.”
“I don’t know how you’re going to swing that. He senses danger now. He knows I’m law enforcement: if he sees me, he’ll start throwing grenades. At this point he’ll probably do the same thing if he sees anyone. Your guys made too much fucking noise when they grabbed the professor.”
“He awake?” Wing Tips asked again.
“It doesn’t matter if he is,” Agent Morrison said. “He’s not leaving this room till we’re done.”
And why not? Lee wondered as he subsided back under the waves. Because he might rush to warn Whitehead? Because he might tip off the press? Morrison constantly seemed to mistake him, this time for a person within reach of the wild-spinning wheel that was steering the course of events. While Lee was still just tangled in the chassis, more mangled the farther it dragged him along. For a short time, the previous night, he had harbored the terrible thought that he himself, in his flight to find Gaither, had led the agents to Whitehead’s front door—the thought terrible not because it meant capture for Whitehead but because it meant Lee, all those miles, had never been undetected, never free of the Furies, never outside a gaze that was that much more awful for being unfelt. But soon he’d realized that his appearance in Sippston had been just as surprising to Morrison and his colleagues as theirs was to him. It hadn’t been Lee who had led them to Whitehead. Their breakthrough had been an unemployed poet and soapbox orator who’d befriended Whitehead in his brief time at Berkeley and then exchanged philosophical letters with him for three decades. An old man himself, one of the unchanging “characters” left from the sixties well known to the students on Telegraph Avenue, the poet had first followed the Brain Bomber story with anarchic glee and had then read the whole manifesto when it ran in the papers. It was easy to imagine his vertiginous doubt at this point of his own sanity, the same doubt he might feel if a specter of his poet’s invention had materialized. Whitehead’s repertoire of metaphor and allusion was vast, but not so vast as to avoid repetition in thirty years’ worth of letters, let alone in a manifesto of thirty-five thousand words. The poet’s proud exultation—he knew the Brain Bomber!—was brief; he’d then suffered intense paranoia and called the police.
He’d also, just after his first lengthy interview with local FBI agents—and just before the Berkeley police, at the FBI’s request, took him into custody on vagrancy charges to prevent precisely such an indiscretion—called a San Francisco network news affiliate. The national network had prepared a story on a Brain Bomber suspect in the Idaho mountains and, as a courtesy, informed the FBI and offered a one-day delay before broadcasting. This was why the three men had been talking all night in Lee’s room, about how to seize Whitehead, without Whitehead’s exploding himself or his cabin—in which the evidence against him must be—or any number of arresting agents, and it was also why no one could wait for the new snow to melt.
“Fuck these people!” exclaimed Morrison, of the network news show, in a tone of exhaustion. Lee remembered the first time he’d heard the generally courteous agent use the same expletive. Then, exhausted himself from his fever, he went back to sleep.
Lee had absorbed the conversation between the three men as thoroughly and indifferently as a lifetime prisoner might absorb the game of chess being played by his captors outside his cell door. He was aware of every move and countermove, in possession of complete understanding of the contest so far, but his soul was elsewhere, in a furnace of fury and shame. He viewed his fever as the outward expression of the fire in his brain, which, having been so diseased, was consuming itself to clear ground for fresh growth, like a scorched mountainside. In their shallow penetration, the roots of his reason had at least knitted tightly together, like a mat of crabgrass, so that everything baffled and wrong came away in one piece. Lewis Gaither’s death wasn’t some sort of trick being played by Agent Morrison on Lee or by Gaither on both of them. It was simply itself, the ungraspable fact of a canceled existence. Lewis Gaither was dead. He had been dead for years. There was a wholeness to Lee’s brokenness, as there was strange love in his old, worn-out hatred: Lewis Gaither was dead, and Lee was surprised by real grief. He knew he wasn’t noble enough to grieve Lewis for Lewis’s sake. And yet he felt grief, perhaps for their brief, awkward friendship or perhaps for an ardent believer in God who could still be as clumsy and mean as a sinner when his love was repulsed and his pride was destroyed—but who was far from a monster of vengeance or a killer of men.
