i. Brooklyn
Panic rarely afflicts those with faith. I had faith in the
Angel. So I enjoyed the last of my cigarette and made my way to the taxi rank. Only
flickers of concern brushed me. The Angel and I had exchanged thousands of
emails over the past six months, so why would I let one unanswered phone call
shake me? I hired a cab. The months had become minutes; the thousands of miles
had become a short ride to the next borough. I was heading to Brooklyn, to the
address she had given me. I was getting close to the Angel.
For a few minutes I tried to take in this new city. Through
my distraction I caught only glimpses, none of which endeared me to the place.
But I wasn’t visiting New York, I was here to see the Angel. I dialled her
number again. The taxi driver put on some loud music. I blocked it out of my
mind. Everywhere I looked there were cars, snaking along freeways, bumper to
bumper, but moving steadily. It was rush hour. I noticed how exhausted I was
after the flight, and I was aware of the warmth of the afternoon heat. But I
was struggling to engage with anything apart from the connecting tone from my
phone. I need you to speak to me, Angel…
And then she did, uncertainly, cautiously: ‘Hello?’
It was the first word to pass between us that hadn’t been
tapped away on a keyboard. And it sounded so strange, because it was so
ordinary—the voice of a woman with an American accent, a little wary, perhaps a
little nervous. I had, of course, played out this moment, and the moments that
were to follow, many times in my mind. I had imagined sparse words cresting an
ocean of feeling; I had imagined a stream of words, flowing seamlessly and
effortlessly from the same source as our virtual correspondence; what I hadn’t
imagined was the everyday awkwardness and hesitancy of two people speaking to
one another for the first time. What had seemed so natural in front of screens 3,500
miles apart now began to assume the contours and gradients of reality. Shading
was appearing around the wispy lines of our relationship. We had voices,
accents, tones—we were real people doing the things real people do, talking
into phones, feeling out situations, confirming meetings, giving definition to
arrangements. Instinctively I knew this was good, for this was where we had
been heading, and, as she had once written to me, we couldn’t make love to our
computer screens.
Our conversation lasted only a couple of minutes. It was no
more than a brief courtesy call. She said that she’d be waiting outside her
apartment. We told each other, with formal reassurance, that we were looking
forward to meeting. We said our goodbyes and hung up.
I tried to relax and to find my way into the feeling I had
always imagined would wrap itself around what was soon to happen—something that
would defy articulation, that would be transcendent and sublime. But reality
was overpowering. My tiredness, the brightness and heat of the afternoon, the
cars, the forbidding housing projects and crumbling freeways, all intruded on
my reverie. And now the driver—who had turned down his music at my
request—began talking to me, asking where I was from, but mostly telling me
about Haiti, his country of birth. Normally I would have seized on such rare
moments of encounter and would have engaged eagerly; now my mind was screaming
for him to shut up. But politely, and with enormous effort, I played the role
of interested participant in the conversation. The taxi laboured through the
interminable traffic. My efforts at conversation were fading fast. I was
willing us to be near but the city seemed to go on forever. Then suddenly we
pulled around a corner and I saw her street name—and there she was, sitting on
the steps outside her building, a glass of wine in her hand, the bottle beside
her. She was real, she was beautiful, she was human.
I took my bag from the taxi and paid the driver. The Angel
stood to greet me. We faced each other, said hello, smiled shyly. It wasn’t a
transcendent moment; it was a real moment in all its dimensions, and that made
it great. Then, an experience I had not had for over a year: lightly, gently,
we touched and kissed.
ii. Nasreen
The Angel has a name, of course. In fact, she has two names:
one is her real name; the other is Nasreen, a name that has been given her and
by which she has acquired some notoriety. How and why she came to be known as
Nasreen comes later in this story. It was never the name I knew her by, and it
feels odd to use it—when talking about her, I still have to pause to check
myself from accidentally revealing her real name, a name that had once been
magical and wondrous and ultimately painful to me, that I suspected had become
etched on my heart. But I wish her the choice of anonymity, so her real name
stays inside me. Once, during a period when I was in danger of being consumed
by hatred of her, I would have wildly and gladly made public her real name. But,
on that September day in 2007, as we kissed on a street in Brooklyn, that time
was still some way in the future.
