Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked Read online

  Even before these melting and merging tendencies of Nasreen’s began manifesting themselves, my emails to her had been growing shorter and more guarded. The reason for this was partly the overwhelming quantity of emails Nasreen was now sending me—often several a day—and partly a resurgence of that once flattering but now merely disconcerting flirtatiousness.

  Again, this flirtatiousness was expressed playfully at first, under the sign of its own acknowledged futility. But over the weeks it grew more insistent, as if my rejection had given it license to evolve in a kind of negative space, feeding off its own extravagance, as in certain kinds of love poetry where the emotion grows fantastical in proportion to the strength of the resistance it meets. September 7: “You don’t love me at all anymore do you, James?” September 19: “Just a sip of water from the Zamzam well that overfloweth despite the disappearance of the Son of Thunder” (in addition to “Sir” I was now the “Son of Thunder” and sometimes “Mr Thunder”). September 20: “James, you should marry me and I’ll support all of the Lasduns…”

  I began to feel that I was becoming more a source of frustration for Nasreen than anything else, and that since I couldn’t be what she wanted me to be, I should withdraw altogether. On the other hand, a part of me still clung to the idea of her as a fascinating new friend, not, after all, any crazier than some of my other writer friends, and one who seemed to find me useful as a sounding board for her own evolving vocabulary of symbols and metaphors. Having formally severed (from my end at least) any erotic current between us, I was ready to assume the role of one of those avuncular, rather eunuchy types who crop up now and then in literature: a critic-mentor figure enlisted by some gifted younger writer he’s had the good or bad luck to cross paths with. (I’d have found it unimaginable to be anything other than the “gifted younger writer” myself in any such relationship before this period: another instance of Nasreen’s aging impact on me.) Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the well-meaning minor-league littérateur approached for guidance by Emily Dickinson, must have been somewhere in my mind, both as designated literary advisor (“Will you be my preceptor, Mr. Higginson?” the poet famously wrote) and as the possible object of the erotic/mystic infatuation in Dickinson’s unsent “Master Letters”: “I want to see you more—Sir—than all I wish for in this world…”

  But I’m overstating my feeling of avuncularity here. The truth is, I saw us on a more equal footing than that: two writers, at different stages of our careers, but involved in similar struggles. And just as Nasreen felt free to interrogate me about my life and writing, so I felt free to ask her the kinds of questions I would have asked any other writer friend (or non-writer friend for that matter) who’d had firsthand experience of things that interested me.

  To this end I asked two questions on subjects that were very much on my mind at that time. The first was a general one about what it was like for someone from the Muslim world to be in New York in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Nasreen answered this in the slightly manic style she sometimes adopted, full of high-speed lists and esoteric references—Razorfish, Dr. Dave, Dharma Priestesses—none of it very illuminating. The second was about veils. Veils, burkas, yashmaks, niqabs, and chadors had been a source of imagery for me since my first book of poems in 1987. Nasreen was clearly interested in the phenomenon of being a woman from an Islamic culture, and it seemed to me natural enough to ask her if she’d had any direct experience with veils. But it was a mistake.

  “Would you like to see me in a veil, sir?” she wrote back. A deluge of fraught, breathless veil-related emails followed, indicating a belief (or at least a decision to believe) that my question was a sexual innuendo (evidently a welcome one) and culminating, on October 11, in this: “… i spent nearly an hour in a lingerie shop contemplating veils today, James…”

  By then I had exasperatedly told her to forget about veils, and with this last email I had to acknowledge that this correspondence of ours was becoming problematic. I didn’t know what to do. I thought gloomily of the various college lawyers and deans of student affairs whose excruciating lectures to new faculty on how to conduct oneself with students so as to avoid a sexual harassment suit had been such a strange and surprising feature of my first years teaching in the States. (The paranoid extremes of self-monitoring that all this had prompted in me, along with the loathsome falsifications of consciousness it seemed to entail, had provided some of the content of my novel The Horned Man.) Not that Nasreen—mid-thirties, and two years out of graduate school—could exactly be considered my “student,” but even so, as I read this latest email I seemed to see those dismal figures wagging their fingers and murmuring We warned you …

