by Peter Gadol
The next day I took the same train at the same time to catch the man and his daughter again. They appeared on the same schedule, wearing more or less the same outfits, exhibiting the same affect, but this time they took tandem seats at the other end of the car from me (the same middle car as the day before). Once again they stared at a woman sitting across from them, and like me, the woman looked away, looked back, and engaged. I couldn’t tell, but I thought she was staring at the man, not the girl, and also this time it was the man who appeared to blink first. Once again the man and his daughter removed their tablets after losing the staring contest.
The next day, the same routine. Not with me, not with the woman from the day before (who wasn’t on the train), but with a teen boy who took on the girl—and as far as I could tell, the boy blinked first. Were they even aware of what they were doing? They had to be, but their shtick was so deadpan, it was hard to say. Was this their own private version of the stranger game?
And then I wondered how many kinds of games people played with strangers every hour every day. We were, each of us, isolated creatures who ached for proximity, for intimacy with others, but who also out of primal self-preservation insisted on and maintained a safe distance. These stranger games we invented shuttled us somewhere halfway between stations of affinity and detachment, but more often than not we ended up at the latter destination. It was a miracle anyone ever connected with anyone. Most of the time we were cast back into our own longing.
I got off at the airport, the end of the line, and as often seemed the case these last months, I was going to be late for a meeting with my partners. I clicked a ride-hailing app on my phone. As was also the case recently, I was easily distracted, and when the car appeared, I’d forgotten to type in my office address.
When I got in, the driver said, “Say when, and I’ll go.”
This sounded odd. “Go?” I said.
And he pulled away from the curb.
“Oh, wait, I didn’t say where,” I said.
The driver pulled behind a black sedan and changed lanes again when it did.
“You don’t say where. We just follow when you say go.”
“I’m sorry, what?”
The driver slowed down and checked me out in his rearview mirror. He let the black sedan roar off ahead of us.
“My apologies,” he said. “I thought you were playing. Where do you want me to take you?”
“You thought I was playing the stranger game.”
We had exited the airport proper and were driving too slowly down a wide boulevard; the driver behind us honked.
“It’s okay, you can tell me,” I said.
“You didn’t enter a destination,” the driver said. “That usually means people want to play the game.”
“And they say go and you follow whomever is in front of you.”
The driver nodded.
“For as long as your passengers want,” I said. “And then they pay the fare.”
He nodded again.
“Is it mostly people coming into the airport who want to play?”
“Not always, but yes, lately, mostly from the airport,” the driver said. “Tourists.”
“I guess it’s a good way to see the city?”
A fare was a fare to him, or maybe he liked the challenge: follow that car.
“So do you want to play, or do you have somewhere you need to be?” he asked.
I thought about seeing what a taxi-assisted follow might be like, but I said, “I have somewhere I need to be.”
THEN ONE WEEK LATER THERE WAS THIS.
I was hiking an upper trail of the park canyon that bordered privately held land. There was a scattering of houses father down the ravine, but only one notable house up here, a never-occupied stucco hull wrecked on a sharp tor. A steep white wall made it next to impossible to peer in, but from where I was standing up top, right at the point where a secondary trail veered off, I could see the way the house stepped down the slope, a layer cake jostled during an earthquake. Some windows had been installed, many had not, and only part of the red tile roof was in place. The drop-off beyond the house was severe, likely making for a panoramic view from the broad terrace, which didn’t appear to be finished as yet with any kind of parapet or rail. There were rumors about what might have happened: cost overruns due to real gold being used to trim imported marble; the accidental death of a child on the site; familicide. Most locals ignored the article that had run last year offering a more mundane explanation: the original owner had died ten years ago, and his aging widow still hoped to finish the project in tribute, although with every passing year that appeared less likely; her heirs would no doubt unload the property.
I was resting a moment and drinking from my water bottle when a bald man in a tracksuit rushed past me. He was pulling a woman behind him, a woman with wild eyes and a medusan fall of blond hair. He wasn’t holding her hand so much as gripping her wrist. She was wearing a matching tracksuit. She blinked back at me in distress. Something untoward was happening. Instead of heading down the trail, they veered off onto the path leading up to the iron gate of the unfinished house, the gate weathered and warped enough to be pushed open just enough to enter. The couple shuffled down the front walk, the man still tugging the woman in tow, and they went around, but not as far as I could tell inside, the house, disappearing within the walled compound.
If that wasn’t odd enough, a minute later another man and another woman hurried past me, too, and there was something about the way this second pair kept glancing around apprehensively that signaled they were players. They had to be: the woman held her forefinger over her mouth, be quiet, as they also wiggled through the gate and crept down the path to the house. Although unlike the first couple, these two went up to the front door, which (maybe not surprisingly) was unlocked. It opened with a creak even I could hear from a hundred yards up the hill. They went in, shutting the door behind them.
