The Stranger Game

I stayed with them on the highway and exited when they did an hour later, each new desert town more baked than the last. I worried they had noticed me, and I dropped back, letting their car push forward until it was no bigger than a hawk hugging the horizon.

Without warning the car pulled off the road, sending up a cloud of dust, and wound down a dirt drive toward a ranch house. They parked next to two pickups, one of them up on blocks. Tempted though I was, I couldn’t very well drive down the dirt road, too, and I couldn’t stay parked up on the street. I wanted to know what the couple/siblings were up to—there had been something notably joyless about them when they’d left the motel without banter, grim-faced, probably not on holiday—and to figure them out, I’d have to take my chances and come back later under the cover of night to see if they were still here.

I drove around. I noticed a sign for an inn a few miles east but napped instead in my car. It started to get dark. I went back to the ranch house. The couple’s car was where they’d left it. I continued a quarter mile on, parked on the shoulder, and walked back. There were lights on in the house. The property wasn’t fenced, but I made sure not to get too close. I wasn’t at all prepared for the desert wind, which numbed my ears. When it was truly night, I could see better into the house, and I crouched down there a long, long while, and this was what I observed:

Three people, the man and woman I’d followed (siblings after all, I decided), both moving about a kitchen, plus a white-haired man seated at the table, the man small in his chair. Their father, from the look of it. The woman was setting the table, and she tied a bib around her father’s neck. The son was at the stove, spooning the contents of various pots into serving bowls. Steam rose from a bowl of spaghetti. Then the siblings sat on either side of the older man, and they held hands in grace. I heard a crescendo of laughter, and the son served food to the father, the daughter promptly cutting it up. The father couldn’t feed himself; his children took turns spooning him dinner. He slumped a bit in his chair, but the siblings were merry anyway, putting on a show, telling stories.

That was it, that was all I saw, adult siblings being tender with their frail father. Where was their mother? Had she died some time ago or did she live (had she lived) another life elsewhere? The father stayed out here far from town, from other houses, so who tended to him when his adult children were not around? Was this visit routine or was it a special occasion? I waited for a birthday cake, but there was no cake, only alps of ice cream. What was the history of this family? Had there been a period of estrangement? Had a mother’s final illness yielded a rapprochement? Had the siblings moved out of the desert the moment they could, or was it the father who’d fled the city? Maybe it was the siblings themselves who had been at odds, but their father‘s failing health had necessitated them setting aside their differences...

My lower back ached from hovering in one place for too long; the wind left me with a ringing in my ears; my hands were shaking. I drove slowly, following the signs to the nearby inn, and before I stepped inside I noticed a flyer taped up to a utility pole, and on the flyer an image of a small dog with pointy tufted ears. Across the top of the page, someone had written Perro perdido.

When I stepped inside the inn, I was delirious with hunger and melancholy, and to the woman who set down her book to greet me, I asked, Are there generally a lot of lost dogs in this town?

The woman thought about it. Not particularly, she said. Now and then, I suppose.

Are they ever found, the dogs that do go missing?

The woman shrugged. Some, she said. That’s the hope.

That is the hope, I said.

When I asked if there was a room available, the woman of course wanted to know for how long, but I didn’t have an answer. Then for some reason she asked if I was looking for work, because she was only filling in and they needed a new night manager. Was I qualified?

I wrote this essay over a series of slow nights at the front desk. I have turned my sabbatical into an extended leave, and although I suspect one day I might return to my city life, I am in no hurry. I no longer follow strangers, but I do interact with new guests at the inn every day, and when someone wants to find the old turquoise mine or a desert trail head, even if it’s the morning and the end of my shift, I usher the guests where they want to go. Along the way, I try to find out as much about them as I can, what brought them here, what they are escaping and/or to what they eventually will return. Where they are headed next.

Once upon a time I was an avid traveler and left the country twice a year. I used to keep a checklist of places I needed to see, the monuments, the landscapes. Now I am less interested in places than people. I can’t get enough of people.

