Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked Read online

  All of which is to say that I was busy.

  On July 19 Nasreen emailed a doubled photo of her face, cheek to cheek with itself, with the words: “I should be committed…” A week later she sent another photo: bare-shouldered, mouth open, head tilted forward with hair hanging down either side, curtaining off one eye, the other staring out with a dazed look. “i’m really scared and very blocked!”

  I didn’t know what to make of these, but I felt, obscurely, that I was being warned that if I didn’t respond, some kind of craziness would ensue.

  The next day a long email arrived: “the novel and where it stands,” ran the heading.

  James, if you care, even, I’ve written a little status report … I’m still unsure why you dislike me so. I rather liked being your little pup.

  Aggrieved tone aside, it was a sober and fairly coherent account of what she had been trying to do with her novel. If those photos with their odd captions had been oblique threats of craziness, this was perhaps the obverse, a sample of the return to sanity I could expect if I chose to respond. I didn’t like the carrot any more than the stick, but for all my strong desire—stronger than ever—not to be back in touch with her, I didn’t see how I could refuse to read the revisions she’d made to her novel, since I was so implicated, by now, in the book’s existence. She wasn’t actually asking me to read anything yet (and it wasn’t clear that she had anything new to read), but I sensed that she wanted me to offer, or at least to show myself willing to take an interest, and I was resigned to doing so.

  That evening, as I was mulling over what to say to her, an email arrived, headed “a coward would not read this.” The text continued:

  and you’re probably not reading it or you are because you are hoping to cull some material. well, fuck you … you’re unethical, an “irresponsible hippy.” And stop all your rationalizing about feeding the family and all that bullshit.

  You had no integrity with me and you’re using a God given talent to say nothing. And I don’t want to hear about your family because your kids have a future of being thought of as Nazi Germans.

  This was the first directly and unequivocally hostile email she’d sent. Later that evening came another:

  when I needed help you disappeared. And wrote a fucking story in which I am obviously the psychopathic jaywalker.

  I’ll come back to this “jaywalker” story later, along with the remark in the earlier email about my alleged desire to “cull” her emails for “material,” a theme that was to develop significantly over the next few weeks. But in the meantime, just to stay with the events of what turned out to be a momentous evening, twenty minutes later another email arrived that introduced what was perhaps the most disconcerting of the half-dozen-odd new themes ushered in during the tumultuous onset of this new phase. Was I disappointed, Nasreen asks, that she had

  yelled and screamed a little about how fucking crazy Jews are these days? It’s fucking TRUE. Stupid and crazy. I can’t say that but hundreds of thousands of Arabs can die in silence? I don’t fucking think so, sir …

  SIR

  Aside from anything else, this was just plain puzzling to me. She had never, as far as I remembered, said anything about Jews before, let alone “yelled and screamed” about them, and I’d never raised the subject myself. I’d published, long before I met her, a book of poems that explored some of the convolutions of my own Anglo-Jewish background, as well as an article about my father that further aired the subject, and Nasreen had—as later became apparent—read both, but in both it is manifestly clear, or I thought it was, that I am not a supporter of Israel’s military policy, let alone any kind of Zionist, so it was very strange to find myself cast suddenly as some kind of would-be silencer of Arabs. Still, this was a relatively benign, even tentative, sounding of the new motif: a test, perhaps, to see how she herself was going to feel about elevating the terms of her grievance against me into something more grand and global.

  Judging from the first email to arrive the next morning, she felt all right about it:

  I think the holocaust was fucking funny and about as hilarious as the holocaust industry …

  How about that, SIR?

  The same email introduces another new theme, also to become a major element in the sustained tirade that had just begun. This was my apparent misconduct as a teacher, in which capacity I was now accused of having deliberately humiliated her:

  You’re so self-serving, you were willing to try to make the stupid class made up of a bunch of shitty American low-lives laugh at my expense after Thanksgiving break.

  “Oh, and how was your thanksgiving, Nasreen?”

  I had no idea what this referred to, but anyway had no time to think about it: a few minutes later another email arrived, bringing another major new theme into play: my apartment, though as yet it was unclear what her precise target was here. “Morgan College, your brothel,” runs the heading:

  that’s what it is. that’s why you have that apartment you would not consider giving up to ACTUALLY HELP SOMEONE.

  A little later she returns to the theme of my exploiting her life in my work, spiking it with the following (presumably) sarcastic suggestion, and thereby introducing yet another theme into the great fugue of hatred and malice that thundered over my life for the next several years, namely the reprehensible nature of my writing in general:

  why don’t you write some more exotic stories about fucking your servants?

  This, as she confirmed in the next, more public phase of her attack, refers to a short story of mine, “The Siege,” about a relationship between an Englishman and a married woman from an unnamed third-world country who lives in his basement and cleans his house in lieu of rent. Half an hour later my novel The Horned Man comes in for similar treatment:

  what is the bottom line of horned man? that men should fuck everything in sight so they don’t become underground psycho killers?

