But I could think of no scenario whereby I stood to gain anything by opening the door. I had read in my impressionable youth too many crime novels not to know that these things always go awry, that certain doors one should never open. So I left, stuffing the paper cone into my pocket, wiping the poignet free of my fingerprints on the way out, leaving my first ex-wife, dead or living, to her fate.
In subsequent days, driving, I have had a great deal of time to consider my actions. In one respect I was correct to remain in ignorance, to avoid precipitating myself into a difficult situation. Yet in another respect, had I opened that door, I would at least know what was on the other side, might at least have some vague sense of why I am now being pursued. As it stands, my first ex-wife, like Schrödinger’s famous and long-suffering cat, seems a creature flickering between life and death, neither alive nor dead — which is to say at once both alive and dead. She is the worst kind of ghost. I would be lying if I did not confess to feeling haunted by her, feeling her presence close to me, almost just over my shoulder sometimes, as I drive. Taking that into account, you might say that, yes, perhaps, in a manner of speaking, I am being pursued by all three of my ex-wives.
I did not open the door. Instead, I fled. I would, I thought, just clamber into my car and regain my seaside town as quickly as possible. The sooner I fled, the less chance I would have, so my reasoning went, of being implicated in whatever had happened behind the door. There were, admittedly, the several villagers to whom I had spoken in order to get directions, but there was nothing I could do about them. And I should explain — and would in fact have explained at the outset were it not that the strain and exhaustion of being subject to pursuit have made me less methodical than I habitually am — that I had taken steps upon my initial contact with these villagers to misdirect them: a slightly altered appearance, a bit of mud smeared to obscure the license number and throw into doubt the car’s nation of origin.
Perhaps you, sitting beside me as I drive, feel you deserve an explanation. But no, wait, I look beside me and see not a flesh-and-blood human but only my overnight bag: no one sits beside me. I am, as the French say, parlant tout seul, speaking all alone. No explanation is needed. Suffice it to say that after three wives I have become a careful man. Knowing my first ex-wife capable, quite frankly, of virtually anything, and my other two ex-wives cut of equally ruthless cloth, I would have been a fool not to take every precaution. Though I shall be the first to admit that these actions may strike others, at least those not privy to my life-experience, as an indication of culpability. But culpable of having done what? What, in fact, actually happened? And isn’t anything, cast in the wrong light, an indication of culpability?
Would it help if I were to swear to you, by the deceased individual of your choice, that I had nothing to do with my first ex-wife’s demise, assuming she is in fact dead?
No, it would not help, because you do not exist. I am speaking only to myself. I am speaking all alone.
One becomes so easily distracted. A part of oneself must watch the road, follow its twists and turns. What is left of one’s mind, stripped of sleep, half-taken with paying attention to the car behind, the pursuing car, when there is a pursuing car, is prone to follow its own path. I have smoked a cigarette, a Dunhill, a favorite of my second wife, one of six cigarettes remaining to me, and feel now slightly light-headed but a little better, a little more focused. This feeling, surely, will not last for long.
But for the moment here we are in the past again, leaving my first ex-wife’s house for the first time, driving as quickly as we can without drawing attention to ourselves — same muddied license plate, same altered appearance, perhaps just a bit of panic, perhaps even the vague desire to turn around and go back, to open the bedroom door, consequences be damned. We have left, or rather I have left, the alpine town, am beginning to wend my way homeward, when I catch a brief glister in my rearview mirror. At first I pay no attention, then it comes again, flashing across my eye, and then yet again, until at last, forced to take a closer look, I see sunlight glinting off the hood of a car. I adjust my mirror and think no more of it — I am after all on a road, cars are to be expected. Yet when after a number of divagations and turnings and accelerations it is still with me, I begin to pay it more heed. Can it be that I am being followed? I slow to allow the car to pass and it does so, barreling perilously around me on a curve, the sun slung upon its side window in such fashion that I cannot catch a glimpse of its driver. And then it is gone.
Enough of the present tense. The car was gone. I relaxed. I crossed the border. Anything to declare? No, nothing to declare. I continued my route down toward the next border, the next country.
I had been driving for some time when I realized, of a sudden, that a car was behind me and that it had in fact been behind me for quite some time. Was this the same car? Perhaps. Or perhaps the same color but a slightly different model. What had the other car been? I had already forgotten — once it had passed me, there seemed no reason to keep it in mind. Was the color really the same after all or merely similar? Or was it the same color but simply cast slightly differently in the declining sun? Perhaps, I told myself, I should take a circuitous route, just to be safe.
I turned down a smaller road, followed it. The other car followed me at first, but as my route became increasingly convoluted, it disappeared. So, not followed after all. I was relieved, but also, as it turned out, lost.
At first I thought it would be easy to get back to something I would recognize. Indeed, though I had engaged in more and more erratic maneuvers to shake my imagined (so I believed at the time) pursuers, I had also carefully noted landmarks — a fountain, a hotel sign, the name of a restaurant reminiscent of my second wife’s pet name, and so forth. Yet as I tried to make my way free of a drab little neighborhood without streetlights that bordered on what appeared to be an industrial wasteland, I had difficulty sorting the landmarks back into a coherent pattern. Thus I knew that, yes, somewhere I had passed that hotel with a stylized goose upon its sign, but not what to look for next nor where to go to find it. The darkness, too, impeded me, and by the time I decided it would be better to stop at the goose inn and spend the night, begin again by morning light, I could not find it. In the end, nearly out of fuel, I pulled up beside a well-manicured hedge, turned off the car, and slept.
Shall I tell you my dreams? Surely they had some effect on me, perhaps at the very least can account for the fact that I awoke more exhausted than I had been when I went to sleep, my back and neck sore, my eyes feeling as if someone had attempted to dig them out with a rusty spoon. There were dreams, of course, of pursuit, the activities of the day simply continuing into my sleep, dreams of constantly staring into the rearview mirror, depressing the gas pedal, turning, turning. There were dreams, too, in which I watched a hand, clearly male, compose the letter putatively from my wife — again no surprise there, and nothing extraordinary: hardly worth mentioning. The third dream, too, I realize now, is of the same sort, but since I have begun and since it was both the least recurrent and the most vivid of the three, I shall share it with you.