Patrick Flanery - I Am No One

‘Peter tells me you lived in England.’

‘That’s right. For more than a decade.’

‘Why’d you come back?’

‘My daughter’s here. And NYU made me an offer I was in no position to refuse.’

‘More money?’

‘Significantly more. And less work.’

‘ Nice ,’ he said, in that way of his generation, drawing out the word, making it sound unpleasant or even immoral, a not entirely justified victory or an advancement won by less than impartial favor, as though both NYU and I had been compromised by the offer made and the fact of my accepting it. ‘But Oxford’s a better school, right?’

‘These things are hard to quantify. If better means older and more selective then Oxford is better, certainly, but as I say, it is difficult to judge abstractions of quality. You and Peter were both at Harvard, weren’t you?’

‘Yeah, I had such a blast.’

‘And before that?’

He hesitated for a moment. ‘Um, Columbia,’ he said, with a rising intonation.

‘Also a great school.’

‘No doubt, no doubt. I didn’t have such a good time, though.’

‘Sometimes we end up where we don’t belong, and it can be difficult to extricate ourselves.’

‘You speaking from experience?’

‘Perhaps. Perhaps not.’

‘Most Americans, you know, they say maybe . I think of perhaps as being very British .’

I smiled, watching him finish the last bites of the dinner I had prepared for myself, making enough to have leftovers for the following evening so I would not have to cook twice over the weekend, though it was just as likely that after having had lunch with my mother I would find reheated pasta too depressing to eat. I allowed myself to think Michael Ramsey was doing me a favor by consuming half the food I had prepared for myself, and yet watching him eat hungrily but carelessly, as if the operation were one of mechanics rather than desire, of the need simply for sustenance with no attention paid to flavor or taste, no savoring of the meal I had cooked, I began to resent not only his imposition but also my quixotic desire to be helpful to someone adrift in a cold upstate night, and my urge to make myself useful — even, strangely, to befriend this young man. He put down his fork on the tray and looked at me in a way that seemed to expect I should make the next move, and when I said nothing while continuing to stare, unsmiling and silent, he squirmed in his chair.

‘I guess I should get going.’

‘Before it gets too late.’ Although it was still quite early I was anxious to be rid of him, so I stood and walked towards the door.

‘You sure you don’t have a flashlight?’

‘I forgot. Let me go look in the kitchen.’ I nearly left him alone in the living room when it occurred to me it would be unwise to assume I could trust him even for a moment. I stopped in the doorway and turned back around, looking down my nose at him from across the room. ‘Why don’t you help me?’

I waited once again as he walked ahead of me into the kitchen and stood in the middle of the floor. Trying to keep him always in sight, I went directly to the utility drawer with its assorted screwdrivers and spare nails and other bits of household detritus, and at the back, in a cavity that remains perpetually darkened by the overhanging countertop and can only be accessed by tilting the drawer off its casters, I reached and searched around until I found not one but two different flashlights, both offering rather uncertain illumination, as though they would not last more than a few paces never mind half a mile back along the road or through the woods, and even if they did Ramsey would still be left alone in a darkened house, assuming his story was true. I searched for batteries in a cupboard but found none. There was an antique oil lamp upstairs in my bedroom, which I had filled in case of power outages, but I was not going to loan it to some stranger. Candles I did not possess, and so I shook my head and said I was sorry but he would have to make do with the flashlights and have an early night.

‘Thanks, that’s helpful, I’ll bring them back tomorrow.’

‘Only if you get the power back on.’

When I opened the front door and the cold blasted my face I felt a spasm of guilt. If Meredith turned up in a similar predicament at the home of, say, Michael Ramsey’s father, if such a man exists, would I not wish for her to be treated with greater care than I was showing this young man?

‘Let me give you a lift,’ I offered. ‘Maybe I can look at the fuse box.’

‘No, no, no, I don’t want to bother you any more than I have. I’ll be okay for the night.’

‘Why? Are you not really staying there?’

‘I don’t understand—’

‘If you don’t want me to come look I assume that means you’re not actually staying at my neighbors’ house and you just made up that story to get in the door, because I don’t think you’re considerate enough to care whether you bother me or put me to any additional trouble or not.’

Michael Ramsey smirked. ‘I’m staying there, man. I’ve got the keys, see?’ He pulled a ring from his pocket, but the keys could have belonged to any property.

‘I’m curious to see if one of those opens my neighbors’ front door.’

I took my coat from the peg in the foyer and told him to wait outside on the porch. Alone again in the house, I locked up and looked for my phone but could not find it so gave up and went out through the garage.

‘What, no vintage Merc?’ Ramsey asked as he opened the passenger door.

The road was empty and black, glinting with ice crystals, and the lights of the car picked out trunks of bare trees lining farmland on either side, so I knew as I drove that no one was observing our passage. I could, if I felt like it, drive Michael Ramsey off to a remote location and kill him, though I am not and could never be a killer, and yet, not for the first time, the thought of eliminating him floated round in my thoughts, bobbing like a red and white plastic fishing float that might get dunked under the calm surface if the bait at the sharp end felt a purposeful nibble. Nibble, Michael Ramsey, I thought to myself, nibble my bait and see what happens, see what I am capable of doing.

‘What exactly do you want from me?’ I asked.

Apart from the sound of the car and the wheels on the asphalt, the grinding of gravel thrown up by rubber and the crunch of a shallow ice puddle broken by the weight of the vehicle, there was total silence. I asked the question because I had convinced myself that Michael Ramsey’s sudden and repeated appearance in my life over the course of the week could not be chance: he had come for a reason and it must be related to the three file boxes delivered to my apartment, related to that and to my time in Oxford. I was convinced this was the case without possessing any evidence apart from my own suspicions.

‘I don’t know what you mean, you offered to come take a look at the fuse box. If you don’t want to then you can let me out here and I’ll walk the rest of the way. I don’t want anything from you. Jesus.’

In the darkened car I could not see his face clearly but he sounded panicked in a way he had not in any of our other conversations, either that night or Thanksgiving morning or on our first meeting the previous Saturday afternoon, and I thought perhaps there had simply been a series of coincidences that led to our meeting three times in a week, and Michael Ramsey had nothing to do with whatever else might be happening in my life, in other words the boxes of phone numbers and web addresses might have originated from someone else entirely, from someone connected to Stephen Jahn. I remembered again how Ramsey had described himself as a ‘corporate shill.’