Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked (18 page)

She had brought me forcibly into the realm of magical thinking, which is to say she had found a way, whether by luck or intelligence, to inflict pain on me from a distance (or, as K—— corrected me, to cause me to inflict pain on myself) and to sap, steadily, my sense of personal autonomy. The insubstantial nature of her attacks, wafted at me over the ether, was further conducive to the thought of sorcerous powers. I spent less time thinking about lawyers and police (Detective Bauer was proving elusive, though he had repeated his promise to call Nasreen), more about spells and curses. Continually on my mind at this time were the witches’ lines from
Macbeth
, where they plot the torment of a hapless ship’s captain:

I will drain him dry as hay:

Sleep shall neither night nor day

Hang upon his penthouse lid;

He shall live a man forbid.

Weary sev’n-nights nine times nine,

Shall he dwindle, peak, and pine …

Those were my symptoms precisely: the insomnia, the dwindling, the peaking and pining. But it was the next two lines, the summation of the
limits
of witchcraft, its power to disturb but not actually capsize one’s ship (“bark”), that I clung to as I began to feel myself toppling into the abyss:

Though his bark cannot be lost,

Yet it shall be tempest-tost

This was my charm against despair, and I invoked it over and over, telling myself that although I could be “tempest-tost” by Nasreen’s malice, nothing she had done, not even the email to Frank, had caused me actual objective harm, and, if Shakespeare’s formula was applicable to her, nothing could. She might, as K—— had observed, cause me to harm myself, but that was my responsibility, and it was within my power to resist it. All I needed to do was keep a level head. Macbeth allows the witches’ prophecies to insinuate themselves, fatally, into his own ambitions and anxieties. But Banquo, who has ambitions of his own and might have been equally thrown by what the witches told him, sees things for what they are: “oftentimes, to win us to our harm, / The instruments of Darkness tell us truths; / Win us with honest trifles, to betray ’s / In deepest consequence…” I would be like Banquo, I resolved (passing over the fact that his skeptical rationalism gets him hacked to death a few scenes later); I would take the emails for what they were: sad and pathetic bits of nonsense; barbed, certainly, with their own clever tricks and “honest trifles,” but incapable of causing harm in themselves. I tried to ignore the anxiety that gripped me every time I signed on in the morning; the palpitations in my heart if there was something new from Nasreen in my inbox. But it was difficult. My total failure, after all these months, to slow down or in any way inhibit the flow of hatred had had a demoralizing effect (as I write, the BP oil catastrophe is unfolding and it is impossible not to picture Nasreen’s hostility as that blackness on the spillcams, billowing unstoppably from the ocean floor, my efforts to stanch it as ineffective as BP’s with their feeble funnels and top kills). I felt flayed, utterly defenseless. Every email sent lacerating spasms through me as it struck, each with an afterburn, a half-life, that was nowhere near over before the next one came in, so that I could never regroup my own forces. And meanwhile the hatred itself was achieving ever more potent intensities of compression. A strange new verbal economy seemed to be emerging, a kind of crystalline purity of malediction, as if Nasreen were no longer speaking the language of humans but of demons:

you are hanging yourself with bittersweet. You are fat, old, a thief—and the ones who matter know about you …

if I could see you, I’d shit in your fat mouth …

If you live in fear say it. And say it loud, don’t cower in fucking fear like you did during the holocaust …

old, shitty man! two faced psychotic …

ha ha ha ha ha ha … go to hell, old man …

*   *   *

One morning in 2008 I received an email purporting to be from the program director at Morgan College. He appeared to be forwarding me an article about the Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and he had accompanied the article with a personal message, though it wasn’t written in his usual style:

Let’s suck cock together! eat your ugly bittersweet and die!

I mentioned earlier that sometime after my meeting with Detective Bauer, I had called the detective to report a new development in Nasreen’s attacks. This email was its first manifestation.

When you forward an article from a newspaper or magazine website, you generally fill out a form that asks for your own email address as well as that of the recipient, and offers you a space to write a personal message. Well, it turns out that in the space for your own email address you can type in the email address of anyone you want and the article and message will be sent as if from that person. Recently I’ve noticed that some forwarded articles warn the recipient that the sender’s identity hasn’t been verified, but this wasn’t the case in 2008 and even now it seems to be the exception. Basically, as Nasreen had discovered, you can pretend to be anyone you want when you forward an article, and she had decided to pretend to be my boss.

As I wrote earlier, I had been struck from the beginning by a certain porousness about Nasreen, a capacity for absorbing other selves or dissolving into them. Her identification with the Angel in Rilke’s
Duino Elegies
had led me to Heidegger’s essay in which he refers to this Angel as one
for whom borderlines and differences … hardly exist any longer
. The connection this remark had suggested, between Nasreen’s blurring propensity and the concept of a “borderline” personality, was cemented (in my mind at least) by Detective Bauer’s use of the word “borderline” to describe his relative, who resembled Nasreen. Amorphousness was Nasreen’s element. And if the Internet in general, with its rich opportunities for shape-shifting and self-reinvention, was her natural medium of expression, then this forwarding system was the perfect refinement, allowing her to take on the identity of anyone she liked.

Viewed dispassionately, the phase of attacks that now began has something of the exuberance one sees in artists when their imaginations are seized by some new subject or method, and in a burst of creativity they start delightedly revolving and reconsidering it from every conceivable angle. I imagine that as I describe these emails, some readers will find it hard to suppress a smile, whatever else they may feel. There is always something appealing about the stirrer, the situationist, the inventive mischief-maker.

From “Elaine,” the former classmate with whom Nasreen believed I had had an affair, I received a forwarding about Rwanda with this message attached:

hi. I’m dumb, stupid and stupid looking and claim to care about people. I like to #### old men.

