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Authors: Susan Choi
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certainty, and of guilt, was now making room for plain anger as well. Dr. Lee, Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, all entirely correct down to the esoteric plus-four of the zip code. The return address was 14 Maple Lane, Woodmont, WA, but the letter was postmarked from Spokane.
Gaither could as easily have put it in the mail during a layover between Bangkok and Boston.
Of course I was laughably innocent then, of the workings of human relations. But I am not a sentimental man—nor are you, I’ve long assumed and admired. I only press on the point (on the bruise!) to impress how I’d like to revive faded fellowship now. Now you are probably angry with me, as I once was with you. Please don’t be. There’s a reason my arrow grazed you. I can learn what my long-ago colleague has done in the long years since we last had contact.
My long-ago colleague. Long assumed and admired.
Long years.
There was only one kid in the mail room, a fi dgety undergraduate with sticky black hair and a pierced ear, the kind of boy who prided himself on never going home to his parents, not even at Christmas.
But he was anxious to leave now for his dorm; he’d probably taken the spring-break shifts in the building’s mail room not for lack of friends or activities but to make extra money. “I’m about to take off,” he told Lee. “There’s no afternoon delivery today. All the mail that comes in now, they’re keeping here extra time to go through it. Cops and stuff.
So I’m sorry if you got something late, Professor, but I’m giving as fast as I’m getting.”
42 S U S A N C H O I
“Nothing was late,” Lee assured him, raking a hand over his scalp, which had gone slick with sweat. “I just wanted to know where this came from.”
“Postmark says Washington.”
“I mean . . . well, that’s all right, that’s all right,” Lee said, gesturing in dismissal. What was he asking? This envelope had come to the departmental mail room from where he now stood, University Station; to University Station, via postal circuits unknown to Lee, from Spokane, Washington. And to the mailbox in Spokane from nowhere this boy, or anyone else on this campus, could tell him.
“Cops’re screening everything now,” the boy added, perhaps regretting his smart-aleck tone. “So you don’t need to worry, Professor. I guess they’ve got a machine that can check mail for bombs.”
“I’m not worried, ” Lee said. “Although I’m glad to hear that they’re doing their job.” The police might be able to screen mail for bombs, but not for insidious weapons like this.
I hope to hear from you soon. Until then I remain, Your Old Colleague and Friend
A slashed, crosshatched mark of some kind filled the rest of the page.
By the time he’d returned to his parking space, the letter was interred at the bottom of his ancient calf briefcase, which had grown spider-webbed with dry cracks in the course of the decades because he had never maintained it. The sight of you a bracing reminder of years that have passed. Lee’s silver Nissan the opposite thing, a disposable tool.
Lee’s material world was made up of these two categories, the fl eeting generic and the eternal and iconic. In the first category, his car and his plasterboard home in a suburb the name of which he had forgotten, a home several times too large for him now that the second Mrs. Lee had departed. In the latter category, his briefcase and the desk in his study, a gigantic oak treasure that had happened to live in his fi rst rooming house in grad school; the green-shaded lamp in his offi ce; the Montblanc pen, a gift from his undergraduate adviser, in the pocket of his cheap Penney’s button-down shirt, a type of shirt he bought three A P E R S O N O F I N T E R E S T 43
to the package, like his briefs and his socks and his undershirts, like his food—cardboard cases of Bud Light, Valu-Saks of white rice, planks of beef framed on Styrofoam mattes. Gaither, he
Gaither could as easily have put it in the mail during a layover between Bangkok and Boston.
Of course I was laughably innocent then, of the workings of human relations. But I am not a sentimental man—nor are you, I’ve long assumed and admired. I only press on the point (on the bruise!) to impress how I’d like to revive faded fellowship now. Now you are probably angry with me, as I once was with you. Please don’t be. There’s a reason my arrow grazed you. I can learn what my long-ago colleague has done in the long years since we last had contact.
My long-ago colleague. Long assumed and admired.
Long years.
There was only one kid in the mail room, a fi dgety undergraduate with sticky black hair and a pierced ear, the kind of boy who prided himself on never going home to his parents, not even at Christmas.
But he was anxious to leave now for his dorm; he’d probably taken the spring-break shifts in the building’s mail room not for lack of friends or activities but to make extra money. “I’m about to take off,” he told Lee. “There’s no afternoon delivery today. All the mail that comes in now, they’re keeping here extra time to go through it. Cops and stuff.
So I’m sorry if you got something late, Professor, but I’m giving as fast as I’m getting.”
42 S U S A N C H O I
“Nothing was late,” Lee assured him, raking a hand over his scalp, which had gone slick with sweat. “I just wanted to know where this came from.”
“Postmark says Washington.”
“I mean . . . well, that’s all right, that’s all right,” Lee said, gesturing in dismissal. What was he asking? This envelope had come to the departmental mail room from where he now stood, University Station; to University Station, via postal circuits unknown to Lee, from Spokane, Washington. And to the mailbox in Spokane from nowhere this boy, or anyone else on this campus, could tell him.
“Cops’re screening everything now,” the boy added, perhaps regretting his smart-aleck tone. “So you don’t need to worry, Professor. I guess they’ve got a machine that can check mail for bombs.”
“I’m not worried, ” Lee said. “Although I’m glad to hear that they’re doing their job.” The police might be able to screen mail for bombs, but not for insidious weapons like this.
I hope to hear from you soon. Until then I remain, Your Old Colleague and Friend
A slashed, crosshatched mark of some kind filled the rest of the page.
By the time he’d returned to his parking space, the letter was interred at the bottom of his ancient calf briefcase, which had grown spider-webbed with dry cracks in the course of the decades because he had never maintained it. The sight of you a bracing reminder of years that have passed. Lee’s silver Nissan the opposite thing, a disposable tool.
Lee’s material world was made up of these two categories, the fl eeting generic and the eternal and iconic. In the first category, his car and his plasterboard home in a suburb the name of which he had forgotten, a home several times too large for him now that the second Mrs. Lee had departed. In the latter category, his briefcase and the desk in his study, a gigantic oak treasure that had happened to live in his fi rst rooming house in grad school; the green-shaded lamp in his offi ce; the Montblanc pen, a gift from his undergraduate adviser, in the pocket of his cheap Penney’s button-down shirt, a type of shirt he bought three A P E R S O N O F I N T E R E S T 43
to the package, like his briefs and his socks and his undershirts, like his food—cardboard cases of Bud Light, Valu-Saks of white rice, planks of beef framed on Styrofoam mattes. Gaither, he
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