Give Me Everything You Have

Part III: The Borderline

The question of “reputation,” to the extent that it had ever interested me before this episode, had done so for purely literary, or antiquarian, reasons. It belonged, I assumed, to a bygone world where communications were imperfect and social arrangements consequently more dependent on trust and hearsay than they are now. In the past your “name”-what other people could report about you-was crucial to your survival, whether you were a medieval knight or an Elizabethan merchant or a Victorian governess. A stain on your honor was potentially catastrophic, and so you guarded it jealously and defended it, if necessary, with your life.

In our own time, with more efficient information systems at our disposal, we were no longer, I supposed, so much at the mercy of other people’s perceptions or opinions. Facts could be checked; rumors and falsehoods refuted. A phone or a plane could bring you into direct contact with a potential business partner or employer. Reputation still meant something, but it no longer meant everything, and no longer required the implied threat of pistols at dawn to underwrite it, or suicide to purge its loss. The insane dueling culture of the past-fights to the death over obscure points of musical criticism, demotion to the ranks for failing to resent an insult-had become obsolete and was fast becoming incomprehensible. People could relax, finally, from the state of coiled-up vigilance in which those who wished to get on in the world had spent their lives for so many centuries.

And yet it seems that sometime near the end of the twentieth century, by a curious quirk of scientific progress, history, in this regard, reversed course. The Internet emerged, and with it the arbitration of reality began to pass back from the realm of verifiable fact to that of rumor and report, from the actual to the virtual. The latter, an indiscriminate tumult of truth and lies, was the zone in which our public identities, our outer selves, once again began to assume their definitive form. There was the private self, still, but for anyone who interacted with the world there was this strange new emanation of yourself, your Internet presence, and it was by this, increasingly, that others knew you and judged you.

Very quickly it was discovered that you could manipulate it: glamorize your image, finesse your biography. And by the same token, you could manipulate other people’s presences: boost an ally’s standing, or launch a corrosive lie against an enemy. One would think that the ease of performing such manipulations, and the large scale on which they immediately began occurring, would have long ago discredited the Web as a source of information about anything, but although we all acknowledge the need to be cautious, to discount much of what we read, split the difference between conflicting statements and so on, our first instinct, being creatures of the Word, is to trust it, and even on deeper consideration we tend to feel that it is basically more right than wrong, and that we can accept its approximations as the truth. You are what the Web says you are, and if it misrepresents you, the feeling of outrage, anguish, of having been violated in some elemental layer of your existence, is, as I began to learn, peculiarly crushing. Reputation (“the gentleman’s second soul,” as someone put it) is once again asserting its power to make or break us. At the present time of writing, a teenage girl has just hanged herself, a victim of cyber-attacks, and the papers are full of editorials about the deadly effectiveness of this form of bullying, how much more dangerous it is than the old-fashioned kind. I believe it. The essence of bullying is to convey the impression that the bully is the representative of a group, a majority, a consensus, while the victim is all alone. With the Internet the scale of alliances that the oppressor can suggest is limitless, and the feeling of isolation in the victim becomes correspondingly acute. And because, being human, one attributes a kind of human consciousness to this seething electronic data cloud, one also attributes to it a capacity for coherent judgment. The world has decided I am a loser, a monster, a jerk, a slut, whatever, goes the logic of the despairing outcast; how can I ever hope to counteract something so vast, and if I can’t, how can I ever show my face again? Spite has never had such an efficient instrument at its disposal.

The Amazon postings came down, but others went up. On a popular book site, Goodreads.com, I found another attack on my story “The Siege” (here retitled “Besieged” after a movie based on it). The review was posted by someone calling herself Elise but there was no doubt in my mind that it was Nasreen. Her imitation of the steely tones of scholarly disquiet begins alarmingly well: “The premise is racist and horribly frightening, considering the reality of surveillance issues in many developing nations…” Halfway through there’s a slight lapse in verbal poise: “There is a trend of uppidy perversion in Mr. Lasdun’s books, which is creepy though not interesting…” I hoped that “uppidy” might indicate something not quite trustworthy about the attack, but the last sentence resumes control with a masterfully understated little piece of nastiness that left me bathed in cold sweat:

“It’s worrisome that he teaches at colleges…”

Once again I seemed to be observing my reflection, my “second soul,” undergoing some transformation that I was helpless to prevent. Here I was, a standard-issue liberal with unimpeachably correct views on everything, casting the shadow of some leering, reactionary bigot. Unlike Amazon, Goodreads doesn’t have a “report” option for malicious postings, so there it still sits today, a little inexhaustible font of poison spreading its plumes into the hitherto clear waters of my virtual self.

Some years earlier I’d been given a short entry in Wikipedia. It was full of minor inaccuracies and misrepresentations (it called me an academic, for instance, which I am not). Trivial as these things were, and presumably not malicious, they bothered me much more than they would have done in an old-fashioned printed reference work. There, they would have simply been mistakes: amenable to correction. Here, they seemed to usurp the facts. Wikipedia says you are an academic? Very well, you are an academic. I had no idea how to go about altering the entry; as a matter of fact I didn’t know it could be altered until I got an email from Nasreen with a jeering hint in it about tampering with Wikipedia entries.

The foreboding I experienced as I logged on to Wikipedia.org and checked my entry can be easily imagined. (This cyber-narcissism, not a vice I’d been prone to before, was another gift from Nasreen: I became-it sounds like a malady from some Victorian hygiene pamphlet-a compulsive self-googler.) Was Wikipedia now going to declare me some kind of notorious Zionist literary racketeer? Interestingly, given that she had figured out how to vandalize the site, Nasreen’s attack seemed, on the face of it, oddly restrained. There were no accusations of plagiarism, no pseudo-scholarly exposés of misogyny or racism. Instead, there was a single, scatological phrase, inserted into a passage quoting the judges’ citation for an award I had won for a story. It was extremely silly, but it had a certain wit, jumping out from the otherwise staid language of a typical wiki entry, and I might have laughed if the entry hadn’t been about me. No doubt, like King Midas whispering to the reeds about his asses’ ears, I am doing myself no favors by repeating it, but my interest here is in presenting this case in all its rich awfulness, not in preserving my dignity. “We chose the story that lingered most,” the judges had written, to which Nasreen had appended: “like a fart.”

I didn’t think much of it at first, but when I checked again a few weeks later and saw that it was still there, lingering malodorously over my entry, I began to sense that it was a cleverer attack than I had realized. Outright denunciations would have aroused suspicion in a Wikipedia entry, which, unlike an Amazon review, is presumably supposed to be neutral. This, however, was like a piece of sly, barely noticeable graffiti that might make people chuckle but probably wouldn’t cause them to try to do anything about it, even if they knew how. But its real harm was the notice it gave that I was a person to whom such a thing could be done: that I had attracted an enemy who wanted the world to categorize me as an object of scorn. Whether randomly or out of deliberate selection, I had been successfully targeted, and with the most primevally effective form of malediction: my name mingled with the smell of shit. Cockroaches, vermin, excrement… there are certain phenomena that, purely by association, have an ability to reassign a person from the category of human being, in their fellow citizens’ minds, to that of waste. All one has to do to trigger the process is find an arresting way of raising the connection. From my self-googling I knew that this Wikipedia entry was usually the first link that came up under my name, which meant that it was the site most commonly visited by anyone looking me up. Again, I am conscious of the dangers of exaggeration here, of sounding self-important or even paranoid (though God knows I did become paranoid in time), and I should say that I realize, again, that probably only a handful of people have ever had any reason to look me up on Wikipedia. But there it was, nevertheless, and it was impossible for me not to imagine the wave of reflexively withdrawn interest, accompanied by the wrinkling of noses, as these people, however few they were, thought better of reading my books, or hiring me to teach, or inviting me to give a reading, or commissioning an article from me, and typed another author’s name into the search box instead-someone who didn’t trail this unwholesome aura of trouble. I did complain to Wikipedia, and in time received a sympathetic note back, but it was several months before the entry was changed, and by then I had begun to feel like a leper.