  * * *

  I was in a jittery, distracted state during those weeks, brought on not by Nasreen but by a new development concerning our apartment. The owner of the management company that had recently bought our building had called up out of the blue to inform us that she’d found a note from the previous owner saying we lived upstate and that the apartment was no longer our primary residence. I’d made a blustering attempt to deny this, and the woman had countered, unexpectedly, by offering to buy us out of our lease. It wasn’t a very large offer, and underneath it was a clear threat to start eviction proceedings if we didn’t accept. But all the same it was a surprise to have money dangled in front of us like that: an unforeseen twist that complicated my unhappiness at possibly losing the apartment with a little sordid glitter of avarice. A lawyer told us we might be able to get substantially more than the owner was offering if we played our cards right, but also warned that if we held out for too much she might opt for settling the matter in Housing Court, in which case we would probably lose and end up with nothing. I’d begun to negotiate, very quickly finding myself in the grip of tumultuous feelings: greedy fantasies of an enormous payout, fear of being outmaneuvered, anxiety over the loss of my lifeline to the city.

  In the midst of all this, Nasreen’s insistent, unstoppably amorous communications, often a dozen or more a day now, had begun to feel oppressive. I answered fewer and fewer of them, responding with just a line or two to those that I did. She noticed, of course, though if she was hurt (which of course she was), she had the grace to blame herself for overwhelming me, and limited her reproaches to the occasional semi-humorous aside (“why do you deny me???”), even as she kept up the barrage. On October 21, in reply to a question about whether I was ill and if so whether this was why I hadn’t written for so long, I said: “No, but I can’t keep up with all these emails you’re sending.” This was my way of asking her to leave me alone for a while, but it had no effect on the torrent of emails, which continued unabated as the fall of 2006 drew to an end: a serial monologue about her love life, her Brooklyn apartment, various intrigues at work, and the stress of finishing her novel.

  In a casual way she often referred to herself as feeling “crazy” or “insane” or “paranoid” about one thing or another. I didn’t take this too seriously, but sometimes she did sound genuinely in pain and on one occasion I suggested she might want to get some professional help or advice. In reply she wrote: “James, they are very silly, the things I say. I’m half joking when I freak out. I’m glad I’m convincing, however.” This added to the general irritated mood gathering in me—nobody likes being jerked around—and when a couple of similarly distressed emails arrived in November I didn’t respond. And in fact I didn’t write again until she demanded to know, once more, whether I was sick and I emailed back, tersely, to say that I wasn’t.

  There was an encouraging moment on November 18, when she wrote:

  my work situation has made me nuts and you sort of became my lifeline during the day. I will stop and contact you when I finish the novel. Need to leave that job and you alone for a while.

  The very reasonable tone of this seemed to suggest that my exasperation had finally got through to her, and that she understood. I was reassured, even felt cautiously confident that she would do as promised and that after a fe
w weeks’ silence we would go back to our old, pleasant, unfrenetic correspondence.

  But the next day the torrent resumed.

  * * *

  That winter, as K—— and I started planning our trip to Provence, Nasreen’s emails entered a distinct new phase of development.

  In terms of subject matter, the main new theme was a situation that had arisen at her job. As I understood it, she was claiming to have had a brief affair with a colleague that had ended with each of them accusing the other of sexual harassment and the college terminating both of their contracts with three months’ pay. In response, Nasreen had decided to launch a discrimination suit against the college, based on both gender and race. She hired a lawyer and began copying me (unasked) on her emails to him, sometimes with explanatory comments, sometimes not. In them the motifs of sex, gender, race, money, and Middle Eastern politics mingle in strange ways. There is also a new tone, a sort of exhibitionistic boisterousness, that seemed to me as odd and out of character as the brashly melodramatic nature of the subject matter itself. “This will be fun,” she enthuses to her lawyer. “Let’s call it legal performance art.” Again: “I want to fight. I want this to be a circus…” She calls the suit “a high-profile case, being that I’m Iranian … It involves sex, violence, and infringement of constitutional and employment rights … They’ve been treating me like a Guantanamo detainee…”

