Patrick Flanery - I Am No One

‘I’m sorry it happened.’

‘Why? It isn’t your fault.’

‘That doesn’t stop me being sorry.’

She yawned and in the light of the elevator I saw how much the last six months have marked her. It was not just the flight, not even the work of motherhood, but perhaps the worry about how life is going to evolve in the coming years. There is a new quality carved into her face. The stone I once admired has become softer, more plastic, and the consciousness of death’s proximity, which in the past I thought I saw in her expression, has been textured by a more nuanced awareness of the precariousness of life, the life she and I produced, the life she must protect. Or so I imagined. At the door I handed Selim back to his mother, and as he left my arms I found my heart was everywhere, torn and scattered between them.

‘I bought a crib and put it in your room, although if you’d rather have separate rooms it’s easily managed. I want you to be comfortable.’

‘The same room is fine. He sleeps well. I won’t be disturbed.’

I asked if she wanted something to eat, but no, she had eaten on the plane, she wasn’t hungry, just a shower, she said, arranging our son on the mattress and already, swiftly, unpacking their things into the closet and chest of drawers. ‘Pick him up if he cries.’

Not presuming to touch her or do anything that might make her feel ill at ease, I nodded, moving aside to let her pass. Tomorrow I should at least offer to put them in a hotel. ‘No!’ I imagine her saying. ‘We want to be with you!’

As the water ran in the bathroom, I watched my boy’s chest rise and fall, his nostrils distend, contract, the eyelids flutter, a sigh push itself out of his mouth. How like me as a baby he looks, the same blond straight hair. Only the dark roots are different, and the subtle olive complexion. Will my son be an American? Is that a choice his mother would allow him to make? Or will he always be foreign in the country of his father?

Now I sit here, fireworks exploding all over the city, as my son and his mother sleep down the hall, the fulfillment of my most profound desire since leaving Oxford, and the source of a pain I did not anticipate, the gnawing of an even greater desire: never again to be parted from either of them.

When I wake on the first day of a new year, the morning of my son’s first birthday, Fadia is moving about in the kitchen, taking care to be quiet, opening cabinets, searching for something she cannot find, and then, in the distance, I hear the sharp cry of my son, the first time I have heard his voice since July, drawing me from bed and into the kitchen. Fadia sees me and smiles an apology, but this, I know, is what it means to live with a baby.

‘Shall I go?’ I offer.

‘No, it’s fine. I’m sorry I woke you. I was looking for the coffee.’

‘In the freezer.’

‘You shouldn’t freeze coffee. It ruins the flavor.’

‘Does it? I didn’t know. I won’t from now on.’

Fadia leaves the room as I make the coffee. A few minutes later she returns with Selim, who is awake and smiling.

‘He needed a change.’ Our son looks at me for an instant and then buries his head in Fadia’s hair. ‘Don’t be shy,’ she coos. ‘Who’s that? Remember? Is that papa? Can you say papa? He already says mama but I think he’s confused. I usually speak to him in French.’

I reach out to touch Selim’s hand but he pulls it away, tightening his fingers into a loose fist. If someone is watching us now, how banal they must think us, making coffee, changing diapers, getting to know each other once more. Surely the banality of our lives puts us above suspicion, or is banality no protection against algorithms and keyword searches and guilt by association?

We sit in the dining area, overlooking the street, which is still dark, not yet dawn.

‘What would you like to do for his birthday?’

‘It’s so cold we could just stay here. Order in food. I don’t like him being out in this weather for too long, and I have no urgent desire to see New York. I know it well enough already. All those childhood shopping trips. My parents used to own an apartment in the East 60s.’

‘You don’t like it?’

‘No, I do, but you understand, everything shifts,’ she says, adjusting her grip on Selim so she can sip her coffee more easily. She puts him down on the carpet and we watch as he crawls towards a collection of soft toys I bought in anticipation of his visit. ‘That was thoughtful of you.’

‘Making up for the last six months. He’s not walking yet?’

‘Pulling himself up. It won’t be long. I’ll need to get some things at the shops for him today.’

We linger over such nothings, watching our son until he needs to be fed, and then Fadia sweeps him up in her arms, raises her loose shirt, and supports his head. Let us be like this always, I think, so relaxed and at ease with one another, content and quiet in a life that might not be private but which proceeds as if it were, perhaps doing nothing to accommodate ourselves to the end of privacy except to live more ethically, to admit our faults, to assume transparency, but also to demand it of others, to insist on the right to know as much about the watchers as they about us.

‘Do you ever see Stephen?’ I ask, still not having told Fadia about the boxes, about Michael Ramsey, about the photographs of her life over the past months. I suppose it is a test, to find out if she will admit to the meeting I saw depicted in the photograph.

‘I ran into him recently on the street. I don’t like the man, but I greeted him, because it seemed impolite not to do so — it was ages since I had seen him — and he nearly exploded there on St. Giles, as if he could not believe I was speaking to him. I did not really understand why, unless it is because of Saif or my father and uncle, but it was like he did not even want to be seen speaking to me in public, and as if he thought I should know better than to approach him.’

So that is that, I think, there is no collusion between them, no alliance, nothing suggested by the single image of Fadia inclining her head towards him on the street outside the Taylorian.

‘But then,’ she continues, adjusting the angle of Selim’s body in her arms, ‘he starts phoning me. He never says his name, but his voice, you know, it is unmistakable. He says terrible things about me, I cannot bring myself to repeat them, and about my brother, and also about you. He was phoning every day, and the line was always clicking and full of static, as if he was using an internet connection or as though the line was being monitored, that is what I imagined. And then he started talking about Selim, saying that one day when I didn’t expect it, I would suddenly find Selim gone. I would turn my back and he would disappear and I would never see him again. I could not tell if it was an empty threat, or if I should take it seriously.’

‘Is that why you finally replied to my messages?’

‘Maybe. I was frightened. I guess I could have gone to the police, but I never feel safe around them, at least the white ones. They see a woman who looks a little Middle Eastern and that is enough to change the whole equation. Even if I was the one being victimized I suspect they would find a way to turn it around on me, and then I might be interrogated, and social workers would get involved, and before I know it Selim really would be gone. Forgive me if it looks like I was running to you for help.’

The sun breaks against the building across the street. Our cups are empty and I refill them from the carafe, deciding now is the time to tell her about the boxes and Michael Ramsey, the phone calls my mother has been receiving from a man who must be Stephen Jahn, the way I have been moved to doubt my own sanity, on occasion to suspect a conspiracy involving my son-in-law, perhaps even my daughter and ex-wife, although now I no longer think that is likely, I believe whoever may be watching me has nothing to do with my family.