Along with these Web attacks, there was yet another development in the email campaign. From my imagined co-conspirators, Nasreen had now progressed to emailing organizations I was professionally associated with. My literary agency in London was sent an email accusing me of the familiar crimes. The Personals department of the London Review of Books, bizarrely, was sent an enraged email heaping curses on me (Nasreen obligingly copied me on this). As a freelance writer I depend for my living on easy relations with magazines, newspapers, creative-writing departments, reading venues, and so on. Nowadays any involvement you might have with such places leaves some kind of record on the Web. All Nasreen had to do was work her way through my Google pages and she could systematically denounce me to every one of them. Given her explicit intent to “ruin” me, I had to assume that this was what she was doing. Very rapidly my relations with all of them became tinged, on my side, with anxiety. Had she contacted them? If so, were they interested? Concerned? Indifferent? I could have asked them, of course, but the thought of doing so seemed, as I considered it, fraught with difficulties. If they hadn’t heard from her, what would they make of my strange tale of a former student denouncing me as a plagiarizing sexual predator? Somehow it seemed a mistake to introduce such a concept of myself into the minds of other people, even my friends. And if they had heard from her, well, what good would it do for me to ask them to please take no notice of what she said? Some of these organizations knew me well enough to dismiss out of hand any of Nasreen’s slanders, but some, I had to surmise, might be given pause, if only by that admirable human instinct for fair play. Putting myself in their position, I had no choice (as I imagined them reading her accusations) but to regard myself in a new and questionable light, and it seemed to me I could sense the first small but decisive motions of disengagement. I quickly succumbed to a kind of paralyzed dread: fearing the worst on every front, nervously examining my correspondence with these people for signs of distrust, attributing longer than usual silences to decisions to cut me off, but unable to bring myself to find out if the worst had actually occurred.

The culminating act in this particular line of attack came in April 2008. I had taken a teaching job at a college near where I live, to supplement my regular fall job at Morgan College. My boss-I’ll call him Frank-was a man in his sixties, an enthusiastic supporter of contemporary writing. There were four other writers in the department and three administrative assistants. Our offices were on the top floor of the campus library. The atmosphere was relaxed, though “relaxed,” by this time, wasn’t really a condition I was able to partake in personally.

One morning, shortly after I arrived for work, there was a knock on my door. It was Frank, looking uncharacteristically ill at ease. He had a piece of paper in his hand.

“We’ve been sent a very weird email,” he said. “Maybe you should read it.”

I knew immediately what it was. The subject heading ran:

James Lasdun, important information about your “writer-in-residence”

The email itself is rather long, but it seems necessary to reproduce it here in its entirety. I omit only some phrases that might identify other people. X, Y, and Z refer, as earlier, to the Iranian writers I was supposed to have helped. I should also mention that the poem I had begun writing on my cross-country train trip the year before had been published by now, under the title “Bittersweet.” It is fairly obviously about my father (you can Google it), but Nasreen had apparently decided it was in fact about her: “Lasdun,” she had written earlier to someone else, “[…] has his ‘lovers’ books reworked. He then writes Bittersweet claiming that I didn’t want fame, money etcetera.” Finally, I should stress that, in order for the full impact of this new email to be felt, it must be read as if by my boss himself, who at this point had no inkling of the psychodrama going on in the background of his new hire:

To Whom It May Concern:

I am a former female student of James Lasdun and find it truly disturbing that he is allowed to teach on any level. During my time as his student he did no work on my writing nor on any other female writer’s work. He did sleep with the well-connected [Elaine Baker] […] and had an on-going affair, which ended in her harassing and stalking me and sending me disgustingly explicit stories about their relationship when she found out he’d taken me to his agent Janice Schwartz.

It turned out that James Lasdun was not interested in my work but was trying to sleep with me. This, after I’d been raped while trying to finish my work, a novel about pre-revolutionary Iran with an emphasis on the atrocities committed against muslims. His agent sent me to Paula Kurwen, who told me she’d edit my work and to continue working on it while keeping silent and not speaking with any agents or editors (though Schwartz said she would not take on my work). In the meantime, Schwartz, with the aid of her neo-con friends X and Y set out to find two Jewish writers and one Zoroastrian to essentially duplicate my work. And then James Lasdun, after a long email relationship and warnings about him from Ms. Baker, cut me off completely. I never had an affair with him but had developed a psychological bond akin to Stockholm Syndrome.

James Lasdun’s poetry is mediocre. His fiction is often racist (I find nothing refreshing about Besieged, a story about an English composer who manipulates a dark woman into fucking him in order to get his help). This is the psychology of your writer-in-residence, at an era when misogyny is no longer romantic.

James Lasdun is probably hard at work writing yet another sadistic tale about me, just like his previous awful, crass poem Bittersweet, knowing that I had dwindled down to 98 pounds after he and his evil witches (Kurwen and banker Schwartz) deceived and stole from me-and after I’d been raped by a colleague at a magazine while writing my book in a 3 month period after finding out that somehow Ms Z was writing the same book (James Lasdun was my advisor on it and apparently he knew, I later found out).

If this is the business side of publishing I would like to vomit on all of you who contribute to such a shallow culture by promoting these people within who are nothing but destructive to beauty, truth and peace.

Please read Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year. It seems many people are aware of Mr. Lasdun’s penchant for daytrading fiction for lack of money and talent. And now you are funding him to exploit me yet again because in my state of trauma and naive trust in him I told him many things, and this is precisely his plan, as he’s told me in the last email he sent.

I hope all the people involved in this rot in hell. And I wish these institutions of higher learning would stop being the banks they are. And I wish you’d keep Mr. Lasdun away from young women over which he has power. It is the only way this twisted, sadistic man can get his kicks.

Best,

Nasreen

For some time after I had finished reading I was unable to speak.

Frank seemed as embarrassed as I was. He had stood up and was pacing up and down my small office.

“Listen,” he said, “I just want you to know that I don’t regard it as any of my business who you’ve had affairs with in the past. It’s this other stuff that-”

“But I haven’t had an affair,” I said, my voice thick and constricted.

“I don’t mean with her, I mean with-” He peered at the email. “With the other girl-Elaine.”

“I haven’t had an affair with anyone!” I was agitated, eager to get the point over.

“All right. Fine. And like I say it’s not my concern. But it’s this other stuff that bothers me. These accusations of-I mean what does this even mean, ‘daytrading fiction’?”

Of Nasreen’s many smears, I had always imagined the sexual ones would be the most likely to harm me, particularly in the context of my teaching jobs. Hackneyed as it has become, the combination of elements-male professor, distraught female student, allegation of impropriety-is still potent. Nasreen was accusing me of sleeping with another student, not her, but clearly she was presenting this as a form of sexual harassment, and in fact at many colleges it would be considered precisely that (the reasoning is apparently that if you are sleeping with one student, this might cause you to give lower grades to others). But while it was a relief to find Frank unconcerned about these particular accusations, it was disconcerting to find him stalled by the other ones, which had seemed to me so self-evidently absurd. Not that he was saying he actually believed them, but he clearly felt that some explanation was called for before he could simply dismiss them. No doubt I would have reacted the same way in his position, but even so, the fact that a person of obvious sophistication would feel professionally obliged to give even passing consideration to this fantasy of a gang of neo-con word pirates filled me with a crushing sense of the difficulties that lay ahead of me.

But before I describe the rest of this conversation and its aftermath, I must backtrack a little, to a development of my own that I haven’t yet mentioned-one that had been progressing for some time.