  I didn’t like being sent this stuff any more than I’d liked it when she forwarded me the email of her old classmate. I didn’t like the careless flouting of basic codes of privacy. I didn’t like the self-intoxicated tone. Above all I didn’t like the galling sense of the discrepancy between the image I’d formed of Nasreen when I taught her—that gifted, reticent, subtly attractive person—and the character disclosing itself now. Had I misjudged her—projected some wishful image of my own making onto the enigmatic exterior she’d first presented (an image drawn, I suppose I must accept, from the corniest archetype of demure Middle Eastern womanhood as concocted in the Western male psyche)? If so, that made me a spectacularly lousy observer of human beings, a thought that in turn played directly into my insecurities concerning my aptitude for this profession of writer.

  On the other hand, perhaps I hadn’t misjudged her. Perhaps she was simply changing, undergoing some kind of metamorphosis. In that case, was I implicated? Responsible? K——, who wasn’t very interested in Nasreen or her emails, had nevertheless made a point of advising me not to break off contact with her, or not too abruptly. I’d sensed she was right, and throughout that winter I continued to think of my silence as a temporary suspension of communication—to be resumed as soon as Nasreen gave me breathing space—rather than a complete cutoff. But with every new email that arrived I felt more antagonized, less inclined to write back. And so the silence deepened.

  As I experienced it, this silence of mine was a sort of self-canceling argument between the impulse to respond and the growing sense of being imposed on. For Nasreen, however, I imagine (in retrospect) that the silence came across as something more controlled and monumental: the imperious silence of a man who no longer considers a woman worthy of his attention and has, as it were, pulled up the drawbridge.

  This perception of me (if I am right about it) didn’t affect the rate of her emails, but was perhaps a factor in their darkening mood. She starts claiming that bad things are happening to her. The colleague accusing her of harassment at work has broken into her computer. Her boss is somehow conniving with him. Parts of her novel have been erased. I didn’t believe any of this and I didn’t really believe she believed it either. I suspected her of simulating a state of nervous anxiety in order to get me to react, and the strong sense that she was trying to manipulate me made me even less inclined to write back.

  Pleas, reproaches, bits of ruefully lucid self-analysis, little lightning flickers of anger alternate in rapid succession as 2006 draws to an end. The harried feeling of being at the receiving end of increasingly unwanted attention still vied with some vague sense that I ought to respond in some way, and at this point I was still imagining that I would, as soon as there was enough space between one email and the next to get over my annoyance and generally overwhelmed feeling, but there never was, and moreover the content of them was increasingly of a nature that made me wary. “you love me james. i know you’re busy but this is more fun. tell me to stop and write my novel” … “your silence is scary, sir, but probably necessary” … “have fun in Provence. brother saw an article on you in Chronicle and i google-stalked you … again.”

  As the new year began, preparations for our trip to France became more concerted. The logistics of pulling our two kids from school for four months, finding someone to look after our house, and setting up places to stay in all the regions we were proposing to cover for our book were complicated and time-consuming. Negotiations over our apartment were still grinding on, though it was becoming clear that we weren’t going to make the killing I’d fantasized, which, if nothing else, streamlined my feelings on that subject into more or less uncomplicated depression.

