Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked (11 page)

*   *   *

I eat a dinner of roast chicken and green beans, then sit for a while in the Observation Lounge, a glass-walled car with seats angled along the sides for optimal viewing.

We have entered a realm of white clapboard farmhouses, each grouped with its barn and silos in a palisade of shade trees, each surrounded by flat, immaculately tended fields of crops. The image repeats itself for mile after mile: farmstead and fields, farmstead and fields, the conformity of the pattern almost as impressive as its extent, as if some gigantic roll of wallpaper were unfurling at the same speed as our train, imposing its slightly surreal pastoral vision over the world with a gently irresistible power, like the power of sleep.

I am going to cut off your head
 …

My son’s unabashed Oedipal exuberance comes back to me as I stare out. Something, some connected thought or memory, seems to be hovering behind the phrase, but I can’t immediately grasp it.

I do remember that the words are spoken by a pleasant, educated young man, the son of Tintin’s Chinese friend Mr. Wang, who has been sent by his father to protect Tintin in Shanghai but has been poisoned with Rajaijah juice on his way.

Rajaijah juice is the poison of madness. It releases impulses of a violent but also childish nature (victims are as likely to spout nonsense or tweet like a bird as attempt to behead someone), and it is irreversible. I recall the picture of the sword-wielding young man in his tunic and skullcap, grinning cheerfully as he grabs Tintin by the shoulder and tells him:
I am going to cut off your head …

The phrase revolves in my mind, trailing various associations. Abu al-Zarqawi, of course, and the many other educated young men you read about all the time now who have drunk the poison of madness and slipped back into the realm of boyhood fantasy, no longer inhibited from speaking its elemental language of explosion and decapitation. I think of the trancelike dance my son calls “exploding,” in which he hurls himself up and down on our bed or on the trampoline out in the yard for hours at a time, flinging his arms in the air and tossing his head back with a rapturous expression while making sounds of bomb blasts, rattling gunfire, swishing light sabers, lost in an imaginary world of blissful, unending combat. I think of Osama Bin Laden’s favorite saying from the Prophet (so I read somewhere): “I wish I could raid and be slain, and then raid and be slain, and then raid and be slain”; its recognition of bodily ecstasy as the secret basis of terror, with even an infantile eroticism implicit in the lullaby rhythms (Bin Laden could be the dead man in my fable, my underworld double, born the same year as me, father a builder of monuments, himself a dreamy, retiring type, living for a time in his agrarian idyll with vague pretensions to poetry until he found his true vocation). But none of this quite brings me in reach of whatever it was I had felt hovering in the aura of that phrase, and I get up, walking back to my roomette with the thwarted feeling that comes when you fail to find your way into some glimpsed area of thought that had seemed to promise a spell of pleasurable contemplation.

Now it is twilight and again the landscape has changed. Different shades of green tinge the gray shadows, and the country has a gentle roll in it, with woods and streams curving down into pockets of darkness. It reminds me of England: an improbably unspoiled England, with shire-sized vistas stretching away like old ink-tinted maps of English hunting country. Only the strange bluish greens and the tall pewter towers of the grain silos (fewer and farther between now) strike a foreign note, though the effect of them, like the képis and peculiar cars in Tintin, isn’t so much to cancel the impression of Englishness as to suggest an Englishness under some interestingly sinister enchantment.

There is a knock at my door: one of the train conductors, come to prepare my bed for the night. I stand to the side, watching her fold the seats together.

“What state are we in?” I ask.

She turns to face me, a pleasant-looking woman in her thirties, with a lock of gold hair curling from under her gray Amtrak visor.

“Missouri,” she says.

She gives me a smile, as if ready to talk more if I would like to. I
would
like to, but I am distracted by something and she leaves before I can speak.

And then, as she disappears down the corridor, I catch hold of what was eluding me before. It was possibly the knock at the door that reminded me, because that is how the adventure begins: a disturbance in the doorway on New Year’s Eve as the stranger bursts into the castle, cantering into the banquet hall on a horse. In one hand he holds a branch of holly, in the other a massive ax. He himself is enormous, a giant of a man, and his beard is green.

