A Person of Interest (31 page)

That was the one luxury he had earned.

And so when his phone finally rang early one morning, more than a week since Fasano’s last call, Lee leaped on it again eagerly, with no preconception of who it might be: Sondra at last, or Fasano again, or, most unlikely, Morrison. But it was Peter Littell, the uncomfortable chairman of their department. “Could you drop by my office? As soon as you can? I know you don’t have class today, but my schedule, my own schedule . . . ,” he apologized, trailing off tensely.

“I have office hours starting at two,” Lee began.

“. . . right,” Littell said unencouragingly.

“But I can come now. I was on my way there,” Lee decided. He would work in his office; he ought to be spending more time there, not
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less. He shouldn’t seem to be shirking his duties, as he’d shirked the memorial.

On the drive to campus, Lee kept having the sense that the car behind him wanted to pass, but the more he slowed down to let it, the more it slowed down, too. He lost track of it navigating the entrance to the MathSci Building’s lot, congested, as it was every morning, with wild-driving students running late to their classes and this morning additionally with more news vans, not only Newscenter 11’s but several others painted loudly with numbers and logos, all with a sort of a periscope unit on top. The vans were trying to depart the parking lot, or perhaps they were just arriving; Lee sat several minutes in the unusual bottleneck before he could get to his space. Inside his building, once again Sondra wasn’t behind her desk, though the coffee samovar was emitting its tendril of steam, the sign of Sondra’s stewardship.

Jeanette was filing her nails at her desk in the corner; she glanced up at Lee, colored deeply, and swiveled toward her computer.

Littell was waiting behind his desk, seeming very pale, even slightly ill. His reddish beard clashed with his grayish complexion. Lee still thought of Littell as one of the young faculty members, though Littell had been in the department for more than ten years. He was in his late forties, a computer scientist like Hendley but otherwise nothing like Hendley. Lee had always assumed that Littell, colorless even on good days, found Hendley mortifyingly charismatic and enragingly overvalued. Littell had been saddled with the department’s chairman-ship for a record six years, in large part because he had never resisted what to everyone else was a burden to be passed off as quickly as possible, or even totally dodged. Lee, for example, had served only one semester as department chairman, in the Bicentennial Year 1976, after which he had never been approached for the duty again. Hendley had also never served. While Lee had gotten off due to administrative incompetence, Hendley, by contrast, had gotten off due to scholarly brilliance. The deans of the college had felt that Hendley’s time should be all for his research, and Hendley had sainted himself by insisting on teaching even more than they’d asked, for the sheer love of it. Lee was sure all of this had scorched Peter Littell to the same degree it had scorched Lee, but they had never discussed it, being cool with each other, and now never would.

A P E R S O N O F I N T E R E S T 193

“It’s been a hard month,” Littell said when Lee had sat down.

“The students seem to be doing okay,” Lee offered, having fi nally learned after decades that in faltering chat with his colleagues, expressing concern for the welfare of students was always a good thing to do.

“Well, that’s exactly what I want to talk about. How the students are doing. If you can try to think of this in . . . that light, I think that’ll be helpful.”

Littell was gazing at him with a mix of distaste and uncertainty, as if searching for confirmation of something he also dreaded to fi nd.

Under that gaze Lee felt his hand closing more tightly around the cracked leather handle of his briefcase, now unburdened of the letter from Gaither and transporting solely a book on a French numbers theorist Lee had hoped to peruse in his office. “Think of what?” he asked Littell, although he already felt his gut tumbling. It was the same crime again, his failure to mourn publicly. Compounded, if Sondra was right, by ancient memories of antagonisms over Kalotay’s tenure. Either this had reminded his colleagues of that, or that had left them less tolerant of this; either way Lee felt barely able to discuss it again.

“This is very hard for me, Lee,” Littell said.

“I wanted to attend the memorial,” Lee rescued him wearily. “But I was very sick that afternoon.”

After a moment Littell said, “So you really weren’t there? I thought you might have wound up with some other department. It was packed.

It was sort of a madhouse. In a way they’re two sides of a coin.”

“What are?” Lee said, now entirely lost.