I imagine that by now anyone reading this document will have at least one fairly pressing question: If I was innocent of everything Nasreen accused me of in her emails to me and other people, then why hadn’t I tried to stop them?

The answer is that I had: several times, and in several different ways.

Two or three months into the campaign, I had called the FBI. It had occurred to me that I was the victim of a hate crime, and this, as I understood it, was a federal offense. I can’t say I actually felt “victimized” by Nasreen’s anti-Semitism at that point; more just bewildered. But I definitely wanted the emails to stop, and the thought of being in a position to unleash the FBI on Nasreen had filled me with a brief surge of hope.

I spoke to several people, first at the FBI headquarters in New York and then at my local office in Albany. I was listened to patiently. Polite noises of sympathy were made. Off-the-cuff advice was offered (I was told on no account to block the emails or stop reading them, in case I missed some overt threat of violence, and not to write back either). But it became obvious, pretty quickly, that nobody was taking the matter as seriously as I was. And I realized, in fact, as I heard myself telling my bizarre story for the third or fourth time, that I probably sounded like a minor sort of lunatic and was just being humored, no doubt according to strict procedures laid down for dealing with crazy-sounding members of the public. The emails themselves, when I read them over the phone, elicited some grudging interest, but it seemed they weren’t threatening enough to warrant intervention from the FBI. For that, I would need direct, repeated death threats and even these would have to be explicitly related to my being Jewish. Nasreen’s description of herself as a “verbal terrorist,” which I had looked on as my trump card, produced little more than mildly puzzled indifference. An agent at the Albany office told me to keep him posted if things got worse, but I had the distinct sense (and this may have been an early symptom of my burgeoning paranoia) that he found me ridiculous, possibly even rather contemptible, for trying to turn the big guns of law enforcement against these harmless, if nasty, squibs. A part of me couldn’t help agreeing with him. The figure that comes to me-grandiose, but somehow irresistible-is Israel’s invasion of Gaza after the cross-border rocket attacks: laser strikes and phosphorous bombs in retaliation for some rusty old Qassams… How could that not look awful? And by the same token, how does a middle-aged man, a member of the “axis of virtue,” with all the advantages of his more or less comfortable position in life, fight a young, struggling Iranian woman filled with the sense of her own marginality, without feeling (and looking) like a jerk, a pussy, a chickenhawk imperialist, a “fucking faggot coward”?

For several weeks I reverted to stoical silence. But then this too started to feel like impotence (the logic of the situation seemed to be that everything, on my side, would sooner or later feel like impotence).

As other people were dragged into the affair, efforts at mounting some kind of collective defense began again, and this time they were more concerted. Phone calls were exchanged, strategies discussed, lawyers consulted. Still, it was surprisingly hard to come up with a plan. None of the lawyers seemed sure how to handle the matter, and anyway even the most basic legal action would have been unaffordable. Someone was given the name of a private security company that specialized in stalkers. I called them up and spoke to a man who seemed to be hinting, through careful euphemism, that the key to his company’s success lay in threatening to break the stalkers’ legs. This didn’t seem a very sensible way to go. At one point Paula, who for a period had been getting almost as many emails as I was, took a chance on going against the universal advice not to respond in any way to Nasreen, and wrote her an email (I should mention that I still hadn’t met Paula, conspiracies notwithstanding, and that it was through Janice that I heard about this). I saw the email after a document was compiled for the police out of all our correspondence. It was a very compassionate email, gently refuting the accusations, empathizing with the various kinds of pain involved in writing a book, and suggesting, among other things, that Nasreen might want to get some counseling. In reply she received a torrent of outstandingly vicious (even by Nasreen’s standards) abuse.

When the net of targets spread to include other writers at Morgan College, someone suggested we ask the school itself to help us. This had crossed my mind already, but I’d held back, basically out of embarrassment. Being the focus of a former student’s meltdown in which words like “rape,” “racist,” and “theft” are being tossed around isn’t a subject you’d want to raise with your employers at an American writing program if you didn’t absolutely have to. But as other faculty began receiving emails from Nasreen, so my reticence became pointless, and I began to talk.

The response was surprisingly warm and sympathetic (so much so that I had to wonder whether the repressive forces I had begun to see everywhere in American society might possibly be more a creation of my own anxieties than objective phenomena). Urgent, concerned phone calls and emails were sent out from various offices. I wrote, on request from the dean’s office, an account of everything that had happened between me and Nasreen. I distributed copies of Nasreen’s emails with annotations explaining the more puzzling references in them. I described my attempts to get the FBI involved in the matter and suggested the administration approach the FBI themselves. They responded that they didn’t have legal standing to do so, since the school itself wasn’t a target, but instead they proposed sending Nasreen an official “cease and desist” letter. This sounded promising to me. Being easily intimidated by the law, I tend to assume others will be just as docile. I didn’t see the letter itself, but Nasreen copied me on her reply. “Sue me,” runs the subject heading of her forwarding email, “go ahead, call your little lawyers…”

The text contained a threat, of sorts-“I would probably harm him if I saw him on the street”-which, by the perverse logic of the situation, counted as a nugget of good news (it raised the possibility of criminal prosecution), but otherwise it was just the usual splatter of accusation and invective.

So much for “ceasing and desisting.” But meanwhile I had had a meeting with the school’s head of security, a former cop, who gave me the number of a police detective in the NYPD, I’ll call him Detective Bauer, who had experience dealing with this kind of problem.

I phoned the detective at once. He was brisk but courteous, and seemed willing to get involved. We arranged to meet the following week at his precinct building.

I have vivid memories of this meeting. It took place on a sunny morning in the early spring of 2008. As I walked from the subway I could feel a kind of thin, improbable elation flickering inside the otherwise black mood engulfing me. I couldn’t quite get over the thought that I was on my way to a meeting with an NYPD detective. My cherished principle of “internal necessity” seemed to have converged, miraculously, with the principle of action, and here I was taking matters into my own hands: exercising “agency.”

The station was near my old neighborhood, and a certain nostalgia further intensified this volatile state of mind. Here was the street where I had lived when I first arrived in New York twenty years ago. Here was our old apartment, K-’s and mine. Here was the street where the woman had called down to me from her window. The sidewalk trees were dotted with tight buds. Banks of tulips in a window box glowed in the sunlight.

Patrol cars and traffic scooters crowded the sidewalk outside the precinct building. Inside, a desk sergeant directed me upstairs to the detectives’ office. I climbed a flight of worn steps. A metal door opened onto a large, open, bustling room. Officers, uniformed and plainclothed, sat at desks that ran the length of it in two rows, interviewing people, talking on the phone, working at laptops. To the left was a barred cell with a bench on which a young man in handcuffs was sitting, head bowed, a uniformed woman leaning against the wall opposite, staring down at him.

Detective Bauer’s desk was at the far end of the room. He stood up as I approached and shook my hand. He wore a brown jacket and tie. I suspect he was about my age, though I perceived him as older. He was pinkish and sandy-haired with very light brown eyes, pale-lashed. His face was large, his body heavy-framed.

He pointed to a swivel chair by his desk and I sat down.

Just as we started talking my cell phone rang. It was my daughter, twelve then, and I took the call, excusing myself to the detective, who smiled affably. It wasn’t anything important and I got off quickly, explaining to my daughter that I was in New York, talking to a detective about Nasreen.

As I hung up it occurred to me that the call had very conveniently solved the problem of how to present myself to the detective as a family man with nothing to hide, something that had seemed important to establish. But then almost immediately I began to wonder if it might have seemed a little too perfectly timed, raising suspicions that I’d set it up in advance, which would of course have suggested the opposite: a furtive, private, calculating type… Another of Nasreen’s legacies: this corrosive tendency to question and distrust all impressions of other people, my own of them as well as theirs of me.

