MY STRANGER
By Will Hodgkinson
I see him first through the window of the cafe. He is waiting for his bus; I am waiting for my coffee. Rain distorts my view, but I notice him at once. I can’t say why, not exactly. You never can, I suppose. Never can articulate why those random details---the pimpled face, the tapping foot, the paperback jutting from the handbag---seize your attention, provoke your curiosity, make you pause and see for the first time. Nothing distinguishes these details from the million others that constitute the gray-toned blur of everyday through which we all pass. Yet we notice them all the same. Like a camera, our gaze focuses for an instant in the blur and picks out that one particular, all the more conspicuous for its anonymity.
It’s the hair this time. Yes, that’s it. Rain-darkened, his hair is the same color as mine. A rust tone, too subdued to be ginger, too brash to be brown. The man is facing away from the window; I can see only the back of his head. But it is enough. The hair has curled in the rain. A single curl, lying hook-shaped on the freckled nape of his neck. I touch the back of my own head, feel the same curl, damp on the nape of my own neck, trace its same hook-shape.
Panic grips me. I look around, startled, certain the stranger will be standing behind me, watching the back of my head as I am watching his. There is no one, of course; I am the only customer. The espresso machine seethes in the quiet. Steam puffs and fades, puffs and fades. A fly taps at the display case. I turn back to the window. The hook of hair snags my attention once more. Hunching forward at the counter, I wipe condensation off the glass, the better to observe him. He stands alone, my stranger, straight-backed even in the downpour. He is wearing an old-fashioned trench coat, black nylon, belted at the waist. Noir chic, favored by black-and-white gumshoe and playground flasher alike. Rainwater beads on his shoulders, each drop distinct, each its own point of frost-white light. I can almost count those drops. Despite the quickening rain, I know their number will not vary. I expect a briefcase, at the very least a rolled newspaper, but he has neither. Nor is his head bowed in serene contemplation of his phone. No: he stands alone, gazing off across the street, waiting. As am I.
The bus arrives, surfacing out of its spray. Its lighted windows draw alongside the cafe. Behind them, I can see no silhouettes, no other strangers for my gaze to find. There is only him, and me, separated by an inch of glass, a foot of rain, nothing more. But now he is leaving. I tense, watching as he steps from the curb, watching as he climbs the steps, watching as the doors close behind him. I wait for him to reappear, half expecting him to have vanished, for the doors to have closed him off from me for good. A moment later a window halfway down the bus frames his silhouette. As straight as before, as anonymous, as distinct. I breathe out and my view clouds with my breath. The bus is moving, sliding with the rainwater on the glass, lengthening like a passing train. For an instant, the silhouette doubles, redoubles, flashing once in each window in turn before the bus pulls away from the curb and vanishes into the rain. I am sitting alone once more. I can hear my heart in my ears, beating to the tap, tap, tap of the fly against the display case. My hands have gone as damp as my hair.
“Sir...?”
The barista is calling my name.
When I return with my coffee, the window has misted over, graying the gray street still further. Still, I squint through the glass, as if expecting the bus to have come back, my stranger to still be waiting for it, but of course, the sidewalk is empty. Sipping from the Styrofoam cup, I lean back from the counter. My coffee tastes of burned rubber. I don’t mind. The taste reassures me; it promises a return to my old routine. My heart slows; the fly has stopped tapping. Either it has flown away or it has died.
I finish my coffee, drawing out each sip, watching the condensation thicken on the window. I can no longer make out individual droplets. The condensation is a single film, gray and opaque as frost. I look down instead, at my empty cup, at the brown smudge of my lip on the rim, the illegible name scratched on the side.
Fingerprints overlay the counter, one superimposed on the other, as if in imperfect duplication of some lost original. I press my own fingers, still warm from the cup, still damp from my sweat, down on the counter. My prints linger a moment, spreading, rainbow-sheened, each whorl distinct against the layered blur beneath. Then they fade: duplicates once more. Behind me, the fly, or perhaps another, begins to tap again.
That night I wait by my window for the bus to return. My apartment overlooks the street. A fourth-floor unit. Top floor in the building, middle of the row, a half-block farther on from the cafe. But, if I sit caddy-corner to my living-room window, I can look out over the corner bus-stop where I first glimpsed him. The solitary streetlamp casts a pool of light into which any disembarking passengers would step, like actors into the spotlight. At least now I do not have to worry about visibility. The rain has coalesced into a pearly, Londonesque mist that enhances rather than obscures my view. Against that mist, he will stand out, crepe-stark, all the more vivid in shadow than in light, his curl of hair an iron-black barb jutting from his neck.
