The Stranger Game

by Peter Gadol

  I explained what I’d seen, being sure to add, “I’m not entirely sure what’s going on, but I know there have been burglaries recently in the neighborhood.”

  The officer said, “Thank you very much.”

  I didn’t understand. “You don’t want to check out what they’re doing?”

  “Thanks for your help, ma’am,” he said. “Thank you very much.”

  “Are you off duty? Should I—?”

  “Everything is fine, ma’am. Have a good day.”

  And with that the officer rolled up his window and stared at me until I turned around and began the uphill walk home.

  I FOLLOWED A TOW TRUCK DRIVER AND WATCHED HIM HAUL OFF a car from a no-parking zone. The tow truck driver stopped at a taco stand for lunch, his truck now in a no-parking zone of its own with the towed car exposed for all the world to see.

  I followed two girls on bikes who sat back with their hands off the handlebars so they could gesture to one another. They weren’t wearing helmets, and I should have but did not break the rules to tell them this was stupidly unsafe. Maybe I envied their invincibility.

  I followed dog walkers and nannies dragging along preschool children and gardeners, all of the noonday caretakers on their rounds.

  I followed furniture delivery trucks and watched crews carefully fold up padded cloths postdelivery with the same care and reverence afforded flags.

  There were other delivery trucks, flowers, pizza; there were taxis. People on cell phones walking down the street, people carrying dry cleaning and cake boxes. I followed a fire truck returning to its station.

  It was summer now and I was driving around with the windows up and the air conditioner on high, which muffled street sounds, which intensified my isolation. I kept checking my mirrors to pick up followers, but I never caught anyone, not that I cared. Go ahead, follow me, follow the woman who needs a haircut and has circles under her eyes, the insomniac talking to herself. I was never home; I kept moving. Motion made it possible for me to avoid the swelling resentment I felt with each passing day that Carey didn’t surface.

  When my phone rang and it wasn’t him calling, I let it go to voice mail. Once it was Detective Allagash reminding me I should not leave town without informing him. I expected to see him at my door again, but he hadn’t returned. Three times I didn’t return Detective Martinez’s call; she, too, didn’t appear as I expected she might, coffee in hand. I knew I couldn’t put them off forever.

  I was spending my days driving in circles around the city, sometimes along familiar streets, often not, and this was how one afternoon I found myself in a neighborhood I didn’t know well, coasting along a boulevard lined with fabric and furniture stores. Traffic was dense, but we were all moving, and I drove past a packed sidewalk café and noticed two men huddled at a small table—I think I gasped, although no one could hear me, least of all the two men.

  One of them was the bald man in the tracksuit whom I’d last seen pushing Carlos Garcia off the terrace of the abandoned house. And sitting across from him was a tall man, rakish with wheaty hair mussed up by the breeze. He leaned in and said something it looked like he wanted no one else to hear. It was Carey.

  It was the bald guy, it was definitely the bald guy, and it was Carey. Together.

  I couldn’t stop. There were no open parking spaces to slide into, and there were cars backed up behind me. I turned the corner and sped up the block, turned right and right again, and came fast down the narrow side street, which was treacherous with cars coming at me in the opposite direction. There was nowhere I could stop, and as I turned back on the boulevard and drove past the café a second time, I saw Carey stand up and wag a finger at the bald man. He was wagging his finger and then pointing it at him, the bald man standing, as well. I couldn’t tell if they were making a scene, if anyone else at the café overheard them or wondered if there was a disturbance—

  I honked. The driver in front of me on the boulevard gave me the finger. I couldn’t see if Carey or the bald man looked in my direction—I had gone too far down the block now. I zoomed around a third time, but when I reached the sidewalk café again, determined to double-park if I had to and jump out, both Carey and the bald guy had vanished. Their table was being cleared for waiting patrons, and I wondered for a moment if I’d seen them at all.

  But I knew I wasn’t imagining them; I knew this was them together, arguing; I knew, I knew, I knew it was them.

  I could not yet understand Carey’s deceit, not with any clarity. I had to drive a ways before finding a place to pull over, and when I did, first I opened my car door and threw up on the pavement. Then I took out my phone.

  “Oh,” Ezra said, surprised, “hi.”

  “I need to see you,” I said.

  4

  “THIS IS ALL MY FAULT,” EZRA SAID.

  We were sitting on my couch. All of the windows were open, and the air both inside and out was warm and heavy and still.

  “If I hadn’t disappeared,” he said, “would you have ever become a player?”

  “I still could have been buying a sweater,” I said, “and Carey still could have started following me. I still could have met him at the bistro.”

  Ezra knew everything now, likely in more detail than he wanted.

  “What a fucking fucker,” he said. “Whoever the fuck he is. What do we do now? We don’t know Allagash’s next move.”

  We was good to hear, I had to admit.

  “By now he’s probably destroyed Carey’s clothing,” I said, which probably was a felony, but I somehow didn’t think Allagash exactly followed the law. “I don’t know why, but I think he wants to eliminate any connection to Carey.”