“So this lady,” the detective resumed. “Remind me. She’s a student of yours?”

“She was, several years ago. It’s a complicated story.”

As succinctly as I could, and uncomfortably aware of all the other people in the room, I told the detective the story of my acquaintance with Nasreen: her term as my student, the friendly correspondence we’d had when she got back in touch two years later, the outburst when I made it clear I wasn’t interested in having an affair, the resumption of our amicable correspondence, my gradual backing away as she started forwarding other people’s emails and deluging me with her own, the hate mail, accusations, and strange demands for my apartment keys that began after this withdrawal became complete. I did my best to supply the logic linking this chain of events, though I was aware of its sounding pretty tenuous, almost as if I had come there to complain about a bad dream I’d had. And I made sure the detective understood that although I was the main target of Nasreen’s wrath, other people, principally Janice and Paula, had been sent equally venomous emails. I didn’t want him to conclude this was all just some murky tale of an illicit affair gone sour, as I imagined I might have done in his position.

He listened without interrupting and nodded thoughtfully when I had finished. If the world of graduate writing programs, literary agents, freelance editors, publishing deals, intellectual property, and so on was at all mysterious to him, he didn’t show it. His demeanor was calm, a little detached but sympathetic, like that of a physician one is consulting for the first time and filling in on the intimate history of one’s ailments.

He asked if I’d brought the emails, and I handed him a selection I’d made from each of the different phases I’d described. He looked through them in silence, taking his time. On a cabinet behind him was a fish tank. The fish in it appeared to be tiny sharks: black with white underbellies, triangular dorsal fins and pugnacious, wedge-shaped heads. I’d never seen anything like them and wondered if they were a standard feature of detectives’ rooms, or peculiar to this precinct. Not that there was anything sharkish, on the face of it, about Detective Bauer. If anything he seemed a rather mild man. He appeared to be genuinely shocked by Nasreen’s emails. His pinkish complexion was mottled with darker reds as he looked up from them.

“All this stuff about drugs,” he said, frowning. “I don’t like that.”

That took me by surprise. Nasreen often mentioned smoking pot or taking speed, but I’d never given it much thought. To the detective, however, these casual references to an illegal activity were apparently not something to be glossed over so easily. I had the feeling he was almost personally affronted by them, and I felt a bit embarrassed at having revealed my lack of concern about them.

I nodded lamely. “What about the other stuff?”

“Well, it’s aggravated harassment, no question. We’d pick her up right now if she was in New York. But you’re saying she moved to California?”

“According to her.”

“That could be a problem.”

Aggravated harassment, he explained, was a misdemeanor rather than a felony, and it was unlikely, given the expense involved, that a district attorney was going to have her extradited from California to New York just for a misdemeanor.

“I’ll talk to the DA’s office, I’ll definitely do that, but even with something as bad as this”-he motioned with what seemed to be sincere disgust at the pile of emails-“it’s going to be a long shot.”

But he had another proposition. In his experience, he said, a call from an NYPD detective was usually enough to stop this kind of thing. He would call up Nasreen and talk to her, tell her that if she continued harassing me or any of her other targets in any way, which meant any kind of contact at all, she’d be arrested and brought to New York to face charges.

“It’s a little bit of a bluff, since like I say the DA probably isn’t going to want to spend the money to have her extradited, but with luck she’ll take me at my word. They usually do.”

Though I didn’t want to discourage him, I thought I should tell him how she’d responded to the cease and desist letter from Morgan College. He nodded, but didn’t seem too concerned.

“We’ll see what happens. Another thing we can do if this doesn’t work is arrange to have a couple of officers out in California drop in on her. That can sometimes get a result.”

I said I thought that would be an excellent idea. There was a pause.

“What do you think of her?” I asked. “I mean, what do you think’s actually going on?”

He looked away a moment, then looked back.

“I have relatives with a daughter like her,” he said. “Same kind of what you’d call borderline personality. Sometimes she’ll do stuff like this and her parents’ll call me. I’ve had to deal with her multiple times.”

“Borderline? You mean as in… on the edge, psychologically?”

He shrugged.

“Able to act very crazy if they want to but also able to control it if they want to.”

The subject had brought a look of melancholy sympathy to his features. He was an odd mixture of compassion and rather old-fashioned severity.

I’d wanted to ask him more about his understanding of “borderline personalities,” but the meeting was apparently over.

“So anyway,” he said, standing up, “give me a little time, but I’ll definitely call her, and we’ll take it from there. Okay?”

I nodded, thanking him effusively.

Nasreen had sent me various phone numbers over the years, including those of family members out in California (she’d copied me, God knows why, on her correspondence with some of them), and I gave these to Detective Bauer.

I left feeling cautiously optimistic.

This, more or less, was where matters stood when Frank appeared at my door with Nasreen’s email denouncing me as a racist, a thief, a mediocre writer, and a danger to young women.

I had spoken once more to Detective Bauer by then, to report a new development in the emails, a disturbing one (but all developments in this saga were disturbing), and to see if he’d spoken to Nasreen yet. He hadn’t, though he assured me he would soon and asked me to fax him the new emails. But just the fact that I had reported the matter to him, that it was now an official police matter, proved extremely helpful. As I began trying to explain to Frank that every one of Nasreen’s assertions was a lie, I had felt that, although he personally believed me, in his professional capacity he needed something stronger than just my word against Nasreen’s. At any rate, as soon as I told him about my meeting with Detective Bauer, he looked immensely relieved, and by the end of our conversation he was offering his full support and sympathy. At my urging he called Morgan College to verify what I’d told him and coordinate a response. Soon after that his own administration contacted their local police on my behalf, who opened their own file on Nasreen.

In practical terms then, I was unharmed by this latest strike. But by that stage I was in more danger from the psychological effects of Nasreen’s campaign than from any practical damage she may have inflicted.

She had been sending me hate email now for almost a year. On the advice of police, lawyers, and friends, I’d refrained from blocking it, not that this would have been easy to do anyway, as she continually set up new email addresses. As she explained, with her usual candor: “I keep changing my email address because I think you are blocking and silencing me and punishing me for my pain.” Sometimes, when I couldn’t face reading the messages, I saved them without opening them. And sometimes, especially when I came on a whole clutch of fresh arrivals gleaming malevolently in my inbox, I deleted them without opening them, dispatching them in a brief frenzy of defiance, though I always regretted this later (what if I had just deleted the one unequivocal threat that would have elevated her crime to a felony and triggered extradition?). For a period, when I was close to the borderline myself, I asked K- to check my email before I looked, and to save anything from Nasreen without telling me about it unless it contained a radical new development: I needed to be able to tell myself that the attacks might be coming to an end. But mostly I read them, and it was like swallowing a cup of poison every morning, with usually a few more cupfuls to follow later in the day.

If her aim, as a verbal terrorist, was to replicate the conditions of the nation at large inside my head, with its panics and paranoias, its thrashing impotence, its schizoid shame and self-righteousness, its droning monomania, she succeeded triumphantly. Possibly the monomania, the increasing difficulty of thinking about anything other than Nasreen, was the worst of these effects. In this respect her obsession with me achieved perfect symmetry: I became just as obsessed with her. I couldn’t write, read, play with my kids, listen to the news, do almost anything, without drifting off, for longer and longer intervals, into morbid speculations about what new mischief she might be getting up to. The sheer quantity of her emails was such that I never had time to recover my equilibrium between them. Even the ones that just consisted of abuse left a bruised, unclean feeling, and there was never time to purge this, so that an accumulation of unprocessed disgust, pain, and bewilderment seemed to be piling up inside me. I lived, increasingly, in the medium of Nasreen’s hatred. I couldn’t think about anything except her, and pretty soon I couldn’t talk about anything except her.

