‘What would you like to do for his birthday?’
‘It’s so cold we could just stay here. Order in food. I don’t like him being out in this weather for too long, and I have no urgent desire to see New York. I know it well enough already. All those childhood shopping trips. My parents used to own an apartment in the East 60s.’
‘You don’t like it?’
‘No, I do, but you understand, everything shifts,’ she says, adjusting her grip on Selim so she can sip her coffee more easily. She puts him down on the carpet and we watch as he crawls towards a collection of soft toys I bought in anticipation of his visit. ‘That was thoughtful of you.’
‘Making up for the last six months. He’s not walking yet?’
‘Pulling himself up. It won’t be long. I’ll need to get some things at the shops for him today.’
We linger over such nothings, watching our son until he needs to be fed, and then Fadia sweeps him up in her arms, raises her loose shirt, and supports his head. Let us be like this always, I think, so relaxed and at ease with one another, content and quiet in a life that might not be private but which proceeds as if it were, perhaps doing nothing to accommodate ourselves to the end of privacy except to live more ethically, to admit our faults, to assume transparency, but also to demand it of others, to insist on the right to know as much about the watchers as they about us.
‘Do you ever see Stephen?’ I ask, still not having told Fadia about the boxes, about Michael Ramsey, about the photographs of her life over the past months. I suppose it is a test, to find out if she will admit to the meeting I saw depicted in the photograph.
‘I ran into him recently on the street. I don’t like the man, but I greeted him, because it seemed impolite not to do so — it was ages since I had seen him — and he nearly exploded there on St. Giles, as if he could not believe I was speaking to him. I did not really understand why, unless it is because of Saif or my father and uncle, but it was like he did not even want to be seen speaking to me in public, and as if he thought I should know better than to approach him.’
So that is that, I think, there is no collusion between them, no alliance, nothing suggested by the single image of Fadia inclining her head towards him on the street outside the Taylorian.
‘But then,’ she continues, adjusting the angle of Selim’s body in her arms, ‘he starts phoning me. He never says his name, but his voice, you know, it is unmistakable. He says terrible things about me, I cannot bring myself to repeat them, and about my brother, and also about you. He was phoning every day, and the line was always clicking and full of static, as if he was using an internet connection or as though the line was being monitored, that is what I imagined. And then he started talking about Selim, saying that one day when I didn’t expect it, I would suddenly find Selim gone. I would turn my back and he would disappear and I would never see him again. I could not tell if it was an empty threat, or if I should take it seriously.’
‘Is that why you finally replied to my messages?’
‘Maybe. I was frightened. I guess I could have gone to the police, but I never feel safe around them, at least the white ones. They see a woman who looks a little Middle Eastern and that is enough to change the whole equation. Even if I was the one being victimized I suspect they would find a way to turn it around on me, and then I might be interrogated, and social workers would get involved, and before I know it Selim really would be gone. Forgive me if it looks like I was running to you for help.’
The sun breaks against the building across the street. Our cups are empty and I refill them from the carafe, deciding now is the time to tell her about the boxes and Michael Ramsey, the phone calls my mother has been receiving from a man who must be Stephen Jahn, the way I have been moved to doubt my own sanity, on occasion to suspect a conspiracy involving my son-in-law, perhaps even my daughter and ex-wife, although now I no longer think that is likely, I believe whoever may be watching me has nothing to do with my family.
‘Can I see the boxes?’ she asks.
‘I gave them to the lawyers. They haven’t returned them.’
‘And this Michael Ramsey? You can contact him?’
‘My son-in-law would know how to reach him, but I hesitate to ask Peter. I don’t entirely trust him. And obviously the phones and email aren’t secure.’
‘A sign in the window?’
‘It sounds like a spy movie.’
‘When did you last see him?’
‘I think I see him on the street every day, but when I try to approach him, he disappears, or I doubt that it’s actually him. For more than a month now I’ve hardly felt sane.’
‘But the last time you spoke with this Mr. Ramsey, he said you should go public?’
‘Yes, in a roundabout way, he suggested running an article in Peter’s magazine, assuming Peter could be convinced to do it, or perhaps the publication of this,’ I say, showing her this very stack of pages, where I write these words, watching my own life, reviewing my own recent history, just as others do. ‘I only wish I could say with certainty who is responsible for watching me. I believe it is the government, but I have no proof. In the end I have no proof of anything, except the files, and those are no longer in my possession.’
Selim is on the carpet again, crawling around and entertaining himself with the toys, so innocent, so unaware of the complexities of his parents’ lives. As I look at him, I vow to myself to be present in a way I was not for my daughter.
‘Does it really matter who is doing it?’ Fadia finally asks. ‘There are some people who live their entire lives in the eye of a camera, broadcasting themselves for strangers to watch. You could do that, you know, install cameras in the apartment, present yourself for the whole world, to demonstrate how ordinary you are, how unsuspicious your life is, how you have nothing to do with whatever it is the government — or Stephen Jahn, or MI5, MI6, the NSA, the CIA, Mossad — think you might be doing. Show them your life, our lives together if you like, to prove the point that there is nothing here to see: just a man and a woman who have a child together, who happen, by no fault of their own, to have a connection to a man who would want nothing to do with them, who would look at the relationship you and I have and condemn us. I have little doubt Saif would do just that, or, like Stephen, threaten to take Selim away, to put me to death for the choices I made, to kill you for what you did with me, or to me, however we want to think of it. Why should we be judged for who Saif has become? I think you must go public, one way or the other. And we can do it together. I will stand beside you,’ she says, her eyes fixed on me with a look of hope, or the intermingling of hope and purpose, and in the spell of her gaze I feel the determination to take what little power we have been granted by Michael Ramsey, if indeed he is the one responsible for all that has transpired, and turn that power back on the powerful.
This text may acquire a life beyond any I would have imagined, not a text solely for my children or my legal defense, but for anyone to read, at any time, on any platform, wherever they may be, whoever they are, if only to prove my ordinariness, my inconsequence, the way I am ultimately like anyone else, like you, coming to the end of this page.
‘Are you willing?’ Fadia says.
‘Yes,’ I say, lifting Selim up from the carpet and kissing his brow, ‘yes.’
NOVEL ENDS
Acknowledgments
Noah Arlow, Kate Ballard, Rita Barnard, Glenn Breuer, Charles Buchan, Megan Carey, Sarah Chalfant, Zahid R. Chaudhary, Justin Cornish, Nadia Davids, Karen Duffy, Tim Duggan, Gail L. Flanery, James A. Flanery, Thomas Gebremedhin, Lucy Valerie Graham, Neville Hoad, Chris Holmes, Michael Holtmann, Suvir Kaul, Thomas Knollys, Ania Loomba, Peter McCullough, Beatrice Monti della Corte von Rezzori, Neel Mukherjee, Rebecca Nagel, Roger Palmer, Angela Rae, James Roxburgh, Adrianne Rubin-Arlow, Paul Saint-Amour, Deborah Seddon, Tamsin Shelton, Margaret Stead, Eddie van der Vlies, Nan van der Vlies, Undine S. Weber, Zoë Wicomb, Will Wolfslau, Andrew Wylie, Robert J.C. Young, Alba Ziegler-Bailey, and everyone at Atlantic Books, Crown, and The Wylie Agency.