That evening a car collected me and my four boxes and drove me uptown where I spent several hours in Meredith and Peter’s apartment with a team of lawyers, men and women, thirties to fifties, white and black and Asian, who grilled me and took away the files for forensic examination. I was told to wait. They would contact me in due course. For now, they suggested I should carry on as if nothing were amiss, although it might be wise, they cautioned, to delay any international travel. Borders can be tricky places. Leaving might not be a problem, but arriving elsewhere, or returning home, could prove difficult.
~ ~ ~
Days pass. I read and teach and wait. I take the elevator to the lobby, I speak with Ernesto and the other doormen, Rafa and Manu and Ignacio. I walk to the grocery store around the corner where I pay more than a dollar for an organic apple, sometimes I go in the middle of the night to buy cereal or cheese because the novelty of a truly twenty-four-hour business is still fresh, and walking those aisles at two in the morning, speaking with clerks who would rather be anywhere else, I notice the enclosed seating area where people can consume a quick meal, a collection of plastic chairs and fiberglass tables that is closed overnight lest the homeless or the destitute try to seek refuge.
I attend a guest lecture in the English Department by a young Pakistani-American professor at Princeton who speaks about Jafar Panahi’s films Closed Curtain and This Is Not a Film, both of which I teach in my Cinema of Surveillance course. There are only ten people in the room, no worse than you might find at a research seminar in Oxford, but not what I would have hoped for in a city like this. I go to dinner afterward with the host from the English Department — an Englishman around my own age who lives just downstairs from me in the Silver Towers — and the young professor from Princeton. We eat at a Malaysian restaurant and the next day I end up with food poisoning, which keeps me circling my apartment, orbiting bed and toilet and kitchen sink, and in so pacing my small quarters, I think how quickly I might accommodate myself to confinement.
Every day, either in the morning or evening, sometimes at lunch, I encounter Michael Ramsey. Occasionally we greet each other, but often he pretends not to see me and simply walks away once I begin approaching him and then I ask myself if it is really Michael I am seeing, or if my brain is playing tricks. Sometimes I call after him, shouting his name, but he never turns around.
The lawyers Peter engaged on my behalf have not returned the files, and so I remain in a state of uncertainty. How much could a group of New York lawyers determine about Saif’s associations? Such matters would seem to be beyond their investigatory powers, but perhaps I am naïve about what is now possible. All I can hope is that Fadia’s account, the account into which my money dribbles on the first of each month, ends up being in her name alone, and that the only serious issue is one of relation: Fadia’s relation to Saif, and my relation to Fadia.
~ ~ ~
Although the exam period finished on December 19th, I have decided to stay in the city for the holidays, hunkering in my warm apartment as the Polar Vortex again swings into force. One morning, a few days before Christmas, after a sober night indoors watching movies and eating takeout Vietnamese, Ernesto buzzes from downstairs to say that someone has dropped off a package for me, and so, on that frigid day, I open yet another box and find inside a shiny black plastic block, the size of a hardback edition of War and Peace or The Collected Earlier Poems of William Carlos Williams or Crime and Punishment, although in fact what it reminds me of more than any book is the humming monolith in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001. I notice the cables and understand this is some kind of external drive, and although I worry for a moment that connecting it to my computer may mean opening myself to a virus or some heretofore unimagined level of surveillance, I decide nothing could be worse than what I am already experiencing.
When I connect the drive and open the icon on the desktop, I am, at first, confused. There must be a glitch, because the window that opens presents an exact copy of the files and folders on my computer’s own desktop. Only a few more clicks and I understand that the drive contains not only a complete copy of my computer’s contents, but one which is current to this very day, the last changes being recorded at 7:52 this morning.
Assuming this is still the work of Michael Ramsey it is clear to me there is now only one possible meaning: a warning that everything I do, write, read, view online, even what I do offline, is accessible. When I am connected to the internet, whoever they are can read everything I have written, even the documents I regard as profoundly private: the diary I keep in a word-processing file document, drafts of occasional poems, pieces of correspondence that, in my old-fashioned way, I sometimes print, sign, and send off in envelopes to their recipients. There is no longer any such thing as privacy, unless one writes letters and diaries and poems longhand, as I write this document now, and even so, our government has long made a habit of scanning the exterior of all mail. It would be clear to the watchers to whom I am writing and from whom I am receiving mail even if they cannot necessarily discern the contents of the letters themselves. The phone Meredith gave me, this, too, has turned me into a trackable subject, someone whose location can be so precisely pinpointed that Michael Ramsey may now find me throughout the day, any given day, anywhere I go. The phone, I understand, is why he has been showing up all over the city, not a bad penny but a red flag, mobile and rippling, trying to catch my attention. And then, I think of the message he left on my old phone, stashed in my refrigerator, on that strange evening a few weeks ago, a message that was also a warning: ‘Phones listen.’
Even when turned off? Do phones listen even when they appear to be powerless?
I realize now that in writing this, in naming Mr. Ramsey, I may be putting him in some kind of danger of reprisal by whoever employs him. Although I did not think about the implications of revealing his identity at the start of this testament, how many days or weeks ago I began writing it, this was not my intention. I mean him no harm. No harm should come to him.
~ ~ ~
After the arrival of the box this morning, I phoned Dr. Sebastian and asked if she could still make time to see me before the holidays.
‘Come now, if you can,’ she said. ‘I’m going away tomorrow.’
As I walked from the station on Broadway to her office on West End Avenue, I stopped to pick up a token of the season, a basket of pears and nuts, almost as if I were a suitor.
‘My patients do not usually bring gifts,’ she said, leading me into the consulting room, which I remembered as more austere than it is. The white walls I had stored in my memory are instead dove gray, the wooden floors covered in Chobi rugs, the furniture a mix of nineteenth-century antiques and midcentury Danish chairs. African masks decorate one of the walls. I remembered none of it from my first visit.
‘I wanted to make up for the short notice, and the time of year.’
‘I am secular, Jeremy, but thank you nonetheless.’ She put the basket to one side and rather than sitting behind her desk as she had on our first meeting, took a seat next to me in one of the two chairs intended for patients. ‘So the scans look good. No anomalies. But perhaps, if there are still questions, you should see someone else. I would be happy to make a referral.’