Patrick Flanery - I Am No One

Anne and Bryan — troublesome though they were, and a lesson in how never to get involved with colleagues — could not have been the reason anyone might wish to pay such close attention to my life, nor could the aborted affair with Bethan in my first year at Oxford, nor, I hoped, my entirely professional run-ins with students like Jayanti, who threatened suicide and caused trouble for no reason and who was, I now feel, never serious in her threats, was making her threats in fact to terrorize me. No, I was certain — I remain convinced even now, as I write these pages, directed to my heirs, perhaps, if you have occasion to read them, or perhaps brought forth one day in my defense in a court either open or clandestine — that none of those people was the reason for the intense scrutiny of my entirely innocent activities.

I know the reason, or at least I suspect, have a ghost of a suspicion, as fleeting as the face I continue to see in the assemblage of text on a page, between the dark veils of those last moments of unconsciousness before waking each morning. By that Thanksgiving morning, talking to Susan, observing Michael Ramsey, and thinking back on my Oxford years, I should have begun to realize that it was not just one thing I had done, no single activity or stray word, not only my departure from home to live in another country, not just my choice of friends and lovers, but the enfolding of all these elements to create a kind of destiny.

‘And then they took me into this tiny room and I sat there for ages,’ the man was saying. He was one of Peter’s acquaintances, a South African lawyer from Johannesburg. ‘With the Americans you know where you stand. After three minutes the woman at the American Embassy smiled at me and said, “okay, thanks, dearie, there you go,” and I got my visa. The British make you wait and wonder. They ask you a million questions, as if they’re trying to catch you out, and then at the end of the interview the snide little man said, “now look up at that camera in the corner of the room.” This thing was minuscule, I hadn’t even noticed it was there until he mentioned it. I looked at the camera and the man said, “now, please say in a nice clear voice, ‘My name is Mark Wald.’” It was the first indication I’d had that my visa interview was being recorded, but I guess it shouldn’t have surprised me. What I don’t understand is why they would have me do that, the looking at the camera and saying my name.’

A man in an adjoining group, who’d had his back to Mr. Wald during the story, suddenly turned around. It was Michael Ramsey. ‘Facial recognition,’ he said.

‘Sorry?’ Mr. Wald said, looking displeased.

‘They do it for facial recognition. Now you’re on file. You could be walking down the street in central London and some technician or law enforcement officer will be sitting at a terminal and maybe they zoom in to get a closer look at you, and the computer can tell instantly that it’s Mark Wald, he’s on such and such a visa, he entered the country on such and such a date, he’s the son of X and Y, he specializes in whatever it is you do, etc.’

‘How do you know all that?’

‘Conspiracy nut,’ Ramsey said, smirking.

‘Well it’s fucking terrifying.’ Mr. Wald accepted another glass of champagne. ‘But that’s not the end of it. So I’m on the plane to New York from Heathrow, after the meetings in London are finished. I’m in Business Class, and as we’re boarding a man sits down next to me, around my age, balding, and I could tell even before he opened his mouth that he was American.’

A round of appreciative laughter rose as Mr. Wald continued.

‘So we exchange courtesies as we’re getting settled. Hello, good evening, etc. I take a glass of sparkling wine from the flight attendant, but my American friend is on orange juice. Okay, I think, he’s a health freak. He’s in great shape, very lean, like he’s at the gym every day or running thirty miles a week. Not like me.’ More laughter. ‘The plane takes off, and as the meals are delivered, he starts making conversation, but from the beginning he addresses me by name, “Mr. Wald.” I think, fine, he must have seen my ticket, or the tag on my case, or something, but then it becomes clear he knows who I am, what I do, where I live, who my wife is, how many kids I have, even who my parents are. This man is sitting next to me for a reason. It’s all prearranged. He asks me about the state of things in South Africa, what I think of the government and the president, and I’m getting even more uncomfortable, although my answers are almost certainly the ones he wants to hear. I don’t like this government, the president is corrupt, the country risks sliding towards chaos. By this point we’ve been talking for an hour or so. The meals have been cleared, he’s let the conversation ebb a bit, and then they dim the cabin lights and people around us get lost in movies and the like, and when he’s certain no one is listening, he leans close to me and says, not in so many words, that the US government would like me to spy on the South African government, “for the greater good,” and it’s my duty as a citizen of the free world to accept.’

The people listening looked surprised, some laughed, some nodded in ways that suggested they had new respect for this Mr. Wald or that what he had revealed confirmed their suspicions about the operations of the American government, while others fidgeted, began checking their phones, and slipped away, making excuses.

‘So what did you say?’ Michael Ramsey asked.

‘I said I was flattered but no, that was something I could not do in good conscience while continuing to practice law.’

‘Why not?’

‘How could I possibly stand in front of the Constitutional Court and argue a case knowing I would also be informing on the people around me, on my fellow lawyers and the justices? That would be antithetical to my idea of democracy.’

‘Democracy would crumble without spies. You should’ve said yes,’ Michael Ramsey said, in a way that was far from friendly. At that moment Meredith pulled me away to speak with a friend’s daughter who had applied for early admission to NYU. My Thanksgiving morning passed in that way, ducking in and out of random fragments of conversation, watching people come and go, and then, when I thought again to look for him, I discovered Michael Ramsey had already left. Good riddance, I thought, and thank goodness he won’t be staying for dinner.

My mother arrived, and Peter’s parents, various aunts and uncles and cousins on his side of the family. We ate in the middle of the afternoon, though we had never really stopped eating. There was great amusement at my not having a smartphone; even my mother has one now, a gift to herself. ‘They’re so intuitive,’ she said, ‘I do everything with it.’

I asked her whether she realized that everything she does on her phone is recorded somewhere, stored on a database, perhaps many different databases.

‘Who cares? I’m an old woman, I have nothing to hide, I don’t break any laws, I just talk to my friends and send emails and watch funny videos of animals. Why the hell would the CIA or the NSA or whoever it is give a damn about any of that?’

‘The fact is, we can’t possibly know what will pique their interest.’

‘Don’t be so paranoid, Jeremy! This is still a free country. We have due process and the Bill of Rights and the best democracy in the world. Why should a law-abiding citizen worry? Even if they’re watching us, they’re doing it for our protection. Frankly I’m all for it.’

I wanted to lean over and whisper in her ear, ‘you have no idea what you’re talking about, you cannot imagine how quickly you could be affected by, for instance, my own activities, how this new regime of data collection does not see innocence first but assumes guilt by algorithmic association. How much do you know about all the people you claim as your friends? What do you know of their connections? We have remade the social landscape without understanding the ramifications of this remodeling.’