The Stranger Game. Peter Gadol
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