Patrick Flanery - I Am No One

‘I hate all this consumerist craziness,’ my mother said. ‘People were lined up at Macy’s overnight! They opened at 8pm on Thanksgiving! What is the world coming to? What are we doing to ourselves? Everything for the almighty dollar! Do you want some coffee? I just made a pot.’

‘It’s not even seven. Our train isn’t until ten.’

‘I needed to get organized!’

‘There is nothing whatsoever to organize. I have organized everything already.’

I found myself watching my mother, anxious she might break a glass or complicate a process I felt I had perfected, for instance the making of coffee, and as I drank a cup of what she had made, I found it at once too weak and too acidic and then made a show of pouring out her pot and making a new one according to my own plan, and when she drank a cup of mine she grimaced, saying she preferred it her way.

‘Yours is too strong. Too bitter.’

‘If you don’t like it, you don’t have to drink it.’

‘Don’t be so goddamned huffy, Jeremy.’

I know that my time in Britain, my partial acculturation there, means that the emotional diffidence I internalized and accommodated to my own personality seems now, to my mother, like a form of rejection or a kind of filial abrasiveness, but there is little I can do to change it. Perhaps in time I will again be American in a way that I was once American, and yet I doubt such reversal is possible.

At eight-thirty we took a taxi to Penn Station, and throughout the ride my mother fidgeted, searching her purse.

‘What did you forget?’

‘Nothing, nothing.’

‘Are you missing something?’

‘No!’ She coughed, and it was clear she was lying. Then she leaned over and said in a low voice, ‘I just wish you would have let us leave half an hour earlier.’

‘Mom, it’s fine. We have plenty of time. If I were going alone I would’ve left half an hour later.’

As it was we had to wait in line for the better part of an hour, standing in the snake of people who know from habit which track the trains heading up the Hudson are likely to depart from, and though the station has changed somewhat over the years there was a great familiarity, even comfort, in standing once again in the same spot, checking over my shoulder at the Departures board and listening to the clacking changeover of times and destinations, the old-fashioned-sounding announcements of track numbers and stops along the various routes, and I noticed the way people bound for upstate New York, particularly those going north of Poughkeepsie, look more like Midwesterners than New Yorkers, so often unfashionably dressed as they are, or at least not dressed like people who live in the city, the businessmen in their poorly fitting khakis and navy blue blazers hiding ample waists, the frumpy government workers checking their smartphones and holding loud conversations, the older woman who arrives and asks if this is the train to Albany and then strikes up a conversation with my mother, assuring us she is not crazy but ‘waiting on line in Penn Station makes me so nervous, you know what I mean?’ and we all know that this old woman, who lives in Vermont and worries about terrorists without saying the word is voicing the fear so many of us have learned to contain in lives that demand travel, but this woman, this Vermonter who is expecting a niece to pick her up from the station in Rensselaer and drive her to Bennington where she and the niece both live, does not come to the city frequently, although she used to live here, was born and grew up in Brooklyn, spent all her professional life working in Manhattan, then retired to Vermont just after the attacks, deciding she did not want to spend the rest of her days worrying about being blown up when she was just minding her business, and the whole story spilled out as we stood there, ‘on line’ as New Yorkers say, the way she had come down simply to have Thanksgiving with her sister and brother-in-law, and that got my mother talking about Meredith and Peter, though she did so without giving their names or divulging where they live or what they do, since a great many people would recognize who they are or be interested in the glittering lives they lead and such knowledge could put them at risk because by revealing our proximity to Peter in particular we might be seen as useful targets for kidnapping or worse.

‘This is my son, he’s a professor at NYU,’ my mother said, and I was forced to meet the woman from Vermont although she did not introduce herself and promised she would not sit next to us on the train, ‘just in case you’re afraid you can’t get rid of me,’ she laughed, and I was, somewhat to my shame, grateful to her for saying that as the track was announced and we waved our printed tickets to the Amtrak employee before descending the escalator and hurrying along the dark platform towards the middle of the train, where I helped my mother into one of the seats at the front of a row so she could stretch her legs, as was her preference, and look out the window onto the Hudson River while the train chugged in its occasionally unreliable way northward to the town where I have made my investment in long-term stability.

After leaving Penn Station, entering and exiting tunnels that took us in and out of darkness, offering glimpses of Riverside Park and then more distant views of the Palisades across the river, a man I thought I recognized from the back passed through our car. There was a familiar quality about him — a certain agitation in his walk — without my being certain that he was who I thought he might be, and for a moment, without this thought registering fully in my consciousness, I became convinced of the possibility that it was Michael Ramsey.

There are people who are not instantly recognizable once you have met them, so if you glimpse the person from behind, or see only a small part of his or her profile, their identity remains uncertain. I had only met Ramsey twice at that point, and on that day after Thanksgiving when much of America was hurtling towards shopping malls to buy quantities of unnecessary gifts and my mother and I were sitting in a train car, bad capitalists failing to participate fully in the life of our economy, it was conceivable to me, at some proximate remove from full consciousness, that Michael Ramsey was with us on that train.

Because my mother had been tired the previous night, and I was not in the best of moods that morning, I did not speak to her about the three boxes of material that seemed to betray the disturbingly close examination of my life, at least my life insofar as it is lived through the internet and over the phone, nor did I mention my encounters with Michael Ramsey, or the presence of that young man at Meredith and Peter’s party, an appearance which had, in retrospect, ruined the holiday that means more to me than any other. All I wanted on that first Thanksgiving back in America was the comfort of sheltering with my family as autumn closes in, fog settling in the hollows of the Berkshires and Catskills and Adirondacks, those hunchbacked mountains of the northeast that, in October and November, seem more American to me than anywhere else. But there, in the season’s final hours, my interloper had appeared, as if to send the message that I was no longer secure in the country of my birth, suggesting I was right to feel paranoid, because my period outside of America had left me vulnerable to questions about my loyalty and habits, even my patriotism, as though treason could be caught like a virus, acquired by removal from home, a disease transmitted by long-term exposure to the unfamiliar.

In the first year I was at Oxford, as America coiled for war, I found myself falling into arguments over email, insisting to friends back home that they did not understand the way the rest of the world saw our country, how we were squandering the sympathy and goodwill of the international community, that my time in Oxford — then only a scant few months — had already ‘radicalized me.’ I used the phrase without knowing how ‘radicalize’ would become a keyword in the grammar of America’s War on Terror, how the media and politicians would describe terror suspects as having been ‘radicalized,’ and as these thoughts came back to me on the train heading north along the Hudson, the trees around us having lost nearly all their leaves, ice forming in the shallows of the river’s wide expanse, so unlike anything in Britain, I wondered whether, in the box of internet addresses sitting in my apartment, there was a link to the email in which I described myself, more than a decade earlier, as ‘radicalized,’ and whether that self-description was the first flag I might have raised, if that offhand remark alone stained me red and started the process of tracking all of my communications.