A Person of Interest Read Online Free

life, we all lose—not just those of us who are his friends and colleagues, but this country. ” Lee almost spat at the revolting waste of it. “Here’s a man who’s the future, and this sonofabitch tries to bomb this man out of existence!” Lee himself was surprised by his eloquence; the volcano within had erupted, and he’d hardly been conscious of the column of fi re that poured out of his mouth. They used it all except the part with “this sonofabitch,” and they had probably wished they could use that part, too. Of Emma Stiles’s interview they used nothing, showing only a quick shot of her crying and being hugged by her roommate. When Lee had finished with the cameras, he’d walked over and hugged Emma tightly himself. And she’d come to him all in a rush, like Esther when she had been small and he’d had to awaken her from a nightmare. A gesture so natural to him, and yet so unexpected of him by the people who thought they knew him. Many of his younger colleagues weren’t even aware that he had a daughter, although framed pictures of Esther—as a toddler, at six, at sixteen—always sat on his desk, as invariable as his green-shaded lamp or his fountain pen.
    Stepping away, giving Emma with care to her roommate again, Lee had tried to forget what she’d said raggedly in his ear: I SAW him —
    Lee watched himself that night on the eleven o’clock news, squirm-ing with not entirely pleasureless discomfort at the strange sight of his own downturned mouth, his own vertical furrow like a knife wound 14 S U S A N C H O I
    between his eyebrows, betrayals of age he could hardly believe he possessed, and the messy white thatch that apparently passed for his hair.
    Seeing himself on TV was like seeing a stranger perform a harsh version of him, under the merciless lights, and then hearing his voice, the strong accent that still stained his English despite decades of rigor, was its own agony. Yet his words sounded good. The vain suspicion that had sustained him through unbroken disappointment at every stage of his career—that he was at least a good lecturer, charismatic and bracingly scary—now found new confirmation. He moved from the ottoman—
    where he’d been squatting like a true Oriental, elbows on his knees, focused motionlessly on the screen of his blizzard-prone Zenith—into the tattered La-Z-Boy, with his bowl of fried beef and green peppers and rice and his can of Bud Light. At least the second Mrs. Lee, in her rapa-cious divorce settlement, hadn’t wanted this hideous chair, in which he’d probably spent twenty percent of the past twenty years. The chair’s upholstery was some kind of supposedly wearproof, stainproof, punc-tureproof miracle fiber of the mid-1970s. He remembered the mentally unstable salesman at the La-Z-Boy store, leaping onto the chair like a hunter onto a felled elephant and stabbing it again and again with a silver nail file that he gripped in his fist. “See?” the salesman had shouted, panting with effort. “No . . . holes! No . . . holes. . . . The weave of the fiber just bounces right back!” “Oh, my God,” Aileen had said, as Lee pulled Esther behind him protectively. But it had worked, hadn’t it?
    They’d purchased the chair, on installment.
    Now the chair was worn, and stained, and its hideous black-and-white plaid was dark gray overall. But there weren’t any holes. Instead the coarse weave had grown less and less like a fabric and more and more like a net, barely restraining the chair’s flesh of crumbling foam rubber. A chair after my own heart, Lee thought as he made it recline—and it still reclined effortlessly. Worn down so it looks like garbage, but at least no holes.
    The next morning Lee read his remarks in the local paper, the Herald, and that afternoon, to his shock, also had them pointed out to him where they appeared in the New York Times. The Times story was small, from the Associated Press, but seeing himself in its pages gave Lee a more