Littell seemed to be fighting a twitch or an oncoming sneeze, not a rare expression for a man whose most colorful trait to his colleagues was his ceaseless discomfort, but Lee suddenly wondered if Littell had played truant to Hendley’s memorial also—if that was the real origin of his squirmish distaste. Even a slavish bureaucrat like Littell must find it absurd to chastise another man for his own misdemeanor, and

“packed . . . a madhouse” was a tellingly vague depiction. But instead Littell said, “That outpouring at the memorial and now these . . . rumors. Some hysteria fueling both. They’re very wild rumors, I know.

Lee—” He interrupted himself, as if Lee had interrupted and needed to be quieted, but Lee was still straining to catch Littell’s meaning.

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“What you have to understand,” Littell went on, “is that it doesn’t matter if the rumors are wild. It doesn’t matter if they’re just so much . . . playacting,” he compromised, though he seemed to have sought a more harrowing term. “I don’t have any interest in acting on rumors, but it looks like I don’t have any choice but to act on the rumors’ effects, and it’s gotten to where I’ve had the TV news people all over the campus this morning. Which brings it all back to student welfare.”

“There are rumors about me,” Lee said into the uncertain silence that followed this outburst. Of course this was what Sondra had already told him, and what he’d tried not to hear. His misunderstanding with Morrison and Shenkman, the most minor and private of things, had somehow tunneled out of his intimate sphere and embarked on a new life as gossip. While his polygraph test—absolute and official and exhibiting no evidence of deception—would remain his own secret.

Through undeceived eyes he saw anew Sondra’s constant elusiveness, and the students he passed on the quad, and, worst of all, his class—

short, as it had been every day since the first “normal” day, by a third of his students. He’d benignly forgiven the absentees’ above-average grief for Hendley. And he’d noted as well the keen gaze the remaining ones pinioned him with, their almost sentrylike attention to his blackboard performance, their dead silence when he’d asked for their questions. He had thought, in a small skip of hope, they finally understood calculus.

“One of our students was on TV the day of the memorial, giving his brilliant opinion. No one at the time treated him as an expert.

You’d think that no one ever would. But now our story is national news again with this ‘manifesto.’ ” Lee didn’t respond, because the belated dawn of humiliation, humiliation he was not sure for what, had advanced another dumb increment, so that his body seemed suffused from its core to its dermis with unpleasant, prickling heat. Littell added, clearly hoping to be told not to bother, “I guess I should tell you what’s going around. Or rather the upshot, since I don’t really know what they’re saying. It’s like the Telephone Game that Sophia plays,” twitching one hand at a framed photograph of an ugly, pale, redheaded girl of about nine or ten. “Who knows where it starts, then it travels with rapid mutations, and lo and behold I have people who’ve heard you’re an FBI suspect.”

A P E R S O N O F I N T E R E S T 195

Lee’s mortified heat had evolved into visions of Gaither’s letter, and the moment he’d finally handed it over to Morrison, and his own disappointment that Morrison wasn’t relieved, as Lee was, but angry.

The word “obstruction” sounded in his mind, gleaned from movies.

Had a rumor gotten out that he’d been an obstruction to Morrison’s work? Lee blinked. “Suspect for what?” he asked cautiously.

“For the bombing.” Littell blinked back at him.

“For the bombing!” Lee said.

There didn’t seem to be any joke, although Lee, feeling almost concerned for Littell, probed with his gaze at the other man’s face, as if this might uncover an uncharacteristic, but explanatory, glint of mischief. “The students think I did the bombing?” Lee said. “Do they also think I wrote this manifesto? This thing that . . . well, I don’t even know what it says! I still haven’t read it. Something about getting rid of computers?” Lee saw that Littell wasn’t in on the joke—with his floury consumptive’s complexion, poor Littell didn’t even know what a joke was. But Lee did; it was not the first time he’d been darkly amused by the students’ rich, if cruel, fantasy lives. “That’s
much
crazier than me thinking the bomber is Gaither.”

“Gaither?” Littell asked warily.

“But the students are capable of thinking anything,” Lee went on, relieved that the rumor was so fantastic, so distinguishable from a possible truth—for example, that Lee hadn’t gone to the service because he disliked the dead man or that he had told some white lies to an FBI agent. Whereas something like this, so fl amboyant, so
youthful,
was clearly absurd. Lee did feel a passing sadness—he knew it was because he was not only Asian but old, an easy target for juvenile rumors as much as for egg throwing on Halloween. “Well, that’s outlandish, even as rumors among students go,” he went on. “I remember the student who spoke on TV, by the way. He must be annoyed because I asked him to give me my mail when we were still on spring break.”