  And all the while, present under each day like the murmur of some underground river, was the steady flow of Nasreen’s emails into my inbox. I didn’t answer them. I couldn’t think of anything to say that wouldn’t either encourage further deluges or else sound too bluntly unfriendly. Still, it bothers me, this silence of mine. I can remember all the reasons for it. I can easily recall the feeling of being oppressed and disillusioned and even in some way taken advantage of. I can summon back exactly the sense of having not so much broken off contact as suspended it until things, as I vaguely put it to myself, “got back to normal.” I can state very confidently, knowing what I know now about Nasreen, that even if I hadn’t stopped responding when I did, I would have been forced to sooner or later and events would have unfolded in the same disastrous way as they did. And yet I can’t help feeling there was something hard about it; that if I were a person in a novel, it would show as a significant character flaw, a failure of empathy.

  At the end of February 2007, I flew with my family to Marseille.

  * * *

  There is the fortress fantasy, to which I am certainly prone, but there is also the fantasy of motion, of being the knight errant (“Sir James”) who ventures forth on a quest, a journey, a mission, and this, at some level, was why we were in France.

  I’m not sure if it counts as the full chivalric “venture” if you ride out accompanied by the entire population of your fortress; i.e., your family. It may be that all I had done was to set my fortress on wheels and roll it through the French countryside. But I was certainly occupied, physically and mentally, to the absolute limit of my capacity, and that, for the moment, appeared to be enough to satisfy this particular fantasy.

  We were on the move almost constantly, driving around to get the lay of the land, then walking—ten, twelve, fifteen miles a day—in search of itineraries that met the very specific requirements of our book: unspoiled landscapes, navigable trails, good places to eat along the way. In between, we were poring over maps and old French hiking guides, while also trying to keep our children on top of their schoolwork. And every couple of weeks we moved house to another part of the enormous region, packing up and heading off into the unknown.

  An unexpected bonus of this nomadic life was how little opportunity there was to sit in front of a computer screen. None of the gîtes we rented had Internet connections, so we had to wait to get our email till we found ourselves near a library or Internet café. This happened only rarely, and we were always in a hurry when it did. Without fail there would be twenty or thirty emails from Nasreen in my inbox. I didn’t answer any of them. Most I deleted without reading. Those I did read continued along the same lines as before: updates on this absurd-sounding lawsuit of hers, descriptions of her new job at a wine store, complaints about her landlord in Brooklyn. Innocuous stuff, except, again, for the sheer quantity of it, and for the habit of forwarding her correspondence with other
people.

  Concerning the latter, there was one possibly significant new development. She had placed an ad in the personals column of the London Review of Books (I had once told her a story about a friend of mine who did this—a jokey story, but I assume it was what gave her the idea), and among the emails she had now begun forwarding me was the intimate correspondence resulting from this ad. She had met, among other lonely hearts, an English academic who had left his wife and daughter after having an affair, and the two of them were exchanging long emails that appeared to be largely about the current political situation: the Iraq war, the Blair/Bush alliance. I read a few of them, but in themselves they didn’t seem all that remarkable (everyone, myself included, was obsessed with those subjects at that time), or not nearly as remarkable—or strange, or disturbing—as the fact that I was being forwarded them in the first place.

  I tried to ignore this little undercurrent of weirdness as we made our way across Provence, but it wasn’t easy. It was becoming clear to me that Nasreen wasn’t going to conveniently fade away from my life just because I wanted her to (which by now I had to admit I did); that by some alchemy I didn’t understand and certainly didn’t want to believe I’d had any part in creating, I had become the object of an obsession.

  We returned to the States in June 2007. The emails continued flooding in and I continued not answering them. The interesting writerly friendship I had thought I was embarking on had clearly been a figment of my imagination, and I felt mocked by my own naïveté. I did have a vague sense of being under an obligation to read the novel if and when Nasreen finished it, but I was beginning to doubt she ever would. Meanwhile the deadline for our own book was September, which gave us less than three months to convert the mass of notes we’d accumulated into serviceable guidebook prose, and turn the piles of torn, creased, sweat- and rain-blotched maps we’d annotated and redrawn en route into presentable topographic diagrams. At the same time there were numerous minor reentry crises to deal with—blown-over trees in the yard, damage done by a bear breaking into the house, groundhogs romping all over the vegetable garden.