Patrick Flanery - I Am No One

In that first, lonely year spent living in College rooms in the front quad overlooking a perfect postage stamp of lawn, woken at odd hours by carousing Oxford students, finding myself sleepless in a twin bed for the first time since I had left college myself, I resented Susan for her failure to remain interested in me, and just when that resentment was about to turn corrosive, at the moment when I became conscious of having drunk a whole bottle of wine each evening for weeks on end and could see myself being looked at by the young students who came to my rooms for tutorials with a mixture of perplexity and vague disgust, I decided that, as Rilke would have insisted, I had to change my life before I, too, became a ruin. I cut back on the drink and started running, despite the English rain, and kept running as a way of reclaiming the man I had been. I was not going to age like most male academics, I decided, and so turned to some of my female colleagues for inspiration. The older they grew, the more carefully they attended to their appearance, so that a woman of sixty who had the rooms next to mine looked scarcely a day over forty-five. I asked her once why she did it, if all the effort was only for herself, or for her partner. ‘The students already think we’re ancient,’ she said. ‘Why give them more ammunition?’

When Rachel knocked on my office door that afternoon, in the townhouse overlooking Washington Square, I was already wondering whether to bring up the confusion about our previous appointment or to pretend nothing had happened. Rachel is one of those graduate students who appears always to be on her way to an interview, usually dressed in a suit, more often — like Dr. Sebastian, who was still much on my mind — in conservative slacks and blouse and stylish black leather boots with a low heel and gently pointed toe that suggested power and professionalism, but without making men like me feel insecure.

I had no sense what Rachel’s background might be, it is often difficult to tell with students just how much money is in the family, but she looked as though she had enjoyed a solid middle-class upbringing, with enough resources to be comfortable. The suit she was wearing that Monday was good quality, it might have been bought by her parents or grandparents, and yet there was a slight edge of professionalism and striving, as though she knew she needed to work to get the kind of coveted tenure-track position that has become ever more difficult to secure because institutions like NYU and Columbia are hiring fewer people for permanent jobs, relying instead on adjuncts with contracts so limited they have little choice but to work at three or four universities just to make ends meet. Rachel had the look of the student who says to herself, ‘That is not going to be me, I’m going to be one of you , Professor O’Keefe, and I want you to know that when it comes to writing a reference next year, I’m the one about whom you will say, you would be fools to hire anyone other than Rachel .’ Among the undergraduate students she was a well-liked TA, which is to say there was a healthy balance of those who complained she was too demanding and those who thought she was a genius, the best teacher they had ever encountered. Because of this response, not to mention the strength of her scholarship, I felt certain I would provide a reference urging hiring committees that Rachel, above all my other doctoral candidates, was the best one for the job. Even still, it was unlikely she would be hired until several more years had passed, and then she might have to spend the first part of her professional life in Louisiana or Utah or Alabama.

‘How was your weekend, Professor O’Keefe? You said something came up? Did that go okay, whatever it was? Sorry, I don’t mean to pry, I just wanted to make sure everything was okay.’

I had been hoping Rachel would not ask such a question.

‘My daughter was hosting a business dinner, and she wanted my advice,’ I lied. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t make a habit of rescheduling like that, but it was a very important occasion for her.’

As Rachel listened to the excuse, which felt even stupider the more I talked myself into it, her eyes began to narrow in a way that made me anxious, and when I had finished speaking I saw them pop wide again, whatever confusion there might have been giving way to surprise, or at least the affectation of surprise.

‘So I didn’t realize your daughter lives in New York, too?’

‘That was one of the attractions of this job, to be near my daughter again after too much time away from her, you know, and as you get older that desire to be close to your children only becomes more acute, I can’t really explain why, it’s as much about wanting them close if something goes wrong as wanting to be available to help them, not that I’m old and need help and not that my daughter needs much in the way of assistance, but you understand what I mean.’

Rachel was nodding vigorously, trying to maintain eye contact even as my own gaze wandered out the window to Washington Square Park, which changed during my absence from the city in ways that seem both subtle and curiously profound, as though it is the same park but a cleaner and tidier version of itself. A man across the street paused, looked towards my office window, stood still for twenty seconds or so staring, and then continued on his walk.

‘So what’s it like moving to America?’ Rachel asked. As I watched the man walk across the park, turn, and then loop back to pass my window once more, I felt a flutter of unease. Second encounter? Third? I began to feel as though I needed a ledger, a way of recording moments that felt strange or uncanny. After the events of Saturday and Sunday, this was the next occasion of what I can only think to call weirdness. ‘Professor O’Keefe?’

‘Sorry? The. .?’

‘I meant is it difficult, moving to America? Do you feel welcomed?’

In a comparable situation in Britain such small talk would be kept to a minimum; this being a professional relationship, there is no requirement or expectation on my part that we should become friends. The point of our meeting was to discuss the work on which I am charged with giving advice and guidance in the hope that my substantial foundation of knowledge in the field will help Rachel or whatever student might be sitting before me not to look like an idiot when it comes time to let a wider group of scholars read what she has written. Rachel, though, is not going to look like an ass. She works like the devil and has an almost preternatural ability to see the problems before they are even on the horizon, and, having realized they are approaching, reroute herself to avoid them or acquire the necessary tools to attack and disable the problems when they arrive (i.e. improve her German so as to read Ernst Bloch in the original, master enough French to read Bernard Stiegler, also in the original, spend a little more time with the work of Hayden White). The question she had asked me, though, was perhaps the real source of my irritation, because it betrayed her failure to understand that I am not British in anything other than a legal sense. One might even say that my Britishness is a legal fiction, except legally it is true, but the legality of it produces a fiction of belonging or acculturation that is nothing short of fantasy for me now. When I was still living in Britain, and believed I might go on living there for the rest of my life or at least until my retirement, it was, perhaps, a matter of self-delusion or even of wishful thinking.

‘What can I say, Rachel? It’s like coming home.’

Once again, the moment I started speaking, she began nodding. I wondered whether, if I said something preposterous, like our planet is simply a simulation run by an unseen and unseeable computer and free will is only an illusion, or if I began spouting racist or sexist bile, if she would continue to signal her agreement so robotically.