The Fool and the Angel, part 3: The Angel

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…