I rest my forehead against the pane, letting the cold soothe the vague ache between my eyes. The ache is always with me here, in my apartment. It hums in tandem with the walls, as if my brain is tuning to their subliminal frequency. I don’t know what causes it. Nothing disturbs the silence of my apartment: no throbbing backbeat from upstairs, no next-door arguments, no breaking dishes, no slamming doors---not even the raucous seesaw of bedsprings during sex. Sound comes only from the walls themselves---that subliminal headache hum---but whether the hum is in fact sound or its disquieting absence, I do not know. I do not even know if I have neighbors. Logic tells me I do, but I have never seen them, never even glimpsed a slamming door, never heard a turning lock, never sensed a presence other than my own behind me in the hall. In my building, with its identical carpeted corridors, its omnipresent new-car smell, its ever-humming walls, anonymity becomes obscurity. Like a prisoner, I have only a number to distinguish me. My door bears a black plastic 8, in whose polished contours my distorted reflection greets me every evening---and leaves me every morning.
I see the bus before I hear it. Its headlights glow in the mist, like the lights of a still-distant ship coming into port. I draw back from the window, dabbing away the smear my forehead has left. The bus draws level with the corner. I hear the air-brake go: an in-drawn hiss, like water hitting a hot pan. The doors are opening. I wait, leaning forward in my chair, the pain between my eyes sharpening.
No one gets off; the pool of light remains empty. The bus idles a moment more, the bass of its engine vibrating in my head, underpinning the maybe-there hum of the walls. Then the doors close and the bus moves away into the darkness. The mist hovers against the streetlight glow: an unused backdrop, ready for its cue. My headache dulls back to the silent hum. I close my eyes, listening, as if my effort to hear will recall the bass of the engine, the hiss of the air-break, the click-swish of the opening doors. The silence persists; the walls broadcast their own mute frequency. I open my eyes. In the pool of light, faint against the mist, I see, imagine I see, his silhouette, the gray space it will fill. I trace its outline in the condensation on the window: the straight back, the upraised head, the hair curling like an inverted question mark.
Leaning back, I appraise my work. My sketched silhouette floats in the window: black strokes on gray. It is already fading against the darkness, blending into the grayness like my fingerprints on the cafe counter. But I don’t care now. When I close my eyes, I can still see it, branded white against the black of my lids.
He is waiting again, my stranger. I am too, sitting at my usual spot at the counter. Outside, yesterday’s weather continues----or repeats. He is wearing the same Noir trench coat, its shoulders stippled with the same frost-white raindrops. As before he is looking neither down nor up, only ahead. As before, we are alone. I hear the barista calling me, but I pay no attention. I listen, my hands splayed on the counter, my fresh prints glowing beneath my fingertips, sustained by my touch.
As soon as I hear the approaching engine, I move. Turning from the window, I sidle along the counter to the door. He is shuffling away, stepping up off the curb. His hook of hair tugs me forward. Unresisting, I step out into the rain. The bus idles, steaming, its doors hanging open. No one gets off. My stranger has vanished inside. Squinting, I see him framed in the same window as yesterday, black against the yellow light. The steam blears my view; his profile ripples and pools like spilled ink. The doors are still hanging open, the engine still vibrating in my head.
The bus driver doesn’t look at me when I climb the step. I hear the doors close behind me, but I don’t look back. I don’t need to. No one else has gotten on; no one else will. Still not looking at me, the driver gestures at the fee-box. I reach into my pocket. I don’t remember taking anything with me, but I already know what I will find. The quarter is warm in my hand, damp with my sweat, bearing a perfect rainbow shard of my thumbprint. For no reason at all, (but is there ever any reason for what our minds snag on?) I think of carnivals. Lighted merry-go-rounds whirling in the dark. The fortune-teller’s tent. Cross my palm with silver. The quarter disappears into the slot; I don’t look at it.
As I start down the aisle, I keep my gaze fixed ahead, past where my stranger is sitting. He hovers on the edge of my vision as I approach: a formless shadow-blur, like a migraine spot, growing and pulsing. I don’t look. The blur nears, nears, passes. Then I am walking on, and my vision is clear once again.
