Susan shuffled across the living room and stared out the window. I found myself no longer able to read the language of her movements as I once could, the way a certain posture might convey assent, or a tilt of the head backwards and to the left would betray disapproval. ‘We were all upset, Peter. Not just me.’
As always in that apartment I was conscious of the sound of traffic from the Henry Hudson Parkway and the click of the radiators that were so impossible to control that on some frigid winter days we’d have to open the windows just to regulate the temperature, and the dog, this new dog who was so like Lotte she could have been a clone, had given up on the three humans and stretched out her front legs, resting her white chin on them as those dark eyes, twitching beneath her brows, glanced from Susan to Peter as if she knew one or the other of them would eventually take her out for a walk. Why Peter? I wondered, why should the dog look at Peter with such familiarity?
‘I know who’s doing it.’
‘Who’s doing what?’
‘The person sending the files. It’s your friend, Michael Ramsey.’
Peter snorted. ‘If you think that then you really must be crazy, Jeremy. Michael is a paper-pusher. He’s like the most boring IT nerd.’
‘You don’t know where he works.’
‘He works for a bank. I can’t remember off the top of my head.’
‘He works for the NSA.’
‘You know this for a fact?’
‘It’s the only logical explanation. He’s been standing outside my building on Houston watching me at night. Yesterday he sent me a box of photographs, images of me in Oxford and London and New York, pictures of Fadia and my son, and the doorman took a picture of Ramsey delivering the box. So I know for a fact it’s him who’s doing it. And if he’s not doing it, then he’s the messenger for someone else, but I don’t think that’s likely. Last night he stood out on Houston waiting for me to see him. He wants me to know but he’s also being careful, because the NSA, or whoever it is, they’re watching too. He can’t email me. He sure as hell can’t phone me. But he can stand out on the street and send me printouts of files and let me know what’s happening. He knows there’s no reason I should be watched in this way. He knows and he’s trying to help me, Peter.’
Perhaps Peter shook his head, but he gave me the kind of look I associate with the condescendingly sane person who sees madness everywhere while remaining convinced they themselves must always remain of sound mind.
‘And you’re certain the photographs you received yesterday aren’t simply your own collection of photographs from the past decade? Maybe something you shipped separately, from Britain.’
‘The box wasn’t shipped, Peter! Like the others it was delivered by hand, no postage. In any case, I don’t own a camera. I haven’t owned a camera since Susan and I split. She was always the photographer.’
‘It’s true,’ she said. ‘Jeremy had a terrible eye.’
‘Besides which I’m in the pictures I received, and when I’m not, they’ve been taken in places where I have not been present on the dates they were taken. Don’t you see? Why are you both staring at me like that?’
‘We just think maybe you need help, Jeremy,’ Susan said, her voice strained like it used to be when I could tell she was out of patience with the world. ‘You don’t look well. Your skin is gray. Your eyes — I haven’t seen you look this way before.’
So I was wrong, Susan was against me as well, and it was then that I began to wonder whether she and Peter were colluding, and if, perchance, Peter might somehow be behind everything that has been happening. Perhaps he wants me out of the way. Perhaps I am too great an embarrassment for him and his family. Perhaps he has known about Fadia for some time, perhaps Stephen Jahn has not only been phoning my mother, but has been poisoning everyone against me, or perhaps Michael Ramsey is merely one of Peter’s many employees. Whatever the case, I knew it was pointless talking to either of them, so I excused myself and said I’d be in touch if there were any further developments.
As I walked back up to West End Avenue I noticed the light in Dr. Sebastian’s office was on, and nearly stopped to see if she had a moment to speak, but then thought better of it. I was not in the correct frame of mind, but I wanted to see her again, or felt, for a moment that flitted in and out of my passing thoughts, that seeing her might dismiss whatever remaining doubts I was having about my sanity, and it’s true, I know this, that the questions Peter asked me were infuriating because they did make me wonder if I might be going mad. I took the subway home, and sitting in that rattling metal car I saw how easily I might become one of the city’s legions of unhinged, a man muttering and unkempt, scribbling proof of his own life on scraps of paper, covering every surface of notebook upon notebook, ever convinced of his sanity.
But then, I came out of the subway at West 4th Street, and who was propped against the newsstand reading a magazine but Michael Ramsey. He was in his dark pea coat, with the collar turned up and a knitted black cap, looking like a Danish sailor. As soon as I was next to him Ramsey looked right up at me, as if he knew in advance the exact moment — down to the millisecond — of my arrival, as if he was tracking me on his phone, watching my progress through the city, a pulsing blue dot on the map. He smiled, and it was the smile that disarmed me. There was nothing smirking or menacing about it, nothing practiced, as in the smiles of Peter, or, it occurred to me, Stephen Jahn. Instead I read pity and concern, but also a kind of desperation from Michael that I should understand what he was trying to do.
I slowed down as I passed, waiting for him to speak.
‘We have to stop meeting this way,’ he said, and turned down into the subway.
On Tuesday I had to teach. My students were already half checked-out for the Christmas vacation but I tried nonetheless to draw them together, despite the blank stares and the expressions of fatigue, the excuses when it emerged that more than half the class had failed to watch Mohammad Rasoulof’s Manuscripts Don’t Burn. One girl who was sipping a bottle of soda and eating a bag of chips complained she had been sick, too sick to watch anything but reality TV.
‘Lay off the soda and chips,’ I shouted. ‘Fruit and vegetables! Protein! Your body’s sick because you’re putting nothing but crap into it. You eat crap, you turn into crap, your mind becomes crap! You eat like that, of course you’re sick. I don’t want to hear any more excuses. You don’t do the work you better be on your deathbed.’
The whole class flinched. A boy in the back of the room whimpered. I’d never said anything like that to any group of students in all my years of teaching. On the contrary, I have always tried to be the easygoing and sympathetic professor who students love. That day, however, I could no longer find the other, kinder Jeremy. He had retreated behind some anterior curtain, or perhaps I had at last allowed myself to step over that boundary in my mind, to run free in the great, perforated state that had long been encroaching on the enclave of my rational self. I struggled through the rest of the hour, teaching only to the brightest among my students, showing clips of the moments when the writers in the film are confronted with their tormentors, when one writer in particular speaks into a dead phone line knowing that someone is listening, that everything he says and does is being monitored.
On leaving the building I was unsurprised to see Michael Ramsey standing across the street, but as I walked towards him, he turned the corner and disappeared into a crowd of students. Was it actually him? Did he expect me to follow? Was he suggesting that here, on campus, we might find a place to meet that would be private enough to speak freely?