‘You think we oughta call campus police?’
I lifted the box and considered the possibility that it might blow up in my face. It was the same weight as the first two packages, more or less, and when I shook it — rolling on the casters, Ernesto pushed his chair away from me — there was nothing to suggest it contained anything capable of causing physical damage.
‘It’s just paper,’ I said, ‘probably one of my doctoral students. Chapter drafts or something.’ I took the box in my arms and marched towards the elevator.
‘If I hear a bang I’ll call 911,’ Ernesto laughed. Did New Yorkers always have this knack for gallows humor, or is it a more recent development?
Back upstairs I almost dumped this third box down the trash chute, but then curiosity got the better of me and I opened what was by now a familiarly wrapped parcel, only this time the pages stacked within did not contain internet addresses but a log of telephone calls with originating number, number called, date and duration of the call. I immediately recognized Meredith and Peter’s number, the number of my daughter’s gallery, the number of my house upstate, and then when I paged deeper into the pile, there was the number of my mother’s house, of my house in Oxford, of various friends in Oxford and London, Berlin, Heidelberg, Hamburg, Munich, Leipzig, Jena, Dresden, etc. It was the history of who I had called, who had called me, at my home, office, or on my various cell numbers, when the calls occurred and for what length of time, going back nearly a decade, although it seemed impossible, inconceivable that someone had been paying attention to my activity for such a long time, had been making note of this kind of detail. The more I thought about it the more it occurred to me that, unlike with the history of my activity on the internet, which could have been followed by any ordinary hacker, to amass such detailed information about my phone activity — unless those records were themselves susceptible to hackers — suggested the involvement of the government, or some intelligence-gathering contractor affiliated with the government to be more specific, and while I knew this was possible, given recent revelations, it was difficult to imagine why I might have become a person of interest to my own government, or to whatever intelligence division has seen fit to pay such close attention to my telecommunications. Moreover, I could not begin to imagine why someone within that organization would then turn around and send me evidence of the monitoring, for surely I might bring such evidence out into the open, as it were, to expose the level of intrusion — unless, of course, there was something within these pages that might cause me profound embarrassment, although what that would be, well, I could only begin to guess. Or perhaps the guess was not so difficult to imagine. The only relief I found was that this third box seemed proof of my sanity: I could not have produced such a record unless I had kept a log of every phone call made and received every day of my life, and that, I remain certain, is something I have never done.
The phone rang. It was Ernesto from the lobby.
‘I wanted to make sure you were okay, Professor O’Keefe. I didn’t hear no explosion. .’
‘Thanks, it was just some files, old correspondence, from my ex-wife. I still have all my limbs. My apologies for the behavior of the delivery man.’
‘Nah, that’s okay, Professor. If I don’t see you later you have a happy Thanksgiving. You going to see your family?’
‘I’ll be with my daughter tomorrow, and my son-in-law. What about you?’
‘With my sister in Queens.’
‘Happy Thanksgiving, Ernesto.’
‘Catch you Sunday maybe, Professor.’
So, I am not crazy, I thought, hanging up the phone. Someone was messing with my life, or at least monitoring it, and perhaps the messing around part, the monkeying with my email, was a first sally, a play to make me see that ‘they’ could do what they liked because ‘they’, whoever ‘they’ were, had full knowledge of what I did and when I did it. What I needed was to get away from the city, and while I could not very well duck out on Thanksgiving, I decided to go upstate on Friday morning and have a couple nights in the country just to think, away from phones and the internet. I was about to buy the ticket online until I thought to myself, if someone is watching all the time then perhaps I don’t want them knowing that I’m going away, perhaps it will be some kind of test. I would go to Penn Station on Friday morning, buy my ticket with cash, and disappear for the weekend. If I could return to the city feeling as though an actual escape had been possible, some sense of slipping away from the world of constant surveillance, then perhaps I would be able to extend my territory of sanity back to the proportions whereby the boundary is no longer visible.
I took the three boxes of unwanted warnings — for how could I see them except as warnings, whether sent benevolently or menacingly? — and put them in the back of the hall closet where it was easier not to think about them. I tried to spend the evening diverting my attention elsewhere, making dinner, listening to NPR, and then, after loading the dishwasher, sitting down to look at a new book of photography drawn from the Stasi archives. Some photos were of agents and employees in risible disguises, each agent assuming various different personae, suggesting actors in a porn film, while others were reminiscent of Jeff Wall’s work or Cindy Sherman’s or even Rineke Dijkstra’s, images achieving a strangely artful quality even within their artlessness. The highly artificed poses and arrangements of people in space suggested authorial intention, which was not out of keeping, I supposed, with the wider ethos of a totalitarian society, whereby intentionality is present in every moment of being, life both in private and public arranged and patterned by ideology as much as by human needs and impulses. Despite the interest I took in these images, my mind kept chewing at the question of why I should have been a person of interest to the surveillance entities of our government. Why would the NSA — for who else could it be? — have any desire to keep me so closely in its sights? I was no one of interest before I left America. I had not been politically active, nor had my parents, so much so that I cannot remember them ever even putting a campaign sign in our front yard, though I know they always voted through a kind of instinctively faithful spirit, loyal both to the Democratic Party and to America, loyal in an unthinking way because they had come of age in the 1950s, spent their childhoods under Roosevelt and Truman, the children of people whose natural affiliations were with organized labor. I suppose they were political in a rather matter-of-fact way, politics being an unconsidered part of their intellectual and social lives, but mostly they just got on with their work and did not raise me to be a political animal. I vote and I had — still have — strong positions and opinions, but have never been a campaigner. Perhaps the very fact of moving to Britain brought me to the attention of the intelligence community, perhaps all Americans who move abroad are scrutinized in this way.
There was, of course, the other matter. My mind spent that evening dancing a great wide arc all the way round the most likely reason my government might see fit to pay such close attention to my behavior. But that reason was comparatively recent, and the surveillance had quite obviously been going on for a longer time. I was ruminating about this and not really thinking about what I was doing — this happens more often than I would like to admit, my mind goes whirring along a given track and my hands and arms and feet and legs get on with other business — when I found myself back at the window in my living room overlooking the lamp-lit length of Houston Street. The man I had seen before was again stopped on the sidewalk, standing quite still and looking up at my window. The difference on this occasion was that the lights were on in my apartment, so he had a very clear view of me from where he was standing, and I had an even less clear view of him. I raised my hand as if to wave and the man, again wearing a ski mask (what the British call a balaclava), shook his head, his eyes flashing briefly in the street lamps, and began walking off towards Broadway, as he had done on the previous occasion. Why didn’t anyone look at him and think there is a potential terrorist and I should call the police, although if you see a woman in a niqab and burqa you do not, if you’re a good liberal, try to think anything of the kind, but a man in western clothes wearing a ski mask in the middle of the city has, by now, come to look like our image of a criminal, someone intent on robbing a bank or a convenience store or perhaps even worse, with those black leather gloves he might easily have been intending to commit murder, a quick killing with a stealthy knife or silenced pistol or his hands alone, before blending into the crowds on Broadway.