The Stranger Game

by Peter Gadol

  THERE WERE NO CARS ON THE STREET BY MY HOUSE, SO I WAS very startled when I saw Detective Martinez standing out back taking in the view. Where had she parked?

  “Would you like to come inside?” I asked. “I can make some tea.”

  The detective eyed Ezra warily.

  “You’ve met,” I said.

  “Let’s stay out here,” Detective Martinez said. “Allagash had his guys sweep the house, right?”

  “Right. Why?”

  Oh. It had never occurred to me they might have planted listening devices. Now I had to worry about everything Ezra and I had talked about having been overheard.

  “Let’s speak alone,” the detective said.

  “It’s okay. He knows about everything,” I said.

  “I’d rather speak to you alone.”

  “It’s fine,” Ezra said.

  The detective waited until he shut the door.

  “I’ve told him—”

  “I’ve been trying to reach you for days,” Detective Martinez said. Her scowl was unfamiliar to me. “Carlos Garcia died. He never regained consciousness.”

  This hit me hard. I had to sit down. I thought about the bald man with his gloved hands pushing against the older man’s chest—Garcia flailing, falling. It had looked like murder and now it was murder. Only fifteen days had gone by, but hearing about Garcia’s death was like learning someone I’d known for the better part of my life was gone.

  “Also there’s this,” Detective Martinez said. “Carlos Garcia was A. Craig.”

  “What? Wait, what do you mean?”

  “A. Craig is an anagram for Garcia.”

  I had forgotten A. Craig was a pseudonym.

  “How do you know it’s him?” I asked.

  “We were in—or I should say Allagash’s crew was in Garcia’s apartment and accessed his laptop. They found the original article and all of the drafts. Also some notes for another essay he never finished.”

  “About what?” I asked.

  “About how none of this, the whole stranger game, none of it was what he hoped to inspire.”

  So he was deliberately disrupting the staging in the way the two tourists thought he was.

  “Allagash told you this?” I asked.

  “I have my sources,” Detective Martinez said.

  “What else did the essay say?” I asked.

  She didn’t answer me. She asked, “What’s going on? Why is he here?”

  How was this any of her concern?

  “I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to be spending time with him right now,” she said.

  I was baffled. I must have looked baffled.

  I didn’t exactly see myself reconciling with Ezra, but I became defensive and said, “You know how it goes. You and your husband got back together, right?”

  Detective Martinez appeared confused: What was I talking about, her husband? Which made me wonder if she even had a husband. My trust in her was evaporating, and I made the decision not to tell her about seeing Carey with the bald guy.

  “Listen, Rebecca,” she said, “I don’t think you grasp the gravity of the situation. Allagash is now running a murder investigation.”

  “And I’m a suspect?”

  “You need to be very careful where you go and what you do and who you’re with—”

  “Are the police on the take?” I asked. I surprised myself by blurting this out. “With the stranger game. Helping players, stagers. Trespassers.”

  “Is that something Ezra told you?” Martinez asked back.

  Before I could put my question to her again, she touched her ear—I hadn’t realized she was wearing an earpiece—and said, “Martinez, go ahead.” Then she sighed. “I guess it really was only a matter of time. I’m nearby.” And to me: “I need to go.”

  “What happened?”

  She hesitated but told me: two players breaking into the home of a stranger they were following had been ambushed and shot by the stranger, whom Detective Martinez speculated had faked his departure only to return right away.

  “And the players who got shot?” I asked.

  “One dead, I don’t know about the other,” she said, and then she left.

  I was paranoid now about my house being bugged and made Ezra come outside so I could fill him in. Even then, I whispered. I had been so thrown off by Detective Martinez’s revelations that I hadn’t asked her anything about trespassers or how the police might be involved in the game. Ezra repeated his mistrust of her. There was something essential, something significant the detective wasn’t revealing, and I couldn’t say why—it was only a premonition—but I worried he might be right. I wanted to be alone to think.

  I said, “Thanks for coming over yesterday and again today.”

  Ezra didn’t move.

  “I’ll talk to you later,” I said.

  “I got you into this,” he said, “and I will see you safely out of it.”

  “You don’t need—”

  “Don’t worry. After this is over I will disappear again, and you can go back to not worrying about wanting what you want. Or whatever you said.”

  I didn’t have the energy to fight him. I kept picturing Garcia broken against the rocks and felt defeated anew.

  IT WAS MUCH LATER THAT I READ THE NOTES FOR THE ESSAY THAT Carlos Garcia never finished and which mysteriously ended up on the internet.

  (1) When I was young and striking out, I believed that my legacy would be a series of scholarly books and articles that advanced the understanding of a time and place and which with any luck would direct the discourse for the generation that followed. But now I see that the things you leave behind are not very important; what is important is how you positively and affirmatively affect the people in your life. My students, my lovers perhaps, my colleagues, my friends. All the new people I met in my new life and maybe only knew for a day or two. For as long as these people were alive, they would carry me in their minds and hearts; after they were gone, they themselves would be carried in the minds and hearts of those whom they touched, and so on.

