Exit Ghost
Page 5
"Richard can be insistent," Billy said. "But," he repeated, "we do want to apologize for telling him where you're staying. That was thoughtless."
"No harm done," I repeated, and once again told myself to get in the car and drive home. New York was full of people motivated by "the spirit of inquiry," and not all of them ethically up to the job. If I were to take over the 71st Street apartment—and the telephone there—I would unavoidably find myself in the sort of circumstances that were superfluous to me and that, as I had just demonstrated, I no longer had the wherewithal to finesse. Not that my curiosity hadn't been aroused by what Kliman was insinuating about Lonoff. Not that I wasn't surprised by the unlikeliness of my coming upon Lonoff's Amy for the first time in close to fifty years, and by my following her from the hospital to that luncheonette, and by Kliman's then calling to tell me about Amy's brain cancer and to try to tantalize me with his insider's knowledge of Lonoff's Hawthorne-like "secret." For one who had cultivated seclusion and bound himself to repetitiveness and thrown in his lot with monotony, who had banished everything deemed by him nonessential (purportedly in the service of his work, more likely at the mercy of a failing), it was like being overwhelmed by some rare astronomical event, as though an eclipse of the sun had taken place in the way eclipses had occurred throughout the prescientific eons: without resident earthlings anticipating their imminence.
Precipitously stepping into a new future, I had retreated unwittingly into the past—a retrograde trajectory not that uncommon, but uncanny anyhow.
"We want to invite you to spend election night with us," Billy said. "It'll just be Jamie and me. We're going to be at home to watch the results. We can have dinner here. Stay afterward for as long as you like. Why don't you come?"
"Tuesday night?"
He laughed. "Still the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November."
"I will be there," I said, "I accept," thinking not of the election but of Billy's wife and Kliman's former girlfriend and of the pleasure I could no longer provide a woman, even should the opportunity present itself. Old men hate young men? Young men fill them with envy and hatred? Why shouldn't they? The preposterous was seeping in fast from every quarter, and my heart pounded away with lunatic eagerness, as if the medical procedure to remedy incontinence had something to do with reversing impotence, which of course it did not—as though, however sexually disabled, however sexually unpracticed I was after eleven years away, the drive excited by meeting Jamie had madly reasserted itself as the animating force. As though in the presence of this young woman there was hope.
Through a single, brief meeting with Billy and Jamie I was not merely dropping back into a world of ambitious literary youth that was of no interest to me but opening myself to the irritants, stimulants, temptations, and dangers of the present moment. In my case, the specific danger threatening me back when I decided to leave the city for good—the danger of fatal attack—didn't emanate from the menace of Islamic terrorism but from death threats that I'd begun to receive and that the FBI determined to be issuing from a single source. Each was written on a picture postcard bearing a postmark from somewhere in northern New Jersey, the region where I'd been raised. The same location never appeared on a postmark twice, though the figure pictured on the front of the card was invariably the current pope, John Paul II, either blessing the crowd at St. Peter's or kneeling at prayer or sitting resplendent in brocaded white robes. The first postcard read:
Dear Jew Bastard, We are part of a new international organization to counter the growth of the racist, filth-laden philosophy Zionism. As yet another Jew parasitizing "goy" countries and their inhabitants, you have been marked down to be targeted. Because of the location of your Jew York apartment, it has fallen to this "department" to do the "targeting." This notice marks the beginning.
The second card bearing John Paul's picture carried the same salutation and message, the text's only alteration in the conclusion: "notice number two, jew !"
Now, I had received communications as vile and ominous in the past, but never more than a couple a year, and most years none at all. Also, on the streets of New York, strangers would intermittently gravitate toward me and initiate a difficult encounter because of something in my fiction that enticed them or that infuriated them or that enticed them because it infuriated them or that infuriated them because it enticed them. I'd been through more than one such unsettling intrusion because of the conception of their author that the books had inspired in minds easily swayed into fantasy by fiction. But this was being targeted: not only did these postcards arrive weekly for months on end, but during this same period a reviewer living in the Midwest who'd once written a laudatory review of a book of mine in The New York Times Book Review also received a threatening postcard picturing the pope, his addressed to him at the college where he taught, in care of the "Department of Sycophancy and English." No salutation. Just this, written in a tiny hand:
Only a cheap little asskissing two-bit fucking "English professor" would have stooped to calling this Jew bastard's latest pile of dogshit "his richest and most rewarding." What a tragedy that scum like you get away with wrenching young minds out of shape. AK-47 fire. That remedy would restore American higher education to what it once was. Or help to.
It was my New York lawyer who put me in touch with the FBI. As a result, I was visited at my apartment on East 91st Street by an agent named M. J. Sweeney, a small, sprightly southerner in her early forties, who took all of the cards (which she sent on to Washington, along with the one received by the reviewer, for examination and analysis) and who advised me of the precautions I should observe, as though she were instructing me in the basic rules of a sport or game I was unfamiliar with. I wasn't to leave a building without first scrutinizing the street in both directions and across the way for anyone suspicious-looking. On the street, if approached by people I didn't know, I was to keep my eyes on their hands instead of their faces to be sure they didn't reach for a weapon. There were more suggestions like these, and I immediately set out to follow them, but not with much conviction that they would furnish serious protection against someone dedicated to gunning me down. The words "AK-47 fire," which had appeared first in the reviewer's postcard, now began to turn up in the messages addressed to me. Some weeks, "AK-47 fire," written with a black felt-tip marker in characters two inches high, constituted the entire message.
