Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked (17 page)

“Yes.”

“Would you mind throwing out your stuff?”

The man, about my age, looked peeved, but said okay.

“You can just put it there, in the garbage,” I told him, still perfectly polite.

The man threw out his paper plates and napkins. Then he looked directly at me with a nasty smile and said:

“Sieg Heil.”

Under normal circumstances I’d have been too dumbstruck, and too inhibited about making a scene in public, to come up with any kind of retort until long after such an incident was over. But I was in such a coiled-up state of tension by that point that I reacted without hesitation:

“What?” I said quietly.

He continued smiling. I took a step toward him.

“Do you want me to throw a cup of boiling coffee in your face?”

His smile turned a bit sickly: “All right, I just…”

“You must be out of your fucking mind, saying something like that to a Jew in New York.”

“I … I’m sorry.”

“People clear their stuff away here. There aren’t any waiters.”

He swallowed, then pouted: “Well … I don’t like being told what to do.”

At this point I became louder. “I wasn’t fucking telling you what to do. I was just asking you to get your fucking crap off the table.”

At that he moved toward the exit. “Okay, I … I apologize. I apologize.”

As he and his girlfriend left, I became aware that everyone in the tiny café was looking at me in silence. Perhaps no one else had heard his “
Sieg Heil
” or, if they had, had known what to make of it (it’s a peculiarly English put-down, and an antiquated one at that). Far from applauding me or even nodding mild approval, they were looking at me as if I might be about to take out a gun and start shooting. I left, feeling distinctly that I wasn’t going to be welcome back there.

And then there was the paranoia. This manifested itself in a number of ways, but the source, the underlying premise of them all, lay in Nasreen’s uncanny ability to orchestrate other people, or at least the illusion of other people, into her attacks. Paranoia is a dysfunction in one’s relations with other people. It requires a social context, and Nasreen’s incorporation of my various personal and professional associates into her campaign supplied this very efficiently. It also requires a constantly shifting boundary between what one knows for a fact and what one can only imagine, and this too, this destabilizing principle, was supplied by Nasreen. All she had had to do was introduce the concept of smearing my name, and furnish a few concrete examples of having done so, and my anxious self-interest could be relied on to expand the process indefinitely. The calculus was simple: If a person is prepared to falsely assert
X
about you, then why would she not also falsely assert
Y
? Why, in fact, would she not assert every terrible thing under the sun? And if that person has already demonstrably reported those terrible things to your agent, your boss, your colleagues, then why might she not also be in the process of reporting them to your neighbors, your friends, your editor at this or that paper or magazine, your relatives, et cetera?

I fell prey to the worst imaginings; suspecting, increasingly, that everyone I spoke to on the phone or ran into in town had heard Nasreen’s allegations about me, either directly from Nasreen or in the form of rumors set off by some Web posting of hers, and that they were secretly harboring the thought that the soft-spoken Englishman in their midst might be some kind of monster. The fact that I had written a novel,
The Horned Man
, in which a college instructor believes he is being framed for a series of sex crimes, gave the situation a piquancy that didn’t escape me, though I was in no condition to enjoy it (“How I had managed to lay myself open to an act of such preposterously elaborate vindictiveness,” my hero reflects with a pertinence I struggle to find purely coincidental; “how or why such an intricate engine of destruction could ever have docked at
my
life, was still unfathomable…”). On rare occasions when I was able to persuade myself that this really
was
all a case of my own worst imaginings, Nasreen would invariably deliver some dismaying new evidence to the contrary. I remember at one point wondering if my sudden interest in honor, name, “reputation” was a bit fanciful, a case of allowing writerly interests to shape the way I was experiencing this ordeal. But in February 2008 a volley of emails arrived in which Nasreen explicitly targets these entities, plucking the words, it seemed, straight out of my own mind. “
Your reputation is ass…,
” runs the inimitably phrased heading of the first email in this volley. “You think you’re clever but your name is tarnished,” goes a line in the next. Just as she had once felt controlled by my fictions (“i’m living your short story out and I’m scared”), so I now began to feel controlled by hers. Never mind that my real self was innocent of everything she accused me of: out there in cyberspace a larger, more vivid version of myself had been engendered and was rapidly (so I felt) supplanting me in the minds of other people: Nasreen’s version, the thief, the racist, the sexual predator.