I half wanted to follow the followers and see how good they were at remaining undetected, and of course I was alarmed by the first couple in the tracksuits, but I was also wary of getting drawn in. I returned to the main trail and headed down the hill with the steep wall on my right; I continued around some rocks and down a ways, and then I thought I heard yelling coming from the abandoned house. I stopped. Silence. Then, yes: a bass voice shouting, a soprano in response.
I went back up the main trail and back down the side trail, this time all the way to the gate, which I now shimmied through, too. The shouting became clearer.
Him: “Don’t you.”
Her: “Stop it.”
I took out my phone and pressed 911 without completing the call. The creak of the front door announced my entry, and I had to wait what seemed a dangerous amount of time for my eyes to adjust to the dim dusty interior.
Him: “You told me you were through with all that.”
Her: “I said, let go.”
Him: “I trusted you. You swore it.”
I followed a corridor toward daylight. There were bedroom-sized rooms off the corridor, and spaces probably meant to be finished as bathrooms.
Her: “Why are you doing this? You stay there. You stay right there.”
Was this the first couple or the second, or some combination of the two? I assumed it was the couple in the tracksuits. I couldn’t see anyone yet, but then I emerged on a landing where more light streamed through opaque windows. I came up to a railing where I could look down on a grand space below. Off to one side was a stone fireplace; the second couple, the players, were crouching down on the other side of the room, whispering to each other. I still couldn’t see where the shouting tracksuit couple was, maybe outside on the terrace.
Him: “Where are you going? Come here.”
Her: “I said stay there.”
The woman was in trouble, and if I screamed (and called 911 at the same tim
e), it would disrupt whatever malevolence was unfolding. And this made me ask why the crouching couple didn’t themselves make their presence known. Oh, right, because they were playing the stranger game, so of course they weren’t going to take action (if they were playing by the original rules, which it would appear they were).
But I was wrong about that.
Right as I was about to scream “Hey” as loud as I could and as many times as was necessary, the man player stood up, very much revealed himself by flailing his arms, and shot outside to the terrace through an opening where a sliding glass door could go, and out of view.
His companion yelled, “What are you doing?” And: “Careful!”
The first shouting man: “What the.”
The man player, in a reedy voice: “You leave her alone, okay? Back off and leave her alone.”
The first man: “Hey, buddy, mind your own—”
The man player: “Why don’t you get lost?”
The woman player: “Should I call the police? Don’t touch him. Stop.”
The first man: “Motherfucker.”
The man player: “All right, all right, why don’t we all calm down here?”
Then I heard some shuffling and muffled screaming and un-muffled screaming (from the woman player), and I was fairly sure that someone was being wrestled to the ground. I tapped the call button on my phone, only to discover I had no reception.
However, as I was trying to make the call, the bald man in the tracksuit appeared inside the house. The woman player took two steps back. And the man stomped across the main room and out a side door. I wasn’t sure what was happening. I looked at the windows to my left and saw the man in the tracksuit run up an exterior flight of stairs, past the upper level where I was standing. I heard him at the gate.
Meanwhile the woman in the tracksuit had come into the main room and was with both players, thanking them repeatedly.
The woman player asked, “Are you okay?”
The woman in the tracksuit said, “I will be. He wasn’t always this way. But oh, oh...” She squeezed the arm of the man player and said, “Thank you. You saved me, you really did.”
Soon the three of them were outside and going up the exterior stairs, leaving me alone in the abandoned house. After I heard them go through the gate, I left, too, and by the time I reached the trail, all four of them had vanished.
Where had the stranger game players started following the tracksuit couple? How far had they pursued them? And what had I just observed? Was I delirious?
I hiked the main trail down past two tiers of tennis courts toward the parking lot. My water bottle was empty, so I made a detour to the drinking fountain by the restrooms. The fountain was outside the men’s room side of the building, the entry to the men’s room behind a wooden fence. I heard two voices.
The first I recognized as the reedy voice of the man player who had saved the day: “That was awesome.”
The other belonged to the bald man in the tracksuit: “Glad you liked it.”
“No, it was amazing. So how much do I still owe you?”
“Three hundred should do it.”
“Right. Here you go.”
I walked away quickly toward the parking lot. I looked over my shoulder and saw the man player behind me, not the man in the tracksuit. I got in my car first and watched the player slip into an expensive coupe across the lot. His companion in the passenger seat was beaming at him. They sped off. It was a full five minutes before the bald man in the tracksuit appeared in the parking lot, too, and climbed into an SUV; its driver was the woman with the tracksuit, except she’d lost the voluminous wig, revealing a tight brunette ponytail—meaning what?
Meaning this whole game had been staged for a fee.
I couldn’t add it up. Was the non-tracksuit couple truly playing the stranger game? Was the scenario set up so the man player could emerge the hero and impress the woman player? How had this been arranged? And at the end of the day, what did the woman player know? Did she figure out the scheme? No, the man player had been thrilled with the way everything unfolded. The woman would remain in the dark. To her friends, she would boast about the man’s unhesitating valor.