  But what a dark stone it is in my chest to know that I have adversely affected countless strangers who have looked at this thing I left behind and misread it and misused it, folding it inside out, this unknown, unseen, thrill-seeking, anarchic mob that wreaks discord and distrust, that sows despair.

  If I had known any of this would happen, I would have kept my story to myself.

  (2) I stayed away much longer than I would have predicted, resigning my position at the university in order to work as a night manager at the desert inn, eventually becoming the day manager and volunteer tour guide. I made the coffee in the morning and set out the breakfast buffet. I drew arrows on maps. I chatted with the guests who came and went, playing board games with them in the afternoon, sometimes sharing whiskey with them at night. They were the transients; I was the fixture. This suited me. And my folly was ignoring any and all news from the city.

  One day guests who were traveling across country told me about being in the city with friends. They went on a hike. There was some kind of scene they witnessed, two people arguing, becoming physical. Someone in their group wanted to call the police, and someone else decided to intervene right then. I wasn’t sure why it was important for the guests at the inn to tell me about this until they explained it was all a hoax, the argument and the fight put on just for them, all paid for by their hosts, likely a tidy sum for it, although the guests only found out about this by accident later when the hosts had been drinking.

  I was lost, and so they explained they were playing the stranger game, and I had to ask what was the stranger game, and then try to understand its scope, and how any of it got started. Once illuminated, I had to excuse myself and went into the office and started to look the whole thing up. I could barely breathe.

  I do no
t recall another moment in my life when I have felt as fevered with shame.

  (3) Denial that this whole phenomenon was born from my essay. Then anger, et cetera. Then accepting this to be the case. More research, the same cycle of feelings. Utter bewilderment, utter disdain.

  Would someone else in my position be amused? Not care? Say, oh, well, and continue living life as life was being lived?

  (4) I could not remain idle, so I returned to the city. First I needed to survey what was going on. Then figure out how to stop it. Intervene. Interfere.

  But how exactly?

  When you never intended to be any kind of prophet and when you have lost complete control over what your words mean, how do you get people to listen to you?

  WE BECAME TRESPASSERS. THIS WAS EZRA’S SCHEME FOR HOW we would get inside information on the game, although I wasn’t clear what we were going to do with what we gleaned: Blackmail the police into permanently leaving me alone? It was a ridiculous gambit, not to mention risky given the report of a subject ambushing his followers. The only reason I did the driving the next morning was out of fear Ezra would do something truly stupid if left on his own.

  We cruised along the boulevard a ways before Ezra pointed out a woman exiting a children’s clothing store. She packed a bunch of small shopping bags in her trunk. We followed her to the grocery store. We waited in the lot and followed her up into the hills. We parked across the street from her ranch house.

  “Now she has to go pick up from school whoever the clothing was purchased for,” Ezra reasoned.

  “If you want to prowl around someone’s house, why can’t we just do that? Why do we have to go through the whole rigmarole of a random follow?” I asked, not for the first time.

  “You know why. You know how the game is played,” Ezra said.

  “We also don’t know whether anyone else is home,” I said.

  “Perfect,” Ezra said.

  After the better part of an hour sitting in my car, I was ready to leave, but then the woman emerged, looking like she was headed to the gym. As soon as she drove off, we walked across the street and then around to the back, which was an unfenced slope of brush a lot like my place. Seeing the same kind of patio with the same clay pots of ill-tended plants, the same open view of the city basin—and thinking now that like me this woman lived alone (who was to say for whom she’d purchased the children’s outfits?)—I myself felt vulnerable and by association violated. I wanted to turn around. Ezra, however, was checking sliding glass doors and windows to see if any would open. He cupped his hands around his eyes to peer inside. I stood back, the lookout, although Ezra wanted us to get caught.

  “Someone is putting together a jigsaw puzzle on the dining table,” he said. “The borders are done.”

  “Ezra, I don’t like this. Let’s go,” I said.

  “No, wait,” he said.

  “No one is going to report us. No one can see or hear us back here the way this house is sited.”

  I decided to go home with or without Ezra, but he did come with me, and back in the car insisted we try again. I said no, that was enough; Ezra said he’d continue without me; I told him to go ahead, but then I neither dropped him off nor relinquished my car keys.

  The weather was wearing me down: the wind rushing in from the east shrouded the sky in a jaundiced scrim. Everybody knew crime rates went up when the air became this dusty and motionless and hot. Our recklessness almost seemed sanctioned.

  We followed a man picking up two young kids from a dance studio, but after pursuing his minivan awhile and after watching the man, presumably the father, swing by a playground and retrieve more children, we decided instead to track a woman also collecting young kids. She drove along residential streets to a house, where she and the children all filed inside. We waited, but it didn’t appear anyone was going to come out again.

  Back on the boulevard, we tracked a man moving through errands, the dry cleaners, the hardware store, but he didn’t head up into a neighborhood. He parked in front of a café, where he sat at a sidewalk table and was joined by a woman whose parted curtain of long hair and round sunglasses made it difficult to measure whether for her part what appeared to be a date was going well. I said it was a date: the man’s posture was stiff at first, straight, but then he leaned in, he was laughing at something, shaking his head oh, my. Ezra read them as old friends who hadn’t seen each other for a long time. In any case, they lingered, and I didn’t find them terribly fascinating, but we kept on watching.