Gaither could never have been such a thing, yet Lee knew he’d seen him this way long before Hendley’s bomb, and the letter. Lee’s thoughts of Gaither had taken their shape from his thoughts of Aileen, which had gouged him for years with sharp edges of blame and regret. Without the deep channel they’d carved, all his torrents of hatred for Gaither might have spread themselves thin and evaporated. But Lee had never cured himself of the shame that he felt toward his wife, which had causes as stark as his gladness her child had vanished and as nebulous as the mistrust that had poisoned their marriage. He’d needed Gaither’s villainy to excuse his own ignoble acts, and perhaps just to feel comparatively like an adequate husband.
That Lee could have imagined it all, that he’d housed such unruly emotion as had made him extrude—like the spider he’d thought Gaither was!—a delusional web that enmeshed the two men in a decades-old dance of revenge, compared only to Donald Whitehead’s astounding misprision of Lee. How could Lee ever have known, while he thrashed through a past that revolved around Aileen and Gaither, that he of all people loomed large in Whitehead’s memories? How could he have realized that for all the loneliness and pain he’d endured in his days as a student, his life—which had included not merely a friend to betray and a lover with whom to effect the betrayal but so many other quotidian ties, to persons who’d had him to dinner or with whom he’d drunk beer and shared warm conversation, that until now he’d so far taken them for granted as not to recall them—had in fact been as normal and varied and full as Donald Whitehead’s had been irregular and narrow and empty? He’d known Donald Whitehead so little he’d never suspected that their glancing acquaintance, for Whitehead, qualified as a singular friendship. He’d been so quick to assume that Whitehead’s social unease was aloofness that he’d acted aloof in return—to Whitehead’s eyes seeming “princely,” as Whitehead admiringly recalled in his letter. All those decades ago, Lee had been so impressed by Whitehead’s brilliance and promise and stature as the rarest of students that he had never perceived it might be Whitehead who trailed after the Byrons, unwanted, and not the reverse. Perhaps it showed something touchingly innocent in Lee’s thinking that he had assumed Whitehead’s genius must be an elevating, not an isolating, force. Lee had associated with that blessing of genius a large number of other, unrelated conditions he had longed to possess for himself—like wealth and taste and self-confidence—that he now understood Donald Whitehead had not possessed either. In severely jarred retrospect, Lee could admit that Whitehead had been not aristocratically eccentric but awkward, not proudly aloof but alone. Perhaps it helped explain why, after Whitehead’s departure from grad school to his plum teaching job, Lee had never heard of him again. Something in Berkeley had been unbearable, or perhaps something had always been unbearable. A few years after taking his job, Whitehead had resigned with no explanation and effectively vanished. At around the same time, “Dr. Burt” had appeared in the Idaho mountains.
Now the very few people who shared that vast wildness with him, whose POSTED: NO TRESPASSING signs came in contact with his, were to be astonished by sharpshooters noiselessly trespassing over their property, with computerized guns and headsets sprouting out of their ears. At least this was the hopeful idea that Wing Tips entertained. But even Lee, as he came to again in the unwholesome fug of the room, knew that this had been Wing Tips’ attempt to constructively rile his colleagues, to produce the argumentative heat that might forge a real option. He must not have succeeded. The lanky, irate, white-haired man had departed. Even Wing Tips had finally departed. An abrasive silence pained Lee’s ears that he realized was the drone from a fluorescent lightbulb. Agent Morrison had pulled his chair close to Lee’s bedside and met Lee’s awakening gaze thoughtfully. Morrison’s square, solid face, at its best like something knocked from granite with a hammer, was in a worse condition than Lee would have imagined this face could achieve: the ruddy skin had gone green with fatigue and seemed pitted all over, made spongy by some cellular breakdown that a bristling, half-gray, day-old beard only partly concealed. If this was how the younger man looked, Lee himself must be gruesome. The thought wasn’t dismaying, as it would usually be. All vanity, all shame, all fear seemed steamed out of the husk of his body.
“Feeling better?” Morrison asked at length.
Lee felt helpless to utter his answer, whatever it was. He was still negotiating phlegmy deposits and the peculiar uncertain sensation of the voice after fever when a single knock came at the door. A boyish-looking man entered, not having waited for any response. He wore a dress shirt with dark armpit stains, a tie pulled slack like a noose, and suit pants so crumpled they must at some point have been dampened and crushed into a ball. “He’s awake,” the man noticed, and from his voice Lee understood that this was Wing Tips, now standing upright.
“Just this instant,” said Morrison.
“So…you float it?”