This meant that in situations where I didn’t feel comfortable raising the subject, I would fall into heavy, unsociable silence, while in situations where I did feel comfortable, I would talk about nothing else. Up to a point, people found it interesting. Some responded with stalker stories of their own. A writer friend who had judged a literary competition was being plagued with abuse by one of the entrants, accusing her of stealing his material. A therapist I knew was being sued by a former patient whom she had helped find a job that hadn’t worked out. A couple of male acquaintances confided that they were being harassed by women they’d had one-night stands with. All moderately comforting, though since none of it was on anything like the scale of Nasreen’s campaign, it left me feeling, more than ever, the sheer singularity of my case, which in turn reinforced the sense of its insolubility. Besides, as I heard myself droning on compulsively to these friends and acquaintances, I could feel, among even the most patient and sympathetic, a certain resistance building: not boredom exactly (the continually evolving weirdness of the story seemed to ensure, if nothing else, a degree of fascination); more a kind of helplessness. What could they do, finally, about this intractable problem of mine? And when there is nothing you can do about a person’s suffering, there comes a point where you don’t want to hear about it anymore.

Depression, anxiety, insomnia… one by one the symptoms of stress took over my life. Irritability too. I don’t usually get angry easily, but at home I became short-tempered, and even out in public I was uncharacteristically prickly. Once, in an espresso bar around the corner from our apartment, I almost attacked a man. It was a tiny place with just a few small tables that patrons were expected to clear off themselves when they were finished. I was standing with my cup of coffee, waiting for a table, when the man and his girlfriend got up to leave without observing this basic courtesy. They were English, so, fair enough, there was no reason why they should have known it was the custom. Very politely I asked them if they were leaving.

“Yes.”

“Would you mind throwing out your stuff?”

The man, about my age, looked peeved, but said okay.

“You can just put it there, in the garbage,” I told him, still perfectly polite.

The man threw out his paper plates and napkins. Then he looked directly at me with a nasty smile and said:

“Sieg Heil.”

Under normal circumstances I’d have been too dumbstruck, and too inhibited about making a scene in public, to come up with any kind of retort until long after such an incident was over. But I was in such a coiled-up state of tension by that point that I reacted without hesitation:

“What?” I said quietly.

He continued smiling. I took a step toward him.

“Do you want me to throw a cup of boiling coffee in your face?”

His smile turned a bit sickly: “All right, I just…”

“You must be out of your fucking mind, saying something like that to a Jew in New York.”

“I… I’m sorry.”

“People clear their stuff away here. There aren’t any waiters.”

He swallowed, then pouted: “Well… I don’t like being told what to do.”

At this point I became louder. “I wasn’t fucking telling you what to do. I was just asking you to get your fucking crap off the table.”

At that he moved toward the exit. “Okay, I… I apologize. I apologize.”

As he and his girlfriend left, I became aware that everyone in the tiny café was looking at me in silence. Perhaps no one else had heard his “Sieg Heil” or, if they had, had known what to make of it (it’s a peculiarly English put-down, and an antiquated one at that). Far from applauding me or even nodding mild approval, they were looking at me as if I might be about to take out a gun and start shooting. I left, feeling distinctly that I wasn’t going to be welcome back there.

And then there was the paranoia. This manifested itself in a number of ways, but the source, the underlying premise of them all, lay in Nasreen’s uncanny ability to orchestrate other people, or at least the illusion of other people, into her attacks. Paranoia is a dysfunction in one’s relations with other people. It requires a social context, and Nasreen’s incorporation of my various personal and professional associates into her campaign supplied this very efficiently. It also requires a constantly shifting boundary between what one knows for a fact and what one can only imagine, and this too, this destabilizing principle, was supplied by Nasreen. All she had had to do was introduce the concept of smearing my name, and furnish a few concrete examples of having done so, and my anxious self-interest could be relied on to expand the process indefinitely. The calculus was simple: If a person is prepared to falsely assert X about you, then why would she not also falsely assert Y? Why, in fact, would she not assert every terrible thing under the sun? And if that person has already demonstrably reported those terrible things to your agent, your boss, your colleagues, then why might she not also be in the process of reporting them to your neighbors, your friends, your editor at this or that paper or magazine, your relatives, et cetera?

I fell prey to the worst imaginings; suspecting, increasingly, that everyone I spoke to on the phone or ran into in town had heard Nasreen’s allegations about me, either directly from Nasreen or in the form of rumors set off by some Web posting of hers, and that they were secretly harboring the thought that the soft-spoken Englishman in their midst might be some kind of monster. The fact that I had written a novel, The Horned Man, in which a college instructor believes he is being framed for a series of sex crimes, gave the situation a piquancy that didn’t escape me, though I was in no condition to enjoy it (“How I had managed to lay myself open to an act of such preposterously elaborate vindictiveness,” my hero reflects with a pertinence I struggle to find purely coincidental; “how or why such an intricate engine of destruction could ever have docked at my life, was still unfathomable…”). On rare occasions when I was able to persuade myself that this really was all a case of my own worst imaginings, Nasreen would invariably deliver some dismaying new evidence to the contrary. I remember at one point wondering if my sudden interest in honor, name, “reputation” was a bit fanciful, a case of allowing writerly interests to shape the way I was experiencing this ordeal. But in February 2008 a volley of emails arrived in which Nasreen explicitly targets these entities, plucking the words, it seemed, straight out of my own mind. “Your reputation is ass…,” runs the inimitably phrased heading of the first email in this volley. “You think you’re clever but your name is tarnished,” goes a line in the next. Just as she had once felt controlled by my fictions (“i’m living your short story out and I’m scared”), so I now began to feel controlled by hers. Never mind that my real self was innocent of everything she accused me of: out there in cyberspace a larger, more vivid version of myself had been engendered and was rapidly (so I felt) supplanting me in the minds of other people: Nasreen’s version, the thief, the racist, the sexual predator.

The sexual slander was of course the most dangerous, threatening not just my livelihood but the basic conditions of my life. We know how vulnerable men have become to this taint (women too, though less so). I had observed it repeatedly since moving to the States, from the “recovered memory” hysteria of the eighties, with its scenes of sheriffs dragging bewildered old fathers off to jail, to the more complex sexual harassment dramas of the nineties. Like most men my age, old enough to have observed the patriarchal model of male behavior up close and young enough to have recognized its obsolescence, I was in favor of the attempt to regulate it out of existence. But I had seen how easy it was to abuse the shaming and ostracizing power the new attitudes brought. At a certain point in the ascendancy of a new idea, just a word can turn a human being into shit: different words in different eras; race words and class words in the past, now sex words.

For some time Nasreen had been very obviously trying to find a way of using this kind of verbal napalm against me. In particular she seemed to have been looking for a formula that would square her acknowledgment that she and I had never come close to any kind of sexual contact, with a paradoxical eagerness to call me a rapist. Already she had found ways of associating me with the idea of rape without actually accusing me of it, but I had sensed that she was moving toward something more direct.

The rape she refers to, so far as I can piece the story together from the various fragmentary accounts she gives in her emails, occurred at the offices of a well-known national magazine where she was working some time before she enrolled at Morgan College (in other words, some time before I met her). She had passed out or been drugged at an office event and woken up certain that she’d been assaulted. She had reported it to the police but they had declined to investigate.

Her Amazon review and email to my boss linked me-rhetorically if not factually-with this rape (“It turned out that James Lasdun was not interested in my work but was trying to sleep with me. This, after I’d been raped while trying to finish my work…”).

