The Stranger Game. Peter Gadol

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      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.

      I thought the stranger game might be akin to getting lost in a landscape you didn’t know and then finding your way back from its littoral edge, that this was the appeal to Ezra, except he hadn’t come back from this drive, had he? Be with me now. I wanted to understand what he was experiencing. I was convinced he’d become a player, and I admit it made no sense, but I thought the only way to find him was to figure out where the game might lead.

      Days after following the two men at the museum, I was looking for new clothes to wear for client presentations, and I ended up randomly tracking a woman my age into the men’s section of a department store. She was checking СКАЧАТЬ