Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked (9 page)

So that I now have to place that enhanced, glamorized version of myself not in some otherwise calm and neutral context, but in a context of already intense emotional upheaval. Just as the fiancé disappears (whether banished or withdrawing), leaving behind a lover-shaped void in Nasreen’s psyche, so this semi-hallucinated image of myself reemerges in her life, already cloaked in the authority of his prior role as her approving teacher and now, as he deigns to enter into correspondence with her on equal terms, unwittingly making himself a natural target for the projection of further imaginary garlands and embellishments.

Pure conjecture, of course, and it feels very strange to be talking about myself as this supernatural figure, but it does go some way to explaining the early, relatively harmless phase of her interest in me. The flirting, the nervous self-commentary, the strange outburst of jealousy concerning her former classmate, all make a bit more sense in the light of this boosted, exaggerated version of reality.

And finally I must go back to that momentous yet oddly muted meeting of ours at the café—
’
sNice—where Nasreen came to give me her manuscript. Her subdued manner (in sharp contrast to the exuberant emails she had been sending) seems, in the light of these suppositions, less that of an innate “reticence” than of the tongue-tied devotee overwhelmed by the presence of the object of both her reverence and her desire. In which case, as I begin blathering on about my apartment and the problem of finding another subtenant to share it with, it becomes possible, just, to imagine her in a state of confusion in which the distorting forces of merciless self-doubt and groundless optimism (both of which, from my own experience, form part of the turbulent atmosphere of an infatuation) mingle in such a way as to make her believe I am hinting that I would like her to become my subtenant, my secret apartment-sharer, with all the erotic promise such a hint implies, and thereby confirming her strong wish, her determination one might almost say, that I should be as interested in her as she is in me.

Whether or not this in fact represents what she believed at the time, later emails indicate that she subsequently decided to interpret my words in this way. But I’m inclined to think it
was
what she believed at the time. A firm belief in the existence of a reciprocal erotic attraction between us would explain her curious insistence that I was in love with her and unhappily married, despite my very clear assurances to the contrary, and would further account for her jealousy of her classmate, not to mention her delirious reaction to my question about veils.

So much for Nasreen’s possible versions of me and the role these might have played in preparing the events that followed. But what of the role played by my versions of
her
? Did I bring nothing to the encounter, no half-finished narratives of my own, into which I might have knowingly or unknowingly incorporated her? Was I an objective, impartial observer, a purely neutral participant in those early months of our exchange?

I was not. Nobody ever is.

*   *   *

I mentioned a cross-country train ride that I took in the summer of 2006. This too was an event I perhaps glossed over a little hastily, especially given Nasreen’s suggestion that I smuggle her along for the ride in my “roomette.” Not that anything very dramatic happened on the journey, but it occurs to me that it might lend itself to the difficult task I now face of providing some kind of self-portrait, or at least an account of the various strivings and vexations that comprised my sense of who and what I was during that first phase of my encounter with Nasreen, and of what I myself brought to the encounter.

The purpose of my trip was to get to L.A., where I had a journalistic assignment. I could have flown, but I had some time on my hands and wanted to see some of the country. Originally I had planned to go by Greyhound bus, but then I found out about the much more comfortable-sounding Superliners and decided to go by train instead. I had also discovered that one of the routes I could choose from passed through Santa Fe, which would allow me to visit the Kiowa Ranch, where D. H. Lawrence lived on and off during the last years of his life and where his ashes were brought after he died. Lawrence’s novella
St. Mawr
, to which I had recently written an introduction, is partly set at the ranch, and I was curious to see the place.

The journey begins on June 8, which happens to be my forty-eighth birthday. The first night is on a regular train from Albany to Chicago (the Superliners don’t come east of Chicago). The train is full—reservations only and no double seats available. I find myself next to a man in a linen jacket, wearing strong cologne. For an hour or so I pore over
The New York Times
and the
London Review of Books
: an article about an ocean of sand spreading across western China; a profile of Abu al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq who was killed yesterday by American forces; a story about a British subject tortured by the CIA with the apparent consent of MI5 agents, who visited him in his cell but did nothing to help.

A cell phone starts flashing through the breast pocket of my neighbor’s jacket. He pulls it out and answers it, speaking at high speed in a language I don’t understand.

