I AM THE OTHER

I used to lie beside her in the dark and gently put my hands over her eyes, then ask her to guess who, knowing she'd answer right away with a laugh--so quick, not a fraction of a second's pause or doubt--and then I'd be angry lying there, my brain churning, wondering how in just this time living together we'd come to know each other so thoroughly yet so falsely: the surfaces known, prisoners, so that when I touched her bent arm as she slept, tracing the delicate tendon below her wrist she'd say my name. In her sleep. It frightened me.

She was in a streetcar. The day was Viennese, people wore long coats, walked quickly. The old apartment buildings were darkening, windows glazed with the last gaudy light, the street sloping downward, bare trees like wrought iron figures; and I was standing on the corner, a bag full of groceries in my arms--tomatoes, I remember, a long loaf of bread. When the streetcar came gliding past me I caught sight of her face in the lighted window: her eyes grazed my features without coming to rest. I looked back at her feeling something like a draft of cool air, recognizing that for the moment I'd been erased; there was a strange wild feeling of lightness. Of course, I realized only seconds later, she must have been looking at her own reflection. The streetcar slid by, the bag was heavy in my arms. I pushed the paper to make it crinkle, running my fingers along its creases. I knew now what I wanted.

Because in the dark there would always be the sharp electric wakefulness, the prickling on my arms like a fire without heat as I lay there knowing I was imprisoned, that as I slept she might be dreaming of me, that just by touching her arm I could rouse my name like a fish from the depths of a murky pond. To be known so and not known at all--it unnerved me. I was a room through which, even in the dark, she could step confidently, avoiding the shapes that waited hidden in the blackness, curving, arched, sharp-pointed--all known. I would run my finger along the cage of my ribs, to the soft plain of my flattened stomach, knowing she knew each indentation, every change in texture, the temperature, the smell.

I began experimenting when we were alone. She reading, let's say, or looking out at the street. I tried erasing myself: The woman is alone in the room. I visualized it: She's looking out into the street. No one else is here. No one is sitting on the red sofa.

Did you say something? She'd turn sharply from the window, bored with the scene outside. Did you say something?

My head would pound savagely. Did you say something? Of course she knew me before she even touched me. Reaching, she would already feel what she reached for.

I could only look at the window where she no longer stood, hearing the metallic sigh of an unseen streetcar. It hadn't always been this way, had it? Had we ever been mysterious to each other?

Could it ever happen again?

I planned and planned. Lying beside her at night I tried out hypotheses, fictions and fantasies, masks, aliases--and I knew they'd all be unavailing. There was only one way to be certain.

Erasure had to come first.

* * *

No vacation of ours had been more calculated and thought-out--even she would have said so, not knowing all the calculations behind the calculations. This lake: remote, wild. The long Indian name. The sigh of the pines. So many stories, I said, so many strange tales.

She read the long name aloud, chanting its mysterious syllables. We were going over maps together, a thing we'd done so many times before. Familiar. I watched her wrist where the tendon moved under her skin. When it was quiet you could hear the whisper of passing traffic.

It sounds romantic, she said.

Yes, she loved me. But for me that love was tainted with knowing.

* * *

Remember, she called as I was leaving, it gets dark so fast up here. We were at that romantic lake. We heard the sigh of the pines, the loon's disturbing cry. Be back soon, she called. My hands gripped the wooden oars, I smelled the boat's paint, the fishy water. Mosquitoes hummed. Back soon.

Already I was alone in the boat, the steady splash and gurgle of the oars pulling me away. She stood a long time on the shore, her figure dissolving at last against the background of massed black pines.

Could I detect in her posture even then some intimation, I wondered. Was I known so thoroughly? I listened to the loon. Above the pines the sky was peach tinged with silver, a cold sky.

When I was far from shore I stopped rowing for a moment, I watched the surface of the lake quiet: it was the color of a knife's blade. Only then did I realize that what I was fleeing was not her knowledge of me but my knowledge of her: I was the one who knew what name she'd guess when my fingers covered her eyes. Now I was trying to reach some vantage point from which I could see her the way I wanted to see her.

Some vantage point more distant than the center of that lake.

* * *

I'm a careful and thorough planner--I foresaw even the unforeseen. It was exhilarating to be lost, though my flesh was cut and torn by the sharp branches, to hear myself panting, alone in a dark that wasn't home. Those first shivering hours--the terror and uncertainty, my cut skin smarting from the rips and tears, my twisted ankle throbbing--maybe they were the best of all.

Deep in the woods I remembered her looking up from the book. The lake, she read aloud, refuses to surrender its dead.