“He’s just come to this instant. He’d just opened his eyes when you came through the door.” Morrison’s face twitched a little, as if in suppression.
“It’s past noon. We’re gonna screw the pooch here if we don’t make a timely decision.”
For a moment they faced off, until Morrison said, “There’s no decision to make, Tom. This is not on the table. It’s unacceptable risk.”
“Not if it works. Besides, what’s on the table? I feel like for the past twenty hours you’ve been saying, ‘No, impossible, Tom. No, it can’t be done, Tom.’”
Morrison stood. “Let’s keep talking outside. Professor Lee needs his rest.”
“He looks rested to me. Why not ask him?”
“No!” Morrison barked startlingly.
“What’s the harm?”
“The harm,” Morrison said, but all at once something seemed to obstruct him, as if what he wanted to say weren’t too minor but too vast to compress into words. He looked so depleted that Lee sat up abruptly in bed, thinking to catch Morrison before that man collapsed.
After the slightest of pauses, the merest gesture toward awaiting the rest of his colleague’s remarks, the agent whose name was apparently Tom said to Lee, “You must already know what we’re driving at, don’t you, Professor?” And before Lee could say he did not, “Our friend on the mountain is homicidally hostile to most everybody but you.”
“Tom,” Morrison said warningly.
“You he welcomes,” Tom went on. “You he invites, if you can be believed. You go up there today and call ‘Yoo-hoo,’ I’m thinking he comes out, our guys pounce. It’s all over.”
“I go back there?” Lee exclaimed huskily.
“Dr. Lee is not a law-enforcement agent,” Morrison interrupted, his own voice very calm but with such unnerving cords of tension expanding the girth of his neck that he might have swallowed a massive explosion just under his tonsils.
“And he’s happy to see you,” Tom answered. “His ‘Old Colleague and Friend.’”
Lee felt goose pimples quicken his skin.
“He comes out, our guys pounce—”
“We don’t invite members of the general public to help us execute arrests,” Morrison continued, a viselike pressure in his voice now, as he turned himself fully to Tom, as if to signal that the scorn in his face was directed at one object only, and not at any members of the general public who might happen to be in the room.
“We take them into our confidence when they’re useful to us,” Tom countered.
“We don’t put them in harm’s way.”
“There’s a lot of things we don’t do that we do. It’s called being creative.”
Another compact, buzzing silence fell here, like a noise of its own, but Lee only remotely heard it. He didn’t disbelieve in the prospect so much as he needed, urgently, to grasp everything perfectly clearly. “I would be alone?” Lee persisted.
When Morrison turned away from Tom again, it was as if he’d shut a door in that man’s face: only Morrison and Lee now remained. Resuming his place in the chair, Morrison trained his oppressed, weary gaze upon Lee. “Lee, this isn’t an option for you to consider.”
“I know that,” Lee said. For him it was also as if Tom were no longer there. “I know you want me to feel there is no obligation.” He had not known, until speaking this particular word, what species of word he might try to say next. But “obligation” seemed to offer an anchorage. It pertained in no way to his entanglement with Morrison and Tom—he was not obligated to them—yet despite this he seized hold of it. Obligation fulfilled; had he ever been able to say this? The persons he longed to oblige himself to were all gone, or his chances with them had all passed. He could no longer be Aileen’s comrade or her son’s guardian. He could not restore Hendley to life or assuage Rachel’s pain. He could never erase the charnel of that burned, spattered office, much less the sight of the victim himself, from young Emma Stiles’s mind. A martyrdom here wouldn’t ever make up for the lapses he saw there and there and all those other immutable elsewheres now lost to the past. Perhaps all Lee really felt now was the need to escape from this bed, where a lifetime’s distillate of shame had enrobed him for hours—and, more simply, that as cocksure as Tom might behave, his idea was right. Tom had outlined a logical plan. And Lee, every once in a while, could be logical, too.
“I know that,” Lee reiterated, “but I’ll do it,” he finished, almost winded by what he had said.
“I’ll get moving,” said Tom, startling them both with his ongoing presence and punching keys on a phone he’d snatched out of his pocket.
“Just hang on a goddamn minute!” Morrison said. “Lee, I think I can understand, better than anyone else, why you might feel under pressure to do this—”
“Jim, what Tom says makes sense,” Lee put forth, his voice a rattling tea tray that was certain to scatter its cups. His resolve felt so precious and frail; he knew that the stronger, authentically brave man could dash it to bits without ever realizing.