  “And Martinez,” Ezra said.

  “What about her?”

  “Why did she keep telling you not to get a lawyer?”

  That I didn’t know. It had become confusing to me, too. Maybe I had wrongly assumed the detective’s interests were the same as my interests, but why would they be?

  “Maybe we should get out of town for a while,” Ezra said.

  “Allagash told me not to go anywhere,” I said.

  “It sounds like he said not to go anywhere without telling him. You can still tell him. Or not.”

  “That man, the bald guy, he pushed someone into a ravine. Shouldn’t he be accountable for that?”

  “Of course,” Ezra said. “But that’s not our problem.”

  “You didn’t see it happen,” I said. “If you saw it happen, it would be your problem.”

  The winds from the west were picking up, sweeping up the hill and rustling the scrub so it sounded like a legion of small animals was suddenly charging the house.

  “I’m glad you called me,” Ezra said. “I’m glad you told me. My fear is that you want revenge, but...”

  But what, he didn’t say. That revenge would be misguided and dangerous? It would. However, I couldn’t abide playing the victim: once a victim, always a victim. That would forever be how I thought of myself.

  “I need to make sure you don’t do something foolish,” Ezra said, well-intentioned but a bit patronizing to my ear.

  Now the wind was in the house and tipped over a standing lamp with a rice-paper shade. I got up to close the back door. When I returned to the couch, I sat closer to Ezra. I would have liked to have said he no longer had the ability to calm me down, but he did.

  “That was a big sigh,” he said.

  “I really am sure I saw them together quarreling,” I said, although even as I reasserted this, I was beginning to question my own hold on reality.

  “I believe you.”

  Maybe he was right; maybe we should sneak off. We could walk down the hill to the boulevard and take the first bus, another bus, a random follow, another, see where we ended up.

  “There’s a lot about the stranger game we don’t know,�
�� Ezra said. “The stagers, their network. How people hire them and then how it works.”

  “Martinez could tell us, I’m sure.”

  “I don’t think we should talk to her,” Ezra said, and I had to agree with him. “But I have an idea,” he said. “Someone we can ask.”

  THE PSYCHOTHERAPIST WAS ABLE TO SEE US THE NEXT MORNING even though it was a Sunday. His carriage-house office was only a ten-minute drive. I didn’t think at first that I’d saved the contact that my partner Rick had given me, but Ezra knew my habits and knew to check the wooden bowl atop my bureau where I tended to toss stray business cards and buttons. Ron was the therapist’s name, and he sat so tall in his wing chair facing us on a long leather couch, it looked like he was holding court from a throne. Ezra and I had cooked up a story, which I had fed Ron when I called him: a close friend had become addicted to the game. In order to help, we wanted to understand it better, and then, since this was his specialty, maybe Ron could facilitate an intervention, et cetera.

  But Ron said to help him help us help our friend, he wanted to know more about our own personal histories, together and apart. I gave him as brief a summary as possible.

  When it was Ezra’s turn, he said, “Actually, Ron, there is no friend. Or what I mean is, I’m the friend.”

  I glared at Ezra. I didn’t see how we’d get the information we wanted if one of us claimed to know too much about the way the game was played.

  Ron looked at me. “Rebecca, is this true?”

  “It’s true,” I said, “but I got into the game as well, arguably in deeper than Ezra.”

  “She only became a player because of me,” Ezra said.

  “I’m my own person,” I said, “fully capable of making a mess of my own life.”

  “As you might imagine,” Ron said, “your stories are not unfamiliar to me. If I had a dime for every so-called friend who ended up where you’re sitting now...”

  This was the problem I had when I had sought out therapists in the past, the way everything I recounted about myself inevitably fell into an easily recognizable behavioral pattern. Yet what if I thought of myself as unique and took no comfort in being like other people, the opposite? Wouldn’t it be more productive in getting me to open up to allow me my delusion?

  “Ezra, what was your experience with the game?” Ron asked.

  I had to listen again to Ezra go through his entire story about life at the colony.

  “And you came back because you wanted to be with Rebecca,” Ron said.

  “I am so sorry,” Ezra said to me.

  I knew that. I didn’t mean to be cruel, but I wanted to get the conversation back on track.

  “Rebecca, what does hearing Ezra’s apology mean to you?” Ron asked.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “Neither one of us was really that far gone. It’s not like we ever hired a stager. It’s not like we’re even sure how to do that.”

  Ron waited for me to say more.

  “How does one do that anyway?” I asked. “Hire a stager.”

  Ron studied us, tilting his head ever so slightly to the left, then the right.

  “Some couples like yourselves come to me to figure out how to live apart,” he said, “but I want to ask if in fact the opposite might be the case for you? Do you think that’s what you might be seeking this morning? A new commitment?”

  “Oh, man,” I said.

  I hadn’t been aware of my body language, my arms crossed, my legs crossed. Ezra’s hands were palm down on the couch, pressing into the leather as if he were about to spring forward.