Nasreen took me up to her apartment. There were two large
rooms, with a further small room adjoining her bedroom; books, a few pictures,
papers, sundry bits and pieces made up a comfortably messy atmosphere. We sat
opposite one another at a large table in the centre of her living area. She poured
wine, we lit cigarettes, we eased into talking, relaxed but unsure how much we
knew one another. Then I did something—or rather didn’t do something—that I
have never fully understood. She asked if I would like to sit closer to her. Perhaps
I was a little overwhelmed by the situation, perhaps my inexperience in these
situations inhibited me, perhaps my lack of physical closeness to a woman for
fourteen months had rendered me too tentative… What would have happened if I
had picked up her invitation? But I replied that I was fine, and almost
immediately regretted that I had stupidly carved out distance between us, a
distance that would possibly be difficult to cross now. There was a brief silence,
the moment passed and we resumed chatting, drinking and smoking.
After a while I asked her how the novel was progressing. ‘That’s
something I need to talk to you about,’ Nasreen answered.
‘Okay,’ I said, and waited.
She paused for a few seconds. ‘I don’t want a lover, I want
a patron.’
I felt numb. Is this what the months of emailing, the
decision to fly halfway across the world, the investment of hope and faith had all
been about—for me to help her finish her novel? Had it all been a trick? Did
she suppose that I had money, and that I would be prepared to fund her novel if
she slept with me? I said none of this, for I was struggling to know what to
say—do I express crushing disappointment, or shock? But I’d only just arrived,
I was tired, I decided I had to remain calm.
‘You know I can’t be your patron. I don’t have that kind of
money. I can barely take care of myself. And anyway, even if I could be your
patron I wouldn’t be. That’s not the sort of thing I’m looking for, it’s not an
arrangement I would want to be in. Nor is it what I thought all our emails were
about, not to me at any rate.’
‘But you know how important my novel is to me, and you know
how much I need someone to help me with it…’ And so she tried to explain things
I already knew, but which I thought (but did not say) had no need to be
entangled with us, with her and me. I partially shut down; I was tired and
would rather curl up with my disappointment than engage with this crap. I
accelerated my wine drinking. The conversation was going nowhere, and so we
steered away from it. We stuck to lightness, wine and cigarettes; we found some
laughter.
Then we went to bed, self-consciously and shyly, and, like
every night I was there, chastely. Carefully we lay and slept next to one
another, affectionately and innocently, but only rarely touching. She was the most
physically beautiful woman I had ever met, yet, though I desired her, I never
once desired sex. For that, I wanted her to desire me, and I never sensed that
she did. And anyway, I had been celibate for so long—as had she—that celibacy
seemed to have become engrained in my being.
The next couple of days were difficult. Nasreen was tense
and brimming with anger: against her family, against her country, against the
literary world, and particularly against James, her former creative writing
teacher. She was gloomy and moody, as if the world oppressed her, and she would
suddenly launch into arguments with me. She dismissed my left-liberal views as
a typical product of a sexist, racist culture, and she labelled me as an
unwitting representative of white male misogyny. Her own views were violently bitter.
She was fixated on the Middle East, and her opposition to western aggression in
the region, an opposition I shared; but I disliked the tone of her opposition as
angry, irrational and lacking compassion, and she criticized mine as complacent,
apologetic and excessively intellectual. She identified as an Iranian and a Muslim,
yet her upbringing had been almost entirely secular, western and privileged. I
tried to connect, but her outbursts were aggressive and alarming to the point
that I imagined her capable of physical violence. Only when she smoked dope,
and she did a lot of it, did she seem to relax, to the point often of spacing
out completely. I began to wonder about her state of mind.
