So far I have had it easy. Threat is brutal to the mind but not the body. Physical pain I fear more than mental. I can imagine how the hood so routinely placed over my head in these recurring dreams might one day be cinched tight round my neck and water poured over the cloth so that I would experience the horror of drowning on dry land only to have the sentence revoked at the last moment, mortality teased again, another reprieve, the torture of death approaching and retreating, fort, da. . And perhaps they would go too far, death arriving by accident so that I fall into her arms blind and suffocating, wet cotton sucked deep into my mouth and nostrils as we rush, Death and the Dying, along the black fringed tunnel, away from the light, into the light.
Isolation itself might be construed as torture. Am I, like Louis Pierre Althusser, no longer of sound mind? (Does my knowledge of him make me suspect? Is the Gallic too foreign?) Could I, like Althusser, strangle someone I love to the point of death? Should I also be given shock therapy? Perhaps it would have been better if I had remained at Oxford (where once every century men chase a wooden duck round a quadrangle), living in College, restricting my life within the walls of academia where eccentricities are tolerated, even valorized, just as Althusser lived out his life between the École Normale Supérieure and mental hospitals. Unlike Althusser, I am no éminence grise, no great mind revered by his nation. If I killed my ex-wife or my son-in-law there would be no excusing my crime, no one to argue my value to society as counterbalance to the horror of my acts. I am no one, a dabbler in history and philosophy, a dilettante, a movie buff who pretends to cinematic philosophy, a failed lover, a father of children who do not and may never know each other, a divorced man, a predatory teacher, an ogre who sees a desirable woman and cannot stop himself, who has no apparatus for self-control, who needs Althusser’s Repressive State Apparatuses to keep him in check, to prevent him from turning himself, however unwittingly, into a traitor not just to the state but to every individual around him.
I tick off the days on a laminated paper calendar, but the ink smears against the glossy surface and I begin to wonder how many days have passed since Thanksgiving weekend, if my shaking hands have smudged the marks or if someone else, perhaps the woman who cleans my apartment, might be working for those who watch me so closely. Some evenings I think I hear voices coming from upstairs or downstairs or out in the hallway, but whenever I stop to listen or open the door there is no one, and I fear these whispering men and women may only be in my head.
Is it possible that even my family, those people I remember as my daughter and mother, my ex-wife, the student who was my three-week lover, the boy I call my son whose face I see as a memory of my own face photographed in infancy, are all just figments, from Latin, fingere, to feign, to fashion (in other words to make or to falsify), all of them inventions that are also fictions, a catalog of frauds. Figment is a word Shakespeare never used; search the corpus. But not Hobbes, he understood its force, compare his theory of personation: ‘An Idol, or meer Figment of the brain, may be Personated,’ which is to say, represented, or acted, even performed, ‘as were the Gods of the Heathen; which by such Officers as the State appointed, were Personated, and held Possessions, and other Goods, and Rights, which men from time to time dedicated, and consecrated unto them. But Idols cannot be Authors: for an Idol is nothing.’
What if, my dear Jeremy — myself, me speaking now to my loony-tune reflected mind, for who knows if anyone else will read these words — my family and my past are mere Hobbesian idols, figments of my brain, that I have been personating to myself? What if the hand of the artist has taken faces of passing acquaintance, manipulated them, and allowed the machine of my thoughts to turn them into a slideshow of false memory? What if I have been in a cool white room all my adult life, ever since leaving high school or college, confined for observation, medication, electroconvulsive therapy, and found still to be so dangerous to himself and others that he must be kept in isolation in a padded cell, handcuffed, blindfolded, allowed only to shower alone, never even seeing the faces of the men and women who jail him, that is me, the first sign of madness the dissociation from self, I no longer know, cannot say with certainty, the pen, in any case, has run low on ink and the machined metal nib scratches, slicing through the flimsy gray page, made not from cotton but wood pulp, reams of the stuff, susceptible to quick decay, so that the text itself might soon disappear, disintegrating long before I have finished this testament.
~ ~ ~
I remember spending the rest of that Sunday, the first of December, with Meredith and Peter in their apartment, and then, because they insisted on including her, with Susan as well. Though she was only a twenty-minute walk away, Peter sent a car to fetch her, wanting her there quickly, as if I were a bomb and my ex-wife the only person with the knowledge to defuse me.
The four of us sat in my daughter’s living room overlooking Central Park and I was forced to explain, several times, the nature of my failure and indiscretion, submitting myself to their interrogation.
‘Have you slept with other students?’ Susan asked, her face as apoplectic as Stephen Jahn’s once was, goggling eyes and crimson cheeks, Judy for a Punch. But could I kill her? No, not possibly.
‘Please, Mom, that’s not what’s important,’ Meredith sighed.
‘I think Jeremy should tell us whether this is habitual behavior or if it was just a one-time fuck up.’
‘It has never happened before and will never happen again.’
‘Damn right it won’t. They’ll put you in prison,’ Susan hissed.
‘I did nothing illegal.’
‘I’m not sure that’s strictly true,’ Peter interrupted. ‘If you’ve been giving money to support a terrorist organization, even indirectly, I think that might be illegal.’
‘But Fadia is not a terrorist organization. She’s not a terrorist. She’s estranged from her brother, and we don’t even know for certain that Saif—’
‘Jesus, will you listen to these names?’ Susan muttered.
‘Mom! Enough.’
‘Nonetheless, you don’t really know, do you, Jeremy?’ Peter continued. ‘Did you ever see a bank statement for Fadia’s account? Did you ever confirm it was her account alone? Do you know for certain there isn’t a co-signer? Are you sure her dad or brother isn’t on that account? How do you know it isn’t in fact the brother’s account and this Fadia is just a co-signer? What if she’s nothing more than a front for terrorist fundraising? You could be just one of dozens, scores of men similarly duped.’
I hesitated. They were reasonable if unpleasant questions. I had never checked any of those details. ‘I trusted her. I was in the hospital room at the birth of my son. I felt — I was in love with her. You trust the people you love, don’t you?’
‘What a moron, Jeremy. You can’t trust people like that!’
‘Honestly, Mom, you’re not helping.’
Susan snorted. ‘I’m glad to see nothing’s changed. All the old loyalties. .’
For a moment no one said anything and then Peter and Susan continued haranguing me in a tag-team relay that suggested a kind of understanding between them I had not expected.
‘I think you’re lucky — we’re all lucky — that you haven’t been arrested already,’ Peter said at last, as if that was the final and most important point. Through my behavior I had risked not only my own reputation and liberty, but the reputation and liberty of my entire family, even perhaps my friends and colleagues.