  “When we were still together and I was alone in our house,” I said, “I used to walk from room to room and run my fingertips over the furniture, over certain objects. A matte green vase from the year we were going to flea markets, or a hammered-tin Christmas star from a trip abroad, or even the lavender on the terrace that I’d watched Ezra pot and water and tend to. I’d touch these things, I think, to verify that they were real, and they were, and I would be so happy, so unbelievably what-did-I-do-to-deserve-to-be-this-happy happy. I loved our life together.”

  Ron smiled at Ezra: look how well this is going. Your turn.

  But I continued, “And then Ezra would come home from the bookstore, and he’d be in another gray mood, and none of this seemed to matter.”

  “She could be happy when I wasn’t home,” Ezra said. “Not when I came home, not because I came home.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” I said.

  “Have you sought couples counseling before?” Ron asked.

  “Briefly,” I said.

  “I’m the problem,” Ezra said blandly. “I am always the problem.”

  But he had disappeared for most of a year—wasn’t that problematic?

  “It takes two to make or unmake any relationship,” Ron said.

  “I don’t mind being on my own now,” I said. “I don’t have to feel guilty about wanting what I want. I can simply want it.”

  My words were darts, I knew this. Ezra was now the one with his arms crossed.

  “Let’s try an exercise,” Ron said.

  “Actually, Ron, let’s not,” Ezra said, back with the program. “We really do have a friend, a player. Much worse off than us, which is why we came to see you.”

  “Much, much worse,” I said.

  “He’s lost his job, his girlfriend,” Ezra said.

  “His house,” I said.

  “He’s depressed, but he can’t stop playing,” Ezra said.

  “He’s someone you worry about becoming,” Ron inserted.

  Ezra waited a beat. “There but for the grace,” he said.

  “And he became a stager,” I said. “Our friend.”

  Ron shook his head and said, “Honestly, I’m not as worried now about the stagers as I am the trespassers.”

  “The trespassers,” I said, as if I knew what he was talking about. “I know, right?”

  “Hopefully your friend isn’t getting into that, too,” Ron said.

  And then I understood. I pictured the couple I’d seen sneaking into that backyard and skinny-dipping. And then there were all of the other break-ins in my neighborhood, yet nothing was ever reported stolen—the spying, the entry, that was the ultimate follow.

  “It used to be seduction,” I said, “that was the endgame. Now this.”

  “Who knows where it will all lead,” Ron said.

  “Now that I think about it, given some things he’s told us, I realize that our friend has indeed been trespassing,” Ezra said with such conviction that I almost asked him which friend.

  Ron held Ezra’s gaze a long moment. “I think we both know your friend needs to stop that immediately.”

  For the rest of the session, which was only introductory and therefore thankfully brief, Ron described his methodology. He likened any long-term couple to two sticks of chewing gum, which over time in the same mouth inevitably became one piece. In the months ahead, we would try to pull the gum apart to restore the two sticks so that moving forward they could exist in the same mouth with mutual love and respect. Or something like that. To be fair I was only half-listening, and I knew Ron meant well, and I probably shouldn’t have said what I said after we told him we’d call soon to schedule a full session.

  “And I guess the problem with chewing gum is that at a certain point it completely loses all taste.”

  Ron looked at me with round forgiving eyes: We have a long road ahead of us, don’t we?

  Ezra and I sat for a while in my car without saying anything. Per usual I had no clue what he was thinking. We had scheduled the time with Ron to see what we could learn about the stranger game, not to relitigate old cases against each other.

  Finally Ezra said, “I didn’t hate our life.”

  “Well,” I started to say.

  “How lon
g do you want me to feel miserable?”

  This took me aback. “Excuse me?”

  “How long—”

  “I heard you,” I said. “You disappeared for nine months and left behind your car and your belongings, and I’m somehow not supposed to be devastated or angry or—”

  “I mean how long do you want me to feel miserable for leaving after years when everything wasn’t so perfect and lovely for me as it was for you? I mean how long should I feel miserable for not being able to keep up with you?”

  I had no idea how to respond to this, so I didn’t. We took turns sighing, and then silence again. We needed to return to the reason we’d sought out Ron.

  “I told you about the people skinny-dipping,” I said.

  Ezra sat up, grateful for the subject change.

  “You said they looked like players,” he said.

  “And I told you about the squad car parked across the street. The officer didn’t care.”

  “Because he knew what was going on. Wow.”

  “He was guarding them,” I said.

  Everything was crashing together now. It made sense; it didn’t make sense.

  “The cop was paid off,” Ezra said. “The cops are in on it.”

  “In on—?”

  “The whole damn thing,” Ezra said.

  “No, I don’t believe that. I don’t think it’s possible,” I said, although I was starting to believe it was indeed very possible.

  “We need to find out.”

  “I don’t know—”

  “I’m telling you, think about it—”

  “Okay, okay, let’s see what we can learn,” I said, pulled out my phone, and tapped the number for my last missed call, for the last three missed calls.

  “Finally,” Detective Martinez said.