A friend who lived in Tribeca had been jogging down Greenwich Street but was already at work in Midtown by the time the first plane hit. It was the closest I had come to being touched by the attacks, though a tremor rippled through my psyche in the ensuing days as I tried to get my affairs together to make a move that suddenly felt foolhardy: how could I possibly leave my daughter? What if there were more attacks? What if planes never flew again? What if the world as we had known it was suddenly coming to a catastrophic end?
That brief exchange with Tom picked away at my guilt, and during my remaining time at the Cock & Boot we did not say another word to each other. I admit I avoided him as much as I could. Loneliness had delivered me to this strange situation, in which I felt, if anything, even more isolated and alienated than I had sitting alone in my College rooms in Oxford.
Bethan and I spent the rest of that day walking in the countryside, crossing the Chatsworth estate, eating lunch in yet another pub, this one in Bakewell. Every meal apart from breakfast involved an alcoholic drink and this, I knew even then, was a habit to which I would never be able to accommodate myself. Night fell by half past three in the afternoon, and as the people around me slipped into intoxication, I again wondered why I had left New York. I knew of course. I had little choice, at least no other choice that made sense to me then.
The New Year’s disco at the Cock & Boot was a sad occasion, and sadder still because Bethan tried to make herself an irrelevance, to pretend she was not one of the elect by virtue of her intelligence and hard work and yet that was exactly what she did, becoming so drunk there was no point in my sticking around. I disappeared without saying goodnight and fled the next morning before anyone was up, leaving behind a note of apology that made some excuse about a crisis requiring my immediate return to New York. In truth I took a taxi to the Chesterfield station and caught the next train back to Oxford, where I holed up in my College rooms behind the battlements, cooking and eating alone until the rest of the College began to return.
Bethan and I managed to achieve a quite British understanding that there was nothing more to be said, and whatever brief romantic spark might have flared between us was allowed to die. The awkwardness I feared never materialized, at least not in a way I was aware of, and by the time I left Oxford she was married to a Professor of Theology whose Bohemian family had left him an elegant villa in Park Town, where Bethan turned herself into a North Oxford bluestocking of the kind who bathes twice a month, trailing children of similarly recherché hygiene.
Lying in bed alone in New York all this came back to me, the flashback leaving a sour taste on my tongue and a cramp in my gut, though perhaps it was the Vietnamese food. Before returning to bed I took a turn around my empty apartment, glancing out the windows at the dark length of Houston Street and feeling, despite myself, a pang of nostalgia and longing for Oxford, which for so many years had felt like a place of semi-voluntary exile. Perhaps people like me, people of my strangely unheimlich temperament, always long to be somewhere other than where we are, to live in a state of unhomeliness as a way of distancing ourselves from other people.
As I stood there looking at the city to which I had returned but which had not, in some essential way, returned itself to me, for I still felt apart from it even in the moment of being a part of it, I noticed a man on the sidewalk pause and look up at my window. This time there was no doubt in my mind. He was staring at me and conscious of me staring back. We were looking at each other, as openly as two people can who are separated by glass and distance and the optical confusions of light and reflection. Who is this man who watches me? Who is the person who tracks my virtual life? Are they one and the same? The room was dark, so I could see him clearly, but there was no hope of identifying the man’s face, because he was wearing a ski mask, only his eyes exposed, glinting in the frosty night.
~ ~ ~
On Wednesday I went for the brain scan on Park Avenue because that is where Peter and Meredith and Dr. Sebastian insisted I go, no doubt at ridiculous cost although I never saw the bills, and as I lay in the clunking, hammering white tunnel, listening to music through earphones, a kind of helmet surrounding my head and a mirror above me offering a view of the technician, I already suspected nothing would appear on the image to suggest my brain was functioning in any way that might be judged abnormal. Observation and assessment: how long, I wondered, before they invent a machine capable of reading our thoughts better than we can ourselves?
Perhaps because I had seen the man standing out on the sidewalk the night before, I believed that I was not sick, and the confusion over my Saturday appointment with Rachel could not have had anything to do with me, which is to say I had become certain that although an email from my account had been sent asking to reschedule our appointment, I had never written it, I had not pressed send, nor had I read Rachel’s answer confirming she had received the message I had never written. Someone, without question, was playing with my life. I changed my email passwords but now kept the accounts open, obsessively checking to be sure nothing was amiss, that no one was sending messages pretending to be me, and no alerts were appearing that might indicate the account was open in another location.
On the way home from the scan I stopped to buy a bottle of wine to take to Meredith and Peter’s for Thanksgiving. They had offered to host an extended family celebration, beginning in the morning with a balloon-level view of the parade from their terrace, or from the sunroom if the weather was too cold. As I stepped out of the liquor store a man at the corner — a tall black man in a suit and tie — shouted out to me, ‘Excuse me! Sir, sir!’
I recognized that the black man was hailing me and I looked instantly in his direction. How this kind of recognition remains possible even in crowded urban spaces is, I think, one of the great mysteries of humanity, that one may be addressed merely with a title or an informal noun and still know by the tone, timbre, and directionality of the voice calling that you are the one intended. I looked at the man, expecting perhaps that he was going to tell me my fly was open or that I had dropped my keys or wallet or receipt, or that the bottle of rather expensive Châteauneuf-du-Pape I had just purchased was about to slip through the bottom of its brown paper bag, but instead he looked at me with a concern I found profoundly touching and beckoned me over, as though he was about to tell me I was being secretly filmed for some sort of man-on-the-street show about bumbling nobodies, my little tiff with the clerk in the liquor store which ended with me calling him a ‘jerk’ and disputing the price of the bottle having been captured for the amusement of millions. As I drew closer, the man dropped his voice and leaned close so he could speak quietly but still be heard above the midday traffic, and said, ‘I thought you should know, somebody’s watching you. He went around the corner toward Lexington just as you came out of the store, but he’d been following you all the way down the block and stood there staring while you were inside. I could be mistaken, but it was weird. I thought you should know.’