I choose a seat at the back of the bus. The opposite side of the aisle from where he is sitting. I have the row to myself; the bus is half-empty. Hunching over the seat-back in front of me, I glimpse his profile. He is turned towards his window; as before, as always, only the back of his head remains visible, its hair-hook cocked at a rakish uptilt.
The air-break hisses; overhead the intercom mutters an indecipherable destination. We jar into motion. I watch the cafe window, now empty, slide away, stretching and blurring until it vanishes into the grayness. Almost at once, the rain thickens, steel-drumming on the roof. The streets dissolve, one into the next, into the next. I keep my gaze on the route-map bolted beneath my windowsill. Four stops separate us from Metro Station, which glows like a tick-bite in the center of its scarlet ring. After Metro, another four stops, descending in reverse order, bring us back to the beginning of the route once more. I wonder at which stop my stranger will alight. The first four are too close. No one comes here: they only come back. He’ll wait until uptown at least. Reassured, I settle into my seat, lulled by the engine, the jolt, swing, jolt of our progress, the stranger’s profile unmoving at its window.
The bus stops. Another streetcorner. Another front window. Another silhouette behind it. The name on the awning is so faded, I cannot read it, cannot tell if this is a store or a second cafe, if the silhouette is a customer or a mannequin. The doors open. Two commuters get on; no one gets off. The silhouette in the front window watches us leave, not moving.
All the passengers are silent, their faces eel-sheened in the light of their phones. I can hear only the slop of breath, the click-click-click of texting, and, above it all, the hypertensive beat of the rain. Body heat condenses, fogging the windows. The air smells of wet dog. At the front of the bus, someone sneezes. No one blesses them.
We stop again. Once more the doors open; once more two commuters get on. My stranger remains seated, turned away as before, looking out his now-opaque window.
At the third stop, the subtractions begin. Two passengers get off; no one gets on. At the fourth stop, the number of departures doubles: four get off; no one gets on. My stranger, good boy that he is, doesn’t move, doesn’t even glance around. From my vantage point, I can’t tell if he is asleep or awake. It doesn’t matter, though. If he is asleep, he will wake, and when he moves, I will move with him.
Ahead, the dome of Metro Station looms out of the murk like a concrete sunrise. The bus empties. I watch the other passengers shuffle out single-file, heads bowed, eyes averted, like convicts beginning their sentence. I don’t watch my stranger; I don’t need to. He and I are travelling together, and I now know our destination.
The day is already darkening when the bus pulls back in at the cafe. Sound recurs: bass of engine, hiss of air brake, click-swish of doors. We are the only two passengers left. No one is waiting at the stop. The cafe window is still glowing, but I can make out no silhouettes behind it, not even the barista’s.
My stranger gets up; I follow. On the sidewalk, he hesitates, his back to me. Standing on the bus’s bottom step, I hesitate too, waiting for him to decide. Will he go into the cafe, become the silhouette I had been, or will he just go on? He turns right, moving past the cafe. I step onto the curb, count (ten seconds, ten paces), and hurry after him. Behind me, the doors close and the bus leaves us both. The rain is lightening back to mist, graining the air like nacreous dust. Yet, like last night’s mist, it only enhances my vision. My stranger strides ahead, solid black against the soft gray.
The distance between us remains constant. The same half block’s length. This equilibrium unnerves me. We are like characters in a math problem, Jim and Bill, travelling in tandem, the one’s stride equaling the other’s. I imagine a line of silhouettes processing down this street. All spaced at the same half-block interval, one following the next and the next into infinity. I turn. There is no one, of course; we are the only pedestrians. There is no traffic either, no more buses materializing out of the rain. The street stretches behind me, block on empty block until it vanishes into the overcast, erased mid-perspective. We pass the front entrance of my own building without slowing, and turn the corner into the next street, just as empty as the first. I wonder where we are going. The buildings to either side have no signs, no advertisements, not even the pyrotechnic squiggle of a graffito. It is as if the overcast through which we are walking has solidified, walling us in.
My stranger pauses. I freeze, waiting for him to turn around, to call out. He doesn’t move, doesn’t look back. Only stands, facing forward, as though watching for a tardy friend. Then he turns, ducks to the right, and vanishes.
Fighting the impulse to run, I walk on. After ten paces I slow, turning like my quarry, half-expecting to encounter only a solid wall, and step into the alley, down which he has disappeared.
