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

the next day, August 2, I have become fully identified with Bush’s America: “ your troops coming home …,” runs the heading,
I hope they die, every single one of your money-making gangster lowlives …
    And a little later, in self-reflexive mode again, comes the comment:
I think this is called verbal terrorism.
    I hadn’t heard that phrase before. But as I came to appreciate Nasreen’s grasp of the dynamics of assymetric conflict, where she had apparently nothing to lose, and I had everything, I realized that it was peculiarly apposite. I, as an Anglo-American Jew, a family man, a published author, a middle-aged male in a position of power (at least from her perspective), was the axis of, shall we say, “virtue,” while she, in her own mind at least, was the lone jihadi. It took a while for her to figure out the exact nature of her mission, but when it did finally clarify itself in her mind, she laid it out in her characteristically succinct and forceful way:
“I will ruin him.”
    One hot morning, as K—— and I were on the porch of our barn, drawing maps, the phone rang. It was Janice Schwartz, my agent, and she sounded upset. For several days she had been receiving strange, unpleasant emails about me from Nasreen. She hadn’t wanted to tell me at first, but now she herself was being attacked in the emails, and she was concerned for her safety. That morning a woman sounding very like Nasreen had called her. “Can I speak to Meir Kahane?” the woman had asked, before hanging up. Meir Kahane was the ultra-Zionist rabbi whose follower Baruch Goldstein had massacred Muslims praying in the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron. Kahane himself was assassinated in 1990, shot in the neck.
    Janice forwarded me the emails. The first, dated August 1, strikes a businesslike tone:
Janice,
I’m sure James is not reading my emails anymore, so I’d appreciate it if you’d tell him that I didn’t appreciate him using my words and ideas I’d expressed in emails verbatim in the short story about the psychotic jaywalker.
    The next is less controlled:
… after reading that short story in which my private words to him jumped at me (and I’m not talking about silly stock-character shit like her drug use, but, rather, her feelings on surrender and vulnerability), I’m left to think that he was being parasitic. Seductively parasitic.
And I’m pissed. And I wanted to share it with you. Why not? You’re not interested in my work and you support your little boy and all he can do to bring you both money.
So, as you can see, reading the psychotic jaywalker story has made me very angry.
    “ His future stories…, ” runs the heading of the next:
Better not be things he stole from me. Listen, lady I’m a real person who’s spent her whole life trying to survive because I live in a fucked up sadistic country …
… if your little boy, who you’re so impressed with for aping a white Englishman, steals anything else from me and I have to see it in print when I deserved to be given a level playing field to write my novel, not pumped for his amusement, there will be hell to pay.
I’m livid—and rightfully so
I was not put on earth to feed James Lasdun’s children. I hope you can understand that.
    Later that day Nasreen sets her sights on Paula Kurwen, the editor to whom Janice had introduced her. For the moment Paula’s offense is merely that she “was an elegant middle-class post–Nazi era Jewess living in America. In other words, she was privileged.” Nevertheless, she, too, is implicated: “You all play a part in unleashing the fury.”
    A minute or so later, with this “fury” now apparently reaching for terms strong enough to account for its own escalating intensity, Nasreen brings on one of those words that scorch everything they come near. The word is “rape.” It isn’t the first time she has used it, but it is the first time she has used it in connection with me, and even though she uses it figuratively rather