* * *
“Gabby stayed late at school for band practice,” Martina said over dinner. “Then she’ll be at Alice Conover’s for a while.”
Gabrielle was our daughter, aged eleven, and Alice Conover was her best friend. I still remember that much, although I can barely call them to mind.
“Oh, and by the way, Joe Meese called from work after you left, and said he’s hosting another of his poker parties tonight. Why don’t you go? I wanted to watch something on PBS anyway.”
I went. By the time we had finished eating and the dishes were cleared away, the wind was gusting outside, and rain and sleet rattled against the windows, but I had decided that, yes, a night of gambling away pocket change and telling dirty jokes was the very thing for the indefinable unease which had come over me. I put on a coat and a thin plastic raincoat over that and went to the door.
“Don’t be out too late,” Martina called. “It may be Friday, but we have that flea market tomorrow.”
“Yes, yes, I remember. See you about eleven.”
I stepped out onto the porch and locked the door. It was as I turned and reached for the iron porch gate that I noticed a man standing on the sidewalk in front of the house, huddled in a shapeless coat, bareheaded and dripping in the savage weather.
He was old, perhaps sixty-five, and disheveled, but he wasn’t threadbare or filthy, and he lacked that empty look the city’s population of homeless lunatics usually have. He wasn’t a bag person. He just looked…lost as he stood there, not exactly staring at me, or anything in particular. The thought came to me that he might be a burglar scouting out the neighborhood, but I flinched inwardly at the sheer absurdity of the idea.
I stood with one hand on the gate.
“May I help you with something? Are you looking for someone?”
His eyes met mine briefly, and for an instant his face came alive, first something almost like joyful recognition, then sadness, then that blank expression again. He merely stood there in the rain and cold, and I was the one who began to shiver.
“I said, may I help you?”
Still he stood there silently. I debated going back into the house rather than leaving Martina alone with this guy just outside, but I didn’t. I tried to shrug him off as one of the city’s peculiar sights. So I opened the gate, stepped through, shut it again, and walked briskly down the steps, and started to get into my car.
Then I noticed that the man was pointing at me. His hand was shaking, not from cold, but for gentle emphasis, as if to say, yes, I know you. I know everything.
I got into the car quickly, slammed the door shut, and locked it, then looked up to see the stranger walking away from me toward the end of the block. I watched him go until he was around the corner. Then I started the car. When I got to that corner, I looked for him, but he was gone.
There. There, too, it began.
* * * *
Joe Meese lived in the Germantown section of the city. It was an easy drive, the streets empty because of the weather. Joe’s street was lined with trees, so many of them that in the darkness and the wind they whipped and writhed and swayed like waves in a hurricane. The rain came in curtains, then sleet again, rattling like pebbles on the car’s roof.
I ran to Joe’s front porch, rang the bell, and stood there shivering, nervously hopping up and down, muttering to myself, “Come on. Come on—”
There was a familiar barking on the other side of the door. Heavy claws scratched wood. It was Woof, the Meeses’ oversized setter/collie/whatever. If I stood on tiptoe I could see the eager brown-and-white face staring up at me through the door’s glass panels.
“Hey! Bark louder. Make them let me in.”
The tone of the barking changed, no longer a challenge, but instead an expectant yelping.
“Glad to see you, too. Now, make enough noise so Joe can hear you.”
The dog obliged, and I rang the bell again.
The door swung open, and there was Joe, cigarette in one hand, beer in the other.
He didn’t stand aside. I made to step past him, into the house.
“Jesus, Joe, you pick the damndest nights—”
His hand slammed into my chest, cigarette and all.
“Just one moment, buddy. Where do you think you’re going?”
“What?”
I was so flabbergasted I didn’t know what to say. I just let him push me back through the doorway.
“I said, what do you want here, mister?”
“But—but—”
“Look, whoever you are, I don’t know who you are or why you’re here, but I’ll just have to ask you to leave or—”
The dog jumped up, trying to lick my face. Joe shoved it aside with his foot, and said, “Sit!” very firmly. Woof sat, looking up at me longingly.
“If this is some kind of joke,” I managed to say, “I don’t get it, Joe. Please stop.”
“I don’t get it either,” he said, pushing me back into the rain. I could tell by his voice and his face that this was not a joke, that he was on the edge of being scared and trying not to show it. And in his eyes, there was no recognition at all.
“Joe—”
“You must have come to the wrong house. This must be a mistake,” he said.
He slammed the door in my face.
I stood there in the rain, looking no doubt as lost as the old man I’d seen in front of my own house. What had happened was so contrary to all expectations that I didn’t feel anything just yet. My mind tried to shut it all out while my body went on auto-pilot, and the next thing I knew, I was sitting in my car, staring up at a streetlight through the rain as it rippled down the windshield.
I sat there—I don’t know how long—just numb, trying to cling to the feeble excuse that it was all an extraordinarily tasteless joke, for all Joe Meese had never been one to play stupid jokes, and, in any case, he wasn’t that good an actor; or that somehow, inexplicably, I had lost my way in the dark and the rain (or maybe bratty kids had turned the street signs around) and found myself on a very similar street, but not the right street, and by one of those incredible coincidences which would be rejected by Ripley’s Believe It Or Not for implausibility, there just happened to be a total stranger living there who looked exactly like my long-time office buddy, Joe Meese.
* * * *
There was a lighted window at the end of the street. I leaned forward, peering through the rain, and recognized the grocery store at the corner. Often, during Joe’s parties, someone had been sent to that store to pick up extra dip or ice or whatever.
Almost before I realized I was doing it, I got out of the
