Patrick Flanery - I Am No One

‘Did I do something to you? I mean, did I do something when you were my student, to make you angry?’

‘I’m not angry with you, Jeremy.’

‘I thought. .’

‘Dude, no, you were a good professor. I was a smartass and you had patience, I mean, you’d tell me to shut up sometimes, not in so many words, and you kind of flaked when I needed references—’

‘Sorry about that.’

‘It’s okay, it’s not, I mean, it didn’t stop me from getting where I wanted to be, I still got into Harvard, and that’s all I really cared about, you know, going to the Kennedy School and whatnot, it was my dream, and you helped me get there even though you didn’t write a reference and I had to scramble at the last minute and shit, but yeah, it’s okay, we’re cool. I don’t hold a grudge or anything. Did you think I was stalking you?’

‘Such a string of coincidences. . it’s enough to make a person suspicious.’

‘Or paranoid.’

‘So you’re not following me?’

‘Of course not.’

‘And you never stood outside my building this week, at night, looking up at my window?’

‘Why would I do that?’

‘I’m asking you , Michael.’

‘No, shit, the answer is no. We ran into each other a week ago in that café, then we ran into each other going to Peter and Meredith’s party, and then I happened to ring your doorbell last night.’

‘You have to admit it looks like a pattern, one might see it as a kind of gradual approach.’

‘If I wanted to stalk you — and I don’t — I’d be much more subtle about it. You wouldn’t even know I was stalking you until it was too late. And what would be the point, anyway? I don’t bear you any ill will. You were a decent professor and our lives have happened, by chance , to intersect again. I had no idea that you were Meredith’s father. I don’t really know her. Chance, see. It’s like on these social networks—’

‘I don’t use them much,’ I said, although this was a lie.

‘Well, if you did, you’d see, it gets really creepy, the way chance plays a part in our lives, or maybe it isn’t chance, but not a week goes by that I don’t discover two of my friends, from completely separate parts of my life, people that I never would have put together in a million years, they know each other independently of me. For instance, my freshman roommate at Columbia, nice guy, works for the State Department, I discover that he knows a filmmaker I dated during a year I spent in Berlin, or I find out that my cousin, who I don’t really know that well, we didn’t get along as kids and — that’s another story — anyway, this cousin lives in LA and I find out she’s now best friends with the wife of one of my colleagues. It’s chance, it’s random, or if it’s not chance, then we’re all unconsciously moving in the networks we’ve somehow designed, or that we don’t even know we’re designing every time we decide to be friends with someone or take a particular job or go to bed with a new partner or get back in touch with a friend we haven’t seen in ten or fifteen years, or, and this is even creepier, we’re being moved around on the chessboard of the world, we don’t really have free will, we’re just players in someone else’s simulation, and the rules and teams and relations, the real relations between us are invisible to us, or they have been until now, until we can begin to see precisely what our own network looks like, and if we were to map it, if someone chose to map all the networks of relation between us, it would be possible to begin to redraw real maps and real borders. And then —no, stay with me, I know it all sounds a little crazy — there are all those people out there, a whole long list of them, people with whom I have like ten, twenty, sometimes even more friends in common and yet I’ve never met the person; I know who he or she is but we’ve never been introduced, never written to each other or spoken to each other or had our lives intersect long enough to make that connection despite the mass of connections that should be drawing us together, and maybe one day will draw us together. You and I, I’m guessing we’re supposed to know each other, whether it’s chance telling us this is the case, or maybe some crazy genetic history — maybe we’re actually related, they say you share a huge number of genes with your closest friends even when you don’t think you’re related, and you can smell, actually smell, people who are even quite distantly related to you — or else something, someone, some entity, call it the universe or God or the players controlling the simulation we might want to suspect is our collective life on this earth, is moving us towards each other to see what happens. Now we can’t be certain, neither you nor I, that we’re necessarily on the same side of whatever game is being played, assuming there are even sides and it’s not just a free-for-all clusterfuck. Every 0 and 1 for itself. Bing bing bing bing bing!’

At the end of his little speech he was almost breathless, sitting on the edge of his chair and leaning forward, palms pressed together and fingers pointed in my direction, like a Jesuit trying to convert the benighted.

‘That’s all very interesting. Thought-provoking theories, I don’t know what to call them. I guess we have nothing else to say to each other for now. Maybe we’ll meet again.’

‘I think we can both fucking count on it, Jeremy.’

Walking to the door I paused and turned, and was surprised to find him so close to me, standing right there as if he’d been creeping up behind me on tiptoe.

‘So you didn’t phone my mother?’

‘Shit, Jeremy, I swear to you, I didn’t.’

I wanted to ask him if he had sent those three boxes to my apartment but some pestering little voice made me pause. I believed he had not phoned my mother, or if he had it was some other part of him that had done so, because the man in front of me in that moment seemed, strange as it felt, entirely benign towards me, he seemed to wish me no ill will and I considered it was perhaps nothing more than chance that had brought us together, and whatever was happening with the boxes of records and with the manipulation of my appointment with Rachel a week earlier, he did not wish to hurt me, if he was even responsible for those things. Fadia’s family, however, was another matter. The phone call to my mother might have been made by some friend of Fadia’s father or by one of her own friends in Oxford — even, I considered once more, by Stephen Jahn, trying to smear my name now that I was safely away from the city where Fadia and our child, my son, remained.

It was almost dark by the time I got back to my house. In the past I would have closed the garage door only after getting out of the car, but for the second time in as many days I waited until the door had rolled shut before unlocking the car, and then made a point, again, of locking the garage door, double-checking all the locks in the house, and closing the curtains, wondering as I did so whether drones or satellites might be zooming in with their long lenses to catch a glimpse of the habits of my completely ordinary life. Again I wondered what I had ever done to attract the attention of whoever might choose to monitor my activity, and rehearsed my crimes, such as they might be perceived by people hostile to me:

I had moved abroad in a time of national crisis, within days of the attacks on New York and Washington; a patriot would have changed his plans and remained to look after his wife, however estranged, and his young daughter; if I was not a traitor I was, at the very least, a selfish man;

During my years in Oxford I had become friends with a man who was almost certainly a spy; I assumed he was on our side, whatever and whoever our side might be (American, chiefly, but also, subsequently, British, for I am, according to the law, loyal to both countries, having sworn an oath to the Monarch and all the heirs to the throne, though in fact I crossed my fingers in my pocket at the time);