Patrick Flanery - I Am No One

‘I’ve never seen him, but the truth is I don’t know anyone here except you and Peter and Meredith. I think I recognize a few people from the wedding, but no one was very interested in me then and I don’t expect they’d be interested now.’

‘So you don’t know him?’

She shook her head. ‘Who is he?’

‘A friend of Peter’s. I’ve encountered him twice in the last few days, on Saturday, down in the Village, and then coming here. I suppose running into him on the way here isn’t really the same, but it seemed like a weird coincidence.’

‘What, like he was following you?’

‘Sound crazy?’

Susan shrugged. I wished she had not shrugged but had instead told me it was completely crazy to be so paranoid about the friend of our son-in-law, or had at least been more dismissive, less ambivalent, less willing to countenance the possible sanity of my paranoia. It is horrible to begin to imagine that what seems like paranoid delusion might be anything but, that suspecting you are being followed and monitored and manipulated is, in fact, the height of sanity, perhaps the very definition of sanity in today’s world. What is crazy is to imagine we are living private lives, or that a private life is a possibility any longer, and this is not just true for those of us living out our sentence in the developed world, but anyone anywhere, except perhaps those hidden underground, for the satellites we have launched into space and the aircraft, manned and unmanned, patrolling the air above the earth, gaze down upon us, producing finely detailed images of all our lives, watching us, or perhaps you could say we are merely watching ourselves, or at least the governments we allow to remain in power are watching us on our own behalf, as well as the corporations who do so only for their own behalf, even as they insist on the public service they claim to provide, and which we use, often for free, spending nothing to look at satellite images of our neighbors’ own backyards and roof terraces or street views of their front windows and doors, trading this free access to all knowledge of the world for the recording by such corporations of the habits of our activity and making ourselves susceptible not only to the collecting of this data and its potential monetization, that is to say its sale to other entities collecting their own kinds of data about us, but also to be bombarded with advertising that, however much we may struggle against it, inserts its messages deep into our thoughts, influencing us one way or another, even though I insist I am not receptive to advertisements for fast food establishments where I haven’t set foot since I was in my teens but nonetheless, and despite the fact I no longer eat meat, I look at those burgers and have to struggle against the desire their images produce.

‘I don’t think much of anything sounds crazy these days,’ Susan sighed, switching from coffee to champagne. ‘But I don’t see how one of Peter’s friends would have any reason to follow you, unless he actually works for Peter, and Peter is checking up on you on Meredith’s behalf, through this proxy, whoever he is, but that’s kind of a fanciful explanation, don’t you think?’

‘Or the explanation of a fantasist.’

‘You said it, sweetie, not me.’ She patted my arm and gave me such a look of sympathy, a look the like of which I had not seen since our marriage began to unravel, that I felt my eyes water and throat harden. The relief of having such a rapport again, however little we said, allowed me to believe things really might not have changed, or the clock had been reversed and it was still fifteen years ago and we were only stumbling but could see how our relationship was going off the map and we had to correct our course and keep within the known limits, because the wilderness of any relationship is a place both of potential and profound existential risk. Leaving the charted territory between you can either lead to the kinds of adventures that will reinvigorate a dying relationship or, quite the opposite, take a thriving and more or less happy one and nudge it into a place of peril out of which it is impossible to escape, a slough of despond, a bog, a wasteland of quicksand and mire. I had no knowledge of the relationships Susan might have had since the end of our marriage, just as she had not been privy to the details of my affairs, such as they were, and because I had never confided much in Meredith, who at first was too young to be told about matters that would only upset her and later because I was waiting to see if the relationship took hold and was going to be permanent enough to publicize, to make a part of my daughter’s own life, because she had never even known the names of the few women with whom I shared a bed in Oxford I was fairly certain Susan did not know either, possibly could not imagine that I am able to count those foreign relationships on two hands and still have fingers to spare.

The life I led in Oxford was, for most of my time there, an isolated one, a bachelor existence in a world surrounded by many other bachelors (of both sexes), though there were the occasional one-night stands, nothing that lasted longer than a few hours or days before it became clear to both parties that it was either deeply unwise because of professional complications (they were often colleagues, like Bethan) or because these women had husbands or partners or boyfriends or lovers. They each of them used different words to describe the men on whose territory I was trespassing, though they themselves would have recoiled at my description of the situation in these terms, not wanting to be regarded as the territory or possession of anyone other than their own selves, and while I respect such a position I understand too the attitude of the men whose women were cheating on them with me, men who would have believed they had a claim at least on the loyalty of those women if not on the women themselves, although the distinction is perhaps a rather Jesuitical one, the species of sophistry I learned to appreciate in what I began to think of as the Oxford intellect, the endlessly supple reasoning that could so often bend logic to self-interest or, scarcely more nobly, self-defense.

There were one or two occasions, perhaps more, when my entanglements with these otherwise committed women of Oxford became quite painful for me, for them, and for their husbands or partners. It’s not that I was helpless in the face of my own desire, although one husband in particular felt compelled to intervene because his wife was threatening to leave him for me, despite having never asked me whether I was interested in a permanent relationship with her. The poor man turned up, hat in hand, quite troubled, at my doorstep on Divinity Road, pleading with me to break things off after having failed to convince his wife to do so herself. I showed him into the house and we sat down in the dining room where I poured him a drink. Quite apart from being aggressive or defensive, this fellow, Bryan, a medievalist who chewed his fingernails, nearly wept, saying that his wife, Anne, one of my colleagues in History, was threatening to take the children and move in with me. I could not imagine anything worse than having to share my life with Bryan’s children and wife and the messy complications of this arrangement, so promptly got on the phone and told Anne it had to end. She was so devastated that the Chair of the Faculty Board asked me to try to control myself in a way that suggested I had somehow been at fault, when in fact it was Anne who had made the first move, following a gaudy at her own College where I happened, by coincidence, to be the guest of another colleague. After dark on one of those extraordinary Oxford spring evenings when summer seems already to breathe its warm airs across the rivers and the overgrown grass of Christ Church Meadow, Anne and I were alone in the Fellows’ Garden of that College, or at least felt ourselves alone in the dark, in a corner, talking about Foucault or at least having the kind of inanely philosophical conversation fueled by excellent wine and incomparable port and the romance of decay forestalled by money that surrounds and encourages such encounters, when she reached a hand across in the dark and rested it against my left breast, pressing to feel the beating heart beneath my clothes and skin and ribs. I thought for a moment that she had reached out for balance, for she seemed to be swaying, but then she leaned in, and, being taller than me and I suspect quite a bit stronger, pushed me against a sandstone wall and prized my mouth open with her lips and tongue. I could not have imagined that our hurried fling in that garden, or the subsequent fucks in her rooms in College, or the weekend she spent at my house when Bryan had taken the children to his parents in Stoney Middleton, would lead to her developing a fantasy of a new life with me.