I very much doubt that most of you reading my account have or will become as closed off as I did, as cold at night, as folded inward, but for those of you who do worry that you, too, might slide into similar despair, I suggest you study the nearest stranger from a safe distance and watch him or her a long while.

Forget about yourself. Don’t make an approach. This is your only chance. Look. Keep looking.

How can you draw a line connecting you and this stranger? How can you make that line indelible?

THE FIRST QUESTIONS THE INVESTIGATING DETECTIVE ASKED ME about the last time I’d seen Ezra were the obvious ones: Had he appeared restless or preoccupied? Was he evasive about anything? Did he seem manic? Or hopeless?

“Did Mr. Voight say anything cryptic?” Detective Martinez asked.

Not that I could recall. The last time I’d been with him was on a Sunday. I was dropping off a cast-iron skillet—

“A skillet?” the detective asked. “Why a skillet?”

There was one in my kitchen that was especially good for searing. I was eating out or ordering in all the time, whereas Ezra had been on a cooking jag. When I showed up he was already making mushroom risotto. I was instructed to pour myself a glass of wine, have a seat, and keep him company while he stirred in wine and broth.

“He seemed settled,” the detective said. “In a good place.”

“I don’t know. Maybe that’s what I wanted to see,” I said.

The risotto was loamy and rich, and we shared a bottle of the same wine he’d cooked with. Ezra was excited about an art book he’d purchased. Even with his employee discount, he spent too much on books, but I didn’t say anything. It was a monograph of an artist we’d both long admired, plates of prints made over the years when this artist wasn’t producing the monumental sculpture she was better known for. In pencil, she would cover a page with notations, numbers, a schematic drawing that looked like a blueprint or a plan for an imaginary city, and then within the grids and boxes, across her notations, she would lay in geometric blocks in powdery pigment, one bold color per print, usually cadmium orange. She made the same kind of work again and again for years, and as we were sitting next to each other on Ezra’s couch, the book open on his lap, what he remarked on, what he found extraordinary, was the way an artist might latch on to an idiom early in a career, and his or her whole output for decades would become variations on an initial theme. But the work never got dull—the opposite. It only grew subtler, more sublime. There was the sculptor with his steel plates, the composer with his arpeggios, the author with her driving declarative refrains. How did they know at such an early age that they were on to something? Where did that self-confidence come from? It’s so alien to me and you, Ezra said.

“To me and you?” the detective asked. “I can understand him speaking for himself, but why did he include you?”

Detective Martinez had an uncanny way of not blinking until her question was answered. She had zeroed in on my discomfort right away.

“When Ezra and I were younger,” I told her, “he wanted to be a novelist, and I was going to be an artist. Off and on, he was still working on something, but I stopped painting after college—”

“You gave up on it.”

“I was never very good at it. I’d have a picture of something in my mind, but then anything I made fell far short of that image. But painting led me to art history, which led to architectural history, and when I imagined becoming an architect, I became so much happier.”

“But Ezra thought you’d left something behind,” Detective Martinez said. “Maybe he thought that you thought he should likewise give up his writing, too—”

“No. I always encouraged him.”

“Earn a real living—”

“You’re putting words in my mouth,” I said.

Ezra used to say that there were two kinds of people: those who looked completely different when they had wet hair, and those who looked exactly the same when their hair was wet or dry. For some reason he never explained, he didn’t trust the people whose hair looked the same wet or dry. The detective likely fell in that category.

“It’s my job to come up with a line and follow that line,” she said. “I don’t always get it right. Then I try to find a better line. It’s an imperfect method, I admit.”

I accepted her apology, if that was what it was, with a nod.

“So you stayed for dinner and were looking at this art book, and he suggested that you and he were alike in your inability to realize your dreams, even if that wasn’t an accurate representation of the situation for you.”

I could have pointed out that for every artist who found his voice early on, there was the genius who created great work later in life. Plus Ezra and I were not that old—maybe no longer young, but only forty. He had time. But I didn’t say these things that night.

“And that was that,” Detective Martinez said. “Nothing else happened?”

