Here I am back in my wife’s cabin once again, but this time I obey my curiosity and move toward the door, pursuing the line of nearly dried blood. My hand moves out to open the door, I push down the poignet, the door swings back, and what do I see inside but myself?
I awoke to the sun beryling off the windshield, a round, gouged circle of light. I felt a little shaken, tired, ready to return home. Clambering out, I urinated into the hedge, then washed my hands and face with water from a bottle taken from my overnight bag. I stretched and only then did I notice the car parked several dozen meters behind me, a car identical, more or less, to the car I thought had been following me the day before. There seemed a figure in the driver’s seat, or if not a figure perhaps only a raised headrest, the sun glinting off the dirty windshield making it difficult to see anything with certainty.
I climb into the car and begin to drive. The other car at first is not with me and then it is, unless it is another, similar car. It is there, then it is gone, then it is there again. I stop for fuel and see no car but then, once I am driving again, there it is, behind me. From time to time it becomes easy to believe I am not being followed, the pursuit being, I have now come to believe, extremely subtle, invisible more often than visible. The car sometimes freshly washed, sometimes covered with mud, the paint such that it catches the light differently at different times of the day, making me always think, Could that possibly be the car? Aren’t I mistaken? I keep changing my route, doubling back, the result being that by the time darkness falls I find myself farther from home than I was before.
I stop at a service station, fill the tank, buy a half-dozen bottles of water, bags of so-called crisps, foreign candy bars consisting of an unidentifiable sugary chewable drenched in chocolate, and, as an afterthought, a packet of cigarettes. These for the next several days will be my only nourishment. I drive that evening until I can barely stay awake. Sometimes there are headlights behind me, sometimes not. Sometimes the hair on the back of my neck tingles and stands up, like an animal, as if I am being pursued; sometimes the same hair lies still, like a dead animal. I stop finally on a small road, wheels edged against a ditch, and sleep.
Awake again. Is the car behind me? No, there is no car behind me. I drive for a few hours, beginning at last to relax. Is the car behind me? Yes, the car is behind me. Twist, turn, evade. Is there a car behind me? No. But yes, later, a few minutes, a few hours, who knows, there it is again. What is it waiting for? Perhaps for me to reveal where I am now living. Solution: do not return home until you are certain you are no longer being followed.
But how, I begin to wonder after a few days of this constant circling, traveling from country to country, never stopping except to sleep briefly in the car before going on again, my mind increasingly distracted, nerves increasingly unstrung, how can one ever be certain of anything? Once you start driving, how can you ever stop?
This accursed present tense. It keeps squirming into my discourse until I feel that everything that has already happened is happening all over again and all at once. Each turn I have already made I am about to make again, each moment of looking up to see the car following me again has both occurred and is about to occur. The car is weighted down with all these past selves threatening to push their way into the present, with the myriad tribe of selves plaguing me like ghosts until I do not know if it is me turning off this wide modern street and onto that narrow cobbled one or if it is one of them. And as I sit here parlant tout seul, I wonder if I really am speaking only to myself or if I am speaking to the ghost of someone who has been or will be in the seat beside. So there is perhaps hope for you after all. And perhaps, too, the self who speaks and the self who drives are not the same, and I myself serve as my own ghost.
I have smoked all my remaining cigarettes, lighting each off its predecessor, a chronologically arranged progression of tiny lives. I no longer feel so in flux, but am instead slightly giddy and nervous, but more focused as well.
Not much remains. I kept driving, but each time I thought I’d effected an escape, each time I felt I could risk returning home, each time I began to relax, the hair on the back of my neck would stand up again. The pursuing car would reappear. I slept only when I had to, and only in fits and starts, and by day became more and more haggard, less and less human. My back, from my having sat for hours in the same position, vacillated between experiencing a dull ache and feeling shooting, sharp pains. Once, it became so painful that I had to pull the car over onto the shoulder and lie flat in the gravel as one hundred meters behind and just out of sight my pursuer surely idled, waited. I lived on bags of artificially preserved bonbons and tins of anchovies and whatever else I could find without getting far from my car: bottles of water, sticks or rounds of bread.
In what must have been only a few days, I had lost any sense of how long I had been driving. The date slipped away from me, as did the proper day of the week. Days shaded into weeks at some point, but I could not say when. Nor can I say how many days had passed before I gathered the identity of my pursuer. One day, early afternoon, I crossed lanes rather abruptly and watched my pursuer make the same maneuver but with a certain fillip: she turned on the turn signal in the wrong direction, and before darting left drifted right, as if the driver had cocked the wheel slightly before forcing it left. Both of these were characteristic of my third wife’s ineptitude. A few hours later, I executed a similar change of lanes and watched the same pattern repeated behind me. Perhaps the car had been doing the same thing all along and I, thinking only to avoid it, had simply paid it no mind.
Such ephemerae hardly amount to an identity, yet once I had noticed them I could not ignore them. And indeed the car itself seemed to respond to my gaze, giving me as time wore on more and more proofs that my pursuer was my third ex-wife. Never one to accept the evidence of my senses, I tested these proofs, engaged my own car in certain gestures intended to solicit certain reactions from her, and indeed these reactions were consistently provoked. I became more certain and also more confident. Now that I had assigned a name to my pursuer, I could develop a scheme to shake her.
My third ex-wife must have sensed my growing awareness, for she raised her pursuit to another level. She began, somehow, to employ different cars. At first I thought, not having seen her car for the course of an entire day, that I had shaken her. I became so confident as to direct my car in the direction I thought must be home, but when I noticed that another car — deep burgundy and of what I presumed must be Eastern European make — had stayed quite near to me for some time, I became suspicious. I engaged in a few tentative maneuvers and was not surprised to find the car reacting as if it were driven by my third ex-wife. Which, in fact, I concluded, it must be.
But, not content, she ratcheted the game up another notch. Or I should say they. For there came a moment when I was driving and there appeared a car behind me and I thought, somewhat smugly, here she is, here is my third ex-wife, and downshifted and pursued a maneuver intended to make her reveal herself, but no, she was not revealed. Not her, I thought, nor her car, and thus, I thought, not my pursuer. Yet this car stayed with me. Hours later, it was with me still. I wriggled around back roads through sleepy and airless towns, and lost it. Several hours later, it found me again. So I tried to draw her out again, with another maneuver, another enticement, and this time too there was nothing to suggest my third ex-wife, though the car did something that disturbed me — a jerky movement as if the driver had pressed too hard on the brakes and then quickly stepped on the accelerator. A gesture characteristic of my second ex-wife, and one of the multitude of irritations that had precipitated the collapse of our marriage.