Patrick Flanery - I Am No One

There are several doormen who work in my building but the guy on duty that Sunday was a clean-cut Puerto Rican called Rafa.

‘Professor O’Keefe! Package for you.’

From behind the desk he pointed to the area where packages are left, near the mailboxes and the windows looking out on the courtyard between the three buildings. Odd that a package would arrive on a Sunday, but perhaps it had been delivered on Saturday and I had simply failed to check whether there was anything for me.

‘Do you know if this came yesterday, Rafa?’

‘Can’t tell you, boss. I came on at ten this morning and it was here when I arrived. Ignacio was on duty yesterday. You can ask him tomorrow.’

The box was wrapped in brown paper and was the size of the old cosmetics cases my mother used as a young woman, the variety of luggage no one takes on airplanes anymore but which were once a staple of women’s accouterments; I remember that the last one she owned, before they became extinct in the age of strict bag limitations, was covered in turquoise vinyl, part of a larger set of suitcases all in the same color, with brass locks and fasteners. It must have dated from the 1960s, and after my mother no longer used it for makeup it became the repository of photographs that had never made it into albums and which she now keeps under her bed and for all I know has continued to open every day, inhaling the case’s old cosmetic smell and the odor of the slowly decaying vinyl and whatever toxic chemical complexity went into fixing the turquoise dye. The box was that size, and had the heaviness of the cosmetic case when it was fully packed with bottles and vials, and as I held it in the elevator going up to the third floor, examining the unfamiliar handwriting that had addressed it to me, Professor Jeremy O’Keefe, I imagined all the possibilities it might contain. There was no return address, no indication of a sender or origin, no postage, and thus no postmark, so truly no way of determining where it might have originated, at least not before I had opened it.

I put the box on the coffee table in the living room and it is possible I forgot about it or that I was disturbed enough by its arrival and mystery that I feared opening it, or it could be nothing more than the fact that Meredith phoned to tell me Peter had spoken with Dr. Sebastian and confirmed I could come for an appointment at ten on Monday morning, which would give me ample time to get back to my office for the meeting with Rachel at 4pm. ‘Maybe,’ Meredith said, ‘it’s time to get a smartphone. That way you’ll always have access to email and something like this would be less likely to happen next time.’

‘I’ll think about it.’

‘Come on, I know that means you won’t think about it.’

‘Okay, sweetheart, I’ll get one tomorrow or the next day, if that makes you happy.’

‘It would make your life easier, that’s all.’

‘I don’t know that it would have made any difference to what happened yesterday. I still would have gone to the café, and if I’d had one of those things then perhaps I wouldn’t have waited for half an hour to see if she arrived, so it might have saved me time, but the mistake would still have happened.’

‘I know it’s unsettling.’

‘If you notice anything, or if you and Peter remember any occasion when I seemed to have been forgetful, but more than just in an ordinary way like struggling for a name or something, then you have to tell me.’

‘I will, but we talked about it again, and neither of us can remember anything of the kind. You seem fine to us. . just a little lonely.’

For a moment I could not speak. A cry swelled in my throat. I was surprised that she was addressing my loneliness, having imagined that by appearing ebullient every time we met, I might have concealed just how depressed I felt. I swallowed a few times and said, ‘Yes, I’ve been a little lonely lately. Missing people in Oxford. I had very good friends there.’

‘But you still know people in New York.’

‘Not any close friends. And everyone in Oxford has gone unexpectedly silent, as if they resent my leaving. You’re the only person I can really talk to, Meredith. I’m sorry if I’ve seemed needy.’

‘You don’t have to be sorry! It’s nice to have you around. You don’t ever have to feel bad for wanting to see me.’

‘But if I call and you’re busy, or it isn’t a good time, I want you to promise you’ll say so. I don’t want to be a burden.’

‘Please, Dad, my life isn’t that busy, I swear.’

She gave me the address, the doctor would be working from her home office instead of the hospital, because, I supposed, it was the week of Thanksgiving, or perhaps memory specialists were not based in hospitals, or for initial consultations they thought it not so threatening to see the patients in a less medicalized space, where the prospect of long years locked in a dementia ward would not open off every corridor glimpsed in the walk from the entrance to the examining room. The address was on the Upper West Side, on West End Avenue, and I entered it in my online calendar so that I would receive an email reminder on Monday morning.

Having spoken to Meredith, and then spending some time reading the news and checking my email — no messages in the personal account, more messages than I wanted to read in my work account — I decided to find something to watch on TV, an old western or even a football game, if there was one of any interest, but the box that had arrived loomed before me on the coffee table and I felt compelled to open it, though it’s true that sometimes I leave my bank statements unopened for weeks or months, and there have been times in the past when a letter has arrived (when letters were still routinely sent) that I so little wanted to read it might sit unopened for days or weeks or even — I remember a letter from a French ex-girlfriend in college that I only opened after the color of the envelope had faded, changing from blue to violet to pink — for years. I went back to the kitchen for a knife and slit open the brown wrapping paper, revealing a brown cardboard box taped shut with brown packing tape, but with no other marks or writing. I looked at it for some time and even thought of calling the police, because I had no idea what it might contain, whether it might be a bomb, since every professor has his host of disgruntled former students, and my mind wandered — in a careening, full-tilt way — to my attachments at Oxford whose loose ends might yet be curling round to bite me. After pressing my ear against the cardboard and hearing nothing, seeing no signs of leakage or other hints that a threat might be packed inside, and having shaken it with no conclusive results — it sounded, simply, full , and I had no sense of parts moving inside when I shook it — I took up the paring knife and slit along the tape to open the top flaps.

For children the opening of packages is almost always a matter of joyful expectation, but as the years progress and one discovers that some packages may not bring happiness and can just as frequently deliver disappointment or anxiety, one looks upon boxes, particularly ones as mysterious as that which arrived at my apartment on the Sunday before Thanksgiving, with a vague feeling of trepidation or even sometimes dread. Perhaps, for me, this shift in the possibility of packages dates from my move to Oxford, when, after six weeks, the shipping container finally arrived in Britain and the vanload of possessions I had thought I could not live without — books, music, a few pieces of art, clothes, but no furniture, since I did not go to Oxford thinking I was staying permanently — was unloaded at the College’s lodge. For the first year I lived in rooms on site, so the porters helped me carry the boxes around the front quad and up the staircase to the top floor, where my furnished rooms were in the eaves, the windows overlooking the sandstone battlements. When I began opening those boxes from home, I found the anticipation and happiness of being reunited with my possessions quickly give way to small irritations — the covers of some valuable books had been damaged, the glass in several framed pictures was cracked — and then to an overwhelming sense of nostalgia that crested only to leave in its wake a sense of despair and regret. I could smell not only New York on my belongings, my books and clothes in particular, but the apartment on the Upper West Side I had so recently shared with my wife and daughter and which I had left of my own accord because I believed the marriage to be finished; I was the one who chose to leave, though it was Susan who had made clear the relationship was coming to an end and our legal severing came only a year later. Sitting in that Oxford room with its cream-colored walls and institutional furniture, surrounded by the carnage of boxes that came freighted with memories of a life abandoned, I wept, and wept so loudly that my neighbor across the corridor, a postdoctoral Fellow from Geneva, knocked on the door to offer me a sherry and then, because he was sensible and helpful and became one of my closest friends during my first year in that city, helped me unpack my books and arrange them on the shelves. If I had been left to do the unpacking alone, it might never have happened. Since then, if not before, a taped-up box has been an object of threat more than one of desire or expectation.