I wander up to the café car and eat dinner. Back in my seat I take out a notebook and start working on a poem. It’s about my father; one of several I have been trying to write since his death a few years ago, most of them in one way or another airing both my grief and my sense of the paltriness of my accomplishments compared with his (at my age he was designing, among other things, Britain’s National Theatre). In this one I am trying to do something with an image of the invasive red-berried vine called bittersweet that has come in under the fence of my vegetable garden. When I started pulling it out I saw that it had spread dense clusters of tiny red roots deep into the garden itself and was going to be extremely difficult to get rid of. The sight of these roots had made me think of the dark crimson capillaries in my father’s high-colored cheeks (he looked like a freshly shaved Father Christmas), which in turn made me think of his presence in my mind, as warmly vivid since his death as it was when he was alive, and in particular of the conviction he appears to have bequeathed me that the only thing worth doing in life is to create art: high, serious art, uncompromised by any conscious striving for worldly success (a conviction that would be a lot easier to live with if he had also passed on the genius necessary to put it into practice).

I write the following lines (and I permit myself the bad form of quoting my own words because they too are in due course to become exhibits in my antagonist’s indictment against me, her fugue of hatred, though it may be puzzling, just now, for the reader to understand how they could ever lend themselves to such a use):

In your book, success

was a dirty word, wealth

even dirtier, fame

not to be uttered;

the work was all that mattered.

I took that to heart I guess,

in my own monkish fashion:

“So much to say no to

before you can start to say yes”

having long been my motto.

No, for instance,

to the bittersweet

I’m trying to extirpate

from under the garden fence …

At which point, having been fairly pleased with my progress, I succumb to doubts. Why should anyone but me be interested in these intimate, personal matters? Shouldn’t I be addressing the kinds of self-evidently important subjects I was reading about in the papers earlier on?

It is a recurrent anxiety of mine, this fear of irrelevance, and I have no argument against it other than the fact, hardly an argument, that sometimes the urge to write these very private things is stronger than the doubts about whether they are worth writing. Right now, the doubts have become stronger than the urge and I close my notebook. Gazing out past my cologne-scented neighbor at twilit pastures, I try to salvage the wasted time by cooking up a story in my head that will involve terrorists, CIA torturers, MI5 observers, and a showdown in the sand-drowned landscapes of western China. It seems to me that if I was to make a concerted effort—read some books, maybe take a research trip—I could possibly come up with something. But for reasons I don’t fully understand I have a strong private taboo against such exercises: stories that owe their existence to an act of will rather than an irresistible internal necessity. What I would like ideally (embarrassing as it is to admit to such yearnings) would be for precisely that force, that “irresistible internal necessity,” to compel me to write about those large subjects instead of the subjects it does compel me to write about, though for this to happen, an event from that larger world would have to impinge directly on my life, and for
that
to happen I must either venture out of my fortress in the hope of something befalling me, or else wait patiently for someone or something to burst in through my door. The latter seems to me the more honorable option, but it requires more faith than I possess (why should any large subject come to my door?), and so I go out from time to time, as I am now: reluctantly, and full of misgivings about the validity of even so passive an exercise in self-exposure.

My neighbor glances at me. Seeing that I am doing nothing, he strikes up conversation. He is traveling to Toledo, he tells me, where he owns a men’s clothing store. His voice, now that he is speaking English, is deep and mellifluous. Memory wants to place a mustache on his lip, but I took notes about his appearance and there is no record of a mustache. He is square-shouldered with large, square-tipped, well-manicured hands and neatly brushed black hair. A faintly dissatisfied expression hovers over him as we talk, the ghost of a frown at his dark brow, as if he is contemplating some vague, constant grievance while simultaneously trying to dismiss it.

He was born in Egypt, he tells me, and lived for several years in Europe—Belgium, Germany, Romania—before moving to the States. I remark that it must be hard, right now, being an Egyptian in America. He shrugs, not disagreeing but not, apparently, regarding the matter as of any great importance. But then he nods. Yes, it can be hard, sometimes, but it’s still a better life here than anywhere else. In Europe, he says, people wouldn’t speak to him. His phrase has a dignified pathos about it: “They did not want to speak to me.”