* * *

It was many days later when I came to a stop at last, as far from her as possible, in a country of huge trees, booted men in large trucks carrying timber that made the bridges shake. I took work at odd jobs, jobs that were beyond me. I ate poorly but I slept like a corpse. When the rainy season came the horizon was abruptly foreshortened: thick trees stopped my steps, there was a continual drizzle. The murky sky hung inches, it seemed, above my head.

I sat in a roadhouse watching a woman. She was by herself, listening to music on the jukebox. Her head, turned from me, was tilted as if she were looking for something. In the raw cold outside as I heard the music fade I watched a snake of mist curling off the highway and my heart jumped. I was free. Unknown.

But I knew this was only part of it.

My appearance was being transformed: I grew more shaggy, heavy work altered the way I walked. I was certain, looking into the mirror, that the very color of my eyes had changed.

Fatigue and inattention caused the accident. I yowled with shock, seeing my fingers gone. The pain--there would be enough of it--would come later, slow thunder to the blade's lightning stroke. A niagara of blood was pouring from my fist.

For a time I was despondent. Look, I told her in my dream, I wanted to touch you while you slept. When I woke I sometimes kept my eyes closed for a long while, thinking that when I opened them the two fingers would be there.

But I was strong, time moved like healing music. I knew it had all been for the best. Eventually I ran the fingers of my good hand over the altered geography of the other. I was fascinated: how strange she'd find that knobby ridge of flesh.

I seemed to see her bent over the table she used as a desk when she brought her work home, a page of typescript illuminated by the little lamp. Without taking her hands off the page she reaches out to touch my hand.

Of course I'd intended from the start to see her again but there'd been no timetable. I never planned the call. It was already some time since my disappearance, I was used to my new hand; change didn't spill out of it anymore. I jostled the coins in my palm, watching the flash as they jingled. Still, I must always have been hearing a voice asking about that new world back there, the world without me. It must have buzzed incessantly beneath the sounds that others could hear. The coins would stop jingling and I'd look at them there.

I knew I should have waited but I'd been drinking, I stupidly dialed the number I remembered so well.

A voice answered: hers. Timbre, color--how thoroughly I recalled it.

I said nothing.

Hello? she called into the phone.

I remained silent.

Hello? And then she said my name. Is it you?

After I hung up I was a little crazy. I remember driving my shoulder into one of those thick trees, again and again. My lip was cut, my hand was swollen. Whoa, there, someone was saying to me.

It's too soon, I kept thinking, too soon.

I knew then, standing there, a thick hand on my numb, heaving shoulder, my breath condensing on the damp air, that this would take time. Of course, I told myself quietly, habits--walking through the dark room without bumping into anything--paths would need time to become overgrown. I'd be a fool to think it could happen quickly. It had been mere months after all, drips from a faucet. I thought of her so far away, the phone still in her hand, saying my name aloud in the darkened room. My thoughts weren't without affection. I couldn't blame her, I blamed myself for my impatience. Even lovers can't be hasty.

Jesus Christ, what have you done to yourself, I heard a voice saying and I realized I was tasting my own blood.

I'm all right, I said with a little laugh, driving my hand across the rough bark of the tree. I was already calm, knowing it hadn't been me but the liquor. There was a feeling of peace and ringing clarity. I'm all right, I repeated. I knew it was true.

For days I meditated, planning my next move. I didn’t wish her any harm, I was sorry to have caused her pain as she stood in that darkened room, my name like shattered glass in her throat when she tried to say it once again. I never wanted that to happen, I wanted anything but that. What, I asked myself, what was it that I wanted?

I was in a room. Clothes piled in a corner, untidy, delicious, a slice of silver under the shade, the hiss of drizzle always--the place I'd chosen. The doors stuck from the dampness, trucks thundered over the highway, then there was the radio's dim crackle. I looked at my shirt pouring like an arrested waterfall down the musty chair. It was all so simple, I had only to be patient.

My head pushed against the pillow, I felt my thick beard, ran my maimed hand through thinning hair. Far away even now she was being distracted, hooks and eyes coming undone: newspapers, television, the clock. A dog barks in the street, followed by silence. A child passes on rollerskates, a friend tells a complicated story. She dreams of the dog, she remembers the child. All this, I knew, undoing the weave of me.

I stayed in that room, motionless for hours at a time. The phone rang unanswered. I knew my job was being lost. I ate from cans without warming the food. It was a keen pleasure. I left the cans in the sink. I lay on the bed looking into the room, the brightening walls, the darkening walls, the gray lump of my untouched shirt disappearing in the dark. I ran my hand over the wrinkled sheet.

