Patrick Flanery - I Am No One

‘Essentially, yes. We’re not talking about a single event, but a series of events, a suite of behaviors, if you like, about which I have no memory.’

‘If that were the case, and I want to underscore my skepticism, then we might be looking at some kind of dissociative disorder, although I would certainly then suggest you see a psychiatrist as well. There are really no childhood traumas? Military service?’

‘Nothing I would call traumatic. Mild, boring, a completely dull childhood in the suburbs. No broken bones, two loving parents who were married until my father died and never did so much as spank me. An adult life lived in libraries and classrooms and academic offices. Although I suppose that can be traumatic in its own way.’

Dr. Sebastian looked down at the ledger, as if it might contain an answer. ‘Let me ask you some questions.’

‘Shoot.’

‘Shoot?’

‘Go ahead.’

‘Right. Do you ever find yourself driving in your car or riding on the subway and then realizing you have no recollection of the beginning of the trip?’

‘No, nothing like that.’

‘When you’re talking to someone, do you ever have the sense, all of a sudden, that you have not heard what the other person is saying?’

‘I suppose so, on occasion. Not very often. I try to be a good listener. Susan, my ex-wife, she used to complain that my mind would wander whenever she started speaking, that I would just grunt my approval without listening attentively, but no, for the most part, I am present when someone is talking to me.’

‘Have you ever looked up and wondered how it is that you are where you are?’

‘In an existential sense, or a physical one?’

Dr. Sebastian smiled. ‘Physical.’

‘No, nothing like that.’

She asked me whether I ever found myself in clothes with no recollection of getting dressed in them. No, never. Discovering objects in my belongings that I did not recognize as my own? No, not that I can remember. I know the contents of my life, my possessions and losses.

‘Has anyone ever approached you, insisting they have met you before, or know you well, and you have no memory of this person?’

A cold sharp pain throbbed in my chest. ‘Yes, that did happen recently. Thanksgiving weekend. I met a young man — I’ve been meeting him regularly, all over the city, even outside of the city — who insists he was my student, but I have no recollection of having taught him, or even of having met him, and yet we seemed to know each other — according to him — for a considerable length of time, at least two years, more than a decade ago.’

Dr. Sebastian scribbled in her ledger. ‘Is this young man the only such person?’

‘As far as I can remember.’

Question followed question, and in most cases the condition she described did not fit my own experiences, or my sense of those experiences, and yet enough of the questions did fit that I began to feel a swelling anxiety that manifested itself as shortness of breath. I described to her exactly what had happened with the boxes, how their content seemed to include material I could not objectively have produced myself, and how the files were now undergoing forensic examination by lawyers and private investigators.

‘Let me ask you,’ I said, after she had finished, ‘if the authorities came to ask what you had gleaned from this single conversation, what would you say?’

‘I might be required to divulge what I know, or what I have concluded about you on the basis of our consultation, particularly if I feel that you might be a danger to others.’

‘In other words, you might tell the authorities I was crazy.’

Dr. Sebastian grimaced. ‘ If that was my conclusion, and if I was required by a court to give evidence, then yes. And if it was a federal case, you should know that there is no doctor — patient privilege.’ She paused, narrowing her eyes and inclining her head. ‘Have you committed a crime, Jeremy?’

‘That is the question. Whether I might have committed a crime, or whether I’m crazy, or both, I suppose. Every morning I get out of bed and try to go about my day, I cannot shake the feeling that I might be crazy. Am I crazy?’

‘Let us rather not use that word. What I can say is this: your brain scan is normal, although that does not necessarily give us a complete picture. In some ways the technology is still rudimentary, and just because the brain looks normal does not mean that other psychological factors cannot be at work. On the basis of the questions I have asked and the answers you have given, it is possible that you have some kind of Unspecified Dissociative Disorder. But , and this is a very important qualification, the fact of the boxes, and the way you keep meeting this young man, the sorts of coincidence that do not seem like coincidence at all, as well as your demeanor, the way I observe you behaving, your general appearance, all that leads me to believe you are very intelligent and also very sane, as much as any intelligent person can remain sane in a world largely governed and determined by far less intelligent minds.’

‘So what does this mean?’

‘It means, I think, that you should trust in what you believe is happening around you.’

‘But what if I don’t know what’s happening?’

‘Then you have to find an answer.’

Flipping back through these pages, I find myself searching for a succession of clues that might lead to a place of certainty, rather than to further branching questions. The files and photographs I turned over to the lawyers still have not been returned. I understand the investigations are incomplete, but without those records I cannot help doubting all that I think may have happened. Only the monolithic hard drive remains, locked in my desk drawer, and who is to say I did not buy it myself and engage the backup system on my computer to create a perfect archive? Who is to say I might not have sent it out by messenger, and arranged for its immediate return precisely in order to buttress a delusion? Can the conscious mind partition what it knows, keeping one part in the dark as another part works frantically behind the curtain, turning gears and knobs, pressing buttons, amplifying and distorting the voice to deceive both its other self and those that encounter the physical person? Fireworks and smoke machines to distract the terrified, among whom might be included one’s own true self. On the basis of Dr. Sebastian’s questions, I find myself continuing to contemplate this as a possibility.

Each day, I see Michael Ramsey somewhere in the city. I follow, and the next moment, just as I’m about to catch up with him, I find he disappears. I stand at my bedroom window and look out on Houston Street, waiting for him to appear. An advertisement painted on a building, with images of palm trees and white beaches, instructs me: ‘Find Your Beach.’ Perhaps I need a holiday.

There is news of terrorists in Syria crucifying a girl who was the victim of rape. There is other news of terrorists in Iraq throwing half a dozen homosexual men off a building. I know this is not the first time such things have happened, and I cannot help wondering if Saif might be among those who conclude they have the right to pass judgment on the fate of strangers. Are such acts ultimately so different from the execution of inmates in American prisons, or the rape and murder of a teenage girl in Iraq by an American soldier? Surely that is part of the point these terrorists, in their evil, are trying to make.

A few days later, The Journal of Modern History asks me to review a new study about a group of leading British historians who were placed under surveillance by MI5 in the decades after the end of the Second World War, a decision made largely because those men were Communists or thought to be Communists or had simply traveled to Russia at some point in their lives. How like those men I might be, although I am no terrorist, and I have never even been to the Middle East, never traveled to Egypt, not even transited through the airport at Dubai on the way back and forth to one unremarkable destination or another. But perhaps logic does not rule the judgment of men in hidden rooms or standing on the tops of buildings, readying themselves to detain one man or push another to his death.