By that morning, having listened to Mr. Wald and Michael Ramsey’s curious intervention in the conversation, I felt certain that my paranoia was not misplaced. Perhaps in not so short a time my mother and I will both be detained, required to prove our innocence or, worse, to reveal whatever we know — which, I am sure, is nothing. Would you — whoever you may be who eventually reads this, either friend or foe — force my mother to scribble away in a room her account of me, of what she knows of my recent life, even if it was clear she knew nothing? Or is clarity a quality in which people like you no longer believe? Do you require that the world is endlessly gray, every person potentially shading into the categories that merit your attention, all of us, every one, people of interest?
Thanksgiving was in fact quite a happy day, without any arguments or serious conflicts, the presence of Michael Ramsey that morning being the only wrinkle in an otherwise unremarkable gathering, and I had no doubt that I was the only one disturbed by him.
Before leaving Meredith and Peter’s, my daughter drew me aside in the kitchen and asked what had happened during my appointment with the neurologist, Dr. Sebastian.
‘There’s nothing physically wrong with me. The scan — I mean I haven’t had the results, but nothing is going to show up.’
‘Oh good, what a relief. Did she have any thoughts about what might have happened? It still seems so strange.’
‘She advised me to see a therapist or an analyst. It’s not because I’m crazy, but she thought it was possible that something traumatic might have happened recently, or because of some past trauma — I don’t know — my memory might have blocked out the exchange with my student on Saturday. The brain does funny things.’
Meredith scrunched her nose, almost as if she’d drunk too much and was struggling to focus, though I knew this was not the case. She was making faces because she was concerned and during such intense family gatherings her emotions tend to rise even more powerfully to the surface. I knew she preferred not to cry in front of other people, even her family, and it was this she was trying to forestall, as much for my sake as to protect her dignity, perhaps precisely because it happened so frequently in the past, crying was as much a part of her childhood and adolescence — though I remind myself how much of that latter period I missed — as was laughter or ordinary sulking, but in the years of her adulthood I had seen her cry two or three times at most, out of frustration and concern rather than sadness, and I did not want to force that response again, especially not on Thanksgiving of all days, when the kitchen crying-fest between parent and child is as well worn a cliché as the drunken relative who makes a scene before passing out in the guest bedroom.
Meredith made a look halfway between disgust and despair, as if she were considering the possibility that rather than being afflicted by a degenerative disease, her father might instead be crazy, and imagining all the implications of this alternative decline and diagnosis, the ways in which I might suddenly be inaccessible to her just when she thought I had returned as a full participant in her life. One wants to offer reassurance in the face of such paralyzing alarm and since I was certain there was nothing physically or psychologically wrong with me, and the confusion with Rachel was the result not of my own mind but of some incursion into my private messages, that the real issue was the fact of my being surveilled and followed and fucked with by persons and entities as yet unknown, I reached out to my daughter to give her the comfort and reassurance I thought she needed.
I hugged her and whispered into her hair, ‘I promise I’m not crazy. I mean I’m all kinds of crazy in an ordinary way, but I am not crazy, or at least not any crazier than most people. Paranoid a little, yes, and perhaps I have a persecution complex, and sometimes I have difficulty with impulse control, but I’m not any crazier than most people who have spent the bulk of their lives in New York, or Oxford for that matter.’ As I said it, I thought of the many crazy people I had known in Oxford, and in particular about the one person who, the more my thoughts returned to him, seemed potentially to be the cause of this sudden strange turbulence in my life.
‘But you’ll talk to someone? I mean, it couldn’t hurt, could it?’
‘Yes, sweetheart, I’ll talk to someone, just to put our minds at ease.’
My mother and I refused Meredith and Peter’s offer to call a car service and took a taxi back down to the Village. During the ride my mother began to nod off, though it was only a little after seven in the evening, and she woke with a start when the cab stopped outside my building. The doorman on duty was not someone I recognized well enough to know his name. He was wearing no badge and seemed more interested in watching a video on his phone than on making sure we were supposed to be going upstairs unannounced. Since it was a holiday I decided not to make a fuss, although as we waited for the elevator I felt a rising urge to say something, which my mother said for me, speaking in a stage whisper the doorman could not help hearing, ‘If it was my building I’d want the doorman to check who was coming and going. In this day and age you can’t be too careful, but I guess he must be obsessed with football, or maybe he’s watching pornography, you know that’s what most of them do these days.’
The elevator doors opened and I stepped inside without looking back to see the face of the doorman, poor guy, poor chap I would have said only six months earlier, to have to be subjected to my mother’s hit-and-run commentary is never pleasant. I put her to bed early with a glass of whisky, which can be relied upon to make her sleep through the night, although I myself was feeling wide awake once more, and thinking back on the people I had known in Oxford, the man and woman on whom my mind was actively avoiding settling throughout that day and the previous few days, knowing nonetheless they were undoubtedly at the root of what was happening — what is now happening as I write this account.
That is to say, I had begun to suspect that Stephen, who I have been trying to forget, and Fadia, whose face hardly ever leaves my consciousness no matter how much a part of my mind wishes to place her beyond memory, were somehow the cause of the persecutions I was suddenly facing. These are the people you care about, I think, and for no greater reason than because I knew them, allowed myself to become involved with them, to entangle my life with theirs.
It was not until the start of my second year at Oxford that I met Stephen Jahn, his return to the College after a year’s sabbatical transforming my own slightly haphazard social life. Our first meeting was at a High Table dinner when we were seated across from each other, an unusual night when there were only six or so Fellows dining on the dais at the far end of the eighteenth-century hall with the students in their gowns seated on benches at the great long tables. They would sometimes clamber over these to reach the benches nearest the wall, it being impossible, given the length of the tables, to move them such that enough room could be made for someone to take a place further down an otherwise full bench, and for some reason there was a perverse habit of leaving blank spaces and of those who did so refusing to make room, or even to file out and file back in so that the space could be filled without putting filthy shoes on the tables where one was about to eat. But this was Oxford, which delights in the precarious balance of decorum and iconoclasm.