From “Paula,” I got a link to a news story about the Middle East, presumably concerning some action by the Israelis (I didn’t open the link), with the message:

Don’t you think we should just cut it out already?

From “Liz,” the colleague at Morgan College with whom I am supposed to have “set up” Nasreen’s rape, I received a story about the Miss Universe Pageant with the message:

Look, I got breast implants!

And so on. All pretty childish and, in themselves, harmless. But again, it wasn’t so much the content that disturbed me as the implied threat of the form: the new field of potential trouble it opened up. How serious was this trick of impersonation going to become? What were its limits and potentialities? It didn’t take me long to conjecture that if she was masquerading as other people to me, then she was probably masquerading as
me
to other people. Having already denounced me to every person or institution she could find an email address for, was she now going to confirm her slanders with creepy emails purporting to come directly from me? Visions of articles being forwarded in my name to people I knew, from “my” email address, with obscene personal messages from me attached, filled my imagination. The situation seemed freshly intolerable. Actually, the sheer unbearableness of it filled me with a brief, paradoxical hope. I remember wondering if it really was possible that Nasreen, even Nasreen, would do something as fiendish as this.

It was, and she did.

Again, there is the swift progression from clumsy first pass to fully evolved weapon. First, before using my email address, Nasreen gets the idea of speaking “as me” in a faked exchange with Janice. The exchange is set up to look as though Janice is replying to a forwarding from me (about the Armenian genocide). As Janice, Nasreen writes:

James, please stop sending me notes like the one below.

And as me, in the note below, she writes:

Janice, I thought we copyrighted all genocides so we can nation-build and kill everyone so we can die on the mount! Why wouldn’t that Iranian bitch fuck me and why is she telling the whole world that I fuck any blonde thing to overcome my self-hatred?

Next, she starts using my email address, masquerading outright as me. I don’t know how often she did this, but from time to time, presumably just to make sure I wasn’t spared any possible nuance of discomfort, she would copy me on them: the usual garbage, to the usual recipients, plus some new ones. Here I am, for instance, sending Janice and Paula a story about Swiss banks funding terrorism:

We will own the middle east before the world ends!

The one consoling thought arising from this new development was that it presumably constituted some kind of identity theft, which I hoped might be a serious-enough crime to trigger extradition. I called Detective Bauer. He asked me to fax him the emails along with printouts of each “sender path”—the list of codes you can display by clicking on “details” at the top of an email, which identify the actual, precise origin of the email and which, unlike the apparent sender address, cannot be faked. He agreed that this amounted to identity theft, but warned me that the Manhattan DA’s office had recently lost a large electronic identity theft case and as a result wasn’t currently prosecuting the crime very enthusiastically. Still, he seemed to think these emails put us in a stronger position for dealing with Nasreen. I asked him if he had had a chance to call her yet. He hadn’t, but he assured me that he was planning to very soon. Why not right now, I wanted to ask him, but for all his courteous affability, he didn’t seem the kind of man you could hurry. He had his own calm, imperturbable pace.

Sometimes I was the recipient as well as the sender of these forwardings, which put me in the disconcerting position of sending obscenities and threats to myself. I felt as if some strange circle of madness was closing. Nasreen herself, in her uncanny way, seems to have intuited as much—perhaps even planned it. As she put it while pretending to be Paula forwarding me a Craigslist posting:

The voices in my head told me the voices in your head might lead us to meet on craigslist …

But the next major step was much more alarming, if less surreal: online exchanges with the wider world, in my name. I first got wind of this when a secretary from Morgan College called to tell me that a sales rep from Hummer had been trying to set up a meeting with me in response to my email inquiry about buying a vehicle. Aside from the mild embarrassment of being thought of as a would-be Hummer owner by the personnel of Morgan College, there was the depressing thought of having to contend with the sales reps of all the other companies Nasreen had contacted in my name, because, knowing her, there would most certainly be others. There were. For months I was deluged with sales info from companies thanking me for my interest in purchasing their products. Again, relatively trivial irritants in themselves, but as effective as anything else in preserving the sense of being under siege by an indefatigable enemy, and fuel, again, for further anxious speculation as to how matters were going to evolve.

The answer to the latter came in June 2008. I had succumbed to one of my periodic fits of self-googling when I found myself being directed to a Jewish literary site called Nextbook.com. There, in the “
comments
” section, under a review of a first novel, I found the following:

I’d like to steal that book to feed my family. I do that with the help of my agent and heavily connected old bag friend Paula Kurwen. Don’t you know that art is dead and Israel is great?

Posted by James Lasdun on 06.21.08

I emailed a complaint to the site and after a while the posting was taken down, but at this point I began to wonder if the game wasn’t as good as over. This other version of me, so much more vital and substantial than I felt myself to be by this time, had completed its usurpation of my identity and was running amok. “
I will not let you go
,” went the heading of one of Nasreen’s emails from this period, and it confirmed my sense that what was happening could no longer be regarded as a passing unpleasantness, but was a permanent condition.

I called Detective Bauer again. To my surprise, he had initiated contact with Nasreen. He hadn’t actually spoken to her, but he had left messages at the numbers I’d given him. He seemed confident that she would return the calls.

I was encouraged by this, but I was apprehensive too. It would have been one thing for Detective Bauer to catch Nasreen off her guard: unprepared for a conversation with a police officer about her emails and therefore more likely to believe him when he threatened her with arrest. But now, with his messages, he’d lost the element of surprise and given her an opportunity not only to prepare her own defense, but also to counterattack. There was no guessing what new smear or accusation she could possibly invent at this stage, but I imagined there would be something.