I didn’t answer.

“Ms. Crane?”

“We talked some more, but yes, that was that,” I said.

Detective Martinez was staring at me again without blinking. She knew I was lying. I glanced around her office, void of personal effects. No photos, no mementos.

“I keep thinking about a documentary we saw,” I said. “It was about a man who disappeared and was found a month later at a hospital not too far from home, but without any ID. He had amnesia. No one would ever figure out what triggered it. The only thing he had with him was a book with a phone number scribbled on the inside cover, which belonged to an ex-girlfriend. She was traveling and unreachable. When she finally came home, she was able to identify the man. The man had retained the ability to do physical things, like ride a bike or surf or make love—even speak French. But he remembered no people or places or experiences. The first time he saw snow after his amnesia, he was both awestruck like a child might be, and analytic like an adult, trying to figure out what it consisted of.”

“Amnesia is pretty rare.”

“Oh, I wasn’t suggesting—”

“Mr. Voight liked this film?”

“He saw it several times when it came out.”

The detective wrote this down, although I didn’t know how it would be useful. Then she set down her pen and laced her fingers.

She said, “Mr. Voight has been gone only one month, but—”

“Only one month?”

“But you need to consider the possibility that he doesn’t want to be found.”

“You’re saying you don’t think we’ll find him?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “I’m saying it’s possible he doesn’t want you to find him.”

This was a sharp arrow; it went in deep. I already knew that, yes. How could I not have thought about that? She didn’t need to say it aloud, not yet anyway.

“I’ll start in on the databases right away,” Detective Martinez said, softer. “Let’s see if we can learn anything.”

Protocols were followed: I provided photos, descriptions of physical attributes (including the location of the moles along Ezra’s chin that his scruff usually masked), and lists of friends and relatives (although like me, he wasn’t close to his family). I filled out an exhaustive questionnaire about what he might be wearing and carrying in the leather shoulder bag that we could say was missing, and per Detective Martinez’s request, I arranged to have his dental records sent over. I dropped off a pair of shoes, too. That part was disconcerting, walking into the precinct with my right index and middle fingers hooked into the heels of Ezra’s worn chukkas, like I was cleaning up after him and returning his things to our closet.

Meanwhile the detective was funneling information into the web of databases operated by various agencies and hospital systems—and morgues. I tried not to think about the morgues. I could access his bank account because he hadn’t changed his password since college, but I could see he wasn’t withdrawing cash. (I’d started paying his rent because I didn’t want to move his belongings to my house; that seemed to suggest he’d never be found or never come back.) According to the bookstore, he had cashed his last paycheck, so he had some money. (At the bookstore, they thought he’d quit without giving notice, which was out of character, but plausible.) We tracked his credit cards, but he wasn’t using them. He wasn’t using his cell phone either. He didn’t appear on any closed-circuit cameras in local shopping malls or major intersections. He’d never much tapped into social media. I was supposed to tell my friends and colleagues about what was going on to cast a wider net, and I did; they weren’t surprised Ezra would pull a stunt like this—a stunt, as if his disappearance were a performance. The detective wanted me to post flyers. Perro perdido, please wander home. I didn’t end up posting anything, and besides, the police had already canvassed nearby shop owners and neighbors about whether they’d seen him.

After a month (which meant Ezra had been missing for two), I showed up at the police station unannounced and demanded to see Detective Martinez. She met me at the front desk because she had someone in her office and guided me to a free bench.

“I haven’t heard anything from you in weeks,” I said.

“Rebecca—”

“You haven’t taken me seriously this whole time. You’ve implied more than once that there’s something peculiar about my history with Ezra.”

“I don’t think I ever said anything like that.”

“I don’t think you’ve been harnessing the full force of the department to find him.”

People waiting to be called to pay citations and report petty thefts all stared at me. For some reason, this was the moment I noticed that Detective Martinez’s earlobes were both multiply pierced, although she wore no jewelry.

She leaned toward me and whispered, “I think we both know you haven’t been completely straight with me.”

