Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked by James Lasdun Read Free Book Online

my writing in general:
why don’t you write some more exotic stories about fucking your servants?
    This, as she confirmed in the next, more public phase of her attack, refers to a short story of mine, “The Siege,” about a relationship between an Englishman and a married woman from an unnamed third-world country who lives in his basement and cleans his house in lieu of rent. Half an hour later my novel The Horned Man comes in for similar treatment:
what is the bottom line of horned man? that men should fuck everything in sight so they don’t become underground psycho killers?
    Fresh attacks began the next morning. At one point she forwarded another round of correspondence with her English academic, with whom she was now also discussing my various wrongdoings:
He took verbatim things I’d written him in an email and just tacked it onto his story. I’m sure my thoughts and ideas are all over his work by now … But he’s a fraud and it’ll all be exposed …
    The intent here, among other things, seemed to be to convey to me that she was now planning to go public with her accusations, which indeed turned out to be the case, though not until those accusations had been substantially beefed up.
    I was in a state of extreme bewilderment by now, my head reeling every time a new email arrived. K—— did her best to calm me down, telling me there was no point getting upset by something so obviously crazy. Her relaxed attitude to life has been a source of immeasurable comfort to me throughout our marriage in general and this saga in particular. But I’ve never quite learned to make it my own, and outside the immediate field of her practical good sense I would soon lapse back into my own more familiar, gnawing anxiety. At this point the anxiety was still closer to bafflement than to actual dread. Among other things, I simply couldn’t connect the ferocity of Nasreen’s words with the quiet, articulate student I had taught at Morgan College, or even with the annoyingly compulsive emailer she had become later. There was an untraversable chasm, it seemed to me, between this eruption of verbal violence and everything that had gone before. My silence, however poorly Nasreen understood it (but I think she understood it well enough—why else all those promises to leave me alone for a bit?), didn’t seem enough to explain what had happened, but then what did? Had she really “gone crazy,” or was this all simply a desperate attempt to get me to react, a mask of madness put on to provoke a response? Possibly. At 9:36 that evening comes the cry:
You fucking faggot coward, say something!
    She couldn’t know it, of course, but I had been wanting very badly to “say something” since the beginning of this onslaught, and in fact had typed out several emails to her, some enraged, some trying to strike a conciliatory note, some explaining at length all the reasons for my silence over the past few months. But in every case something had held me back from hitting the send button. Aside from my confusion about what to say, I was suddenly wary of what this forwarder of emails might do with anything I might send her.
    I didn’t know much, at that time, about the protocols of forging or altering emails from other people and resending them to recipients of your choice, or of determining the true identity of the sender (I have since become an expert), but instinctively, it seemed a mistake to deliver anything containing my own electronic DNA into Nasreen’s possession. Though I didn’t quite know it yet, I had entered the realm of stricken enchantment in which technology and psychology overlap, where the magical thinking of the primitive mind, with its susceptibility to spells, curses, witchcraft of every kind, converges with the paranoias peculiar to our own age.
9:45 p.m.:
Do you have to be the stereotype of a Jew, James?
    A few seconds later:
I’m NOT in love with you, I want your apartment
9:48 p.m.:
give me your fucking keys.
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