“If you’d never been here, we’d still be where we are, and we’d still move ahead.”
“Into a shitstorm,” Tom said.
“You’ll have a shitstorm when Professor Lee is injured or dead.”
“I never said it was ideal. Ideal is no network news yanking our pants down, we get to wander around in our mountain-man clothes while we nail down probable cause, I do some skiing, the jerk finally gets hungry, and we cuff him in front of the grocery store—”
“He really did invite me,” Lee murmured as the two men resumed arguing. “He went to so much trouble. He must have taken a bus all the way to our school, so he could put that note inside my book.”
“You’re gonna have to let me kick it upstairs,” Tom was saying to Morrison. “He’s volunteered. It’s not my call or yours.”
“It is a logical plan,” Lee whispered, less to the other men than to himself. I know that you, like me, are rational. He heard those words again in his mind and cringed from them. Now they were spoken by Whitehead’s stentorian voice.
He scarcely noticed when the two men banged out of the room. Once the noise of the door ceased to echo and the fluorescent’s flat buzz filled his ears, he might have waited three minutes or thirty. His Seiko seemed unreachable, on the farther nightstand. He lay on the chemical-scented motel pillows and felt the drifting movement of the mattress over calm, windless seas and realized that his body and not the mattress was the source of the feeling. He grew aware of voices outside his door, both raised and suppressed—high emotion, low volume. He couldn’t pick out distinct words. When he heard the door open again, he jerked upright, his gut sick with dread. He’d wanted this limbo to last, and perhaps never end.
Morrison reseated himself in the chair. For another long time, another three minutes or thirty, he didn’t speak, until he finally did. “We’re off the map here. This is not the way I like to work.”
“I know,” Lee said in a rush of compassion, for a moment forgetting himself. “You like to have all the i’s dotted and all the t’s crossed.”
“SWAT will have to do a wide perimeter. A big loose circle, several hundred yards from the house so he doesn’t detect them. But they’re the best shots in the world. You’ll be protected if he tries anything.”
“I know,” Lee said, by which he didn’t mean, I know SWAT is the best in the world, so much as, My personal safety does not matter now. He didn’t mean he didn’t care if he died; he did not want to die. But the shock of what he’d offered to do had transformed him somehow. He felt weird imperviousness, as if a spell had been cast.
“You’ll be wearing a bulletproof vest. Dave and I will drive you up to within about five hundred yards on a snowmobile; then we’ll have to hike up. But once we get to the clearing, you step out on your own. No closer to the house than necessary. Think of the cabin like it’s radioactive. You can’t approach it. Can’t touch it. Persuade him to come out to you. And you can’t let him know that you’re with us. You have to talk to him just like you would, Lee. He has to think you’re alone.”
“I know,” Lee said.
“And if you get killed or hurt, I will make you regret it.” This said not in jest but almost in anger, as if he expected to have to make good on his threat.
“I know,” Lee said a last time, though he wasn’t confident or courageous. He was just the one person to do it, the one way that the thing could be done. As if the whole misbegotten equation added up after all.
The prematurely white-haired man, Dave, was a law-enforcement agent of the United States Forest Service, and it was he who fitted Lee, from his own closet, with snowshoes and a winter coat, the coat reaching almost to Lee’s knees but cut narrow, so that it fit somewhat better than Morrison’s clothes. The snowshoes were not the rustic wooden tennis rackets that Lee had envisioned. They were ungainly rectangular frameworks of aluminum pipe with a welter of buckles and straps with which Dave struggled while Lee sat sideways in the passenger seat of an SUV, either the same one that had plucked him off Whitehead’s mountain or its identical twin, the car door standing open and the chill air, ominous with moisture, probing Dave’s coat, seeking points of entry. Dave squatted on the icy asphalt while he worked, in the same plaid shirt he’d been wearing before, cuffs rolled back, his only concession to being outdoors a thin black knitted cap on his head. When he had finished, he helped Lee to his feet, and Lee, leaning hard on Dave as if he were an old woman and Dave were a Boy Scout, scraped with a horrible noise across the asphalt to a vast, pristine stretch of meringue at the parking lot’s border. Dave had to roughly hoist Lee, holding him under the armpits, to get him over the filthy bulwark of plowed snow that hemmed the lot on all sides. When Lee touched down on the level meringue, he clung to Dave across the bulwark, certain he’d sink to his knees, and felt Dave’s fingers matter-of-factly prying his loose from the sleeve of Dave’s shirt. Morrison watched from the lot’s farther side. Dave pushed Lee, the stronger animal calmly imposing its will on the weaker, until Lee stopped bendingly reaching for Dave and stood straight, miraculously afloat on the bright crust of snow.
