For hours that night I read through my history, in the telegraphic style of web addresses. I say read, though in fact I barely made a dent in those five thousand pages because once I had confirmed what was before me the temptation to check the addresses against my memory, to ascertain whether every email I had sent and received was there accounted for (they were, to my astonishment, every one of them, beginning from a week before the first box arrived and going backwards in time, though how far I could not quite discern on first reading), and in so reliving my recent activity I felt both the futility and waste of my hours but also the horror of being watched, of knowing that even if someone was not actively monitoring everything I did then they were surely recording for future use everything I read and wrote and viewed online. I do not imagine, I am sensitive enough for this to be true, that the intrusion I felt in those hours alone on a cold Monday night in my apartment was as painful or traumatic as rape, but rape was the metaphor for which my mind first grasped. The violation felt like a hand punching up through my viscera and seizing my heart. I could not begin to go to sleep. It is one thing to imagine a faceless government entity somewhere logging my activity, quite another to have someone go to the trouble of printing out the record of such activity on white paper, placing it in a standard cardboard box, wrapping it in brown paper, and addressing it in permanent marker before having it delivered, or delivering it himself, in person, in disguise, to my home address.
~ ~ ~
Unable to sleep, I watched Tuesday dawn knowing I could not possibly teach that morning. On the radio, Democracy Now was reporting that the United Nations had scheduled peace talks between rebels and the Syrian government, while the government of Pakistan was protesting America’s ongoing drone war, which seems, according to The Washington Post, to be under the control of the CIA rather than the US military. On the New York Times website I read about the effective banning of street protests in Egypt, and because I suddenly wondered about the wisdom of reading such an article in a form that was traceable, and, more to the point, because the story itself was something I did not wish to think about, I turned off my computer and stared out the window at the dull November light, seeing a face in my mind, in the movements of cloud behind the projection of memory: a face I had been trying, unsuccessfully, to forget, along with the three syllables, the arrangement of phonemes, attached to its image.
Since it was the week of Thanksgiving and a major storm was threatening the East Coast, no one would complain if I canceled my classes, which I promptly did. With nowhere else to be I stayed in bed all morning listening to the radio, reading the news about Egypt and Syria and Iran and Iraq and Pakistan and Yemen even when I wanted not to think about such places, listening and reading as I lay surrounded by the record of my recent life, sometimes moved to bouts of shaking and weeping. There was more of my life recorded in those pages than I cared to remember. Not that I have done anything about which I should be truly embarrassed. A sex life lived out alone, in isolation, with still images on a screen, not even with another adult interacting in some live if remote way on the other end of an anonymized connection, did not seem extraordinary, since so very many people view porn and the porn I had looked at over the years was not even terribly exceptional, I would hazard. Yet seeing in glimpses the perambulations of my own fantasies and desires mapped in this way so galled me that I felt I could not even leave the apartment, terrified that the shame would flare on my cheeks and brow, visible for all.
What, in fact, if the pages had come from a current student, perhaps even Rachel? She had behaved slightly out of character the day before, and it was not unreasonable to suspect that, as one of my closest advisees, one of the students I had come to know best in those first months back in New York, she might have taken offense at something I said in the welter of comments I have made on her work. It is possible I unwittingly provoked her anger, such that she might attempt to persecute or threaten me. Something like this had happened in Oxford, I have to admit, actually on more than one occasion.
I cannot explain why I have attracted this particular breed of student over the years. In one of my tutorial groups during my first year at Oxford I had a student named Jayanti, and in that small group (I think perhaps there were at most only half a dozen second-year undergraduate students), Jayanti was always the least prepared, had sometimes not prepared at all, failing to do the reading, or writing nothing she might present. Halfway through the course of the eight-week term in which the trouble occurred (I think it was Michaelmas, I remember the leaves turning, or rather I remember taking walks to try to sort out what was happening and being conscious of rotting leaves underfoot), Jayanti began missing tutorials. With each tutorial she missed I would send her an email noting her absence, enquiring if she had been unwell, hoping she would be able to attend the next tutorial, reminding her that tutorials were compulsory and she should send me the work she had failed to deliver in person. Always I copied in the Senior Tutor. At first Jayanti responded in a measured way, apologizing, claiming illness, offering a doctor’s note, asking to arrange to make up the missed class, though I was under no obligation to provide such a service and I do not think we had any meetings outside of the ordinary tutorial sessions.
For a couple weeks Jayanti came to class, although she still did not seem very well prepared and the essays she had written sounded as though they might have been the work of someone else. Then, in the final two weeks of term, as we were approaching the Christmas holidays, she failed to turn up for a tutorial and failed to write to explain her absence, so in response I wrote a firm but professional email, again copying the Senior Tutor, to make note of her absence and remind her once more that tutorials were compulsory and illness required a doctor’s note to be excused.