Green trash barrels line the cinderblock walls, narrowing the alley to an aisle no wider than the bus’s. My heart quickens with my stride. I can no longer see my Stranger, but I can hear his footsteps ahead, neither slower nor faster than before. The alley bends, doubling in on itself. I round the angle of it and see him ahead. Despite his sudden turn, he remains the same distance from me as before: a half-block, ten paces, always separate us. Our rhythm resumes. Silent behind him, I match his pace, stepping over puddles clouded with rainbow grease, my footfalls a perfect echo of his. I sense we are close. We are not slowing, but our strides have eased, become more fluid. This is a familiar route, I realize. He has made the same turn many times before, walked the same alley and arrived at the same place. His place, of course. His home. Following him, I feel a sense of vicarious recognition. The walls, the trash barrels, the rainbow-sheened puddles---these all have the too-slick tone of backdrop, of details noticed only when they are gone. They form my stranger’s backdrop, and now mine.
The alley opens into a courtyard, paved in pebbled cement flags. There are no benches, no fountains, no flower-tubs, yet neither is there the flamboyant squalor crime movies have taught me to expect in such places. No mounded trash bags, no busy rats, no whimpering junkies curled up in their rotting cardboard nests. Only us. Overhead, stainless steel ductwork frames a rectangle of blank sky: a gray mirror of the ground.
My stranger is crossing to the single door, anonymous as everything else, at the far end of the courtyard. He takes a key-ring from his pocket. Two keys on the ring; I hear the familiar jingle-plink. The same two keys I have: front door, apartment door. He holds the keys up to the light, picks one, and unlocks the door. Speeding up, I catch it before it closes, and slip in after him. The vestibule is empty. To the left are three elevators, their doors shut. To the right uncarpeted cement stairs lead up out of sight. Am I too late, has he taken the elevators? No: their numbered displays remain unlit. Then I hear his footsteps ascending. I climb, jumping every other step, aware of the same sense of detached familiarity I first felt in the alley. Yes, the raw cement steps, the mounted fire-extinguishers, the green-painted railing, more backdrop, which I both know and have never known. One landing, two. I hear his footsteps slowing above me; we are arriving.
At the third landing, I duck after him into the corridor. The sense of familiarity intensifies. Taupe-papered walls, lights in smoked-glass sconces, black-plastic numbers on the doors to right and left---yes, I have seen it all ten-thousand times, never seen it before. The carpet has a pattern of miniature blue-and-pink hexagons, which multiply with every step. He is ahead once again, leading the way, his silhouette wafting in the smoked light. I hurry after him, the corridor lengthening, the carpet buzzing underfoot with fine-grained color. The apartment numbers are falling like floors in a descending elevator: 30, 20, 15. I am almost running now, though the distance that separates us doesn’t shorten. Between my eyes, the pain begins, humming and sharpening.
My stranger stops. Straightbacked as ever, he stands gazing off down the corridor, just as he had gazed down the street, waiting for someone who never comes. Then he turns back to the door and puts his key in the lock. I see the door open, see my stranger step through it, see it close once more. The lock turns. The silence resumes. I stand alone in the corridor, staring at my reflection, smeared like a fingerprint in the upper curves of the black plastic 8. For a moment I consider knocking. I raise my fist, hold my knuckles against the 8, and open my hand again. My forehead pressed against my door, his door, our door, its smooth dulling the pain, I listen. As before, as always, I can hear only the walls, their mute hum in my head.
Back outside, I look up at the building. My window, mine no longer, glows yellow in the darkness, and silhouetted in it is my stranger. From my vantage point under the streetlight, his silhouette appears two-dimensional: a shadowman projected by my voyeur's gaze.
The cafe is dark; there is no one at the counter. Not yet. Only my reflection looks back at me in the misted window, as distorted as in the 8. I don’t recognize it, but I will. I will. Tomorrow. Yes, tomorrow. Turning from the cafe, I wait. My stranger will be watching, watching from that window behind me as he always does, and when the bus comes, he will see me for the first time.
Will Hodgkinson has had his fiction published in NORTHWEST REVIEW (2024), in 2025 issues of WORDPEACE, PORTLAND MONTHLY magazine, PONDER REVIEW and FJORDS REVIEW. His work has also been published multiple times in OFF THE COAST and in the anthology BELOW THE POVERTY LINE. Will’s interview with Noam Chomsky and Will’s reflection on that interview were published in BREAKWATER REVIEW; Will’s interview is archived at chomsky.info.org. He has recently graduated from Brandeis University magna cum laude and is in Graduate School in World History at Northeastern University.
