The Stranger Game. Peter Gadol
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saying you don’t think we’ll find him?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “I’m saying it’s possible he doesn’t want you to find him.”
This was a sharp arrow; it went in deep. I already knew that, yes. How could I not have thought about that? She didn’t need to say it aloud, not yet anyway.
“I’ll start in on the databases right away,” Detective Martinez said, softer. “Let’s see if we can learn anything.”
Protocols were followed: I provided photos, descriptions of physical attributes (including the location of the moles along Ezra’s chin that his scruff usually masked), and lists of friends and relatives (although like me, he wasn’t close to his family). I filled out an exhaustive questionnaire about what he might be wearing and carrying in the leather shoulder bag that we could say was missing, and per Detective Martinez’s request, I arranged to have his dental records sent over. I dropped off a pair of shoes, too. That part was disconcerting, walking into the precinct with my right index and middle fingers hooked into the heels of Ezra’s worn chukkas, like I was cleaning up after him and returning his things to our closet.
Meanwhile the detective was funneling information into the web of databases operated by various agencies and hospital systems—and morgues. I tried not to think about the morgues. I could access his bank account because he hadn’t changed his password since college, but I could see he wasn’t withdrawing cash. (I’d started paying his rent because I didn’t want to move his belongings to my house; that seemed to suggest he’d never be found or never come back.) According to the bookstore, he had cashed his last paycheck, so he had some money. (At the bookstore, they thought he’d quit without giving notice, which was out of character, but plausible.) We tracked his credit cards, but he wasn’t using them. He wasn’t using his cell phone either. He didn’t appear on any closed-circuit cameras in local shopping malls or major intersections. He’d never much tapped into social media. I was supposed to tell my friends and colleagues about what was going on to cast a wider net, and I did; they weren’t surprised Ezra would pull a stunt like this—a stunt, as if his disappearance were a performance. The detective wanted me to post flyers. Perro perdido, please wander home. I didn’t end up posting anything, and besides, the police had already canvassed nearby shop owners and neighbors about whether they’d seen him.
After a month (which meant Ezra had been missing for two), I showed up at the police station unannounced and demanded to see Detective Martinez. She met me at the front desk because she had someone in her office and guided me to a free bench.
“I haven’t heard anything from you in weeks,” I said.
“Rebecca—”
“You haven’t taken me seriously this whole time. You’ve implied more than once that there’s something peculiar about my history with Ezra.”
“I don’t think I ever said anything like that.”
“I don’t think you’ve been harnessing the full force of the department to find him.”
People waiting to be called to pay citations and report petty thefts all stared at me. For some reason, this was the moment I noticed that Detective Martinez’s earlobes were both multiply pierced, although she wore 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