It occurs to me as I write that even then, at this early, not yet hostile stage in Nasreen’s campaign, I
was
, after all, aware that some large subject had arrived at my own fortress door, despite my skepticism about the likelihood of such a thing ever happening. It was just that the nature of the challenge she represented hadn’t yet disclosed itself. The Green Knight’s challenge is of course immediate and unambiguous: the most bizarre challenge in all of literature, and also, in its sheer brazen irrationality, a radical summation of all other challenges. I will stake everything and lose everything if you will stake everything and lose everything and then perhaps one or both of us may gain something neither had ever imagined even existed.

You cut my head off, he says to Sir Gawain, offering him the ax, and in a year and a day’s time, seek me out and let me do the same to you.

*   *   *

I was thirteen, in my last year at boarding school, when I first read
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
. It was given to our class by our English and music teacher, an enthusiast for all things medieval. The school itself, a Gothic pile rising from the greensward of its golf course and games fields, had something medieval about it. All boys, its atmosphere was part monastery, part military outpost. Before meals we lined up in divisions for inspection, and then marched in formation into a dining hall frescoed from top to bottom in scenes from Arthurian legend, with castles, forests, jousting knights, and a gold-hilted sword in a stone.

Free time was devoted largely to warfare. In the woods beyond the games fields we built fortified encampments over the craters left by fallen trees, digging trenches and tunnels between them to create ever-larger compounds, and charging out to attack other boys’ encampments (to raid and be slain, and then raid and be slain) with pinecone hand grenades and, when we could smuggle them past the matrons who checked our baggage on arrival every term, pea-shooting Sekiden guns.

There was the physical joy of fighting, but more intense and long-lasting was the glory that burned inside you when you had distinguished yourself by some bold act and been recognized for it. In the austere regime we lived under, with few possessions and no personal power, glory was what made us rich, and we attended to the correct remembrance of our own and one another’s deeds with the heraldic zeal of Arthur and his knights.

There was a chapel too, a small stone and stained-glass building, which you entered through a door in the gym, exchanging the thick sock-stink for the scent of candle wax. A portrait of Edmund the Martyr, for whom the school was named, was painted over the nave. The school motto—
Per Manendo Vincimus
, “Through perseverance we conquer”—was inscribed above the altar on a pennant with a stylized flutter in it rather like the one adopted after 9/11 for depictions of the American flag; that stirring, menacing, triple ripple suggestive of some violent agitation being stoutly withstood by its fabric. Every weekday morning we filed in for prayers, Christians and heathens alike (the king of Jordan’s son, Prince Abdullah, now king himself, sat in the pew behind me with his bodyguards), and on Sundays there was a full-length Communion service, also obligatory.

I didn’t mind this; in fact I liked it. I joined the choir and wore my white surplice with modest pride. I liked being part of the mood of gentle pathos created by the anthems we sang: “Ave Verum,” “O for the Wings of a Dove,” and I liked the religion too, or thought I did. When the chaplain commended us to the Peace of God which passeth all understanding I felt a soothing calm settle over me. If I was unhappy I said the Lord’s Prayer and felt happier. It seemed to me a natural progression from this to partaking in the Communion itself, and I signed up for confirmation classes so that I could join the other initiates at the altar, consuming the wafers and wine.

And yet almost from the beginning of these classes, a feeling of unease began mounting inside me. I tried to ignore it, but a few weeks before the Bishop of Chichester was due to arrive and perform the ceremony, it rose to a pitch of intense, if obscure, dread. Bracing myself for a unpleasant encounter, I told the chaplain I was having doubts, and after a surprisingly short conversation (he didn’t seem nearly as concerned or upset as I felt he should have been, or as I was myself), I pulled out. Sometimes, looking back, I have been tempted to see this episode as the sign of some authentic core of Jewishness in my soul, recoiling from the act of apostasy. But aside from the fact that none of those things mean very much to me anymore—souls, apostasy, authentic cores—the truth was that I experienced it as something purely negative; merely a kind of surging veto, unaccompanied by any more positive sense of who or what I might be if I was not this.

