Riding in the back of the black town car down Seventh Avenue, I thought of a Syrian doctoral student who arrived in Oxford almost at the same time as me, and I think of him now, wondering if my brief association with him might have been a foretaste of what was to come. The young man made odd threats against me and my colleagues, demanding special treatment for no better reason than because he had recently been working for Syria’s mission at the United Nations in New York. When his demands were rebuffed he threatened the entire department. At first no one took it seriously, but when the threats escalated I reported the young man to the terrorist hotline that Britain had then set up and within a few days he disappeared and no more was heard of him.
I did not then and still do not regret what I did, and the fact that he disappeared suggests to me I was not mistaken in reporting him to the authorities. It occurs to me now how easily a single tip-off, a phone call lasting no more than five minutes, might change the course of a stranger’s life. Am I, I wonder, any different from the ordinary East Germans who turned themselves into informers for the Stasi? I assumed the young Syrian was a threat but had no evidence other than my suspicions and fears. I remember now that he said something to me along the lines of, ‘things are going to change around here. You’ll see who really runs the show.’ It was perhaps nothing more than a young man’s boast. In fact it sounds, thinking about it once more, like little more than ill-advised swagger, the sort of threat someone who has been on the receiving end of an authoritarian boss might then turn around and use against the next weak person he or she encounters — the kind of boast I can imagine I myself could have made to a senior colleague at Columbia, much to my regret. Perhaps there was nothing suspicious about that young Syrian, but the British security services must have thought otherwise, since he disappeared. It is possible, I suppose, that he was not detained but simply chose to leave. His face came back to me that Sunday as we turned onto Bleecker and suddenly a group of young Middle Eastern men surrounded the car as they crossed the street. I had more or less inoculated myself against seeing threat in a brown face during my years in Oxford, particularly after buying the house on Divinity Road, which required, for the fastest possible commute to my College, walking along the Cowley Road where so many Pakistanis and people from elsewhere in the Muslim world have shops and make their homes, as well as go to worship. From my back garden I could see the dome and white spire of the Central Oxford Mosque and on more than one occasion had to listen to the music of a party in some neighboring garden, melodies and rhythms such that I fancied I might as well have been in Lahore or Istanbul. No, living in Oxford in the immediate aftermath of the attacks on New York and Washington was like having immersion therapy by exposure to the thing one fears most.
There are several doormen who work in my building but the guy on duty that Sunday was a clean-cut Puerto Rican called Rafa.
‘Professor O’Keefe! Package for you.’
From behind the desk he pointed to the area where packages are left, near the mailboxes and the windows looking out on the courtyard between the three buildings. Odd that a package would arrive on a Sunday, but perhaps it had been delivered on Saturday and I had simply failed to check whether there was anything for me.
‘Do you know if this came yesterday, Rafa?’
‘Can’t tell you, boss. I came on at ten this morning and it was here when I arrived. Ignacio was on duty yesterday. You can ask him tomorrow.’
The box was wrapped in brown paper and was the size of the old cosmetics cases my mother used as a young woman, the variety of luggage no one takes on airplanes anymore but which were once a staple of women’s accouterments; I remember that the last one she owned, before they became extinct in the age of strict bag limitations, was covered in turquoise vinyl, part of a larger set of suitcases all in the same color, with brass locks and fasteners. It must have dated from the 1960s, and after my mother no longer used it for makeup it became the repository of photographs that had never made it into albums and which she now keeps under her bed and for all I know has continued to open every day, inhaling the case’s old cosmetic smell and the odor of the slowly decaying vinyl and whatever toxic chemical complexity went into fixing the turquoise dye. The box was that size, and had the heaviness of the cosmetic case when it was fully packed with bottles and vials, and as I held it in the elevator going up to the third floor, examining the unfamiliar handwriting that had addressed it to me, Professor Jeremy O’Keefe, I imagined all the possibilities it might contain. There was no return address, no indication of a sender or origin, no postage, and thus no postmark, so truly no way of determining where it might have originated, at least not before I had opened it.
I put the box on the coffee table in the living room and it is possible I forgot about it or that I was disturbed enough by its arrival and mystery that I feared opening it, or it could be nothing more than the fact that Meredith phoned to tell me Peter had spoken with Dr. Sebastian and confirmed I could come for an appointment at ten on Monday morning, which would give me ample time to get back to my office for the meeting with Rachel at 4pm. ‘Maybe,’ Meredith said, ‘it’s time to get a smartphone. That way you’ll always have access to email and something like this would be less likely to happen next time.’
‘I’ll think about it.’
‘Come on, I know that means you won’t think about it.’
‘Okay, sweetheart, I’ll get one tomorrow or the next day, if that makes you happy.’
‘It would make your life easier, that’s all.’
‘I don’t know that it would have made any difference to what happened yesterday. I still would have gone to the café, and if I’d had one of those things then perhaps I wouldn’t have waited for half an hour to see if she arrived, so it might have saved me time, but the mistake would still have happened.’
‘I know it’s unsettling.’
‘If you notice anything, or if you and Peter remember any occasion when I seemed to have been forgetful, but more than just in an ordinary way like struggling for a name or something, then you have to tell me.’
‘I will, but we talked about it again, and neither of us can remember anything of the kind. You seem fine to us. . just a little lonely.’
For a moment I could not speak. A cry swelled in my throat. I was surprised that she was addressing my loneliness, having imagined that by appearing ebullient every time we met, I might have concealed just how depressed I felt. I swallowed a few times and said, ‘Yes, I’ve been a little lonely lately. Missing people in Oxford. I had very good friends there.’
‘But you still know people in New York.’
‘Not any close friends. And everyone in Oxford has gone unexpectedly silent, as if they resent my leaving. You’re the only person I can really talk to, Meredith. I’m sorry if I’ve seemed needy.’
‘You don’t have to be sorry! It’s nice to have you around. You don’t ever have to feel bad for wanting to see me.’
‘But if I call and you’re busy, or it isn’t a good time, I want you to promise you’ll say so. I don’t want to be a burden.’
‘Please, Dad, my life isn’t that busy, I swear.’
She gave me the address, the doctor would be working from her home office instead of the hospital, because, I supposed, it was the week of Thanksgiving, or perhaps memory specialists were not based in hospitals, or for initial consultations they thought it not so threatening to see the patients in a less medicalized space, where the prospect of long years locked in a dementia ward would not open off every corridor glimpsed in the walk from the entrance to the examining room. The address was on the Upper West Side, on West End Avenue, and I entered it in my online calendar so that I would receive an email reminder on Monday morning.