Dave handed Lee a pair of spindly flexible sticks made of plastic and rubber. “Use them for balance, not leverage,” he said. “Pretend you’re walking on water. Go light. You’ll have to put your feet wider,” he added, as Lee, confused by the width of the shoes, almost fell on his face.
There wasn’t much time to practice, or rather there was no time at all. It was one-thirty; Lee had done his best to eat a ham sandwich and a cup of chicken noodle soup with Morrison at the wood-laminate table in his motel room, but the sandwich bread had stuck in his windpipe and the smell of the ham made him nauseous; he’d gotten the soup down his throat at the rate of an eyedropper. The national network would air their story, blowing Morrison’s and all his colleagues’ cover, at six-thirty. But dusk would have already fallen an hour before—SWAT had to work with just visual contact between the team members, because radios were too loud. And really, visual conditions would already be hopelessly lousy an hour before that, given how shoehorned in mountains Donald Whitehead’s place was. And to cap it, the forecast was calling for even more snow. At best they had three hours remaining; at worst it was already over—
This overheard information impressed itself upon Lee about as well as might a discussion of wind speed if he was about to be pushed from a plane. He knew it impinged upon him, but he couldn’t digest it. He took a step, swayed, waved his sticks like a flailing insect, felt the protest in the small of his back and his groin and his calves. He had to spread his feet wider. And up there he’d be climbing: that same final ascent that felt grueling enough from the inside of Marjorie’s truck.
Now another huge SUV, which gleamed like new despite radial spatters of road salt and mud, drove into the slush-flooded lot with a trailer in hitch that had a snowmobile on it, and at the same time Agent Morrison came striding as fast as he could through the slop. “We’ve got it,” he told Dave, “so let’s go,” and because Lee understood all the prerequisites of their mission, like a rank-and-file soldier whose sheer petrifaction has paradoxically honed his perceptions, he knew this meant that the warrants had now been obtained from the district court judge, and the next instant Dave had boosted him back to the parking-lot side of the bulwark of snow and then boosted him again, a clumsy and clattering scarecrow in his overlarge coat and aluminum shoes, into the SUV’s passenger seat, and with an angry slamming of doors all around they had “launched,” as had the SWAT team already; Lee and Morrison and Dave would drive as far as a defunct wood mill and wait there for confirmation that the SWAT team had formed their “loose ring,” and then the three men would continue on the snowmobile and then on their snowshoes, and then came the point when the smallest and last rocket stage tumbled off all alone.
Lee’s bulletproof vest seemed too long for his torso; it dug painfully into his armpits. He struggled to bring into his mind all the parts of his life he would have hoped might enfold him and solace him now. He was disappointed; his life did not “pass before him,” although he could feel, when he closed his eyes, when he let the cement-grinder noise of the tires drown out the terse exchanges between the other men in the car, Esther’s small, glossy head, beaming warmth, in the cup of his palm…. He did not mean to be melodramatic, only as acknowledging, as undeceived, as Agent Morrison was. Before, over lunch in the room, Lee had said to him, “Jim, are you nervous?” and Morrison had said, “I always am.”
Lee knew he was nervous also, so nervous that the word seemed absurd when proposed as the name of his inner condition. If he had felt this before, he could not recall it, in the way that some say one cannot recall physical pain, so that pain is always brand-new, lacking all precedent, laying siege to a body unsuspecting of it and so that much more vulnerable. Lee only knew that his feeling was entirely different this time up the mountain. In the truck with Marjorie, his awareness of the impending encounter had been so acute he’d felt bruised on all sides, as if by an onslaught of sensory hail. Now a featureless pad seemed to muffle him from his surroundings, even silence his breath in his throat. When he did choose to listen to Morrison and Dave and the third agent, whose job was to drive, the substance of their conversation was received by his mind with the indifference of a pond stretched beneath a light rain. Explosives ordnance detonation, command post, device signature—Lee might already have been on his own, already climbing the mountain, wizened and hunched and impervious, like the monks he remembered from boyhood: serene with indifference, their life in this world and their life in the next mere conditions, marked off by the slightest of membranes, through which one might pass anytime, no big drama, no tears, no regrets….
