‘So what does this mean?’
‘It means, I think, that you should trust in what you believe is happening around you.’
‘But what if I don’t know what’s happening?’
‘Then you have to find an answer.’
~ ~ ~
Flipping back through these pages, I find myself searching for a succession of clues that might lead to a place of certainty, rather than to further branching questions. The files and photographs I turned over to the lawyers still have not been returned. I understand the investigations are incomplete, but without those records I cannot help doubting all that I think may have happened. Only the monolithic hard drive remains, locked in my desk drawer, and who is to say I did not buy it myself and engage the backup system on my computer to create a perfect archive? Who is to say I might not have sent it out by messenger, and arranged for its immediate return precisely in order to buttress a delusion? Can the conscious mind partition what it knows, keeping one part in the dark as another part works frantically behind the curtain, turning gears and knobs, pressing buttons, amplifying and distorting the voice to deceive both its other self and those that encounter the physical person? Fireworks and smoke machines to distract the terrified, among whom might be included one’s own true self. On the basis of Dr. Sebastian’s questions, I find myself continuing to contemplate this as a possibility.
Each day, I see Michael Ramsey somewhere in the city. I follow, and the next moment, just as I’m about to catch up with him, I find he disappears. I stand at my bedroom window and look out on Houston Street, waiting for him to appear. An advertisement painted on a building, with images of palm trees and white beaches, instructs me: ‘Find Your Beach.’ Perhaps I need a holiday.
There is news of terrorists in Syria crucifying a girl who was the victim of rape. There is other news of terrorists in Iraq throwing half a dozen homosexual men off a building. I know this is not the first time such things have happened, and I cannot help wondering if Saif might be among those who conclude they have the right to pass judgment on the fate of strangers. Are such acts ultimately so different from the execution of inmates in American prisons, or the rape and murder of a teenage girl in Iraq by an American soldier? Surely that is part of the point these terrorists, in their evil, are trying to make.
A few days later, The Journal of Modern History asks me to review a new study about a group of leading British historians who were placed under surveillance by MI5 in the decades after the end of the Second World War, a decision made largely because those men were Communists or thought to be Communists or had simply traveled to Russia at some point in their lives. How like those men I might be, although I am no terrorist, and I have never even been to the Middle East, never traveled to Egypt, not even transited through the airport at Dubai on the way back and forth to one unremarkable destination or another. But perhaps logic does not rule the judgment of men in hidden rooms or standing on the tops of buildings, readying themselves to detain one man or push another to his death.
A new box arrives, this one, identical to the first three, contains all my bank records and IRS returns, beginning from the year in which I first met Fadia. This is not in my mind, surely, and yet, how easy it would be for me to order back statements, to pull up copies of my returns, to make the theater of my brain suspend its disbelief in the film projected on its internal screen, in the fiction — is it fiction? — that the projectionist has chosen from the reels at his disposal. Fiction or documentary? Campus melodrama or spy thriller? In what genre am I trapped?
I appear to be free for now, however imperfectly, and I give thanks for that at least, although I sometimes wake in the night shouting, asking to be released. Perhaps all I need is to see open country and an expanse of sky. I have not returned to Rhinebeck since Thanksgiving weekend and cannot recall when I last spoke to my mother. From the past two days there are dozens of missed calls from Meredith on my phone. I log into my computer, I read Meredith’s plaintive emails but find no energy to reply. I look in my sent mail and discover messages that I myself appear to have written — not unlike the messages I supposedly wrote to my student Rachel — but once more I have no memory of writing them. There is an invitation from Meredith to join her and Peter for a Christmas Eve party at their apartment. My mother will be there, staying for several days, Peter’s parents as well. I should feel free to come early on the day. I think of going upstate instead, absenting myself, but the desperation in Meredith’s tone tells me I should simply accept, which I do. She replies in seconds, offering to send a car. No, on Christmas Eve it makes more sense to take the subway, traffic will be impossible. She replies again, offering that I could come early in the day and stay over, but no, I thank her, I would rather sleep in my own bed.
The night before Christmas Eve I spend alone, eating Vietnamese takeout and watching Blade Runner, the director’s authoritative final cut, which seems to make Deckard more unambiguously android than the other versions I have seen over the years. Once, almost twenty-five years ago, when I was still a graduate student, I flew into Los Angeles one night for a conference. As we penetrated the clouds a landscape of orange lights, glowing through the darkness and smog, came into view, so much like the one Ridley Scott conjured that I imagined for an instant we had flown into the future. Can I see my own place in the system? Can I, unlike Deckard, know what I am beneath the conscious fiction I present to others as well as myself? Will the true instinct seek to express itself if placed under threat? What is it that I think I might be? An android, no, certainly not, but what is Deckard if not (or not only) an android? A revolutionary, an insurgent, a sleeper agent. Perhaps in walking blindfolded through this country of my birth, this motherland I love, the home I want more than anything to find homely, heimlich, the zone of my greatest familiarity, I will eventually begin to see with other eyes.
~ ~ ~
The cawing of crows in wet winter air was England for me, and that crying through bare limbs over lawns which remain green beneath an occasional frost, moss growing dense on all that is still, never failed to hollow me out, leaving a husk of melancholy. In Oxford I avoided going out after dark. I feared the damp streets in greasy orange lamplight and the unpredictability of English men, the surges of violence that seemed to come from nowhere. For wearing a tuxedo, a colleague claimed he was attacked one night after a High Table dinner at Lincoln College, beaten on Ship Street in the center of town as bystanders observed, egging on his assailants, who had no interest in his money or possessions. It was all about class. That is a country in need of revolution, or perhaps every country now is, throwing over the old, the ossified, all the systems we use to destroy ourselves and our world. Burn it all to the ground, only save the art and the archives, the libraries, the knowledge of our past, and then build something better.
For a moment I allow myself to relax to the bleat of taxi horns. I exhale. I feel the warmth and dryness of the sheets when I wake on Christmas Eve day. I touch walls that have never been damp.