M.J. and I spoke each time a new postcard arrived, and I would photocopy both sides before putting the original in an envelope and mailing it off to her. When I called one day to tell her that my latest book had been nominated for a prize and I was expected to attend the award ceremony in a midtown Manhattan hotel, she asked, "What kind of security do they have?" "I would think very little." "It's open to the public?" "It's not not open to the public," I said; "I can't imagine anybody determined to get in having trouble. I'd guess there'll be around a thousand people." "Well, watch yourself," she said. "You sound as if you don't think I ought to show up." "I can't speak for the FBI," M.J. said. "The FBI cannot advise you on this." "Should I happen to win, if I have to go up on the stage to accept the prize, I'd make an easy target, would I not?" "If I were speaking as a friend," she replied, "I'd say you would." "If you were speaking as a friend, what would you suggest I do?" "Does it mean a lot to you to be there?" "It means nothing." "Well, if it were me to whom it meant nothing," M.J. said, "and I'd just got twenty-some death threats in the mail, I wouldn't go anywhere near the place."
The next morning I rented a car and drove to western Massachusetts, and within forty-eight hours I'd bought my cabin, two large rooms with a big stone fireplace in one and a wood stove in the other and between them a small kitchen with a window looking out back onto a grove of twisted old apple trees to a good-sized oval swimming pond and a big storm-damaged willow tree. The twelve acres were situated across from a picturesque swamp where waterfowl were plentiful and a couple hundred feet back from a dirt road that you followed for close to three miles before you rea
ched the blacktop that wound five more miles down the mountain to Athena. Athena was where E. I. Lonoff was teaching when I met him in 1956, along with his wife and Amy Bellette. The Lonoff house, built in 1790 and passed down over the years through his wife's family, was a ten-minute drive from the house I'd just bought. It was because this locale had been Lonoff's place of refuge that I had instinctively chosen it as my own—because of that and because I was twenty-three years old when I'd met him, and never forgotten it.
I'd learned to use a rifle in the army, and so I bought a .22 at a local gun shop and spent a few afternoons firing alone in the woods until I got the hang of it again. I kept the rifle in a closet next to my bed and a box of ammunition beside it on the closet floor. I arranged to have a security system installed that connected to the local state troopers' barracks, and to have outdoor spotlights fixed at the corners of my roof so that the grounds wouldn't be pitch-black if I got home after dark. Then I called M.J. and told her what I'd done. "Maybe I'm worse off out here in the woods, but so far I'm feeling less exposed and anxious than I felt in the city. I'm keeping my apartment for the time being, but I'm going to live up here for now, till there are no more death threats coming my way." "Does anybody know where you are?" "So far only you. I've arranged for my mail to be forwarded elsewhere." "Well," M.J. said, "it wouldn't have been my first recommendation, but you must do whatever makes you feel safe." "I'll be in and out of the city, but I'll be living here." "Good luck," she said, then went on to tell me she'd now have to transfer my file to the Boston office. After she said goodbye and hung up, I agonized all night long over what I had done, convinced that all the while I'd been receiving the death threats, it had been M. J. Sweeney who had been the barrier between me and my correspondent's AK-47.
When the death threats eventually stopped coming by mail I didn't forsake the cabin. By then it had turned into a home, and there I lived those eleven years writing books, staying fit, getting cancer, taking the radical cure, and, off by myself, without my quite knowing it or my keeping track, advancing in age by the day. The habit of solitude, of solitude without anguish, had taken hold of me, and with it the pleasures of being unanswerable and being free—paradoxically, free above all of oneself. For days on end of only work, I would feel sweetened by luxurious contentment. Loneliness, raving loneliness, was sporadic and amenable to strategy: should it sweep over me during the day, I'd leave my desk and go for a five-mile walk in the woods or along the river, and when it insinuated itself at night, I'd temporarily put aside the book I was reading and listen to something requiring the whole of my attention—something, say, like a Bartok quartet. Thus did I restore stability and make the loneliness bearable. All in all, being without any need to play a role was preferable to the friction and agitation and conflict and pointlessness and disgust that, as a person ages, can render less than desirable the manifold relations that make for a rich, full life. I stayed away because over the years I conquered a way of life that I (and not just I) would have thought impossible, and there's pride taken in that. I may have left New York because I was fearful, but by paring and paring and paring away, I found in my solitude a species of freedom that was to my liking much of the time.
I shed the tyranny of my intensity—or, perhaps, by living apart for over a decade, merely reveled in its sternest mode.
