Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked (16 page)

I have vivid memories of this meeting. It took place on a sunny morning in the early spring of 2008. As I walked from the subway I could feel a kind of thin, improbable elation flickering inside the otherwise black mood engulfing me. I couldn’t quite get over the thought that I was on my way to a meeting with an NYPD detective. My cherished principle of “internal necessity” seemed to have converged, miraculously, with the principle of action, and here I was taking matters into my own hands: exercising “agency.”

The station was near my old neighborhood, and a certain nostalgia further intensified this volatile state of mind. Here was the street where I had lived when I first arrived in New York twenty years ago. Here was our old apartment, K——’s and mine. Here was the street where the woman had called down to me from her window. The sidewalk trees were dotted with tight buds. Banks of tulips in a window box glowed in the sunlight.

Patrol cars and traffic scooters crowded the sidewalk outside the precinct building. Inside, a desk sergeant directed me upstairs to the detectives’ office. I climbed a flight of worn steps. A metal door opened onto a large, open, bustling room. Officers, uniformed and plainclothed, sat at desks that ran the length of it in two rows, interviewing people, talking on the phone, working at laptops. To the left was a barred cell with a bench on which a young man in handcuffs was sitting, head bowed, a uniformed woman leaning against the wall opposite, staring down at him.

Detective Bauer’s desk was at the far end of the room. He stood up as I approached and shook my hand. He wore a brown jacket and tie. I suspect he was about my age, though I perceived him as older. He was pinkish and sandy-haired with very light brown eyes, pale-lashed. His face was large, his body heavy-framed.

He pointed to a swivel chair by his desk and I sat down.

Just as we started talking my cell phone rang. It was my daughter, twelve then, and I took the call, excusing myself to the detective, who smiled affably. It wasn’t anything important and I got off quickly, explaining to my daughter that I was in New York, talking to a detective about Nasreen.

As I hung up it occurred to me that the call had very conveniently solved the problem of how to present myself to the detective as a family man with nothing to hide, something that had seemed important to establish. But then almost immediately I began to wonder if it might have seemed a little too perfectly timed, raising suspicions that I’d set it up in advance, which would of course have suggested the opposite: a furtive, private, calculating type … Another of Nasreen’s legacies: this corrosive tendency to question and distrust all impressions of other people, my own of them as well as theirs of me.

“So this lady,” the detective resumed. “Remind me. She’s a student of yours?”

“She was, several years ago. It’s a complicated story.”

As succinctly as I could, and uncomfortably aware of all the other people in the room, I told the detective the story of my acquaintance with Nasreen: her term as my student, the friendly correspondence we’d had when she got back in touch two years later, the outburst when I made it clear I wasn’t interested in having an affair, the resumption of our amicable correspondence, my gradual backing away as she started forwarding other people’s emails and deluging me with her own, the hate mail, accusations, and strange demands for my apartment keys that began after this withdrawal became complete. I did my best to supply the logic linking this chain of events, though I was aware of its sounding pretty tenuous, almost as if I had come there to complain about a bad dream I’d had. And I made sure the detective understood that although I was the main target of Nasreen’s wrath, other people, principally Janice and Paula, had been sent equally venomous emails. I didn’t want him to conclude this was all just some murky tale of an illicit affair gone sour, as I imagined I might have done in his position.

He listened without interrupting and nodded thoughtfully when I had finished. If the world of graduate writing programs, literary agents, freelance editors, publishing deals, intellectual property, and so on was at all mysterious to him, he didn’t show it. His demeanor was calm, a little detached but sympathetic, like that of a physician one is consulting for the first time and filling in on the intimate history of one’s ailments.

He asked if I’d brought the emails, and I handed him a selection I’d made from each of the different phases I’d described. He looked through them in silence, taking his time. On a cabinet behind him was a fish tank. The fish in it appeared to be tiny sharks: black with white underbellies, triangular dorsal fins and pugnacious, wedge-shaped heads. I’d never seen anything like them and wondered if they were a standard feature of detectives’ rooms, or peculiar to this precinct. Not that there was anything sharkish, on the face of it, about Detective Bauer. If anything he seemed a rather mild man. He appeared to be genuinely shocked by Nasreen’s emails. His pinkish complexion was mottled with darker reds as he looked up from them.