  Fresh attacks began the next morning. At one point she forwarded another round of correspondence with her English academic, with whom she was now also discussing my various wrongdoings:

  He took verbatim things I’d written him in an email and just tacked it onto his story. I’m sure my thoughts and ideas are all over his work by now … But he’s a fraud and it’ll all be exposed …

  The intent here, among other things, seemed to be to convey to me that she was now planning to go public with her accusations, which indeed turned out to be the case, though not until those accusations had been substantially beefed up.

  I was in a state of extreme bewilderment by now, my head reeling every time a new email arrived. K—— did her best to calm me down, telling me there was no point getting upset by something so obviously crazy. Her relaxed attitude to life has been a source of immeasurable comfort to me throughout our marriage in general and this saga in particular. But I’ve never quite learned to make it my own, and outside the immediate field of her practical good sense I would soon lapse back into my own more familiar, gnawing anxiety. At this point the anxiety was still closer to bafflement than to actual dread. Among other things, I simply couldn’t connect the ferocity of Nasreen’s words with the quiet, articulate student I had taught at Morgan College, or even with the annoyingly compulsive emailer she had become later. There was an untraversable chasm, it seemed to me, between this eruption of verbal violence and everything that had gone before. My silence, however poorly Nasreen understood it (but I think she understood it well enough—why else all those promises to leave me alone for a bit?), didn’t seem enough to explain what had happened, but then what did? Had she really “gone crazy,” or was this all simply a desperate attempt to get me to react, a mask of madness put on to provoke a response? Possibly. At 9:36 that evening comes the cry:

  You fucking faggot coward, say something!

  She couldn’t know it, of course, but I had been wanting very badly to “say something” since the beginning of this onslaught, and in fact had typed out several emails to her, some enraged, some trying to strike a conciliatory note, some explaining at length all the reasons for my silence over the past few months. But in every case something had held me back from hitting the send button. Aside from my confusion about what to say, I was suddenly wary of what this forwarder of emails might do with anything I might send her.

  I didn’t know much, at that time, about the protocols of forging or altering emails from other people and resending them to recipients of your choice, or of determining the true identity of the sender (I have since become an expert), but instinctively, it seemed a mistake to deliver anything containing my own electronic DNA into Nasreen’s possession. Though I didn’t quite know it yet, I had entered the realm of stricken enchantment in which technology and psychology overlap, where the magical thinking of the primitive mind, with its susceptibility to spells, curses, witchcraft of every kind, converges with the paranoias peculiar to our own age.

  9:45 p.m.:

  Do you have to be the stereotype of a Jew, James?

  A few seconds later:

  I’m NOT in love with you, I want your apartment

  9:48 p.m.:

  give me your fucking keys.

  By the next day, August 2, I have become fully identified with Bush’s America: “your troops coming home…,” runs the heading,

  I hope they die, every single one of your money-making gangster lowlives …

  And a little later, in self-reflexive mode again, comes the comment:

  I think this is called verbal terrorism.

  I hadn’t heard that phrase before. But as I came to appreciate Nasreen’s grasp of the dynamics of assymetric conflict, where she had apparently nothing to lose, and I had everything, I realized that it was peculiarly apposite. I, as an Anglo-American Jew, a family man, a published author
, a middle-aged male in a position of power (at least from her perspective), was the axis of, shall we say, “virtue,” while she, in her own mind at least, was the lone jihadi. It took a while for her to figure out the exact nature of her mission, but when it did finally clarify itself in her mind, she laid it out in her characteristically succinct and forceful way:

  “I will ruin him.”

  One hot morning, as K—— and I were on the porch of our barn, drawing maps, the phone rang. It was Janice Schwartz, my agent, and she sounded upset. For several days she had been receiving strange, unpleasant emails about me from Nasreen. She hadn’t wanted to tell me at first, but now she herself was being attacked in the emails, and she was concerned for her safety. That morning a woman sounding very like Nasreen had called her. “Can I speak to Meir Kahane?” the woman had asked, before hanging up. Meir Kahane was the ultra-Zionist rabbi whose follower Baruch Goldstein had massacred Muslims praying in the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron. Kahane himself was assassinated in 1990, shot in the neck.

  Janice forwarded me the emails. The first, dated August 1, strikes a businesslike tone:

  Janice,

  I’m sure James is not reading my emails anymore, so I’d appreciate it if you’d tell him that I didn’t appreciate him using my words and ideas I’d expressed in emails verbatim in the short story about the psychotic jaywalker.

  The next is less controlled:

  … after reading that short story in which my private words to him jumped at me (and I’m not talking about silly stock-character shit like her drug use, but, rather, her feelings on surrender and vulnerability), I’m left to think that he was being parasitic. Seductively parasitic.

  And I’m pissed. And I wanted to share it with you. Why not? You’re not interested in my work and you support your little boy and all he can do to bring you both money.

  So, as you can see, reading the psychotic jaywalker story has made me very angry.

