Patrick Flanery - I Am No One

‘Totally. Wow. Can you imagine? You’d be working all the time just to stay warm.’

‘Simpler existence. Zen-like, or something.’

‘You’re a funny guy, Professor.’

‘What did I say that’s funny?’

‘ Zen-like, or something . . beat, beat, beat. I like your comic timing. Very post-ironic. I never noticed that about you before. So, can I use your phone?’

‘Why not?’ I pointed with my forehead at the phone in the corner of the living room and Michael Ramsey loped across the floor, I could see he was in what seemed to be his trademark outfit, all blacks and grays, wools and cottons and leathers, as if he had internalized some outsider’s sense of the limits of Manhattan chic, how a Midwesterner might imagine a New Yorker should dress, and then in an elegant movement he picked up the phone and dialed. He was skinny and elastic, and I thought again that he was too thin to be healthy, the body of a junkie or anorexic.

‘I know their number by heart,’ he said, turning to address me over his shoulder.

‘Photographic memory?’

‘Eidetic. Especially for numbers and addresses and shit. Hey, Sara, it’s Michael. .’

I listened or half listened as he recounted his discovery of my neighbors’ cold and dark house and his inability to make the heating or lights work and then the revelation that he was phoning from my own house. It became evident within a few further sentences that Sara and Phil (I later confirmed those are, in fact, the names of my neighbors) had no idea why the power should be off and were hopeful that Michael would be willing to stick around on Saturday for someone to come have a look at things and perhaps they themselves would think twice about coming up for the weekend, which suggested that either the Applegates were assholes or they were not as friendly with Michael Ramsey as he wanted me to believe. (I still have not got to the bottom of that.) At last he hung up the phone and turned around to find me standing at the edge of the living room rug, my toes just touching the tassels, one of my hands resting on the back of a chair while the other searched the inside of my pants pocket for any indication of how I should handle the situation, but cloth offers no answers and a pocket is all too often merely a pocket.

‘I guess I’m kind of screwed. Are you sure you don’t have some candles or a flashlight? I’ll bring them back tomorrow. Or, I mean, I could buy some more candles tomorrow to replace whatever you. .’

If it was an act he was a convincing liar. He seemed almost bereft, stricken by the prospect of staying in a cold dark house, nearly as horrified as I might have been if faced with the prospect of having to use a toilet in the middle of Penn Station with strangers passing around me on all sides, bumping my bare bottom and shanks with their rolling suitcases and snickering as they watched me reach round to wipe myself.

‘I’ll see what I can find in the kitchen. I don’t think I have candles but I may be able to spare a flashlight.’

‘Thanks, anything would be great, you know, even a pen light or whatever.’

As I was about to leave the room I realized I did not want Michael Ramsey to remain alone and unobserved in my house, just as, I imagined, Stephen Jahn might have felt about me those many years ago in Oxford, when I visited his flat in Folly Bridge Court.

‘Come with me. I’ll make you a cup of tea if you like.’

‘Oh no, that’s okay. I’m fine, really, I don’t want to put you to any trouble.’

‘It’s no trouble. Come on, I’ll make a pot.’

I stood in the vestibule between the living room and the hall that led to the kitchen, making it clear from my stance that I was going nowhere without him. He shuffled across the rug, nearly tripping. I wanted to tell him to pick up his feet and be sharp about it but I just smiled, stepping aside so he could go first into the kitchen. As I did so I imagined pushing him down the stairs into the basement, which was just ahead, the door to that staircase open, the cellar dark, and if I pushed him down those stairs, as I suspected I would have little trouble doing given his slender frame, he would almost certainly die. I stuffed the thought away and followed him into the kitchen, where the lights were still on, leaving my dinner sitting on the tray in the living room, the television flickering in silence.

Michael stood in the middle of the kitchen floor taking in the stove and the open bottle of wine and the cupboards full of plates and cups and glasses, the drawer I had left open, heaving with a second-hand set of silver-plated cutlery bought at a tag sale in Hudson.

‘Smells good, man, you cook this yourself?’

‘Have you eaten?’ I asked, all of a sudden feeling the power in pretending to be hospitable. Rudeness is limiting. Sometimes a false hospitality can be even more dangerous, as any reader of fairy tales must know. The stranger’s house in the woods which is suddenly opened and well stocked, the well-laid table of the old woman who smiles and offers a chair at her hearth, the graybeard who pours you a glass of grog and tells his tale, these people all want your life, at the very least, if not your immortal soul, for they may be demons in disguise, Satan in the skin of a man, a hag in the wig of a crone.

‘No, but really, that’s nice of you—’

‘I’m not necessarily offering.’

‘Oh, sorry, I thought—’

‘Just kidding. Have you eaten?’

‘No, but like I said. .’

‘It’s no problem. I have plenty. You have a house without heat or electricity. As you say, it’s a cold night. You have no car. You know my daughter and son-in-law, therefore custom, as you have reminded me, says I should be hospitable.’ I took a plate from the cupboard and dished up a mound of pasta and a helping of salad and a piece of garlic bread, then poured a glass of red wine and smiled at Mr. Ramsey in a way I hoped suggested I was not entirely happy to be doing this but accepted it was the only humane thing to do, or perhaps the most humane act I could have chosen to do short of inviting him to stay the night, which I had no intention of doing. I put the plate on a tray and handed it to him, taking the glass of wine and leading us back into the living room, where I resumed my place on the couch and motioned for him to sit in one of the hard-backed wooden chairs I had acquired at that same tag sale in Hudson where I bought my upstate cutlery from a couple of on-the-make young homosexuals trying to transform another corner of rural poverty into a land of antiques and artisanal cheeses.

‘This looks great, thank you,’ he said, and for the first time I thought I sensed he might be anxious or was suffering second thoughts about the wisdom of accepting my food and the risk of putting in his mouth what I had prepared, though he must have realized I had not been afforded any opportunity to poison what he was eating unless I had done so in advance. I took up my own plate, with my now cold portion of pasta, and put a forkful of penne with tomato sauce rich in eggplant and garlic into my mouth. After I had swallowed he also ate a forkful and took a sip of wine and nibbled at the garlic bread and all at once looked both exhausted and relieved. We went on eating in silence and as he ate Mr. Ramsey seemed to become ever thinner and younger, more childlike, vulnerable, so that, far from being in his early thirties, as I guessed was the case, he became in my sight someone half that age, and though he knew my daughter and son-in-law, and we had met twice before, I was struck by the strangeness of having this very immature-looking young visitor seated in my living room eating my food, intruding on my privacy after having noticed, through the half-mile of woodland between the house where he was staying and my own property, the lights of my home at night. It meant he had been looking for a solution, or perhaps there was no solution needed, and he knew all along that I was coming here, and then it occurred to me he might not even be staying with my neighbors but had arrived from town in a taxi, which could have dropped him off half a mile away so that I would not have seen its lights, and walked through the cold in the dark to arrive at my doorway with a story of staying at my neighbors’ house when in fact that might have been as fabulous a concoction as if I were to tell him I had once gone to bed with an Egyptian princess.