At the defunct wood mill, they unloaded the snowmobile, put on their snowshoes, watched the SUV leave them behind. The SWAT team was in place, too far away to give alarm and so too far away also to give comfort. At least four separate law-enforcement agencies, represented by more than two dozen persons, with countless more en route, from East Coast and West, from a nearby army base, were secreted in Sippston; yet it was really just three mismatched men, in the sighing near silence of a pine mountainside. Two of the men hadn’t slept for two days, and one was sick with the flu, underweight, over sixty, and his cold-weather clothes did not fit. Two were armed, and one could barely stay upright in snowshoes and while supporting the weight, which seemed to double and double again, of his bulletproof vest. It seemed to Lee, every moment, that in the next moment they would sit and discuss in detail what was going to happen, but they never did, because they never could have; future time had taken on a strange, truncated quality, and there was only the immediate moment, in which shoes and sidearms were adjusted, and the subsequent immediate moment, in which they awkwardly climbed on the snowmobile—Lee in the middle, Morrison behind him, and Dave at the controls—and the subsequent immediate moment, in which this physical intimacy felt almost comical, but the comedy was remote, out of reach, like the V-shaped black bird drifting far overhead, and then the subsequent immediate moment when the snowmobile came to life with a racket like that of Lee’s ancient lawn mower, and then Lee was no longer aware of immediate moments.
Nothing looked as it had the night before, in the darkness and rain. At every bend and ascent in the track, Lee expected the cabin to leap onto them, a devouring monster of shingles and boards. They roared and whined, throwing snow divots, seeming to fissure the earth with their noise, his terror that Whitehead would hear them endurable only because demolished by the even greater terror he’d be pitched from the bucking machine—but after they’d abruptly stopped, and dismounted, and started to slog on their own, he understood that they’d never been anywhere close to the cabin, that in fact they would never come close. It was Zeno’s snow hike. Lee felt, within ten or twelve marshy, upstraining steps, that he’d been pushed to the limits of his body’s endurance, that now he’d passed into the dissociated state of a victim of torture, that the vest, which seemed made of lead plates, was sawing his arms from his shoulders, and the shoes, which seemed glued to the snow, were uprooting the tops of his thighs from his hip joints, and that feverish unconsciousness was about to submerge him. He seemed to see himself, and Agent Morrison and Dave, from some swirl-inscribed distance, across which their three forms, bent in effort, appeared scored by a swarming of little white worms. It was snowing again, he realized: tiny featureless pellets this time instead of feathery flakes. The sky seemed to have closed like a lid. It was harder to see. Beside him, their gasping breaths drowned out by his, Agent Morrison and Dave were lumpen blocks of dull color, of browns and sickly army greens, camouflage tones that made them not less visible but more inexplicable against the backdrop of whitish gray soup. What were these shuddering, khaki-clad lumps? Lee was no less visible in his borrowed parka, which was navy blue, with an edging of mangy fake fur on the hood that had clotted with snow and his own frozen spit. And he remembered, suddenly, that the Communist soldiers had worn white cotton clothes in the winter and crawled through the snow while invading his country, and this was why no one had seen them in time to repel them.
“Do you know what a hemlock is?” Dave was asking. “Like a feathery pine?” Lee managed to show that he did. “Once you’ve climbed to that big hemlock there, that’s about fifty yards, you have a clear line of sight to the cabin. But go slow. Me and Jim’ll go the long way to come out at the back of his woodpile, but we need time to get in position.”
No admonition had ever been less necessary. Watching the other two men hunker off, Lee experienced a sudden inversion, all the alarming sensations of being knocked off his feet, as he sometimes did when nodding off to sleep. Perhaps he had actually fainted. But when he jerked back to awareness, his heart rampaging, his limbs turned to rubber, he was upright. This was the form defeat took. He might have been a dead piece of tree that had fallen upright in the snow. He would stand here forever, immobile, and not even rot.