All I needed, the voice told me, were years. Trucks moved along the invisible roads all through the night.

But I couldn't stay, I'd seen to that. I needed changes. Soon I'd be gone, this place of thick trees behind me forever. Someone else would step from the roadhouse months from now and, seeing the mist curling off the highway, think his own thoughts.

* * *

I stood at the edge of a road writhing with heat. The bus whined toward the horizon. What is it that we want, I wondered.

Life here was ice and fire. All through the night I worked in a building that hummed with chilled air: bells sounding softly, endless passageways covered with thick carpets. Standing in a corridor you could tell yourself: outside are thick trees, mist curling off a highway; or: outside a streetcar is passing. Though even as you said it your skin knew there was only the most desolate of places, burnt stretches of desert, wrinkled mountains, miles of nothing.

I waited for the moment of release, leaving the frigid hum of that honeycomb of corridors, stepping into the fire that all but lifted me off my feet. The few people in the streets wore dark glasses but I kept my eyes uncovered, I wanted the glare to ache and scorch, I trembled under waves of unbelievable heat.

Everywhere there was burning sand and burning glass. Windows blazed, smooth walls flashed, metal roofs shimmered into insubstantiality. Long cars moved by slowly, reflecting onlookers in their darkened panes. I watched a man looking out at me: he held a bag of groceries in his arms. I knew him. The long car crawled by, silent as a dream. The man moved out of the glass. The street broiled.

I watched television indiscriminately, voraciously, inattentively. I surrounded myself with images: the handsome private detective frowning, a well-dressed woman turning suddenly away.

I dreamed of the detective, I dreamed of the woman. I dreamed I was standing on a corner as a streetcar made its slow descent down a hill. No one else was there, everything was black and empty. My heart pounded, my fists were clenched, there wasn't a sound to be heard. Then a snake of lights was passing, window after glowing window, and I seemed to hold my breath like a singer sustaining the longest of notes; and then I was looking at the apartment buildings across the way, a solid wall of blackness, the far side of a canyon, and I couldn't remember if there'd been any passengers.

In other dreams the detective would frown, the woman would turn suddenly away.

Years passed. I saw the woman hire the detective. I saw the detective realize why she'd hired him. I saw her response. I'd seen it all before. I studied the mirror, tracing the subtle alterations of my face. My eyes had definitely changed: something of the opacity of those thick trees, the hard glare of the desert had gotten into them. All over there were the marks of time.

I saw many women, with little desire but with an insatiable need. I like that stump, more than one of them would tell me. Touch me with your stump.

One day I was walking in the blazing street and somebody hit me. Blows to the head, a man was trying to kill me. I saw the flash of the knife. There was sky, shining glass. I was on the hot pavement, I heard a groan, felt something wet against my mouth. Only milk, I realized, tasting it now--it had spilled from my groceries. Then I seemed to leave myself: I watched the man tear the wallet free, I saw the stripe of red on my face, saw the man running down the street. I knew even then I was going to be all right. But seeing myself lying on the pavement I was suddenly fearful for her.

The man was crazy, the nurse said. Another one on drugs. She looked at me. We weren't sure about you: you were out a long time.

The doctor stood before the x-ray. My skull was the color of smoke. Very complicated, he said. You're lucky. The scar, we agreed, might have been worse.

Maybe you should take a little vacation, he said.

I knew where I was going.

Still, doubts skittered across my brain constantly, I couldn't sleep. How did I know she was still there, I asked myself, looking into the dark, hearing the hum of the air conditioner. She was no longer in the phone book, I'd discovered, but there could be many explanations for that. I listened to the air conditioner. She might have had an accident, I was well aware.

I knew I had to leave at once.

* * *

When I arrived in that city I had the sense of moving through dreams. Restlessly I kept walking, trying to calm myself. I had no destination: I crossed bridges, hurried through parks, passed lighted hospitals and dim churches, plunged into downtown streets crowded with people. Nothing could quell the excitement, the ache: I missed grievously the places I'd come from. I moved swiftly, no browser, no loiterer. I went everywhere: grime surrounded me, I kicked away litter and trash. Dogs growled, baleful eyes looked down from stoops.

At last my planless wanderings brought me, as I knew they would, to the familiar area of apartment buildings, a sloping street. The day was turning bitter, a bruise of cloud covered the sky, the wind bit at my exposed skin. Occasionally hard cold pellets of rain fell. I wasn't dressed for this weather.

I was across the street from where we'd lived, in a little store on the corner that smelled of cigars. Lights were on in that building, lights were on in that window. I knew I had to find out if she was still there to quiet these voices that were shouting inside me. I looked through the dirty glass, mesmerized by that light near the top of the building across the street.