But even before this, she had begun to work me into the rape itself, writing in January: “It’s clear James has been using me… he may have even initiated the rape so as to steal my work and give it to X…” and in February floating the suspicion that I might have been the actual assailant: “I hope to God James is not my rapist…” The practicalities of this scenario, in which my plot against her turns out to have been in motion even before I became her teacher, obliged her to construct a complicated set of motives and connections linking me to her, which in turn required me to have been already working in concert with one of my future colleagues at Morgan College (I’ll call her Liz): “i think he and liz set up my rape…”

No doubt these allegations sound too obviously ridiculous or crazed to convince anyone of anything, and perhaps they were. But I don’t think Nasreen particularly cared about convincing people. The point, as she had candidly stated, was simply to tarnish and smear-to render me, shall we say, unfit for public consumption. Given the energy she was putting into this, it seemed to me that she was bound to succeed, if not by reason or subtlety then by sheer force of attrition. In the deepening gloom of that winter I began to feel that I and other men were beginning to occupy a position in our society like that of women in repressive traditional societies, where the merest suggestion of sexual transgression could mean death. Like them our reputations were frail, in need of vigilant protection. We needed our own form of purdah, it seemed to me; our own yashmaks and chadors… Certainly I could have used something like that after my conversation with Frank. Formally speaking, I was in the clear, my word accepted over Nasreen’s, but the nature of a smear is that it survives formal cleansing, and I felt the foulness it had left behind, like an almost physical residue. What did the other people in the department who had read the email think, now, as I passed through the offices? What did these assistants and other teachers see when they looked at me? People die of curses in primitive societies. The victim internalizes his designation as poison, excrement, untouchable filth; feels or imagines the community cutting itself off from him and collapses inward. Fatwa, voodoo, excommunication-all attempt to tap into this power, and Nasreen seemed to have found her own way of using it. It became an agony to walk through those gray-carpeted rooms and corridors. I felt the literal reality of that elemental attribute of shame, the desire to hide one’s face, and I would have gladly covered mine if some convention for doing so had existed. Somehow I had re-created in my own psyche the America of the Scarlet Letter and the Long Black Veil.

By June 2008 the rhetoric of the emails had reached a logical extreme. Not death threats exactly (Nasreen seems to have been too canny for that); more like death wishes, death prophecies, death curses:

I hope he dies if he is behind all this…

die. i hope your kids die…

Die traitor-ugly-bitches… DIE…

I didn’t seriously think she was going to come and kill me, though I did find myself looking closely at the cars that drove by on the dirt road outside our house, and sometimes at night if I heard a sound I would lie half awake for long stretches, wishing I owned a gun. But by this point I was no longer responding so much to the literal content of the emails as to the mere fact of their undiminishing volume and persistence. They reached me less as specific threats than as a kind of pure, abstract antagonism, and I reacted with a correspondingly abstract distillation of pure pain. “Thinking” about the emails no longer consisted of appraising or trying to understand them, so much as merely feeling them pulsate in my mind like some malignant bolus.

In my initial plan for this part of the story, I had considered transposing an event from fifteen years earlier in my life, in which a prolonged period of stress had culminated in a rather spectacular medical drama. I was afraid all this talk of torment might become a bit vaporous without some concrete dramatic representation to anchor it in reality, and this event would have fit the bill perfectly.

I had been sitting on my bed when I felt an excruciating pain across my back and left shoulder. I thought I’d pulled a muscle and maybe pinched a few nerves. There was a strange pressure against my lung when I breathed in, and soon I found I couldn’t draw in enough breath to fill my lungs. I took some ibuprofen and lay down, trying to rest, but every time I changed my position something seemed to shift inside my chest like a sac filled with oil and gravel, the gravel grinding over a network of nerves as it slowly repositioned itself in the thick oil. Finally I called my doctor, who told me to come in immediately. He listened to my chest and sent me straight to the hospital, where an X-ray revealed that my left lung had collapsed. The emergency-room doctor made an incision over my upper rib cage. Lifting a sharpened steel rod with both hands, he plunged it down between two of my ribs. As I shouted with pain, he stuck a tube into the hole, connected to a device that looked like a small humidifier. Bubbles went up through the water in this, indicating, so he told me, that the lung was reinflating itself.

The condition, known as spontaneous pneumothorax, isn’t fully understood, though it has a relatively high rate of incidence among Jewish males in their thirties. I had had TB in my twenties, which the doctor thought might have made me more susceptible. Also, under the stress of the foregoing months I had stupidly started smoking, and this too may have been a factor. But whatever the immediate medical or genetic cause, the occurrence was so irresistibly symbolic of my inability to shake off the burdened feeling that had been afflicting me that I chose to think of it as entirely psychosomatic in origin. Basically I had imploded.

My idea, as I say, had been to move this event into the present narrative, using it to indicate the level of stress I was experiencing under Nasreen’s onslaught. But soon after I began writing I realized this strange narrative could work only if I kept very strictly to the facts. So I am obliged to relinquish the scene. But there are other things I could offer in its place that, if less dramatic, were at least a part of the imagery that presented itself to me at the time. Reading Tintin to my son, for instance, The Seven Crystal Balls and Prisoners of the Sun, I saw myself graphically portrayed in the tomb-robbing Western scientists who fall into comas on returning from South America, and go into paroxysms of pain every few hours as their Inca tormentors back in the Andes stick pins into their doll-like effigies. Those were me, those white, middle-aged men writhing in agony on their beds from some unseen cause. And Rascar Capac, the Inca succubus who breaks into their homes to administer the coma-inducing narcotic; Rascar Capac with his fiendish yet sympathetic presence (after all, he is the avenger of the colonized, the oppressed, the pillaged), his angry dark skull-face and skeletal arms, his affinity with fireballs and lightning and smashed glass; Rascar Capac, “he-who-unleashes-the-fire-of-heaven,” was Nasreen.

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.

All this time I was trying to preserve some semblance of functionality in the other parts of my life. There was the editing of our Provence book to deal with. There were the details of our ignominious “surrender” agreement on the apartment to finalize. There was my vegetable garden to keep up and a clan of obstinately ingenious groundhogs to keep out.

In some activities I could hold the thought of Nasreen at bay more easily than in others, or at least I was less disabled by it. But as the months passed it seemed to determine the way I experienced just about everything I did. Her inexplicable fixation on our apartment, for instance, seemed to converge with the owner’s efforts to drive us out, to the point where her physical appearance began to substitute itself in my mind for that of the owner, whom I had never seen. Likewise with the groundhogs. Defiantly present in my garden every morning despite the skirting of galvanized mesh I’d buried to a depth of two feet underground and the barbed wire coils I attached to the fence, these creatures became the embodiment of the successive waves of new malice Nasreen kept coming up with. Or they were the emails themselves, sitting in my inbox with that same air of triumphant cunning…

The further her occupation of my mind extended, the harder it was to concentrate on anything else. Reading became problematic. Books that required any active effort of engagement were out of the question. At the same time, books that required only passive submission to a well-oiled mechanism of suspense became addictive. Mysteries, crime novels, psychological thrillers were all I read that year. The genres of Ahriman, you could say: narratives of disintegration and ruin, of what Robert Lowell called “the downward glide and bias of existing,” the reading of which was itself a mimicry of the processes of collapse they dramatized. The very opposite of D. H. Lawrence and George Eliot and Tolstoy and all the other life-affirming, upward-aspiring writers whose books at one time had been the only literary company I cared to keep.