  “His future stories…,” runs the heading of the next:

  Better not be things he stole from me. Listen, lady I’m a real person who’s spent her whole life trying to survive because I live in a fucked up sadistic country …

  … if your little boy, who you’re so impressed with for aping a white Englishman, steals anything else from me and I have to see it in print when I deserved to be given a level playing field to write my novel, not pumped for his amusement, there will be hell to pay.

  I’m livid—and rightfully so

  I was not put on earth to feed James Lasdun’s children. I hope you can understand that.

  Later that day Nasreen sets her sights on Paula Kurwen, the editor to whom Janice had introduced her. For the moment Paula’s offense is merely that she “was an elegant middle-class post–Nazi era Jewess living in America. In other words, she was privileged.” Nevertheless, she, too, is implicated: “You all play a part in unleashing the fury.”

  A minute or so later, with this “fury” now apparently reaching for terms strong enough to account for its own escalating intensity, Nasreen brings on one of those words that scorch everything they come near. The word is “rape.” It isn’t the first time she has used it, but it is the first time she has used it in connection with me, and even though she uses it figuratively rather than literally, I feel immediately the disfiguring potency of its touch, as if I have been splashed with acid:

  I say if I can’t write my book and get emotionally and verbally raped by James Lasdun, a Jew disguising himself as an English-American, well then, the Holocaust Industry Books should all be banned as should the films.

  It is one thing to be abused in private: you experience it almost as an internal event, not so different from listening to the more punitive voices in your own head. But to have other people, people you know and care about, brought into the drama, whether as witnesses or collateral victims or both, is another matter. It confers a different order of reality on the abuse: fuller and more objective. This strange, awful thing really is happening to you, and people are witnessing it.

  Along with the accusations of theft, Janice had also received details of my supposed (but entirely fictitious) affair with Nasreen’s former classmate Elaine, complete with descriptions of various kinky sexual practices that Nasreen claimed to have heard I went in for (she had an uncanny way with that transparent and yet curiously effective device of rumor, the unattributed source: “I’m told he…” “I hear he…” “Everyone knows he…”).

  Regardless of whether Janice believed a word of these emails (and she assured me she didn’t), my impulse was to deny them indignantly. But even as I was forming the words I felt the futility of doing so. Intrinsic to the very nature of Nasreen’s denunciations and insinuations was, as I began to understand, an iron law whereby the more I denied them, the more substance they would acquire, and the more plausible they would begin to seem. Their very wildness was a part of their peculiar power. On the basis of there being no smoke without fire (so I imagined Janice, and then Paula, and then, as things got worse, all sorts of other people, thinking), surely something as black and billowing as these emails must indicate that I was guilty of something, and that even if I wasn’t unscrupulous or weird or fucked up in the precise way Nasreen claimed, I probably was in some other, related way. For the first time in my life I began to consider the word “honor” as something more than an antique formula, and the word “reputation” as something other than an index of value in the literary marketplace.

  * * *

  But the “psychotic jaywalker.”

  Something bizarre happened to me when I first arrived in New York, in 1986. I was walking down a quiet street in the West Village when I heard a woman’s voice calling “Sir, sir, excuse me, sir” from a window at the top of a narrow town house. The door to her apartment was stuck, she said, and she was trapped inside. Would I come up and help her get it open? She sounded pleasant enough, laughing a little at her own helplessness, but I’d heard too many horror stories about New York not to be suspicious, and my instinct was to keep moving. Still, I hesitated, and a moment later I was gloomily climbing the dark stairway to her floor, certain I was being set up to be mugged.

  Outside her apartment I tried opening the door with the handle, but I couldn’t get it to engage with the opening mechanism. I pushed the door, but that didn’t work either. “Try taking a run at it,” the woman called from the other side. The imagined mugging gave way, in my mind, to something worse: I was going to be framed for breaking and entering or whatever they called it here, blackmailed, sent home in disgrace … Resigning myself, I went to the end of the narrow hallway and ran full tilt at the door, hurling myself against it as hard as I could. It flew open, revealing a cluttered, brick-walled studio, with a bed in the corner and the woman—dark-haired, well dressed, attractive—looking at me, startled. She thanked me profusely. There was no mugger, no blackmail camera, nothing untoward at all.

  But as I stood in the doorway, the situation seemed to take on a new, unexpected complexion, in which I myself was the source of menace. I was a man who had just broken open the door to a strange woman’s apartment, and this large fact somehow overshadowed, even seemed to obliterate, the perfectly innocent explanation behind it. The woman appeared suddenly nervous. She did ask if she could offer me a cup of coffee, but I felt she was doing so only out of politeness and that to accept, even just to linger there talking to her (both of which I found myself wanting to do), would have been to take advantage of the situation in an underhand way. I declined politely and left, reflecting on how the desire to appear scrupulously honorable (itself based entirely on the fact that I had found her attractive and wanted her to find me attractive) had required me to do precisely the thing that would guarantee no further contact between us.