By the third day I was struggling with the situation. I told
her that I didn’t think this was working, and that maybe it hadn’t been a good
idea—and that I was thinking it would probably be best if I flew home early. She
became very upset. In tears, she told me how alone she was, how difficult she
found her life, and now she was being abandoned by me. I held her and consoled
her, I told her how talented, intelligent and beautiful she was, how much I
cared about her and wanted her to do well, how I would not abandon her. So I
told her I would stay. We became calm and soothing.
But nothing really changed. We carried on as before, with
moody tension and arguments, even a fiery and vocal row one evening. Still, I
was in love with her, but so impossible was she to reach that it assumed a kind
of torture. And just as I worried about Nasreen’s state of mind, so I began to
wonder about my own. I was finding the situation increasingly emotionally stressful.
On the morning of the anniversary of 9/11, I wept by myself in the bathroom. I
feared I was heading for a breakdown. I needed to get away, to have some time
and space out of this craziness. So I headed off, alone, into Manhattan.
iii. Manhattan church
experience
Nasreen lived close to Brooklyn Bridge, so I decided to walk
through her area of Brooklyn, over the bridge into Manhattan, to visit Ground
Zero, and then to wander and think. It was a dismal, grey day, as I set out, a
fine drizzle in the air. I was sad and fragile, a kind of soul-sickness was
afflicting me, but I hoped that the view of Manhattan from the bridge would
distract me. But my state of mind was such that I thought it horrifying—it
looked so inhuman. What were individual humans in a city like this? Little more
than insects, it appeared, part of a hive mentality amid these monuments to
finance and capital. I was utterly disenchanted. But I ploughed on, my
melancholy intensifying, and entered Manhattan itself. Ground Zero was bleakly
uninteresting, and it was impossible to connect what had happened there six
years earlier with what I was looking at. Just after leaving Ground Zero a
storm broke, almost biblical in its ferocity. Thin rivers of water gushed down
the streets, and, from the partial shelter I had found by a building, I watched
a limp and bedraggled American flag being lashed by the wind and the rain. I
wondered what this sign from God was. I needed God…
Finally the storm cleared and was replaced by bright sun. Aimlessly,
and cold and wet, I headed up Broadway. On the sidewalk a man had collapsed and
was receiving assistance. I was alert to signs of apocalypse and to my own
impending collapse—I didn’t know how much more I could take. I walked and
walked, trying to escape, somehow, from something, to something? I had no idea.
All I knew was that I didn’t want to be there. And then, quite unexpectedly
amid the grimness of everything around me, I came across a nineteenth-century
Gothic church. I had to enter, to find a sanctuary.
 |
| Grace Church Broadway, Manhattan |
The peace and stillness instantly overwhelmed me. Barely
able to stand, I sat on a pew—and wept and wept. My anguish, my pain poured
out, torrentially, relentlessly. Never, before or since, have I felt so alone
as I did at that moment, so far from home, so far from anyone who loved or
cared about me. My life had fallen apart, through nobody’s fault but my own,
and I had pinned my hopes on an angel who, if she existed at all, was going to
destroy me. I wept about all this, and about nothing tangible. On the other
side of the church I spotted a priest, and for a moment I had an urge to fling
myself at his feet and beg for him to help me. But I could barely move. Through
my tears I mused on the images of saints and angels and Christ in the stained-glass windows. I began to pray. I asked God for a comfort, a saviour, I asked for
Christ to come to me. I waited for his embrace, but I felt nothing. I continued
with my prayers. I asked for forgiveness: for all the pain I had caused so many
who loved me, for the way I had pulled apart the lives of people who cared
about me. I understood why I was suffering now. I deserved it. I told God I was
truly sorry. And I was.