And yet he must have clawed his way somehow, from the place they’d left him to the hemlock and from the hemlock to the cabin’s little clearing, which drew him miragelike, alternately appearing and fading, assembling and dissolving, through the snow and the trees. When he was a young man, he’d walked from his invaded, fallen city all the way to the sea. He’d walked, amid corpses and stragglers, completely alone, his family swept untraceably from him as if by a tsunami. And that had happened to a separate man’s body, perhaps even a separate man’s soul: he retained only the dry knowledge of it, as if acquired from history books, the same way this ordeal was being swiftly excised, so that even as he endured, he diligently forgot.
He didn’t so much bravely enter as fall into the clearing.
The snow here was almost two feet deep. Exhausted, he sank into it, his knees buckling, the tangled snowshoes partly under his buttocks, his left hip canted out so that it quickly grew wet. Gaither was dead, he remembered. His own Aileen was dead. Brilliant, unbearable Hendley was dead. Lee was alive, but in a moment he, too, might be dead, just another condition, the boundary of his life a mere membrane through which he would pass. He was aware of the cabin’s door opening; the snowflakes had grown larger and lighter, and the wind had died down, so that the whine of the cabin door’s hinges was as audible to him as if he stood just on the threshold, though he was possibly ten yards away, a few pickup-truck lengths. Marjorie had turned around in this space; she’d had to squeeze, but she’d done it. Now came Whitehead’s boots scraping onto the threshold; if in the snow hush Lee could hear their abrasions this clearly, wouldn’t Whitehead hear two other men creeping past his woodpile? But Lee wasn’t thinking of this. He was remembering instead something Whitehead once said in a class they had taken. They’d both been interested in simple group classification, which held that of those phenomena known as multiply transitive permutation groups, only four existed. That was a given; it was not controversial; but Donald Whitehead had once scoffed at it, and when their professor had asked what he meant, he’d replied, with strange heat, “I don’t like to be told there are only so many of something. I don’t like to be told things like that,” and Lee had been both disturbed and impressed by that peculiar, self-certain outburst.
“I must admit I am less overjoyed,” Whitehead said now, from his doorway, his voice sounding very different, wary and thick, as if congested with feeling it fought to suppress. “I’ve assumed, since our strange reunion, that your trustworthiness went without saying. But perhaps I’m sentimental after all, and deceived. Who fetched you last night? And how did you get back here now?” Lee saw Whitehead reaching for something, brushing fingertips over some item to be assured it was there. From behind Whitehead’s bulk, a white plume of misvented woodsmoke escaped out the door, and Lee remembered the stench of the cabin, or smelled it again, as it made its way across the cold to him. Whitehead’s attire, as well as his manner, had changed since the previous night. Lee realized he was wearing the old houndstooth jacket. He must have ventured outside to retrieve it from where Lee had dropped it in the course of his flight. And then dried it, perhaps carefully draped on the smoking woodstove. It was true that the decades had made it too small for his frame. It barely stretched shoulder to shoulder and winged out on both sides from a gap where it should have been buttoned. Even the sleeves ended short of the thick, hairy wrists. Now Lee knew, from Agent Morrison and Dave and Tom, that Whitehead had never been the scion of a moneyed and lettered East Coast family, as Lee once romantically thought. He was the midwestern son of a husbandless mother, who had raised him in sooty brick houses against a background of smokestacks. The jacket must have come from a secondhand store, like Lee’s briefcase. Perhaps it had never quite fit.
He could only ignore Whitehead’s questions and accusing assumptions. “Donald,” he said instead, hoarsely, around chattering teeth. “Did you ever do it? Did you ever manage to prove a fifth group?”
Lee was not near enough, but he sensed something disrupt Whitehead’s threatening face. An impulse of eagerness: it made a tentative showing, lingering in the background of the forbidding expression, as Whitehead lingered in the doorway of his cabin. “You mean a quintuply transitive permutation group?” Whitehead finally said.
“Yes. Like we discussed in seminar.”
“Well, Mathieu says that the problem is settled,” Whitehead countered, a note of irony lifting his voice.
“You didn’t think that it was.”
“I still don’t. I think Mathieu’s approach lacked generality. It’s very strange you should remember I said that.”
“I remember very well,” Lee said, although he hadn’t remembered, not for thirty-one years, until now. But now he did remember very well. Now it came to him envelopingly, as memory often did.
“Your memory didn’t serve you so well yesterday. You seemed taken aback. I notice you still haven’t explained how you got here alone.”