The sexual slander was of course the most dangerous, threatening not just my livelihood but the basic conditions of my life. We know how vulnerable men have become to this taint (women too, though less so). I had observed it repeatedly since moving to the States, from the “recovered memory” hysteria of the eighties, with its scenes of sheriffs dragging bewildered old fathers off to jail, to the more complex sexual harassment dramas of the nineties. Like most men my age, old enough to have observed the patriarchal model of male behavior up close and young enough to have recognized its obsolescence, I was in favor of the attempt to regulate it out of existence. But I had seen how easy it was to abuse the shaming and ostracizing power the new attitudes brought. At a certain point in the ascendancy of a new idea, just a word can turn a human being into shit: different words in different eras; race words and class words in the past, now sex words.

For some time Nasreen had been very obviously trying to find a way of using this kind of verbal napalm against me. In particular she seemed to have been looking for a formula that would square her acknowledgment that she and I had never come close to any kind of sexual contact, with a paradoxical eagerness to call me a rapist. Already she had found ways of associating me with the idea of rape without actually accusing me of it, but I had sensed that she was moving toward something more direct.

The rape she refers to, so far as I can piece the story together from the various fragmentary accounts she gives in her emails, occurred at the offices of a well-known national magazine where she was working some time before she enrolled at Morgan College (in other words, some time before I met her). She had passed out or been drugged at an office event and woken up certain that she’d been assaulted. She had reported it to the police but they had declined to investigate.

Her Amazon review and email to my boss linked me—rhetorically if not factually—with this rape (“It turned out that James Lasdun was not interested in my work but was trying to sleep with me. This, after I’d been raped while trying to finish my work…”).

But even before this, she had begun to work me into the rape itself, writing in January: “It’s clear James has been using me … he may have even initiated the rape so as to steal my work and give it to X…” and in February floating the suspicion that I might have been the actual assailant: “I hope to God James is not my rapist…” The practicalities of this scenario, in which my plot against her turns out to have been in motion even before I became her teacher, obliged her to construct a complicated set of motives and connections linking me to her, which in turn required me to have been already working in concert with one of my future colleagues at Morgan College (I’ll call her Liz): “i think he and liz set up my rape…”

No doubt these allegations sound too obviously ridiculous or crazed to convince anyone of anything, and perhaps they were. But I don’t think Nasreen particularly cared about convincing people. The point, as she had candidly stated, was simply to tarnish and smear—to render me, shall we say, unfit for public consumption. Given the energy she was putting into this, it seemed to me that she was bound to succeed, if not by reason or subtlety then by sheer force of attrition. In the deepening gloom of that winter I began to feel that I and other men were beginning to occupy a position in our society like that of women in repressive traditional societies, where the merest suggestion of sexual transgression could mean death. Like them our reputations were frail, in need of vigilant protection. We needed our own form of purdah, it seemed to me; our own yashmaks and chadors … Certainly I could have used something like that after my conversation with Frank. Formally speaking, I was in the clear, my word accepted over Nasreen’s, but the nature of a smear is that it survives formal cleansing, and I felt the foulness it had left behind, like an almost physical residue. What did the other people in the department who had read the email think, now, as I passed through the offices? What did these assistants and other teachers see when they looked at me? People die of curses in primitive societies. The victim internalizes his designation as poison, excrement, untouchable filth; feels or imagines the community cutting itself off from him and collapses inward. Fatwa, voodoo, excommunication—all attempt to tap into this power, and Nasreen seemed to have found her own way of using it. It became an agony to walk through those gray-carpeted rooms and corridors. I felt the literal reality of that elemental attribute of shame, the desire to hide one’s face, and I would have gladly covered mine if some convention for doing so had existed. Somehow I had re-created in my own psyche the America of the Scarlet Letter and the Long Black Veil.