Now I was the one who didn’t blink.

“For whatever reason, you decided not to tell me what you found when you first went into Ezra’s apartment with the property manager,” she said.

I blinked.

“I’m guessing the property manager noticed me taking the printout,” I said.

“Look,” Detective Martinez said, “this stranger game is the bane of my existence. Do you know how many missing persons reports have been filed in the last year alone?”

“Stranger game?” I asked.

“The article. You read it?”

“Yes, but what about it?”

“The fad that came out of it,” Detective Martinez said. “You mean to say you don’t know about that?”

I shook my head no.

“That’s refreshing,” the detective said. “I wish more people didn’t know about it. But then why did you take the article with you?”

I’d sensed it was important. I wanted to know what Ezra was reading when he vanished. He’d always had a way of being deeply affected by whatever he encountered, be it a book, a song, a dog, a tree—he was both more available than I was to be influenced and more readily buffeted.

“It’s been passed around five million times, ten million times,” the detective said. “I don’t think we really know how many times.”

She described the craze the essay had launched, and I was confused.

“But the article is about overcoming your alienation,” I said.

“I think most people only read about the other people playing the game, not the original article itself.”

“It’s a terrible misinterpretation then. There is no mention of any kind of game.”

“The writer talks about empathy, but the game isn’t about that at all. It’s about seeing how long you can follow a stranger without getting caught. There are the three rules because it wouldn’t be a game without rules. But it’s not a game at all. From where I sit, it’s called stalking.”

Some gossip I’d heard about a friend of a friend now made sense. This person was an ambitious associate at a big law firm, the consummate networker, and meanwhile always planning weekend getaways with her fiancé. But some months ago, she had become deeply engaged in an activity that my friend labeled addictive. I assumed it was drugs. Then my friend’s friend started showing up late to meetings and went missing for hours, and apparently she lied to her fiancé about her whereabouts—the fiancé assumed she was hiding an affair. It didn’t let up. Eventually the fiancé left her and the woman was asked to take a leave from her law firm to sort things out; she’d moved in with her mother, but by all accounts, she still went missing for days at a time. When I asked my friend what kind of drugs her friend had gotten into, or if it was alcohol, my friend made it clear there weren’t substances involved; her friend had been playing the game, and I assumed game was code for gambling or sex.

“So people lose themselves in this,” I said. “But do they usually disappear?”

“Eventually they come home, they turn up,” Detective Martinez said. “It’s a waste of our resources chasing grown adults who run off one day because they feel like it, but we don’t choose who we look for and who we don’t. We look for everybody.”

I very much could see the appeal to Ezra. He craved the open road, and he took so much pleasure in meeting strangers. He quizzed taxi drivers and airplane row mates and buskers in the park for their life stories.

“I separated from my husband last year after twenty years,” Detective Martinez said. “We met on the force. I still work with him. We get along fine, all things considered. We have joint custody of the dogs. So I understand how things might be between you and Ezra. The concern, the care—it doesn’t simply stop. You could’ve told me about finding the article.”

I was still very much in love with Ezra, and the detective was probably still very much in love with her soon-to-be ex-husband, and the whole world was full of people very much in love with lost lovers. We sat there a moment longer before the detective stood up to return to whomever was in her office, and I pulled her arm so she sat back down.

I wanted to ask: Have you ever watched someone close to you slip away? You see it happening, but there’s nothing you can do about it—has that happened to you?

Instead I said, “He was always a little adrift. It was charming for a while, and then it was exhausting.” I said, “I didn’t take care of him.”

I started sobbing in my hands, and the detective’s whole posture changed. She slumped back in the bench a bit. When I looked up, I noticed everyone in the room doing his or her best to look away.

“I live around the corner from here. I made chicken soup last night. Come home with me now, I’ll give you some homemade soup, you’ll feel better. Let me get rid of the people in my office, then we’ll get you some soup.”

“This sounds unorthodox,” I said.

“Nobody follows the rules all the time,” the detective said.