Often in these suspense novels I would find echoes of my own predicament: similar structures of anguish; events that strikingly resembled those in my own drama; sometimes entire plotlines. One book in particular seemed to articulate my circumstances during this phase with the same dreamlike, redistributive accuracy as Gawain had in that earlier phase. This was Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train. I had seen the Hitchcock film but never read the book until now. The train in question turns out to be on its way, as mine had been, to Santa Fe. As evening falls, Guy Haines, a high-minded young man, sits in his Pullman trying to read Plato. He is distracted, however, by anxieties concerning his impending meeting with his estranged wife, Miriam, a manipulative, unfaithful woman from whom he is hoping to obtain a divorce so that he can marry his true soulmate, the lovely Anne. His career is at stake as well as his personal happiness. He is an aspiring architect (a hybrid, you could say, of me and my father) with a high sense of the nobility of this profession, in which the virtuousness of the socially committed intellectual is combined with the prestige of the artist. His prospects are bright on both fronts, home and career, but for the sake of both he needs to purge from his life the error of judgment represented by the tawdry, tacky Miriam. Miriam had agreed to the divorce, but from her last communication Guy has reason to be worried that she isn’t, after all, going to let him go.

As he broods on this, while still trying to read his Plato, a young man sits down opposite him. He has an “interesting face,” Guy notices, his skin “smooth as a girl’s.” There is something seedy about him, though also something beguilingly open and friendly. This is Charles Anthony Bruno, the first of Highsmith’s great studies in the psychopathic mind. He smiles at Guy, who at once retreats into his book. A moment later, however, racked by a renewed spasm of anxiety over Miriam, Guy accidentally touches Bruno’s outstretched foot with his own.

In D. H. Lawrence, accidental physical contact of this kind will often (as in the story “You Touched Me”) provide the spark that awakens lovers to their transfiguring passions for each other. In Highsmith, the touch sets off a similarly intense involvement, but of a deathward orientation, its eroticism purely disintegrative, like the hectic colors of fall.

The two start talking: Guy reservedly at first, Bruno with a gushing candor that disarms Guy and fascinates him despite the dubious things Bruno reveals about himself, the most notable of which is an obsessive resentment of his father, whom he would very much like to kill.

Full of self-deprecating charm, he persuades Guy to dine with him in his roomette (though the word doesn’t appear to have entered the Amtrak lexicon yet), where, as they get drunk together, he begins questioning Guy about his private life. In no time he has wheedled the whole story of Miriam out of Guy and begun insinuatingly probing into Guy’s feelings about her infidelities, the other men, the possible hold-up of the divorce, subtly but firmly bringing to the surface of Guy’s mind all his suppressed rage and hatred. What he is after is an admission that Guy would like to kill Miriam, just as he, Bruno, would like to kill his father. At one point as he talks he seems to Guy “to be growing indefinite at the edges, as if by some process of deliquescence.” He too, it appears, is some kind of borderline, a dark angel eager to draw out and feed on the darkness in others. Dimly, Guy recognizes the signs: “He seemed only a voice and a spirit now, the spirit of evil,” and yet for all his repugnance he can’t quite shrug off his fascination. Finally Bruno comes out with his famous proposition, a variation on the Green Knight’s: “‘I kill your wife and you kill my father! We meet on the train, see, and nobody knows we know each other. Perfect alibis! Catch?’”

Only now, confronted a little too nakedly with his own fantasy, does Guy tear himself away from Bruno’s sickly sweet force field, violently rejecting the proposition. But a connection has been opened, a powerful linkage underpinned by a half-conscious sexual attraction between them and by the disclosure (if only to himself) of Guy’s murderous impulses.

The two part in Santa Fe with no agreement and no intention, on Guy’s side, of ever seeing Bruno again. But before long Bruno, cheerfully infatuated with Guy and obsessed with cementing their alliance, decides to carry out his side of the proposal anyway. Tracking down Miriam, he follows her to an amusement park, where he approaches her in the darkness and strangles her. On the practical level this rids Guy of a threat to his future happiness. But on the more occult plane, the murder has the effect of merging Bruno and Miriam together, concentrating their respective capacities for evil into a single, composite figure whose ability to harm Guy is now immeasurably magnified.

Guy, hearing of the murder, hopes that it has nothing to do with Bruno but knows in his heart that it does. Should he tell the police? Of course he should. But how is he to explain Bruno’s fiendish proposal without the risk of incriminating himself? An unblemished reputation, needless to say, is crucial to both his marriage and his chosen career. The police appear to believe the murder was an act of random violence, so why not let sleeping dogs lie? His sin at this point is purely one of omission. Nobody asked, so why should he tell? And what is there to tell anyway? Not only had he not entered into any kind of agreement with Bruno, but he had also explicitly denied to Bruno having ever had any desire to kill Miriam. So what if Bruno had divined that this was less than the truth? One is answerable for one’s actions in this life, and possibly also for one’s words, but not, surely, for the desires and fantasies that pass through one’s mind unbidden, unarticulated, and unacted on.

Well, apparently one is answerable for these too, at least to the Brunos and Nasreens of this world. Having killed Miriam, Bruno, who has a genius for rationalizing matters to suit his own fancies, now considers he is owed a murder by Guy, but Guy understandably declines.

And so the stalking begins: Bruno phoning at odd hours, leaving messages with Guy’s mother, his colleagues, his clients; Bruno appearing at Guy’s office, outside his apartment, in the woods next to the house (the fortress) Guy is building for himself and Anne. Bruno sending emails, or rather letters, every two or three days: “either a gush of brotherly love or a threat to haunt Guy all his life, ruin his career…”

One morning (and here the story melts into my own in a scene I still find unbearable to think of) Guy gets a call from a man who is about to hire him for an important job:

“‘Mr. Haines… we’ve received a most peculiar letter concerning you…’”

Listening to the letter-identical to Nasreen’s in spirit if not its literal content (allegations that Guy had a role in Miriam’s death)-Guy grasps, for the first time, the extent of the malignancy that has attached itself to him:

“It would only be a matter of time until Bruno informed the next client, and then the next…”

Bruno, on the face of it, is harassing Guy for a very specific reason: to get him to kill his father. Whereas Nasreen-what did Nasreen want from me? Was there something I could have done or said that would have stopped her attacks once they began? Suppose I had handed over the keys to our apartment, or given her the money she occasionally demanded, or suppose I’d publicly confessed to being part of a Jewish conspiracy to steal her work and sell it to those other Iranian writers-would she have left me alone? I don’t think so; certainly not if Highsmith is a reliable guide. Goaded beyond endurance (and the book enters a realm of darkness here that the film evades), Guy finally surrenders to Bruno’s demands and kills Bruno’s father. All goes well, in the sense that he gets away with it, and for a while Bruno leaves him alone. But even though any further contact with Guy at this point would be insanely dangerous for both of them, Bruno can’t help himself. Because what he really wants-what he, like all such afflicted souls, fundamentally believes he is owed from Guy-is love; not the Lawrentian love that thrives on the separateness of the beloved, but the love that consumes him, dissolving him into the lover totally and for all eternity. Guy and Anne’s wedding day comes around, and as Guy walks up the aisle, there is Bruno, smiling. “Bruno was here with them, not an event, not a moment, but a condition, something that had always been and always would be.”

That was how I had come to see Nasreen by this time: not an event, not a moment, but a condition.

The surprise of the book is its unexpected compassion. Even at his most tormented, Guy continues to acknowledge something human and touching at the core of his tormentor: a vulnerability, even a kind of warped honesty, that sets him apart from other people and deserves its own kind of recognition, even its own kind of love. I can’t say I’ve felt any of those things for Nasreen since she became my enemy, but at odd moments I have sensed that this is a failing on my part, maybe the precise failing that laid me open to her siege in the first place, and that perhaps if I could summon such feelings, the great sense of injustice lodged inside her, whatever its source, would stand a chance of being salved. But then I think of how she reacted to Paula’s attempt at compassionate engagement, and I feel, once again, confronted by something unassuageable and beyond all understanding: a malice that has no real cause or motive but simply is.