When I felt the damp cold on my face I realized I'd left the store and I was moving, or rather was being moved: swift, short paces becoming a trot; and before I knew it I'd broken into a run through the now pelting rain, dashing across the wide boulevard heedless of the clanging bell, realizing only after it happened that I'd barely jumped out of the path of the streetcar, which slid by me now, metal against metal, with the breathless hiss of the guillotine blade.

I was already pushing at the outer door, I was panting. Then all at once I was inside, the sounds changing when the door closed behind me, a dim brownish light, a smell I remembered.

I was breathing quickly as I scanned the nameplates, I could taste the metal slabs on my tongue. I saw immediately that where our names had been there was now the name of a physician. I studied it, silently pronouncing its many syllables. My successor. Could it be, I wondered, that she was living with him. I touched the metal. In the midst of my excitement there was calm: I acknowledged that I would have to watch and wait.

Before long, like a private detective on television, I was making discreet inquiries. There was a new super in the building, I'd noticed, and I asked him some questions. I discovered there was no connection between her and the doctor of many syllables. She'd moved, I was told. Where? The super didn't know, he barely remembered her. He had a thick ginger mustache and faraway blue eyes. People come and go, he said, impatient to get back to his tabloid. It's a big city.

As we were talking I saw out of the corner of my eye another tenant coming down the stairs. He was a big man with a florid face and short blonde hair, he was wearing a dark expensive overcoat and I guessed that he'd put on ten pounds since I'd seen him last. We hadn't known each other but we'd frequently exchanged greetings. Suddenly I had to know how thoroughly I'd managed to erase myself. Do you have the time? I asked, stopping him. He tried not to look at my hand as he gave me the answer. I caught his eye. Are you sure? I asked and he repeated it impatiently, then scuttled off.

Why didn't you ask me? the super complained.

Now I felt triumphant and defeated at once. The man in the overcoat hadn't had an inkling, his eyes had been empty of the slightest recognition. But though I was lost to him she was even more lost to me. She could be anywhere. I imagined her driving at that very moment through the country of thick trees, or stopping before the building of many corridors in the desert.

Yes, I realized, she could be anywhere. But she might be here too, I reminded myself. As the super had said, it was a big city. It was certainly possible, wasn't it, that after a period of waiting she didn't want to continue living in rooms that held so many disturbing memories.

I stood on a bridge and shivered. Cars were crawling along the river, the sky was the color of paper, the water was gray as cement. Ladders of light burned in the skyscrapers on the shore. Soon there would be snow. This city had become strange to me. The shapes of these bridges were troubling, this river, where did it go? Was the woman I looked for somewhere among the lights that climbed or the lights that crawled along the river? My shoulders were hunched together, the wind drove into my back like an ice-pick but suddenly, looking into the lights on the shore I felt a sense of certainty. I knew I had to stay here and look for her. I knew I'd find her.

* * *

I went to every part of the city. I walked, I rode on busses and streetcars, underground and above ground, looking without seeming to look. There was always the newspaper, the magazine, but I was a reader of faces. Was it possible that she looked different, had the years inflicted on her the kinds of accidents that had come my way? Scanning the page, I looked into eyes. Though I practiced in secret it didn't surprise me how many of my subjects were uncomfortably aware that someone was watching them. Their heads would suddenly turn as if they wanted to ask, Did you say something?

But my observation was swift and thorough, I knew who I was looking for. The instant it was clear that somebody was not she I withdrew my attention.

I expected disappointment. I was a man searching the brilliant dazzle of the night sky for a single star, incredibly distant, hidden somewhere in that dense, pulsing mass of light.

And yet I found her. My head lowered as I hurried through the rain, I bumped into someone. Excuse me, she said and I answered. In the driving rain as I stood pressed against the lighted window of the downtown shop I saw her go into the subway entrance. I was absolutely calm--no pounding heart, no rushing blood. I listened to the rain striking the pavement. There was no doubt. Even after she'd disappeared I remembered the hurried walk. I tried to reconstruct her expression at the moment of our encounter. Had there been, I wondered, the slightest degree of recognition? As she ran toward the dark hole of the subway entrance was she too remembering?

I was a practiced pursuer. Amid the packed bodies and the smell of wet clothes I was able to make my way into the same car she'd boarded. I had a perfect vantage point: people pressed against me like trees; I could see where she got off without her seeing me.