All of which—the medieval atmosphere, the strong group identity and my dawning sense of estrangement from it, also the near total absence of women (and its effect of investing the female sex with powers verging on the occult)—made me naturally inclined to be interested in a text like
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
. Even so, I was unprepared for the force of its impact on me. Aside from anything else, it was the first piece of literature that made me want to write something myself. The speed and boldness of its opening moves excited me like nothing I had read before. There was something almost physically violent in the way the story accelerated into high gear through those first outrageous images—the green-bearded knight on his green horse, the beheading, the monstrous body seizing its own head and riding off—the alliterative lines slashing their way forward as if the act of creation were occurring over a simultaneous hidden act of destruction. I had noticed that when my father was pleased about the way his work was going, a look of savage glee (I think of it as his “Tartar” expression—his ancestors were Russian) would light up his face, and I connected that expression with this opening, each seeming to reveal something pleasurably violent at the core of the creative act: a sensation I was extremely interested in experiencing myself.

But even more stirring than this literary pleasure was my feeling of affinity with the figure of Gawain himself.

From his first moment of modest self-assertion as he asks King Arthur’s permission to accept the Green Knight’s challenge, I identified with him in a peculiarly intimate way. Even now, at different moments of my life, different junctures of the strange quest that follows (strange because it is the story of a man seeking his own destruction) seem to throw an uncanny light on my own existence.

Permission granted, he takes the ax and prepares to deal the blow. The knight bares his neck and Gawain strikes, cutting the great head clean from the massive shoulders.

Does he believe the affair is now over, that the decapitated knight, having made his foolish provocation and got what he asked for, is going to remain obligingly dead? If so, he is seriously mistaken. Blood spurting from the wound, the Green Knight picks up his rolling head by the hair and remounts his horse. “Find me at the Green Chapel,” he says, angling his disembodied face at Gawain. He gives no clue as to where, in all of England, this chapel might be, but warns Gawain that if he fails to come, he will be called a coward. (I want to write that as “a fucking faggot coward” but the text won’t quite bear me out.)

Life, death, honor, reputation. Such, at this point, are the terms and stakes of the challenge.

The story has been lighthearted up until now. Christmas festivities are in full swing and laughter pervades the court. But as the year passes and the time approaches for Gawain to set off on his mission, anxiety descends. For Gawain’s sake his comrades keep up the pretense that this is all a jolly adventure, but under their jokes they are already grieving for a doomed man.

There is an icily ironic scene of him putting on his sumptuous armor, the last word in sabots and greaves, all lavishly embossed and embroidered, with the pentangle, symbol of virtue and purity, painted in gold on the shield. The irony being that his mission is to receive a blow, not to ward one off, so that all of this extravagant protection is entirely pointless. This is a suicide mission.

Off he rides then, setting out into the wide reaches of prehistoric Britain. Loneliness assails him. Hunger sets in. Cold pierces through his armor, and as the appointed day approaches with him still having no clue as to the chapel’s whereabouts, he begins to reckon with the gravity of his situation. The isolation of the hero has begun. As he sleeps in his armor, near slain with sleet, night after night in the naked rocks with the cold creeks clattering around him, his severance from the easy, cozy, determinedly upbeat collective consciousness of the court is complete, and he begins to emerge as an individual human being, “a man all alone”: vulnerable, doubting, with failure and dishonor looming, and annihilation suddenly an encroaching reality.

In this condition, lost in a deep wood, he reverts, as people do, to the self-soothing formulas of religion. He says his Lord’s Prayer and his Ave Maria, then begins making the sign of the cross over himself, once, twice, three times …

A castle appears, shimmering through the oaks. I remember it as I remember the town that springs up instantaneously in Tintin, or the McMansion developments outside Chicago, with their look of improbable newness. To Gawain it resembles a paper ornament, with its shining white towers.