Early in the summer I arrived home one afternoon to find a message from Detective Bauer. I phoned him at the precinct.

“I got a call from the lady,” he said.

I tried to sound uncomplicatedly pleased: “That’s great!”

“I figured she’d get around to it, sooner or later.”

“You were right.”

The detective cleared his throat. “She was extremely angry. She used a lot of bad language. I don’t like that.”

I asked what she was angry about.

“She didn’t appreciate getting messages from her relatives to call the cops. That was a part of it.”

“What else?”

“Well, she certainly seems to believe you stole her work.”

I didn’t think I needed to remind the detective how crazy Nasreen’s conspiracy theories were.

“I guess she convinced herself,” I said.

There was a pause.

“Is it true you used to teach at Princeton?”

“Yes.”

“But not any longer?”

“Well, not at the moment.”

“She says you were fired for doing the same thing there. Taking students’ work and selling it to other writers. She told me this is a well-known fact.”

I had predicted a counterattack, but as always the sheer brazen outrageousness of Nasreen’s malice caught me off my guard. A reeling sensation took hold of me. I heard myself explaining to the detective that I had taught on a casual basis at Princeton for twenty years, usually just for a term or two at a time, often with several years between appointments. I assured him my relations with the faculty there were good, that I certainly hadn’t stolen or been accused of stealing students’ work, that there was no particular reason why I wasn’t teaching there at the moment, and that I would be more than happy for him to call the writing department to verify all this. But even as I spoke I felt, again, the strange thinness and feebleness of my words in the face of Nasreen’s. It wasn’t that the detective was telling me he believed her, necessarily, but he had apparently felt unable to dismiss out of hand the possibility that a black market in students’ stories was a part of the fabric of the creative-writing industry, with desperate authors buying up workshop submissions from unscrupulous instructors, and that I was a known dealer. He listened in silence while I spoke, and his response, when I had finished, was dismayingly noncommittal. I offered several times to give him the number of the Princeton writing department, but he ignored me: not, I felt, because he took my word, but because he had decided not to get any more deeply involved in this dubious affair.

The one thing that seemed to count unequivocally against Nasreen was her “bad language,” which upset the detective as much as her casual references to drug-taking had earlier. It amazed me that an American cop, even one as buttoned-up as Detective Bauer, could be upset by “bad language.” But he mentioned it disapprovingly several times, and as far as I could tell this unusual sense of decorum was the main reason why he had decided to continue regarding me as the victim, even if he was no longer sure I was guiltless.

“Anyway,” he said, “I warned her if she contacted you or any of your colleagues ever again, we’d have her arrested for aggravated harassment.”

I thanked him. “Do you think she’ll stop now?”

“Well, I asked if she wanted to spend the rest of the summer locked up in a New York jail, and she said she definitely didn’t want to. So I’m guessing she’ll stop.”

“And if she doesn’t?”

“I can talk to the DA, but like I said, I don’t think he’s going to extradite her from California on a misdemeanor.”

“So if she ignores your warning, there’s really nothing else anyone can do?”

I was pushing him, but I had a feeling it wasn’t going to be easy to get hold of the detective again after this conversation.

“We’ll have to see. Maybe we can have a squad car drop by where she lives and talk to her. That’s a possibility.”

“I should call you, then, if she sends any more emails?”

“Like I say, I think she’ll stop, but if she does continue, then sure, go ahead and fax me the emails, and we’ll see what else we can do. All right, Mr. Lasdun?”

I hung up, telling myself that on balance this was good news. But I was depressed, all the same. Among other things, Nasreen had made it clear (so it seemed to me) that she now had my connection to Princeton in her sights. Did that mean she had sent them an email denouncing me as a thief and sexual predator like the one she’d sent Frank? I realized, with a kind of weary dread, that I was going to have to call the head of the writing department there to find out. I did: she hadn’t sent anything, but if anything this made the conversation with my old colleague even weirder and more embarrassing than it would have been if she had. A lifetime of such conversations was what seemed to lie ahead of me if Detective Bauer’s warning should fail.

There was silence for a few days. I allowed myself to feel fractionally encouraged. Then a YouTube forwarding arrived: a PJ Harvey video with the heading: “ever hear of email blocking? This is my farewell email. Bye!” Aware of how precarious my own mental condition was, I tried to take this as a good sign; proof that Detective Bauer had made an impression on Nasreen and that, in her incomparably annoying way, she was disengaging. Twenty minutes later another PJ Harvey video arrived. There was no message but the title of the song, “Bitter Little Bird,” seemed significant. Again, I told myself it was encouraging: a little rueful acknowledgment that she had come to the end of the road. Then a song called “Rid of Me,” also by PJ Harvey, arrived, along with the message: “last one… promise. tee hee.” The taunting note was unmistakable, and the next couple of forwardings confirmed beyond doubt that any sense of defeat she may have initially felt after Detective Bauer’s call was giving way to mocking defiance. “you are under arrest for sending pj harvey videos!” read the first; the second: “You’ll extradite me to ny for pj harvey videos. that’s sooooo nazi like.” And by the end of the day she was back in full cackling cry. The video was Jay-Z’s “Breathe Easy,” the message: “ha ha ha ha.”

I had been afraid of what would happen to me, psychologically, if the time came when I could no longer convince myself I was going to be able to make the emails stop. Now that time appeared to have come. Not that Detective Bauer’s warning had had no effect at all: the emails did slow down after that initial deluge, and there were days, sometimes whole weeks, when I didn’t hear from Nasreen. And for a long period the emails themselves became more oblique, less often overtly threatening. But by this time it was neither the content nor the frequency of the emails that mattered to me, so much as the mere fact of their continued existence. In my hypersensitized state, all it took was the sight of Nasreen’s name or one of her many pseudonyms in my inbox to send me into a state of anxiety that could last all day. I was being given notice, it seemed to me, that there was nothing in my power that could bring an end to this torment. It was one thing to indulge in a kind of medicinal imagining of the worst, saturating myself in Patricia Highsmith while knowing that Detective Bauer was on the case, but now there was no longer any comforting frame of provisionality around the facts, and they were stark. The illness I had contracted was incurable. My adversary was stronger than I was. In abstract that sounds like a useful lesson for a man to learn, midway through life’s journey, but it is hard nevertheless, and one learns it only with great bitterness and pain.

I put off calling Detective Bauer for some time, mainly because I didn’t want to extinguish the last, faint, doubtless illusory flicker of hope that the thought of him still held out. I also disliked playing the role of the timid citizen who entrusts every aspect of his well-being to the forces of law and order, rather than defending them himself. But the logic of the situation seemed to have been steadily embedding the mask of that helpless figure into my own features ever since the drama began.

When I finally called the detective he was away, but he left a message a few days later, asking me to fax him the new emails. I did. Weeks passed with no word from him. I called again and was put through to his voice mail. The desk sergeants who answered the phone all knew my voice by now, and I felt I had become a laughingstock at the station: the poor persecuted professor. I hung up without leaving another message.

Winter arrived. In March 2009 I read an article in The New York Times about an identity theft case being prosecuted by the Manhattan DA, Robert Morgenthau, that bore some resemblance to my own. The setting was academe: an embattled biblical scholar whose overzealous son had assumed the identity of one of his father’s critics and begun posting online messages in that person’s name, “admitting” to plagiarism from the father’s work. “‘This exemplifies a growing trend in the area of identity theft,’” the article quoted an assistant DA as saying. The son had been charged with identity theft, criminal impersonation, and aggravated harassment, and faced up to four years in prison if convicted. I cut out the article and faxed it off to Detective Bauer, with a long letter explaining its relevance. He didn’t respond. I concluded, perhaps unfairly, that he had decided he had done all he could do in this strange affair.

I couldn’t altogether say that I blamed him.