It was on the last day of June 2004 that the name "AK-47" returned to alarm me. I know it was on June 30 because that's the day that the female snapping turtles in my part of New England make their annual trek out from their watery habitat to find an open sandy spot to dig a nest for their eggs. These are strong, slow-moving creatures, large turtles with sawtooth armored shells a foot or more in diameter and long, heavily scaled tails. They appear in abundance at the south end of Athena, troops of them crossing the two-lane macadam road that leads into town. Drivers will patiently wait for minutes on end so as not to hit them as they emerge from the deep woods whose marshes and ponds they inhabit, and it is the annual custom of many local residents like me not merely to stop but to pull over and step out onto the shoulder of the road to watch the parade of these rarely seen amphibians, lumbering forward inch by inch on the powerful, foreshortened, scaly legs that end in prehistoric-looking reptilian claws.
Every year you hear pretty much the same joking and laughter and wonderment from the onlookers, and from the pedagogical parents who've brought their children around to see the show you learn yet again how much the turtles weigh, and how long their necks are, and how strong their bite is, and how many eggs they lay, and how long they live. Then you get back in the car and drive into town to do your errands, as I did on that sunny day just four months before I traveled down to New York to inquire about the collagen treatment.
After having parked diagonally alongside the town green, I ran into several of the local merchants I know who'd come out of their shops to momentarily bask in the sunshine. I stood and talked for a while—about very little, all of us assuming the amiable attitude of men who think only the best of everything, a haberdasher, a liquor store owner, and a writer all exuding the contentment of Americans living safely beyond the reach of the nerve-racking world.
It was after I'd crossed the street and was on my way to the hardware store that I suddenly heard "AK-47" muttered into my ear by the person who had just passed me, heading in the other direction. I swung around and from the mass of his back and the pigeon-toed gait recognized him right off. He was the painter whom I'd hired the summer before to paint the outside of my house, and whom, because he failed to turn up for work just about every other day—and when he put in an appearance did so for no more than two or three hours—I'd had to fire less than halfway into the job. He then sent me a bill so exorbitant that rather than argue with him—and because, on the phone or in person, we'd had noisy arguments nearly every day about either his hours or his absences—I turned the bill over to my local lawyer to deal with. The housepainter's name was Buddy Barnes and rather too late I learned that he was one of Athena's leading alcoholics. I'd never much liked the bumper sticker on his car that read CHARLTON HESTON IS MY PRESIDENT, but I paid little attention to it because, though the legendary movie star had been renowned as the celebrity president of the recklessly irresponsible National Rifle Association, he was well on his way to dementia by the time I got around to hiring Buddy, and the bumper sticker struck me as foolish and innocuous more than anything else.
I was stunned, of course, by what I'd heard on the street, so stunned that rather than give myself a moment to contemplate how best to respond or to determine whether I should respond at all, I raced across to the green, where he had just climbed into his pickup truck. I called his name and banged a fist on his fender until he rolled his window down. "What did you just say to me?" I asked him. Buddy had an almost angelic pink-complexioned look for a gruff-mannered man in his forties, angelic despite the blond hairs growing thinly under his nose and on his chin. "I got nothing to say to you," he replied in his customary high-pitched howl. "What did you say to me, Barnes?" "Je-sus," he replied, rolling his eyes. "Answer me. Answer me, Barnes. Why did you say that to me?" "You're hearing things, nutcase," he said. Then, throwing the truck into reverse, he backed out, and with a teenage tire-screech, he was gone.
In the end, I decided that the incident had nothing like the dramatic meaning I had first lighted on. Yes, "AK-47" was what he said, and yes, I was so sure that as soon as I got home, I placed a call to the New York office of the FBI to speak to M. J. Sweeney, only to be told that she had left the agency two years earlier. I reminded myself that those postcards had been sent to me months before I had moved up here and before anybody like Buddy Barnes knew of my existence. It was impossible for Barnes to have sent them, especially as they were postmarked from cities and towns in north Jersey, over a hundred miles south of Athena, Massachusetts. His intending to harass me with the very word that I'd been harassed with through the mails some eleven years earlier was nothing but the weirdest of coincidences.
The incontinence was wholly unaffected by the collagen treatment, and when I reported this on the morning of the election, the doctor's office recommended that I schedule an appointment for a second procedure the following month. If there was an improvement in the interim, I could always cancel it; if not, the procedure would be repeated. "And if it's not effective?" "Then we repeat it. The third time, we don't go in through the urethra," the nurse explained, "but through the scars from the prostate operation. Just a puncture. Local anesthetic. No pain." "And if a third procedure doesn't work?" I asked. "Oh, that's a long way off, Mr. Zuckerman. Let's just take one step at a time. Don't lose heart. This is not going to come to nothing."
As if incontinence weren't indignity enough, one had then to be addressed like a churlish eight-year-old balking at taking his cod liver oil. But that's how it goes when an elderly patient refuses to resign himself to the inevitable travails and totter politely toward the grave: doctors and nurses have a child on their hands who must be soothed into soldiering on in behalf of his own lost cause. That, at any rate, was my thinking when I hung up the phone, drained of pride and feeling all the limitations of my strength, the man at the point where he fails whether he resists or acquiesces.