“All this stuff about drugs,” he said, frowning. “I don’t like that.”

That took me by surprise. Nasreen often mentioned smoking pot or taking speed, but I’d never given it much thought. To the detective, however, these casual references to an illegal activity were apparently not something to be glossed over so easily. I had the feeling he was almost personally affronted by them, and I felt a bit embarrassed at having revealed my lack of concern about them.

I nodded lamely. “What about the other stuff?”

“Well, it’s aggravated harassment, no question. We’d pick her up right now if she was in New York. But you’re saying she moved to California?”

“According to her.”

“That could be a problem.”

Aggravated harassment, he explained, was a misdemeanor rather than a felony, and it was unlikely, given the expense involved, that a district attorney was going to have her extradited from California to New York just for a misdemeanor.

“I’ll talk to the DA’s office, I’ll definitely do that, but even with something as bad as this”—he motioned with what seemed to be sincere disgust at the pile of emails—“it’s going to be a long shot.”

But he had another proposition. In his experience, he said, a call from an NYPD detective was usually enough to stop this kind of thing. He would call up Nasreen and talk to her, tell her that if she continued harassing me or any of her other targets in any way, which meant any kind of contact at all, she’d be arrested and brought to New York to face charges.

“It’s a little bit of a bluff, since like I say the DA probably isn’t going to want to spend the money to have her extradited, but with luck she’ll take me at my word. They usually do.”

Though I didn’t want to discourage him, I thought I should tell him how she’d responded to the cease and desist letter from Morgan College. He nodded, but didn’t seem too concerned.

“We’ll see what happens. Another thing we can do if this doesn’t work is arrange to have a couple of officers out in California drop in on her. That can sometimes get a result.”

I said I thought that would be an excellent idea. There was a pause.

“What do you think of her?” I asked. “I mean, what do you think’s actually going on?”

He looked away a moment, then looked back.

“I have relatives with a daughter like her,” he said. “Same kind of what you’d call borderline personality. Sometimes she’ll do stuff like this and her parents’ll call me. I’ve had to deal with her multiple times.”

“Borderline? You mean as in … on the edge, psychologically?”

He shrugged.

“Able to act very crazy if they want to but also able to control it if they want to.”

The subject had brought a look of melancholy sympathy to his features. He was an odd mixture of compassion and rather old-fashioned severity.

I’d wanted to ask him more about his understanding of “borderline personalities,” but the meeting was apparently over.

“So anyway,” he said, standing up, “give me a little time, but I’ll definitely call her, and we’ll take it from there. Okay?”

I nodded, thanking him effusively.

Nasreen had sent me various phone numbers over the years, including those of family members out in California (she’d copied me, God knows why, on her correspondence with some of them), and I gave these to Detective Bauer.

I left feeling cautiously optimistic.

*   *   *

This, more or less, was where matters stood when Frank appeared at my door with Nasreen’s email denouncing me as a racist, a thief, a mediocre writer, and a danger to young women.

I had spoken once more to Detective Bauer by then, to report a new development in the emails, a disturbing one (but all developments in this saga were disturbing), and to see if he’d spoken to Nasreen yet. He hadn’t, though he assured me he would soon and asked me to fax him the new emails. But just the fact that I had reported the matter to him, that it was now an official police matter, proved extremely helpful. As I began trying to explain to Frank that every one of Nasreen’s assertions was a lie, I had felt that, although he personally believed me, in his professional capacity he needed something stronger than just my word against Nasreen’s. At any rate, as soon as I told him about my meeting with Detective Bauer, he looked immensely relieved, and by the end of our conversation he was offering his full support and sympathy. At my urging he called Morgan College to verify what I’d told him and coordinate a response. Soon after that his own administration contacted their local police on my behalf, who opened their own file on Nasreen.

