My walk home should have taken me directly across Washington Square Park, but instead, without making a conscious decision to do so, I skirted its northern and eastern perimeter, as if the vision of that young man passing my office earlier, his circling round and round again, acted as a repellent force, though as the autumn days grew shorter I had been finding it more difficult to brave the park after nightfall, despite it being well lit and, particularly in late afternoon and early evening, full of people walking to their homes or jobs or simply exercising their dogs. It did not seem to be the zone of criminality and licentiousness I remembered from the past, a park where one could scarcely walk ten feet without being offered drugs or noticing the invitation of some person’s gaze.
As I walked round the edge of the park, I felt a spasm of regret for the tone I had adopted with Rachel. Such truculence was not like me, and I began to compose a message to her in my mind, apologizing for the confusion while also explaining, in brief, the history behind my irritation with the subject, and then assuring her that it was not a big deal and finishing by asserting my sincere hope that I had not upset her. The more I thought about it the more I began to realize that the confusion and insistence by others that they knew better who I was than I did myself was only partly the cause of the intense irritation I was feeling. What was really irritating me was that I had taken the job at Oxford out of a sense of desperation since Columbia’s failure to grant me tenure seemed effectively to have ended my career in America at the time. After such a decision there is little one can do, nowhere one can go in America but down, to some lesser institution, perhaps even to a community college, or worse, to a high school, and faced with the prospect of becoming a high school History teacher to teenagers who cared nothing for the subject and would become ever more hostile to an aging teacher who, God only knows, might have developed a cancer the treatment for which his job’s poor medical insurance would not have begun to cover and instead of turning to the production of crystal meth, as in that unlikely television drama, I might have been moved to do something no less illegal like applying my linguistic and historical knowledge to treasonous ends, that is to say by turning spy, though as soon as I thought of this the more ridiculous it seemed since I have no access to government files or secrets, and my loyalty, though engaged and interrogative, a loyalty that marks its fidelity by the robustness of its critique, has never been in doubt. I would have been no one but a failed and failing high school History teacher with scant knowledge that any foreign government might wish to acquire. I am still in possession of nothing — no information, no secrets, no connections (at least I believe this is true) — that can possibly be of use to anyone other than myself, perhaps my heirs and a few of my students and colleagues. I know nothing that would or should make me a person of interest to the authorities on either side of whatever divisions now carve up our world.
Although I was exceptionally lucky to get the position at Oxford given what had happened at Columbia, moving there did not feel like a choice made freely, since the alternative — a life of poorly paid secondary school teaching or criminality of whatever stripe — was so horrific that I could do nothing but leave the country of my birth to find better work elsewhere. It was that which niggled, the resentment I felt for having been forced into a more complicated relationship with the idea of home.
In any case, I vowed to write out my apology to Rachel and send it the next day, then to put it from my mind since I will have no occasion to see her again until this coming spring.
When I got home — though it is strange to think of this apartment as home, since for so many years home was a redbrick Victorian house with a beech hedge in the small front courtyard shielding the living room windows from the street — there was another box waiting for me, the same size as the first, with the address written in the same hand. Would there be forensic traces if I turned it over to the police? Had the sender worn gloves? Could the police even be trusted?
I took this second box up in the elevator and opened it as I had the first, again finding some two thousand pages or so filled with web addresses. I put the boxes next to each other, wondering what I should do about them; neither had postage, both were unmistakably intended for me, which suggested there was a clear intention about the delivery, but what it meant or who might be sending the packages I could not imagine. I phoned the doorman, Manu, and asked him who had dropped it off.
‘Sorry, Professor, I don’t know anything about the guy.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘He looked like a bike messenger, you know, and he had one of those exhaust masks on, with the mesh, like a gas mask? And sunglasses and a hat, so I couldn’t tell much about him.’
‘Did he say anything?’
‘Just to make sure you got it.’
‘Nothing else?’
‘Nah. He was kind of unfriendly. Most of these guys, you know, even if they’re in a rush and having a shitty day — oh, sorry, Professor O’Keefe—’
‘Never mind about that.’
‘What I mean is, even when they’re having a really, really bad day, most of these guys, you know, they’ll still be polite, and this guy was seriously not polite. He was a fucking asshole.’
I thanked Manu, hung up the phone, and poured a glass of wine, but then became curious and pulled the boxes out again and sat with them open before me, turning the pages over one at a time, thinking that I would look at every one, at least skim what was printed on each, even if it took me all night. Living in a doorman building, which is to say living with an intermediary between my domestic space and the outside world, offers a considerable sense of comfort and security. One of the unexpected outcomes of living on Divinity Road in Oxford was the profound vulnerability I felt when I moved in and discovered for the first time since leaving my childhood home for college, what it feels like to have someone arrive unexpected at my front door, not to have at least an intercom between me and the outside world. At the worst, when I was living with Susan and Meredith on 75th Street, we got the occasional drunk in the middle of the night pressing our buzzer and waking us up. Sometimes Meredith would be crying at the door by the time I woke and there was one terrible occasion when Susan had taken Meredith on a mother — daughter trip to Amsterdam and I was alone in the apartment and someone pressed the buzzer repeatedly at three in the morning and I was convinced it was not a mistake, that even if the person — it turned out to be a man — was drunk, he knew exactly where he was; in fact this was true, because between bouts of buzzing he stood back on the sidewalk, swaying unsteadily and looking up at our apartment as I cowered behind a curtain looking down at him, and though he did not shout or scream, because this might have attracted the attention of neighbors or police, he was pointing his finger at our apartment, stabbing it in the air, and the more animated he became the more I was convinced he must have been a student I had offended or who believed I had wronged him in some way, ruining his chances for graduate school, or who knows what, because students can, some of them, become incredibly volatile, unpredictable, and even dangerous.