DATE: May 22, 2016 05:13 PM
SUBJECT: This is Basam Mansour from Kindred
Hello, Ms. Van Antwerp,
I apologize for contacting you from my personal email address. I was let go from my position at Kindred before the new year, and now I am working as a driver for Uber and delivering carryout meals for a Vietnamese restaurant. I continue to look for work in my field.
I did something ignorant. I tried to send my resume to you from the customer service email address. There was a firewall in the system I did not know about, which screens attachments. It was foolish of me not to have predicted this. My supervisor did an audit of my emails and discovered the long history of exchanges we have shared. Finding my correspondence with you inappropriate, he cut off my access to client accounts and I worked for two weeks in a nonclient-facing role, and afterward was terminated. It was very bad, but I also understand and knew it was not ethical to do what I was doing: sending you my resume.
Several months ago I tried to email you. I received no reply and assumed you did not want to maintain communication outside of the Kindred context, understandably so, but this morning I returned to my email and evaluated the possibility I had spelled your email address wrong. I was working from memory, as I was not able to access any information in Kindred, as I said, once I was relocated in the company. And here was the problem! I’d spelled your name “von” rather than “van” initially.
If this is the correct email address, I hope you will reply, and please forgive me for this unconventional manner of communication. I am attaching my resume at last, and welcome your assistance if you have any to provide.
I hope to hear from you,
Basam Mansour
P.S. I did look into the account of the DNA match you had. I am forgetting the name, but I remember this woman who contacted you lives in Fort William, Scotland. When I worked for Kindred, I was troubled by the ethics of sending you this information, but I am free from that contract now.
Felix Stone
7 Rue de la Papillon
84220 Gordes
FRANCE
July 6, 2016
Dear Felix,
I have had such a week. I was going to call because it’s too much to write, even for me, but you are on the hike in Argentina so it forces me to write it, which is better by far. Additionally, I had planned to spend this afternoon weeding the garden, but we’ve had a storm move in and it’s looking like rain for the duration of daylight, so here I sit at the desk, and this gives me time to consider things as they come onto the page rather than simply prattling on and on and rushing through and tripping over my spoken words.
I have descended a spiral staircase to hell.
Ten days ago I received a letter from theadministrative assistantto the dean of the College of English at UMDCP. SHE PAWNED ME OFF ON HER SECRETARY. This gal, her name is Ellie, said Melissa’s position on the matter of my auditing an English course had not changed. In the last paragraph this woman (Ellie) said that Dr. Genet would very much appreciate it if I would “let the matter rest” as she has “already made her final decision.” Let the matter rest I WILL NOT,as you know very well.
It was the very next day I received a phone call from James Landy. If you can’t place the name, James was clerk to Tom Buggs, and then he went to the federal courts and now he’s got his own bench. I have written letters back and forth with his son for almost ten years now, I guess, and the boy is troubled. His parents think he is demented in some way, but I have always thought they were misunderstanding. The child is a savant of mathematics. He is somewhat peculiar in social contexts, but so am I. His name isHarry. He is charming, intelligent, thoughtful, but he has fits. He is treated poorly by the standard boys (athletic, cruel, you know the type; they were as bad to you). He is sixteen now, and the letters had begun to dry up, but I kept on, you see, rather having the sense that he was pulled on the one hand to quit writing to an old woman like myself, and on the other, to continue the letters as I believe it was rather a kind of therapy for him. He discloses his problems to me freely. Once a few years ago, I don’t know if I ever told you this, he ran away and turned up on my doorstep, so you see what I’m saying is that we have a bond. Anyway, on top of this his mother is out of her wits. She was always an odd bird, but she’s taken to stays in mental institutions over the last few years. It’s an anxiety issue that apparently spread like kudzu. It just grew and grew and grew and then James called last week asking me when was the last I’d corresponded with Harry (it was around the holidays the last time I’d received a letter), so I told him, and he said that the boy tried to kill himself by taking pills. Would have done, too, but the maid found the child and called the ambulance and now he is in a hospital recovering and then he’ll be moved to a mental place for rehabilitation for weeks or months. Oh, Felix. One does begin to feel very tired at times.
Mick Watts has invited me to come visit his home in Houston. He said he wants to take me shooting (imagine) and to his golf club for “the best crab cakes I’ve ever had”—in TEXAS—and I told him that was downright offensive. Anyway, he extended the invitation while we were speaking on the phone, and you know, Felix, I despise the notion of Texas with every atom in my being, a hot, barren wasteland of tumbleweed and people carrying guns and wearing cowboy boots, but I am actually considering the possibility. However, I’m in a quandary. How can I put this without sounding like an airless girl? I have been doing things with Theodore Lübeck. We have been playing gin rummy some evenings and we drove to Baltimore a few weeks ago to trya German bakery there called Oma’s. We take walks on nice days together. I’ve not told Theodore about Mick, NOT that there is anything to tell, but when I received Mick’s invitation I had a bad feeling in my bowels and I realized it’s because after a quarter-century draught, at the age of seventy-seven, I find myself courted by two men at the same time!
Well, and here is the icing on the cake. This morning I log into my e-mail account on the computer and I’m surprised to discover a message from my good friend Basam. Do you remember that whole thing? He was helping me for a few years working with the Kindred website, he’s a wonderful man, he is from Syria and he’s an engineer, and I was going to try to help him find a decent job, and then last fall when the power surge took out my computer I was out of touch with him for several months and when I went back in the spring I e-mailed him and someone else at the company got back to me and said Basam no longer worked there. It was odd, you know, but so is life and that was that.
Lo and behold, an e-mail from Basam, from his PERSONAL e-mail address, in my e-mail account this morning just sitting there like a little rabbit with eyes up waiting for me. He was FIRED from Kindred because of the online correspondence he exchanged with ME (he tried to send me his résumé so I could find him a proper job), and anyway HERE IS THE THING (I am sorry, I told you it was too much to write, and I’m flying past details):
I have a DNA match. I’ve actually known this for some time, but what was I going to do with a thing like that? I’ll tell you, I did nothing for quite some time. They didn’t want me! Well, fine. But eventually curiosity got the best of me and I contacted this person (Henrietta Gleason is her name), but her account was suspended and I asked Basam to help me locate her, and that’s just before the long stretch without communication came, and now he’s back, and he grabbed some information for me before he’dleft Kindred, and he said that the woman with whom I share 49% of my DNA lives in Scotland. Henrietta Gleason. What am I to do with that, or any of the above? Everything was going along without a single blip on the radar for years and BAM! CHAOS!
Call me when you’re home from Argentina,
Syb
Postscript: Fiona and I spoke on the phone this week—first actual call, not a text or e-mail, in a month—and she was calling to say they’ve successfully implanted another embryo and she’ll have another baby. They know it’s a girl because of science, and they’re naming the child Frances, calling it Frannie. I swear I won’t say this to anyone else, but I hate the name.
FROM: [email protected]
DATE: July 20, 2016 8:23 AM