In practical terms then, I was unharmed by this latest strike. But by that stage I was in more danger from the psychological effects of Nasreen’s campaign than from any practical damage she may have inflicted.

She had been sending me hate email now for almost a year. On the advice of police, lawyers, and friends, I’d refrained from blocking it, not that this would have been easy to do anyway, as she continually set up new email addresses. As she explained, with her usual candor: “I keep changing my email address because I think you are blocking and silencing me and punishing me for my pain.” Sometimes, when I couldn’t face reading the messages, I saved them without opening them. And sometimes, especially when I came on a whole clutch of fresh arrivals gleaming malevolently in my inbox, I deleted them without opening them, dispatching them in a brief frenzy of defiance, though I always regretted this later (what if I had just deleted the one unequivocal threat that would have elevated her crime to a felony and triggered extradition?). For a period, when I was close to the borderline myself, I asked K—— to check my email before I looked, and to save anything from Nasreen without telling me about it unless it contained a radical new development: I needed to be able to tell myself that the attacks
might
be coming to an end. But mostly I read them, and it was like swallowing a cup of poison every morning, with usually a few more cupfuls to follow later in the day.

If her aim, as a verbal terrorist, was to replicate the conditions of the nation at large inside my head, with its panics and paranoias, its thrashing impotence, its schizoid shame and self-righteousness, its droning monomania, she succeeded triumphantly. Possibly the monomania, the increasing difficulty of thinking about anything other than Nasreen, was the worst of these effects. In this respect her obsession with me achieved perfect symmetry: I became just as obsessed with her. I couldn’t write, read, play with my kids, listen to the news, do almost anything, without drifting off, for longer and longer intervals, into morbid speculations about what new mischief she might be getting up to. The sheer quantity of her emails was such that I never had time to recover my equilibrium between them. Even the ones that just consisted of abuse left a bruised, unclean feeling, and there was never time to purge this, so that an accumulation of unprocessed disgust, pain, and bewilderment seemed to be piling up inside me. I lived, increasingly, in the medium of Nasreen’s hatred. I couldn’t think about anything except her, and pretty soon I couldn’t
talk
about anything except her.

This meant that in situations where I didn’t feel comfortable raising the subject, I would fall into heavy, unsociable silence, while in situations where I did feel comfortable, I would talk about nothing else. Up to a point, people found it interesting. Some responded with stalker stories of their own. A writer friend who had judged a literary competition was being plagued with abuse by one of the entrants, accusing her of stealing his material. A therapist I knew was being sued by a former patient whom she had helped find a job that hadn’t worked out. A couple of male acquaintances confided that they were being harassed by women they’d had one-night stands with. All moderately comforting, though since none of it was on anything like the scale of Nasreen’s campaign, it left me feeling, more than ever, the sheer singularity of my case, which in turn reinforced the sense of its insolubility. Besides, as I heard myself droning on compulsively to these friends and acquaintances, I could feel, among even the most patient and sympathetic, a certain resistance building: not boredom exactly (the continually evolving weirdness of the story seemed to ensure, if nothing else, a degree of fascination); more a kind of helplessness. What could they do, finally, about this intractable problem of mine? And when there is nothing you can do about a person’s suffering, there comes a point where you don’t want to hear about it anymore.

Depression, anxiety, insomnia … one by one the symptoms of stress took over my life. Irritability too. I don’t usually get angry easily, but at home I became short-tempered, and even out in public I was uncharacteristically prickly. Once, in an espresso bar around the corner from our apartment, I almost attacked a man. It was a tiny place with just a few small tables that patrons were expected to clear off themselves when they were finished. I was standing with my cup of coffee, waiting for a table, when the man and his girlfriend got up to leave without observing this basic courtesy. They were English, so, fair enough, there was no reason why they should have known it was the custom. Very politely I asked them if they were leaving.