*   *   *

By June 2008 the rhetoric of the emails had reached a logical extreme. Not death threats exactly (Nasreen seems to have been too canny for that); more like death wishes, death prophecies, death curses:

I hope he dies if he is behind all this …

die. i hope your kids die …

Die traitor-ugly-bitches … DIE …

I didn’t seriously think she was going to come and kill me, though I did find myself looking closely at the cars that drove by on the dirt road outside our house, and sometimes at night if I heard a sound I would lie half awake for long stretches, wishing I owned a gun. But by this point I was no longer responding so much to the literal content of the emails as to the mere fact of their undiminishing volume and persistence. They reached me less as specific threats than as a kind of pure, abstract antagonism, and I reacted with a correspondingly abstract distillation of pure pain. “Thinking” about the emails no longer consisted of appraising or trying to understand them, so much as merely feeling them pulsate in my mind like some malignant bolus.

In my initial plan for this part of the story, I had considered transposing an event from fifteen years earlier in my life, in which a prolonged period of stress had culminated in a rather spectacular medical drama. I was afraid all this talk of torment might become a bit vaporous without some concrete dramatic representation to anchor it in reality, and this event would have fit the bill perfectly.

I had been sitting on my bed when I felt an excruciating pain across my back and left shoulder. I thought I’d pulled a muscle and maybe pinched a few nerves. There was a strange pressure against my lung when I breathed in, and soon I found I couldn’t draw in enough breath to fill my lungs. I took some ibuprofen and lay down, trying to rest, but every time I changed my position something seemed to shift inside my chest like a sac filled with oil and gravel, the gravel grinding over a network of nerves as it slowly repositioned itself in the thick oil. Finally I called my doctor, who told me to come in immediately. He listened to my chest and sent me straight to the hospital, where an X-ray revealed that my left lung had collapsed. The emergency-room doctor made an incision over my upper rib cage. Lifting a sharpened steel rod with both hands, he plunged it down between two of my ribs. As I shouted with pain, he stuck a tube into the hole, connected to a device that looked like a small humidifier. Bubbles went up through the water in this, indicating, so he told me, that the lung was reinflating itself.

The condition, known as spontaneous pneumothorax, isn’t fully understood, though it has a relatively high rate of incidence among Jewish males in their thirties. I had had TB in my twenties, which the doctor thought might have made me more susceptible. Also, under the stress of the foregoing months I had stupidly started smoking, and this too may have been a factor. But whatever the immediate medical or genetic cause, the occurrence was so irresistibly symbolic of my inability to shake off the burdened feeling that had been afflicting me that I chose to think of it as entirely psychosomatic in origin. Basically I had imploded.

My idea, as I say, had been to move this event into the present narrative, using it to indicate the level of stress I was experiencing under Nasreen’s onslaught. But soon after I began writing I realized this strange narrative could work only if I kept very strictly to the facts. So I am obliged to relinquish the scene. But there are other things I could offer in its place that, if less dramatic, were at least a part of the imagery that presented itself to me at the time. Reading Tintin to my son, for instance,
The Seven Crystal Balls
and
Prisoners of the Sun
, I saw myself graphically portrayed in the tomb-robbing Western scientists who fall into comas on returning from South America, and go into paroxysms of pain every few hours as their Inca tormentors back in the Andes stick pins into their doll-like effigies. Those were me, those white, middle-aged men writhing in agony on their beds from some unseen cause. And Rascar Capac, the Inca succubus who breaks into their homes to administer the coma-inducing narcotic; Rascar Capac with his fiendish yet sympathetic presence (after all, he is the avenger of the colonized, the oppressed, the pillaged), his angry dark skull-face and skeletal arms, his affinity with fireballs and lightning and smashed glass; Rascar Capac, “he-who-unleashes-the-fire-of-heaven,” was Nasreen.