The Stranger Game. Peter Gadol
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