Patrick Flanery - I Am No One

In the second half of my period in Britain I taught and subsequently had a dozen or more assignations with an Egyptian student whose brother is now by all accounts involved in a terrorist organization trying to establish a new caliphate; her father, moreover, was until recently wanted for crimes committed during the twenty years leading up to Egypt’s forestalled revolution;

The fling with this sister of a terrorist and daughter of a despot’s henchman has resulted in a child who, far from being aborted before the statutory period in which terminations might be performed under British law had passed, was carried to full term, arrived seven days after he was due, and named Selim.

Was that ethical charge sheet enough, I wondered, to imperil my privacy, even perhaps my liberty? As far as I could see, I had committed no crime, unless giving money to Fadia could itself be construed as a criminal act. Laws change so rapidly it is difficult to know when the ordinary business of one’s life, the way one governs one’s affairs in a fashion that has long been legal and seems innocent enough, might be proscribed overnight by the whim of a few hundred men and women in a stuffy room. Ignorance of the law is no defense, and yet it seems, so often, that the lawmakers themselves have only a partial understanding of the statutes they pass. Is the sister of a terrorist now as good, or bad, under the laws of Britain and America, as being a terrorist herself? Have I jeopardized my liberty by doing nothing more than seeking lawfully to support my son?

Last night, in the hours between finishing one page of this text and beginning another, I fell in and out of sleep, splayed across the daybed here in my home office, nothing but white walls and the Neo Rauch I bought years ago hanging above my desk, and dreamt I was in a similarly sparse white room, sitting alone, with a stainless steel toilet and sink in one corner, a window too high in the wall for me to see out of it, a door with a slot through which I pushed the papers I wrote, through which was pushed back more blank paper and pens when my writing grew faint, a slot through which I received my three daily meals and a ration of water. In the dream I could hear no one else, and knew nothing of where I was. Once every two days in the course of the dream, where the passage of time was uncannily easy to judge, a voice instructed me to sit on the floor and rest my head against the slot in the door. Hands then reached through, passing a hood over my head before the voice instructed me to stand with my hands on the back of my neck. When I had done so the door would open, someone grip my arms and twist them round to handcuff me behind my back. The man, I assumed it was a man, led me down a hall where the handcuffs and hood were removed and I was left alone in a shower room, given ten minutes to wash before the man returned and instructed me to stand, back to the shower room door, hands on my neck as the hood was lowered once more, and my wrists were cuffed. The dream seemed to last for weeks, perhaps even months, and every two days I was allowed to bathe, but was otherwise left alone to write my account, the account I am writing now, in a more realistic way, at this very moment. When you read these pages, whoever you are, will you pity me? Or will you wait for a confession I cannot provide? To confess my participation in crimes about which I have no knowledge would itself be an even greater crime according to the edicts of my own philosophy, which, for me, stands in the place of that religion I have eschewed, finding, like Fadia, that faith itself is the greatest form of terror.

That last Saturday night in November, sitting in my house outside Rhinebeck, having just spoken with Michael Ramsey, having eaten lunch with my mother and being told of the harassing phone call she received, I made myself a drink, thinking of my son, Selim, who is now almost a year old. I raised a glass to his health, toasted the secret I was keeping from the rest of my family, one I had even begun keeping from myself, burying all thought of the boy as deeply as I could because Fadia had made it clear that, for the foreseeable future, she did not want me involved, although she made promises about trips to New York, and I continue to live in a state of suspended hope that some other future might in fact come to pass, and we could perhaps find a way to establish ourselves as an unconventional American family, a very New York-style family, one that would not be out of place in Manhattan or Brooklyn, that might in time come to feel at home in Rhinebeck, although the more I have allowed myself to imagine these future lives and the more weeks and months pass in which I hear nothing from Fadia and my phone calls and emails go unanswered, I realize how I am nursing a wound I have little hope of healing. She is unlikely to come around, and I know, I made the bargain, that we would do this on her terms. In a sense, she saved me from professional oblivion, from the technikon in Limpopo or the university in Chhattisgarh or indeed from the likes of Staten Island Community College, places that have little use for a man whose entire career has been built around an obsessive examination of one country’s past.

Fadia told her parents an invented story of a party and getting drunk and not being able to remember who the father was, and in so doing she saved me embarrassment and much more besides, taking all the shame upon herself, nobly enacting the part of single mother with a baby boy and no father. At least this is what I understand, what little she has told me. I am under no illusions: I know the shame was great, perhaps so profound that she has risked the love of her family, although she insists they have stood by her, inasmuch as they can given their own reduced circumstances, her father’s accounts remaining frozen, her mother’s resources dwindling. When I asked her how her father had responded to the news of her pregnancy, I remember she said, ‘He was furious, as you might have expected. He threatened to have me followed, he said we should get DNA tests to track down the father, but I knew, in the end, he would do nothing like that. My behavior was a defeat for him more than anything, and I realized, in the few days of ranting that followed the news, just how toothless he has become. My mother is the one with all the power now.’ And then, not long after the birth of our child, Fadia told me of her father’s near total transformation. ‘Selim of course is his son, his boy , he sees his own features in Selim’s face, as if he himself were the father, as if Selim were born of father alone, and no mother. It makes me furious.’

In exchange for Fadia’s deception I vowed to support her with a monthly payment transferred automatically from my British bank account into her own. There — I suspect, I feel with increasing certainty — is the reason I am being monitored: money to a woman whose brother is a terrorist, whose father was on the side of a regime now out of favor with America, this is enough to make the intelligence services in London and Washington and Tel Aviv sit up and analyze your affairs with the probing long lenses of their remote gaze, to rifle your virtual drawers with their digital fingers, every trace a sequence of binary code. I should not have been so naïve as to think a standing order to Fadia could remain a matter between the two of us.

I have kept my bank account in Oxford open for the sake of convenience and with half a thought that I might one day need to return there if America sinks itself and Britain, by some miracle, remains afloat. I left enough money to cover the monthly payments to Fadia for the next several years, and planned that when it was exhausted I would simply transfer more, or, greatest and most deeply hidden hope, imagined she might at some stage agree to move to America and be my wife. Such a dream suggests I love Fadia well enough to imagine spending the rest of my life with her. It did not seem so preposterous then, and as I watched her grow over the summer and autumn of last year, her body blossoming and expanding in ways that surprised and mesmerized me (Susan’s pregnancy with Meredith had been one of illness and discomfort by comparison), it was possible to think we might become a couple of the kind who would joke about the difference in our ages: as I grew older, I might turn a blind eye to Fadia’s dalliances, allowing that she would want a younger man to satisfy her sexual needs, whereas I would be faithful to the last, never looking at another woman but basking in the gratitude that must warm a man when a woman of greater beauty and intelligence condescends to love and accept him on whatever terms suit her, and that this love — or fond tolerance, call it what you will — would create a child who might see between his parents the crackle of energy that produced him and know it to be the essence of his own being as much as it would always remain mysterious. How could this man and this woman have come together to make me ? he must think, as we all wonder to some degree about our parents. How could these two people who perhaps he would love in differing degrees, find infuriating, exasperating, even repellent, have seen something in each other that fired the spark required to produce his own life?