Lee stabbed his spindly, flexible poles through the snow until they struck solid ground and then began struggling to pull himself upright, although he remembered Dave saying to use them for balance, not leverage. “Maybe that’s because,” he managed, heaving breaths, “I remember you differently. To me you were like an aristocrat.”
He saw Whitehead start forward to help him and stop short. Whitehead stepped back into his doorway and made a brusque noise of scorn. “The prince saw me as princely.”
“I was no prince,” Lee said, giving up for the moment and sitting back heavily, his legs splayed in front of him now, his rear soaking and numb.
“Nor was I.”
“You were the best of us,” Lee rebuked. “You were brilliant.” He remembered Fasano’s words to him: So bright they seem radioactive. “All my life all I wanted was what you threw away.”
“All you wanted was the chance to work on weapons contracts, or build supercomputers? I doubt you wanted that, Lee.”
“Is that what you were doing? Those aren’t the only choices. When we studied together, we did pure mathematics. We ignored applications.”
“Certain applications I’ve found interesting.” Whitehead cocked his head slightly. “These are things that I was very much looking forward to discussing with you. Come in, Lee. Cross over this untouched snowfield, on your surprising snowshoes, and come into my home. But perhaps some misgiving is making you pause.”
“You could have done brilliant work,” Lee persisted. “You were given such gifts, and you wasted them. It’s awful to someone like me, who never had them at all.”
“Or perhaps you are tired, or hurt, and you need my assistance,” Whitehead added. “You wonder why I don’t come to you, with my own hand extended. Are my misgivings a mirror of yours? Or do I misjudge my friend?”
Whitehead had not contradicted Lee’s own claim to lack scholarly gifts. After a moment Lee said, not to wound the other man but from an opposite impulse, an authentic concern for his soul, “You could have used your own mind, instead of trying to get rid of others.”
Now Lee saw, for the first time, Whitehead’s inchoate suspicion coalesce into anger. “Is that your assessment of me? If so, it’s sentimental, not rational. Every human life is not sacrosanct. I hold this is true. I think you do. I know our society does. It will want to remove me for my so-called crimes, and if you agree with that punishment’s premise, then you agree with me, Lee. Some humans must be removed, for the good of the whole. We all concur on the principle. We only disagree on how it’s put into practice. Society will condone my removal, to avenge the removals I’ve accomplished myself, which had far greater value. How can one judge? You’ll be lucky not to. If the atom bomb hadn’t existed, would the people of Hiroshima have been able to judge the superior outcome, on August sixth, 1945, when nothing particular happened?”
“Hendley never would have harmed other people,” Lee protested, meaning to continue, and even if he had, it’s not your place to judge any more than it’s mine: you’re not God, but the rest of the sentence was stuck in his throat. For the first time since Hendley had died, his death pierced Lee with intimate force. Lee was as stunned by the taste of his tears as if from the top of this mountain he’d found himself thrashing around in the sea.
“Hendley’s world of computer junk food for the brain would have been, and probably still will be, despite my best efforts, even worse than the atom bomb was, because it will come on by stealth, like a cancer, and be fatal before it’s detected. Oh, my friend,” Whitehead said in remorse, crunching down the two steps and plowing powerfully through the deep crust of snow, arm outstretched, toward where Lee found himself not just crumpled on spent legs but weeping. “Oh, my friend, I’ve been touchy and rude. I’ve been pacing all day like a cat in a cage, your departure last night made me think—”
Lee’s tears had seized hold of him so ruthlessly, were wringing him so unrelentingly, he discerned even less than Whitehead the approach of the two hidden men; he was equally shocked, more afraid, as they came flying clumsily forth, wallowing through the snow, leaping on Whitehead like cooperative ambushing beasts. Whitehead was a singular beast of his own, for a moment majestic and doomed, his leonine hair standing out as he fought to twist free of his captors, who had snared him ignobly, with handcuffs snapped open like giant fishhooks, and with guns. It seemed to Lee that despite all the roared imprecations to Get down! and Hands up! and Lie still! and Don’t move! the event was silent, a wild mute tornado before which he cowered, but perhaps this was only because Whitehead in his fury was silent, never looking at Lee, never calling to him, not with threats nor with supplications. By the time Lee was lifted back up to his feet, the little clearing was teeming with people and bristling with guns, but Whitehead himself, the caught beast, had been carried away.