Her house was a clapboard cottage painted mint green, the trim also green but darker. Green was clearly Detective Martinez’s favorite color because her sunlit cozy kitchen with its shelves of cookbooks and pots hanging over the range was yet another soft green. I did feel calmer sipping warm soup on a warm day. There was a collection of frogs on a windowsill, some crystal, some plastic. Two large dogs were lolling in the sun in the backyard. I knew that Detective Martinez didn’t want to tell me that after two months she was pretty sure Ezra wouldn’t turn up. She wasn’t exactly my new friend, but she knew I needed a new friend.

“Can I ask you something?” Detective Martinez said. “And I ask this because I’m trying to help. You admitted to finding the article, great. Is there anything else maybe that you haven’t told me?”

“Nothing,” I said a little too quickly.

The detective didn’t blink.

“Now you know everything,” I said.

“Okay. Right.”

“No, honestly, you do.”

“All right then, I’ll believe you. Let me put it this way. Rebecca, let’s say hypothetically that Ezra has moved on—”

“I haven’t been to the studio today,” I said. “I really should go.”

“Let’s just say he’s moved on. You two haven’t been together awhile now. Let’s just say he disappeared because he wanted a new life, and this was the only way he knew how to find it. So. What about you? What are you going to do now for yourself?”

I wasn’t going to give the detective what she wanted. I thanked her for her soup and sympathy, told her to let me know if she learned anything new, and I left.

A MEMORY NOW, A WINTER NIGHT—EZRA AND I TUCKED INTO opposite corners of the couch. I might have been half reading a novel, half staring out at the city, considering getting into bed, but Ezra would be up another hour or longer; he was wide-awake, elsewhere, studying the maps of a country thousands of miles away. He’d brought home a travel guide from the bookstore, one from the series he liked that came packed with extra history and excerpts by literary heroes juxtaposed with the usual photos of spires and spice markets. We hadn’t necessarily agreed this was where we’d go the following summer, but in his mind we were on our way, and the planning fell to him. Ezra took such pleasure in constructing the perfect day. We’d follow the path he’d mark out for us, from the chapel with restored frescoes to the house where a poet wrote his odes and died young, across stone bridges, through a cluttered cemetery, coiling up narrow streets until we reached the ledge of a park overlooking the jeweled city, the city a puzzle we’d solved together. Then Ezra would withdraw a bottle of wine from his backpack, a wedge of cheese, bread, fruit—a sleight of hand because I never noticed him packing a picnic (or I chose not to keep track of what he was doing because I wanted to be surprised). These were days of lidless pleasure. My only dread would be the return flight, the arrival home, Ezra’s lassitude when we had to fall back into our regular routines. In later years when he seemed down to me, I’d ask him where we were going next to cheer him up, and this worked for a time—he’d come home with a new travel guide, he’d unfold new maps. It worked, and then it didn’t work so much; nothing did.

Another memory, even earlier, from around the time Ezra moved out west to be with me. On Sunday afternoons, postnap, predinner, he would announce we were going on a drive. A drive where? I’d ask. Oh, nowhere in particular, he’d say. The idea was we’d venture out, allow ourselves to get lost, then figure out how to get back without consulting a map. I myself didn’t know the neighborhoods well because I’d been working long hours and hadn’t had time to explore. Let’s see what we can discover, Ezra said, and usually he would steer us up into the foothills, and we’d follow the haunches and hollows of that terrain until we wound down to the beach. Sometimes we got out and walked on the windy bluff at dusk. Sometimes we sat in the car parked on the side of the coast road and made out like teenagers. Dusk was Ezra’s favorite time of day, and mine, too; it was impossible not to believe in your eventual prosperity when the sun melted into the pacific distance and the night was still unwritten.

Eventually there were more and more Sundays when I needed to catch up on work and begged out of the drive, and Ezra didn’t pout about it; he went alone. When he came home, however, he would pull me from my desk to the couch to cuddle with him. Be with me now, he’d say, and he was cute about it, and of course I gave in. I should have gone on the drives though. Even then I could see this, and I don’t know why I didn’t.