Patrick Flanery - I Am No One

Driving away from my mother’s house I turned on the heat, stretched out my hands to feel the hot air blowing against my fingers, and steered north towards my own house, which was now not only house but home, although I had not entirely assimilated it into my revised and endlessly revisable sense of my place in the world. This small upstate town, this wooded acreage, this solid if modest building were the places I thought I would spend the rest of my life, attended by my daughter or the people she paid to support me when I could no longer look after myself. That was what I imagined, naïvely thinking that I had left the complications of Oxford behind me, or that they would somehow be amenable to forgetting because of the kind of arm’s-length management I established earlier this year to look after them. Now, of course, I know that not to be the case.

It was a short drive, hardly long enough to consider what I was doing, or I might have thought better of it and simply gone to my own house rather than pulling into that driveway half a mile south and stopping the car outside my neighbors’, sitting in the subsiding warmth of the vehicle and feeling, with some surprise, the quickness of the heat loss, as my fingers started to smart with the cold air that crept through the vents. The temperature was too low to sit there for long and I knew Michael Ramsey must have been watching. Before I could ring the bell he had opened the door and was standing there, smirking. ‘I thought you’d be back.’

‘Can I come in? It’s frigid.’

‘Are you armed?’

‘Of course I’m not armed. What a stupid thing to ask.’

‘Just wanted to find out if I’m putting myself in danger by letting you in.’ I could not tell whether he was joking.

‘I thought perhaps I was the one who should be afraid.’

His smirk disappeared. ‘You could call the cops.’

‘I left my phone at home.’

With that he stepped aside, allowing me to enter the house I had first explored in such unusual circumstances the night before, bopping around in the dark in what might, I thought in retrospect, have been little more than a ruse to gauge the limits of my fear.

My neighbors’ taste for primitive American furniture was so obsessive that all the furnishings and art were from that period, arranged in a tightly curated palette of colors and forms. The couch where I sat was firm and uncomfortable, meant for a body shorter and leaner than mine.

‘You said last night you were my student. When exactly did I teach you, Mr. Ramsey?’

‘My junior and senior years.’

‘You were in more than one of my seminars?’

‘Yeah, like three.’ He sounded shocked by my failure to remember him, and objectively, it was true, I had quite clear memories of several students who had taken more than one of my classes, at least I could see their faces even if I could no longer remember their names, though I think this is less a failure of memory than a natural process by which a teacher, confronted with dozens of names and faces every year — sometimes different groups from semester to semester — might remember the students for a necessary period of contact with each other, but at some point not long after the student has moved off to the next phase in his or her life, the teacher’s mind must begin to purge the files, to manage the data of memory such that room is made to remember other, more important information in the space taken up by people with whom one has no permanent relationship, or people with whom that brief moment of relation was not significant enough to create lasting memories.

‘Forgive me, I’ve tried to remember you, but I can’t.’

‘I was such a good student, too,’ he said, grimacing, and the way he said it made me think for the first time that I might not be dealing with a man in his right mind.

‘Are you being facetious?’

‘No, I was really good. Solid A, every course, all four years. Summa Cum Laude.’

‘You have to understand I’ve had lots of students over the years.’

‘Not like me.’ A smirk twitched back onto his lips.

‘You were a troublemaker?’

‘Let’s not talk about me.’

‘Why? I find it interesting. I’d like to know more about you, Michael. Can I call you Michael?’

‘Call me whatever you like, Jeremy.’

‘You said you were a librarian, I think.’

‘Something like that. Corporate archivist would be a better description.’

‘And you majored in History at Columbia?’

‘With a minor in German Literature and Cultural History.’

‘And your master’s degree, when you met Peter?’

‘International Relations.’

‘And yet you’re an archivist. No degree in library or information science or anything like that?’

‘Maybe I trained on the job. Or I did a diploma or a certificate, an online course in that other stuff.’

‘Can you tell me why we’ve been meeting?’

He smiled. ‘Chance.’

‘Is that possible?’

‘These things happen in New York.’

‘So, according to you, we spent a number of hours together in a Columbia seminar room more than a decade ago, over the course of several semesters.’

‘Three semesters in total. And you were the advisor for my senior thesis.’

I tried not to let this shock me, and it still seemed possible he was making up all of it, just to unsettle me or to see what the effect might be. The question in my mind was this: if Michael Ramsey was behind the three boxes of internet and telephone records that were sent to my apartment, and if he was somehow stalking me, then what was the point? Was he trying to demonstrate his power to hurt me, because of some old grievance, or was he trying, in a more complicated way, to help me, to warn me that I was in the crosshairs of a much larger entity? Michael, I considered, might be more ally than adversary. Or was it possible for someone like him to have warring intentions, to want to help at the same moment that he might have wanted revenge, to show his hand at the same time that he remained concealed, perhaps not even present? And then there was the possibility, the very real possibility, that Michael Ramsey had nothing to do with any of it, that his appearance in my life over the course of the week was indeed pure chance, and someone else altogether — a someone who could only be Stephen Jahn — was trying both to threaten and discredit me.

‘Did you phone my mother?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘You deny phoning my mother?’

‘Yes, I deny it.’ He said it without hesitation. ‘What reason would I have for calling your mother? Anyway, I wouldn’t begin to know how to find her.’

‘I think that’s a lie.’

‘An understatement maybe. Sure, I could find out who she is and where she lives, unless she’s in witness protection, and even then there are ways of locating such people. But no, I mean, in an ordinary sense, I don’t have a clue where your mother is, what her name is, whether she’s divorced or married or widowed, owns a house, has an unlisted phone number or Swiss bank account. Zip, nada. I don’t know anything about her, Jeremy.’

‘Why are we meeting?’

‘You tell me. You came to the door.’

‘Why are you staying in this house?’

‘I told you, it belongs to my friends, the Applegates. They were supposed to come up here this weekend. We were going to do upstate things!’ He punched the air with his fist in a mock-heroic gesture that seemed to signal a change in register as well, or perhaps this is only a failure of my memory. ‘I don’t have any family nearby, man. Friends are my family. It was just supposed to be a chill weekend, not a frigid one. Anyway, at least the heat’s working now. Thanks for your help last night. I’m sorry if I freaked you out.’