After a few lurching stops beneath the streets the car climbed out of a tunnel and on to the surface. It was the same line that passed our old apartment building. As the streetcar began its descent of the long hill above that building I remembered my time there, looking from across the street, I remembered the sense of mystery I'd felt as I watched that light burning in our old window, even now I could recall the thrill of seeing the many-syllabled name of the doctor--saying the name in my mind brought back the smell of that vestibule. I couldn't see through the other people how she reacted as we passed that corner. Were there memories of our life together, the many times we'd looked at maps, planning vacations?

I left the streetcar one stop after she got off--it wasn't far from the old neighborhood, as things turned out. Within a day I was able to discover where she lived, in a building much like the one we'd been in. It didn't take long to find a place for myself almost directly across the street.

* * *

Now I can watch her constantly. I can see the subtle changes around the eyes that the years have brought. There's something too in the way she walks, a faint hesitation, invisible, I'm sure, to all but me, like someone who's had an accident and isn't as confident with her foot as she used to be. I wonder if that's what happened. Or if in fact she's always walked that way.

Sometimes I see her at her window, looking out into the street, and she'll turn suddenly away. Is someone in the room with her? Is she alone? I watch with fascinated excitement, my heart pounds when I see her without expecting to. Now, I tell myself, I have what I wanted, I have a chance to watch her without me.

I've seen her with men. Several of them have come by. My guess, judging from the way she looked when I saw her enter a car with one of them, a pleasant-enough looking fellow, taller and stockier than I am, is that there's something of that same hesitation, that sense that however things begin, she can't forget that they might end badly.

I've heard this note in her laugh. I happened to be passing the entrance to her building one evening. It was dark and I was well concealed. The man she was coming down the steps with must have said something funny and she laughed--I remembered that laugh so well--but it ended a second before I'd expected it to end, as though the pedal of the piano were suddenly lifted. Only I noted that, I thought. And she.

I can imagine the inside of her apartment. Very much like ours. When I see her standing at the window looking into the street--thinking what? I sometimes ask myself, did I ever know, was she thinking thoughts like mine?--I can fill the room behind her, the red sofa, the coffee table.

She dresses well, very much in her own style, as I remember--she always liked colorful scarves. Every day I learn more about her.

Yet I feel the urge to push further all the time, to know this unknown woman more thoroughly. Now that I've found her I seem to have to take more and more risks. I had a cup of coffee one Saturday morning in a diner I'd seen her enter. We were in the same room for fifteen minutes, breathing the same air, though she had her head in a book almost the whole time. Yet once, when she lifted her eyes for a moment and looked quickly around the room there was no recognition. I smiled to myself.

There are places in the neighborhood where the two of us go shopping. I followed her one day, watched her examine some tomatoes and put them back. Seconds later I did the same thing.

These tomatoes are a little soft, I wanted to say to her before she'd got too far away.

Yes, she'd laugh, turning to look.

But sometimes if you use them right away the soft ones are fine, I'd tell her, coming a step closer.

She might turn down the corners of her mouth as if she were about to say I live alone, I couldn't possibly use them up before they went bad. She wouldn't say that, though. She'd just tilt her head and say No, these are too soft. She might be torn between wanting to get away from an uninvited encounter and maybe, just maybe, a faint curiosity. Are you some kind of expert on tomatoes? she might ask, laughing quietly.

I'd turn the tomato around slowly in my good hand. As it caught the light it would look ripe, juicy, incredibly red. I'd gradually bring my other hand up for her to see in enough time so that she wouldn't have to show surprise. And maybe too she'd be listening to something in my voice that was like a song she couldn't quite remember. I'd laugh. I might have been thinking of potatoes, I'd say, not tomatoes, and she'd laugh at that, the pedal held down so that the laugh would continue.

* * *

--But would you? You didn't, of course, because I never said that about tomatoes. I just waited for you to make your purchase and leave before I followed a few minutes later, a bag of groceries in my arms. The lighted windows of a streetcar flashed by and you were entering the building across the street.

I stopped myself then but how can I say what I'll do next time when I feel this need to know more each day, not just the way you dress, where you live, how you laugh. I want to know more. Will I ever see you cry?

Because that was why I left you after all, wasn't it? To know you more, to know you beneath the weave of habit with which we covered ourselves. Taking myself out of your life was my way of trying to know you better, more deeply.

And now I'm impatient. One day I'll approach you. It may be in the grocery, it may be on a streetcar. I'll want to look directly into your eyes. Me: changed, cut, broken and healed, older; you: a question. A question I need to have answered.

I'll have that answer.

I dream of entering your apartment at night, like the private detective on television, of silently making my way to your bed. I know how you look when you sleep: curled, facing away from the window. I'll approach carefully until I'm beside you, then I'll put what fingers I have across your eyes.

And I'll whisper: Guess who?