The Stranger Game. Peter Gadol
bundled up given the warm weather, a sweater pulled high around his neck, and he moved stiffly around a small cherry of a car to where the woman was standing. It seemed reasonable to assume they were married. The woman appeared both serene and distant. She was wearing a knit cap. She didn’t look the man in the eye when he opened the passenger-side door for her and eased her into the seat. Craig noted the tenderness with which the man, still moving very slowly, reached across the woman to buckle her safety belt. Then the man took half an eternity to walk around the car and slip in behind the wheel. Eventually he sped off, and not at a pace commensurate with his mobility; he drove fast, dangerously fast, as if with the potential speed of the car, the man were compensating for his diminished agility. This sporty coupe, impractically low to the ground, devilishly bright, was affirmatively alive with horsepower.
At home that night, I found myself thinking only about the fuchsia-haired woman and the sports car couple, and I experienced the pleasant erasure of time that I always imagined writers must enjoy when they submerged themselves in their characters. But eventually my own solitude returned. How faint and spectral I looked to myself reflected in the window. I didn’t want to become a ghost. I knew I needed to get out and wander. This was how I came up with my scheme, rules and all.
I imagine that given what A. Craig subsequently started doing, no matter the boundaries he set and no matter his intent in posting this so-called travelogue, he knew most readers would consider him little more than a sketchy voyeur; thus the pseudonym. His first real follow (his term) involved driving across the city and slipping into a table at a boardwalk café, the ocean loud on the other side of the wide white beach.
It was sunny out, and there were volleyball games in progress, skaters in slalom around tourists, sunbathers, and most important a crowd ample enough for me to become one more nobody. I ordered a sandwich and coffee and watched a group form around a gray-haired older woman wearing a red bikini and performing what might be described as an exotic dance; a muscular, significantly younger man with a boom box hoisted up on his shoulder moved in a circle around her. I focused on one woman in a purple dress standing at the edge of the group and taking in the spectacle. That I picked out this person at random and stuck with her was part of my plan.
When she began continuing her walk south down the boardwalk, I left cash on the table and followed her, moving quickly out of the touristy commercial stretch into a neighborhood of beach houses and walk streets. The crowd had thinned, and so I had a better view of her, but I also became more conspicuous, especially when she abruptly came to a halt and I had to stop, too, with nothing to duck behind.
The woman had spotted a cat basking in the sun. The cat was round, cared for, orange, on its back. And docile: it neither righted itself nor skittered off when the woman bent down to pet it. After a few good strokes, the woman pulled something from a tote bag, which caused the cat to flip around onto all fours and sit back on its haunches. The cat dug his snout into the woman’s open palm and devoured what must have been a treat. When the woman stood, she waited while the cat rubbed up against her legs.
I maintained an even distance as the woman turned into a block of bungalows. A few houses in, she saw a gray cat lying out on a broad porch, and she walked right up the front path to pet this one, too, a cat who also did not run away, who also eagerly accepted the woman’s caresses and eventual treat. Among these cats, she apparently enjoyed renown. Around the corner, yet another one appeared to be guarding a local election sign planted in the lawn; he received the same treatment. Two blocks east, the woman ministered her affections to a fat black Persian. Having slipped behind an easement eucalyptus, I was close enough to hear her friendly lilt, but not close enough to hear what exactly she said.
I hadn’t been in this part of town in a while and didn’t know it well, and the farther from the beach the woman strolled, the tighter the plot of streets became. When she turned a corner, I lost her. Maybe she went inside. I’d decided that my random follow needed to be conducted without the benefit of technology, but ultimately I did take out my phone to pull up a map. I’d had no contact with the woman, and I was pretty sure I had eluded detection (and therefore not caused alarm), so for the greater part I’d obeyed my own rules.
This had been interesting. Here was a cat lady who had a routine, a neighborhood; she belonged somewhere, but I didn’t know anything else about her, like if she herself had cats. Maybe she couldn’t because she lived her life with someone allergic to them, so she distributed her affections elsewhere. Or maybe she did live with cats and had extra love and treats to spare. I had no sense of how she’d spend her afternoon. Would her evening be as solitary as mine? Like me, did she have too much time to think? I accepted I’d never know. The final rule I’d made for myself was in many ways the most important, which was that if I tried to follow the same person twice, I might be perceived of as a threat.
I wanted to be extra sure I went unseen, so the next day I started following strangers by car. Maybe it wasn’t true, but I thought I’d be less noticeable driving and able to get away faster if I was discovered. I drove over the hill into the valley, to a development of white stucco houses with red tile roofs. I coasted around awhile, not spotting anyone, and then I saw a woman loading three children into a minivan. Where were they going at eleven in the morning on a school day?
I stayed with the minivan on a six-lane boulevard, even though the driver didn’t believe in using her turn signal. I worked out a scenario: the kids attended a parochial school, and today was a religious holiday, but the woman wasn’t pious and she’d promised to take them out for lunch somewhere fun, a diner where the waiters all sang if it was your birthday, a bowling alley, something like that. I could see the kids in the back of the minivan were a wild bunch, bouncing up and down, jabbing each other. Or maybe what was actually going on was dark: she was one of those evil mothers whose tale was told too late; she’d snapped and was going to drive the minivan off a bridge and kill them all in one sudden swerve—weren’t they now headed toward a bridge that spanned the freeway? Should I call 911?
No need. Where they ended up about ten miles later was on another sun-flattened street not unlike the one they’d started out on. A man roughly the same age as the woman stepped out onto his stoop. I parked across the street and unrolled my window. I could hear lively pop music emanating from the man’s house. The man stayed put while the woman slid open the door to the minivan. The children poured out and shuffled toward the house. The man went inside with the kids, and then the woman was back in the minivan, pulling away.
No wonder the kids were anxious: they should have been in school but were forced instead to perform this custodial dance. Would the father get them to their soccer practices and guitar lessons? The woman, meanwhile, doubled back the way we’d come. She pulled into a strip mall. I waited a moment, then followed her into a crafts store. One wall was devoted to yarn, which was where the woman stood and ran her fingertips across soft skeins. She was getting ideas, she told the salesperson. Was she knitting a gift for someone? Probably, the woman said, she usually gave away what she made. She had family somewhere cold. At night, especially when her ex-husband had the kids, it helped to keep her hands busy.
The woman actually didn’t speak any of this—these were my thoughts—but I wanted to imagine her life. I wanted to lose myself in it. And was I correct about her? Did it matter? Something was breaking in me, and after I left the store and went a short ways, I had to pull over because I became too teary to drive. Did I feel sorry for the woman? Not exactly, but I recognized a pattern: I projected loneliness onto everyone whom I encountered. The stories I was concocting, they were in the end all about me, weren’t they? And I desperately needed to move beyond the perimeter of my own being.
I drove around some more with no clue where I was, and I followed other people: gardeners trimming coral trees, an old woman walking an old dachshund, three young guys tossing a basketball back and forth. I would follow one person or group for a while, then veer off and follow another: a carom follow.
Back home I took a warm shower. It must have been nine or ten at night, and I’d not eaten. I was so exhausted that I sat down in the stall with the water beating down on my shoulders. How was it possible I’d lost sight of what bound humans to one another? The same epic sorrows, the same epic joys. I had to wonder how alone I was in drifting so easily from such basic commune, and maybe this was more common than I