I was in such a fog that when I pulled into my driveway, I didn’t notice at first the man sitting by my front door, holding a cone of bright flowers. It was Carey.
I SAT IN MY CAR AWHILE CONTEMPLATING MY OPTIONS. I COULD pull back out of the driveway and zoom off. To make matters worse, a home alarm somewhere nearby started blaring, filling the neighborhood for several minutes with a fast-repeating siren. When the alarm was turned off and I finally got out of my car and approached him, Carey held out the flowers for me. I stared at them without accepting them. He drew them back to his chest, and then he sneezed.
“Slightly allergic,” he said and extended the bouquet once again, a dozen velvety roses, open, honeyed.
I took them from him.
“That wasn’t me,” he said. “I got lost in that idiotic game. And I was drunk. And then, I don’t know. I only thought I’d talk to you. I never expected to end up here. I know I’m terrible, and there’s nothing I can say, except I was not myself—or I wasn’t who I want to be. And the worst part of it is you told me, you told me very explicitly how you’d not really been out with anyone since... I am so sorry.”
When he was done I finally looked at him: his eyes were like ponds, two perfect blue ponds. I hated myself for being as attracted to him as much as I was, even now, this freckled monster.
“Is Carey your real name?”
“It is,” he said and sounded hopeful: that I was asking this question meant I might forgive him.
“Thank you for the flowers,” I said. “Apology accepted.”
I was eternally lonely. I wanted to ask him in and make tea and laugh off what had happened. What a world, what a dark age we lived in—why were we doing this to one another? I craved banter. And touch. I suspected he might actually be one of the good guys but had strayed. Wasn’t I a great believer in second chances?
I said, “I was on a hike. I need to go inside now and clean up.”
“Of course,” Carey said and stepped away from the door, switching positions with me, backing down the front walk.
When I didn’t know what to say, I often resorted to expressions I never used. I said, “Bye now,” and I said, “Ciao,” my head already buzzing with regret.
I MOVED THROUGH MY DAYS AT A SLOWER TEMPO. I SHOWED up where I was expected, met deadlines, and even managed to get my bedroom repainted a color that rightly should have been called weak tea. However, the time between appointments and driving from place to place, lying in bed at night, in the morning—this time seemed endless to me. Ezra had been gone six months, there was that. I’d moved his possessions to a nearby storage facility, not that he had much, because it would have been too costly to pay the insurance; I sold his car for not very much money, which I used for the storage. And then also I had nothing to look forward to—not only nothing to look forward to, but also no memory of having had anything to look forward to for a long while.
A memory from when I was four: our house was a block away from an elementary school, and one early fall morning I was sitting under a tree by the end of the driveway, playing with the fallen pods and leaves in the dirt. Some teenage girls walked by on their way to school and thought I was cute, and they stopped to say hi to me. And it occurred to me in that moment that the only things that existed in the world were what I could observe: the pods, the leaves, the dirt, the tree. The tricycle I’d abandoned up the driveway, the driveway. The girls with their hair falling in their faces as they bent down to talk to me, their backpacks, their sweaters with knobby knitting, their denim skirts, their legs, their sandals. What I could not see did not exist (like my mother’s god). I say I had these thoughts that morning when I was four, true, but naturally my ability to arti
culate them only came years later, and Ezra was one of the first people I met who didn’t think I was strange to have had this epiphany so young; the opposite. He said, Me, too.
It was odd to think about how coincidence worked in the life of an atheist. For the believer, when something uncanny happened, it could be read as part of a plan; there was always an explanation. For someone like me, coincidence might be delightful (or unsettling), but there never was any greater scheme to consider. But then at the same time, we atheists potentially became blind to hidden plots; we didn’t perceive patterns; encounters that appeared accidental might not be accidental at all.
Two weeks after Carey showed up with flowers, I spotted him at the museum at noon (and I knew I hadn’t mentioned that I liked to come here during lunchtime, but it was likely he’d followed me in at some point). I stood at the top of the steps leading down into the sunken sculpture garden behind the original building; because it was on the opposite side of the museum from newer and more popular pavilions, the garden was less visited. Carey couldn’t have been more than fifty feet away. I pulled back behind a palm tree. His back was to me; he didn’t turn around. He was sitting on a bench, drinking coffee, staring at a set of brushed steel cubes arranged to evoke a dancing man. He shifted on the bench to face the red-painted steelwork that resembled a giant tricorn hat tipped onto its side. He was facing the sculpture, but his gaze appeared fixed on nothing in particular. He was slouching a bit, and he seemed a little rumpled to me, his shirt untucked, his hair tousled.
When he stood, I hopped around the corner into a gift shop. I waited. Carey walked past the shop out to the street. I waited another moment, then followed him. He was headed in the same direction as my studio, and I was paranoid enough to think he was looking for me again. But he walked two blocks beyond my building to another, grander one with a fountain flowering in front. I’d forgotten he’d mentioned how close his office was to mine. I watched him go inside: there was something defeated about his rounded shoulders, something pressing against him, an unseen weight.