I sat in that church for a long time. I experienced no
presence, nobody came to comfort me—but I did feel a catharsis, a release. Taking
some deep breaths, I dried my eyes, and sat for a while meditating. When I
emerged once more into Manhattan to embark on the long walk back to Brooklyn I
was not perhaps any happier, but I was calmer and stiller.
iv. ‘We’re idiots, babe’
I spent nine days with Nasreen. We continued to argue, but
with less frequency and intensity. Around the edge of the emotional wasteland
were bright points: we read poetry together, she introduced me to Rilke and
Anne Carson, we talked about F. Scott Fitzgerald, she showed me photographs and
Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, we
listened to music, we smoked and drank wine, occasionally we got high together,
there were jokes and moments of laughter. We tried talking in upbeat and
positive ways about our futures. But an unspoken hopelessness, a melancholy
fatalism pervaded the atmosphere.
We were also hungry most of the time. There was never any
food around, not even for her cats: lacking any cat food, Nasreen presented
them with the only thing she could find, ice-cream, which they refused with a
disgust we found hilarious (since we were both slightly high). But I have never felt
as famished as I did during my time with Nasreen. It occurred to me that if we
were together long enough we would probably waste away into oblivion together,
starved and lonely and lying next to one another. Neither of us had the strength,
energy or will to arrest our collapsing lives; we both wanted to be saved, but
we were never going to save each other. One afternoon, as we sat looking out of
her window, smoking, doing nothing, talking rubbish, I compared our lives to
Bob Dylan’s ‘Idiot Wind’:
Idiot wind, blowing through the buttons of our coats,
blowing through the letters that we wrote.
Idiot wind, blowing through the dust upon our shelves.
We’re idiots, babe, it’s a wonder we can even feed ourselves.
Early in the morning of my penultimate day, lying and
talking in bed together, she suddenly became extremely upset. I could see how
much pain she was in. I moved over to her, caressing her, stroking her hair and
face, wiping away her tears, kissing her tenderly, and, with tears in my eyes, telling
her that I loved her. Briefly, as we gazed into one another’s eyes, I felt a
momentary connection and deep feeling between us. It was the closest we got to
intimacy. Later that day, as we walked along a street in Brooklyn, she put her
arm through mine and told me how sad she was that I was leaving. We stopped and
embraced, holding one another closely and tightly. Despite everything, my
feelings of love for her were still overpowering. I wondered about
possibilities of staying; she seemed open to the idea. But I knew it was
hopeless, I knew that slowly we would have destroyed each other.
On my final morning, amid the heavy air of a significant
departure, with my taxi due in half an hour, she again told me how she would
miss me. She offered an unsolicited apology for being a poor host; I told her
not to worry, it had been fine. We spoke vaguely about meeting again, and she
said she would be in a better state when we did, that things had been
particularly tough for her recently. Then she suggested, and I had a sense that
she was being serious: ‘Maybe we should bang each other quickly, just so that
we can say we’ve done it.’ But even if she’d expressed it as ‘making love’, I
didn’t want to. I told her that, no, that was not the way I wanted us to part.
We hugged and kissed as I stood by the taxi, and she told me
that definitely we should meet again. Then we parted. I watched her walk up the
street. She didn’t turn round. I wondered how she felt. The taxi pulled away. I
wondered how I felt. Sad, but strangely relieved too, as if I had survived an
ordeal. Would I ever see her again? Intuitively I thought not, but as I made my
way back through Brooklyn and Queens to JFK airport, as the distance between
Nasreen and me grew, so I sensed the return of something—the return of the
person that I had been for the past few months, as if I had left him behind
nine days earlier, the return of the pure love of the Angel.
I texted Nasreen from the airport to say that I was missing
her. She replied that she was missing me too, and that she loved me. Joy filled
my heart at the prospect of going back to who we were. We would rediscover our
pure, ethereal love, we would pick up where we left off. When I arrived back in
London there were emails waiting from her. She missed me. She thought that ‘perhaps
we should have made the beast with two backs’. She loved me. We were virtual
lovers again.
But soon things were to become very strange and disturbing…