Darkness has fallen and the passengers in the seats around us are preparing for sleep: spreading coats on their knees, turning off overhead lights. Suddenly a blue blaze flashes from my neighbor’s chest: the phone in his breast pocket pulsating again, brighter now, in the dimming carriage—a strange sight, as if his heart were throbbing with light. He answers it, speaking again at high speed in that harsh tongue—Egyptian Arabic presumably—that sounds to me like some plectrumed instrument being played with sudden, savage virtuosity. Listening, noting my own reactions, I remember the words of Frantz Fanon, drilled into me by an idealistic schoolteacher: “It is necessary at all times and in all places to make explicit, to demystify, and to harry the insult to mankind that exists in oneself.” Well, I have made explicit to the best of my ability, I have demystified and diligently harried, but there are still things that evade my precautions, and the sounds of certain languages appear to be among them. I don’t think I am alone in this. My own language, the Queen’s English, is well-known to strike the ear of many people as intrinsically offensive; the aural essence of officiousness and pomposity. And it isn’t that I find my neighbor’s language offensive; as a matter of fact I find it enviably expressive, but try as I might I cannot dispel the impression it arouses in me of violent emotion, as if in switching to it the man has jumped from the bland, have-a-nice-day conventions of American social interaction into a world of operatic amazements and outrages, every word its own little melodrama. Or as if the language were a force in itself, expressing its character through the man, making him its instrument. And at a certain point my mind, acting in that solicitously associative manner mimicked so cleverly by online shopping sites (“since you looked at this you may also be interested in this”), calls up for consideration the stories I was reading earlier, about Abu al-Zarqawi, killed yesterday with his wife and child, and before I can catch myself (the mind has a mind of its own) I am back in the nightmarish aura of this figure who kidnapped and cut off the head of the American businessman Nicholas Berg with a knife while he—al-Zarqawi—and his four cohorts in ski masks and shemaghs shouted
Allahu Akbar
, God is Great, after which they posted a video online of the butchering, complete with the victim’s screams, bearing the title “Abu Musa’b al-Zarqawi Slaughters an American.” It isn’t difficult to understand how a person becomes a terrorist: how, under what conditions, one might contemplate killing the representatives, military or even civilian, of forces fundamentally opposed to one’s own existence. But to fall on the neck of a captive human being and hack off his head with a knife while he screams; to make yourself into the throat-ripping fiend of primeval nightmare, the crouching, leaping enemy of man, and then blazon images of the deed across the Internet; that would seem to shift the terms of conflict altogether out of the plane of human meaning—politics or even war—into some non-human dimension, bestial but also demonological, something like that realm of frenzied encounter imagined by medieval painters in their depictions of hell, the sinners torn apart by devils, the devils no less tormented-looking than their victims.

The phone call ends. We resume our conversation for a while, and then he yawns and closes his eyes and falls asleep.

In the small hours of the night we are woken—he and I—by federal agents carrying long black flashlights. They want our IDs, just his and mine. We hand them our driver’s licenses. After inspecting them and asking some cursory questions about our respective journeys, they leave. It is no big deal and neither of us makes any comment. But someone in our compartment must have alerted the guard to the presence of suspicious Middle Easterners on the train, presumably after hearing the man talk on the phone. Whoever it was apparently considered me just as suspicious as him, and I am glad of this, but even so I feel implicated: embarrassed and a little ashamed of what was going on in my mind while he was talking, the feverish drift of my thoughts, and as he returns his driver’s license to his wallet and buttons up his linen jacket again, I find myself attributing that restless, faintly injured look of his to an intuition about the nature of those thoughts, the way I mingled his image with that of the terrorist al-Zarqawi. One has no control over the use other people make of one’s image or the sound of one’s voice or any other outward manifestation of oneself. It is purely a matter of trust, and I feel, vaguely, that I have betrayed that trust. And I find myself wondering about some of the attitudes that survive in my mind: ruins of ancient prejudices, inactive but disturbing to encounter, like the decommissioned artillery emplacements we came across the following year in France, steel and concrete structures left behind by Mussolini’s army in the woods above the Roya Valley in Provence, ilex growing out of the gun embrasures, earth silting up the inner chambers.