  “It’s Monday,” I said. “Don’t these people have jobs?”

  I was one to talk. Ezra ignored me.

  Eventually they paid their bill and the man got back in his car, the woman in hers a few spots away. He pulled out into the street slowly, waited for her, and she followed him. We trailed them up into a nearby neighborhood, and while the man pulled into a driveway, the woman remained parked on the street, the engine running. The man dashed in the house with his dry cleaning and then popped out again moments later. He got in the woman’s car, and then they were gone.

  One more time we went around to the rear of the house; the properties were narrower on this street, the neighbors closer. I was surprised to find a neat rectangular pool occupying most of a flat backyard. The house was all wood vertical siding in front, but glass in back. We could see the master bedroom, the unmade bed; the television over the living room fireplace was twice the size of the hearth.

  Ezra kicked off his shoes, tugged off his socks. I was afraid he’d shrug off his jeans next—he did.

  “You’re kidding,” I said.

  “It’s like when you saw the trespassers the first time,” he said and with his back to me pulled off his shirt.

  “The only time,” I said. “Wait, keep your—”

  Too late. He stepped out of his boxer briefs. I tried not to look at him. I looked at him. He dove neatly into the deep end and disappeared underwater. I watched him swim a slow lap, the water sliding off his back and butt. It was difficult not to stare, to see him naked like this, to think about the last time we were intimate, what happened after that.

  Ezra had always been so at ease with his body in a way I wasn’t. It was an early gift, the way he made me comfortable around him, appreciated, sexual. I would have to say after we split up, I’d lost that unselfconsciousness being around other naked bodies. I waited until he was swimming away from me before hastily stepping out of my jeans and throwing off my top. I climbed down the ladder into the pool. My underwear clung to my body, revealed everything anyway. I reasoned that if the man returned home with his date or if the police did come, I would preserve some modesty. Or maybe I tricked myself into believing that technically I wasn’t completely naked with Ezra, but why was I in the water at all?

  I remained submerged up to my neck in the deep end while Ezra kept swimming. The pool was lined with dark stucco, making the water dark, too; our bodies by contrast appeared to glow. Ezra’s farmer’s tan made him look like he was wearing long gloves. Even as an adolescent I had never done anything like this, but I knew Ezra had. For a moment I forgot why we were doing what we were doing and simply felt—what? Young.

  Ezra swam over to me and slapped his hands against the surface.

  “Hey,” I said. “Be nice.”

  He wanted to make noise and splashed more water, but why would the neighbors suspect that we were trespassers? The splashing could be coming from the man who lived here or his guests, us in this case, friends given access on a warm day near the solstice.

  When I came back up for air Ezra was close to me. The waves we made bobbed up against the coping. He seemed sober to me now, like something serious needed to be said. I didn’t want to hear it, so I swam over quickly to the ladder in an efficient freestyle and got out. How foolish I felt putting my clothes back on without toweling off, my clothes immediately soaked through.

  “We can
dry off first in the sun,” Ezra said from the pool.

  Barefoot, I headed back through the gate and out to the front. I’d forgotten my shoes, but Ezra appeared moments later with them. His drenched shirt and pants clung to his narrow frame.

  At my house I threw our clothes in the dryer, and we took turns in the bathroom, and while Ezra was in the shower, I did something I shouldn’t have done and never had done while we were together. Ezra had kept a journal since he was a teenager, and I knew I would find his current one in his shoulder bag, which I did. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for, maybe simply an entry that might reveal what he’d been thinking about since returning to the city. I didn’t read anything though because in quickly flipping pages, I noticed sketches instead—he’d said a colony resident had taught him some drawing basics. There were rough outlines of elderly oaks. And he said he’d been drawing from memory—he had. I found pages of very linear but very accurate drawings of me. Me in an armchair reading a book. Me staring out the window. Me looking at him (presumably), my hair longer than it was now. I didn’t think anyone but me would recognize myself—technically he wasn’t that sharp. But that wasn’t the point. He’d said I’d been in his thoughts, and here was proof. I slid the journal back into his bag when I heard him turn off the shower.

  Ezra borrowed a hotel robe, which fit him fine. We didn’t say much. I wanted to open a bottle of white wine, which made me remember the one time (the only time) we’d committed a crime together in the past, a misdemeanor. I had to dig around in the back of a kitchen drawer but found the waiter’s corkscrew we’d lifted, that I’d plucked from a bin and slid into Ezra’s jacket pocket: it had a red handle embellished with a gold fleur-de-lis, the fleur-de-lis mostly worn away. I showed it to Ezra, who didn’t recognize it at first. Then he grinned.

  “You still have that, wow,” he said. “That’s from one of those early drives up the coast.”

  “We brought a bottle from home but forgot the corkscrew, classic, and we were in that town, in that knickknack-gewgaw-gadget shop, but I guess we’d left our wallets—”