On the way to my house I stopped at the grocery store on Route 9 to get a few odds and ends so that, apart from seeing my mother for lunch the next day, I could spend a stretch of hours reading and perhaps also thinking about my recent past, about Stephen Jahn and Fadia and Saif and the way that trio of people had come to dominate my world.
The house, off a long rural road north of town, sits on a plot of land surrounded by small farms. My closest neighbor is more than half a mile away and the road itself is little but a paved farm track, wide enough for one vehicle, so it often feels more remote and removed from the world than it is.
I unloaded the groceries into the mudroom and was relieved to find the house in good order. Watching the garage door go down and the gray afternoon light give way to the white glow of lamps, I felt calm again after the events of the week, and relieved to know I could retreat to this kind of space away from the city, from students and colleagues, even away from Meredith and Peter, for this felt like the locus of some future retirement, a sample of what my own old age would be like, though unlike my mother I could not imagine placing myself at the center of any community.
Whatever may happen in my own case, now more uncertain than ever, it has always seemed to me that elderly women are more likely to be looked after by friends and neighbors than elderly men, who are perhaps by nature more disposed to retreat into themselves, less adept at reaching out for support. Perhaps people assume men are better able to see to their needs, a symptom of an old sexism that does as little for us as it ultimately does for women, men being thought capable and thus ignorable and so declining more rapidly, women thought incapable and thus in need of a cossetting that assumes only one way of growing old correctly, although one might well think that women, in the end, get the better deal out of such assumptions. Or perhaps this is not true, perhaps people assume the opposite, that men cannot begin to know how to care for themselves domestically while women, as they age, are assumed to live lives focused around the domestic, ruling an arena over which they have long been masters (or mistresses), and therefore can be left to themselves. In truth, too many old women and men are forgotten and ignored and prejudices one way or another do much to hurt both. Perhaps a little watching in such cases is no bad thing.
For now I am happy to be alone and ignored, perhaps even forgotten, although I know Meredith does not forget me, and I am not elderly, only in my fifties, in perhaps the September of my life, or if we are to believe the predictions for our own longevity, even the early July. It is comforting to think I still might have half a life more to live, another five decades to set right what I sometimes got spectacularly wrong, in particular where it comes to my relationships with women, and not just Susan and Meredith, and to a lesser extent my mother, but with Fadia, about whom I feel a profound and troubling sense of failure, of having not only failed her but having actively done wrong, quite regardless of the complex circumstances. Even where matters were not straightforward I know it is possible I might have done better than I did.
There are times now — sitting in this apartment on Houston Street, unsure how long I may yet come and go with a sense of freedom — when I wonder if I have already slipped past the boundary of life, and if this current situation might be, for the historian, the academic, the pursuer of other people’s stories in the archive of recent history, the only version of purgatory I could have earned, an accounting of my failures, recorded in anticipation of an audience about whose character, identity, composition and purpose I can but speculate: the authorities, my heirs, some future historians concerned with the ways this nation has contorted its gaze back on itself.
I spent that Friday afternoon, the last one in November, installed in my warm living room, gazing out at the lawn and the garden to which I did very little this year, promising myself that in April or May, when the ground has thawed, I will hire someone to make a garden requiring minimal maintenance and little watering, a garden that can be left to grow regardless of the seasons and immune to my oblivious eye, and between those spells of watching the garden disappear into shadow and my own reflection grow more distinct in the windows through which I was looking, turning on lights so I would not be in the dark, I read, flipping between my former colleague Timothy Garton Ash’s memoir The File and Simon Menner’s Top Secret, which chilled me with its polaroid images of the homes of people who had been subject to surveillance. At the end of Menner’s book a series of photos shows the head of the Stasi’s Phone Surveillance Unit in his gray suit going down on one knee, tapped on the shoulder with the blade of a sword, and bestowed with an ornamental pendant featuring a red telephone receiver. The honors of surveillance, the spy’s secret accolade. Would my own watchers be so garlanded?
When I found myself dozing I turned on the television, trying to slip into one of those thoughtless moods when the mind can rest on lives and concerns other than one’s own. I must not have found anything sufficiently distracting because my thoughts kept returning to the events of the week, trying to separate the fact of the surveillance to which I was subject (my God, someone is watching me at all times!) from the purpose (why would someone wish to track me so closely?) and the revelation itself (who would want to make me aware of this surveillance and why would they do so?).
I had almost accepted the fact of the surveillance, and had a sense, now, that whatever I did, wherever I went, if I did so in ways that could be tracked (facial recognition software, financial traces, even my MetroCard, not to mention my online and phone activities), then someone would be collecting the data even if they were not necessarily analyzing it to look for patterns of behavior or suggestions that I might, in some preposterous way, be regarded as a threat to national security. I picked up the handset of my landline and spoke to the dial tone, or anyone who might be listening, insisting to them as much as to myself, ‘I have done nothing wrong, I am a blameless, guiltless person, a Professor of History at a reputable university in one of the world’s great cities. Why should I be concerned about the government monitoring my habits and communications and financial transactions if I have nothing to hide? A student said to me not long ago that privacy is for criminals, that only a criminal would think to demand privacy of his or her communications. I am not a criminal and still I demand privacy. I demand the right to be left alone, to be forgotten, to be a nonentity.’
Of course I knew this had something to do with the people I had known in Oxford, and perhaps also with what I had read online or carelessly written in emails or said over the phone during the course of the last decade. Over the coming two days I would begin to see these reasons with growing clarity, as I see them now, or suspect I see them, regardless of the ongoing imponderability of all that has happened. But at the time, on the last Friday in November, it was beyond my powers of analysis or imagination to guess who would wish to make me conscious of the surveillance and why he or she would risk alerting me to such an intrusion.