“You don’t seem that concerned.”

“Should I be concerned about something so ludicrous? No one over the age of eighteen could believe it. And even with the students, it will pass. Things like this always do.”

“I hope you’re right,” Littell said. He seemed coldly surprised, perhaps at Lee’s greater wealth of experience—Littell was still, Lee
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reflected, a young faculty member when compared with himself. Littell seemed to realize this and by visible effort to take up a cajoling, acknowledging tone. “Of course you’re right,” Littell said. “It’ll pass. So the best thing to do in the meantime, I think, is not give anyone any more to get worked up about. My thought is that you take the rest of term off. Take it easy. Get off campus and avoid all this nonsense.” It felt like the moment when Morrison mentioned the polygraph test—Lee was sure his interpretation was so flawed it would make Littell laugh. “You want me to stop teaching class?” he essayed, more uncertain than incredulous.

“Just for the rest of this term. And for the summer, perhaps, if you were going to do summer session.”

“I do every year.”

“In that case, for this term and this summer, you could take the time off. Kalotay’s already offered to cover your classes and give your exams, and I think he’d be happy to cover your summer also, I can just double-check—” Littell riffled his desk as if to secure Kalotay’s assistance that instant, to oblige Lee’s concerns. At the mention of Kalotay, Lee’s astonishment was eclipsed by a darker emotion; he was very near saying something to Littell from which, tenure or not, he might never recover.

“It is just the students, isn’t it?” he asked tightly. “Who are thinking these things?”

“And the TV reporters, unfortunately,” Littell said, with comradely academic disparagement for the rabble of popular culture, now that he seemed to have won Lee’s compliance.

“The TV news can’t report lies,” Lee observed, but Littell seemed disinclined to view as less than very grave a situation he had himself just a moment before called “hysterical.” Lee felt the need to escape Littell’s office. He had a vertiginous sense of reversal he recognized only from dreams, so that everything it crossed his mind to say seemed at once too severe and too frivolous; he couldn’t read the temperature of this encounter any longer, and he’d never been friendly enough with Littell to appeal for help. He heard himself saying, in a veer toward the too-severe end of the spectrum, “I have tenure,” as if, with his decade-old scoff at retirement—a trait he had always assumed endeared him to his colleagues—there were anyone, let alone Peter Littell, unaware of this fact.

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“Lee,” Littell said very coldly, as if Lee’s hysteria were the one species he couldn’t bear, “I’m not suggesting you give up your job. I’m just letting you take some time off until all this blows over. We’ll all be glad to start fresh in the fall.”

It wasn’t until Lee had left the building, his office unvisited, the French numbers theorist still cached in his briefcase, that it occurred to him that Littell probably welcomed the rumor; it gave him a noble excuse to push Lee into quasi retirement, no doubt with the hope that Lee might then retire for good. He knew that Littell would prefer he recede to emeritus status and give up his classes to a new junior hire who could be paid less than half what Lee got. Lee couldn’t be disposed of, but he could be marginalized, so that his long memory of the way things were done no longer embarrassed Littell’s inexperience, and his centrally located offi ce—though it had a bad view—could be conferred on obsequious Kalotay. Or had he in fact been disposed of already?

He’d come to a shocked halt on the sidewalk, baking beneath the high sun. The day was another taste of midsummer in April, and he was aware of being over- and shabbily dressed, despite having meant to appear very august, in his teaching khakis and an old not-quite-houndstooth jacket he’d purchased years ago, in an unsuccessful effort to fulfill some ideal of academic élan he no longer remembered.

The jacket was not one of those that look better with age. As he stood paralyzed just outside the shadow of the MathSci Building, not even taking the few steps backward that would allow him the shadow’s blue refuge, a pair of female students came conversing around the corner, their heads inclined toward each other. Seeing him, they stopped short and stopped talking, and it was less their approach than its sudden arrest that drew Lee from his thoughts. For a moment the ponytailed blonde, in frayed shorts and T-shirt, and the more elegant, sober brunette, with short hair sleeked close to her skull and in a slim navy skirt and white blouse, confounded Lee in their sisterly union, though he would have known both instantly if he’d seen them apart.