I.
That first time, when Rask had first felt the urge, he’d had a good job, a delightful girlfriend he was engaged to marry, an excellent apartment. He had been at work, sitting in his cubicle, typing up a quarterly evaluation of his section, when he felt someone watching him. He turned but nobody was there.
He turned back, continued with his report. A moment later he felt it again, the hair rising on the back of his neck. This time he turned quickly, whipping his head around—still, nobody there. Could it be one of his fellow workers? No, none of them were looking this way. Or they were looking out of open curiosity, wondering why he had spun around so quickly, what was the matter with him.
He got up and went to the bathroom. He stood in a stall, door closed, and stared at the little coat hook on the back of the door. He waited. Did he still feel the gaze behind him? No.
He flushed the unused toilet for form’s sake. He splashed water on his face at the sink. There he was in the mirror, looking as he always did, a little more haggard perhaps, slightly exhausted, but still recognizably himself, still Rask. He stayed there, meeting his reflection’s gaze, hesitating.
And then he felt it again: that prickling of somebody else’s gaze on the back of his neck; the unavoidable feeling of being watched. In the mirror, he examined the line of closed stall doors behind him. There were no feet below any of them, no movement, no sign of human presence, and yet he still felt watched.
He tried to shake it off. He splashed water over his face again. He returned to his desk and quickly drank the rest of his coffee, and then felt the blood vessels pulsing in his eyes. He still felt watched. There was a video camera affixed to one corner of the ceiling, but it didn’t work, never had—the light wasn’t on, he could see where the power line had been cut—nevertheless, he waited for a moment when he thought he was unobserved and taped a piece of paper over the lens. But this didn’t make him feel any less observed.
He waited until everyone else had left and then sat there, alone, just him. He still felt watched. He prowled the floor of the office, just to make sure. He turned off all the computers, every one in every cubicle. He put the pictures of family members and boyfriends and girlfriends facedown on the desks. He unplugged the radios and boom boxes and put them into desk drawers. And then he went back to his desk and sat, fingers poised over the keyboard as if he were about to type something, even though the computer was not on. He waited.
A moment later, he felt it.
This is crazy, he thought. I’m being crazy. But thinking this didn’t make him feel less watched.
At home his girlfriend was sitting at the table, arms crossed.
“I didn’t know if I should eat or wait,” she said. “And so, I waited.”
“You should have eaten,” Rask said.
“I thought you’d call me if you were going to be late,” she said. “Usually you do.”
“I didn’t know how late I was,” he said. “I lost track of time. I’m sorry.”
They ate lukewarm lasagna. After dinner, she spread some catalogs on the table. She asked Rask what he thought of this wedding dress or that wedding dress, this table setting, that technique of folding a napkin.
“Fine,” he said, half ignoring her. “Yes. Good. Good.”
“What’s wrong with you tonight?” she finally asked.
But that was a question that Rask didn’t quite know how to answer. Someone is watching me, didn’t sound right, nor did, I keep imagining that I’m being watched. The truth was somewhere in between these things, though where exactly, and how to define it in a way that she would understand, he wasn’t sure.
She was still staring at him, waiting for an answer.
“I’m just tired,” he finally said.
That night, lying beside her, staring up at the ceiling, he felt even more strongly that he was being watched, and slowly he felt panic begin to rise. He put up with it as long as he could and then got out of bed. His girlfriend moaned a little but did not wake up.
He went into the living room. He tried to sit and read, but still he felt it. He stood and began to pace, moving from one side of the living room to the other, and felt a little better, if only for a while. When he extended his route into the kitchen, that helped, though that too, in time, didn’t feel like enough. Before long, he found himself opening the door into the hallway, striding out of his apartment and down to the elevator and back, and then, before he knew clearly what he was doing, he was dressed and walking down the emergency stairwell and out the door, up and down the streets near his apartment, and then up and down streets a few blocks away, and then out into the city beyond.
II.
Thus began for Rask what he would refer to later, after his institutionalization, as his days of wandering. He went from city to city, never staying more than a week at a time, begging or stealing food, sleeping under bridges or in parks, moving along whenever he felt again that he was being observed. Was he being observed? He didn’t know, just as he hadn’t known the first time, but he felt something, thought he felt something, and that was enough to make his anxiety rise. The only thing that would alleviate the anxiety was to move, to walk and not stop walking, to wander.
As he went from city to city, his face and hands becoming sun-and wind-chapped, rough, the soles of his shoes wearing thin, his clothing becoming sweat stained and stinking, he began to see the world in a different way. He had been in dozens of cities, and the more he visited, the harder time he had seeing them as distinct and separate. They struck him as more and more alike, as if parts of the same city were being rearranged and used over again. He would see an alley and think Chicago, even though he was in Nashville. But it was, he was sure, almost sure, the same alley he had seen in Chicago. A freeway overpass in Salt Lake City and one in Albuquerque not only looked alike but also seemed to be, the more he thought about it, exactly the same. There were even moments when he would see someone discard something into a dumpster—a broken brooch, a bag of family photographs, a top hat with a hole punched through the top of it—and when he opened the dumpster would find nothing there at all. And yet, opening another dumpster days later, in an entirely different city, there the things were, waiting for him.
Every place is one place, he began to feel. For a while this seemed like mere theoretical knowledge and then, unexpectedly, it seemed like much more than that. He became convinced that, if he could bring himself to believe, he would be able to navigate from these bits and pieces of places back to the places where they had originated. He could enter a dumpster at West 180th Street in Hudson Heights and emerge behind a nightclub in South Beach. All he had to do was keep fixed in his mind the place where he had originally seen the piece of the other city. He would close his eyes, move forward, and when he opened them he would be elsewhere.
But even when this actually started happening, a part of Rask held back. Was it really happening or was he simply imagining it? Cities didn’t really work like that, did they? Was he doing it all himself? Was he allowing days to pass in a kind of fugue state while he hitchhiked his way from one city to another? But any time he started to feel a presence again, any time he began to feel watched, he would search out these flaws in the city’s fabric and, when he found them, use them to go to another city.
Sometimes he considered his life: what it had been, what had become of it. He had left, he thought sometimes, for no reason. And now he was wandering for no reason. He had given everything up—his job, his girlfriend, his life. But any time he began to feel this way, he would quickly begin to feel eyes on him again. And then he would think, No, I was right to leave. What else could I have done?
And so it went on, with Rask moving from city to city, either on foot or by way of these bits of overlap, these places where one city led into another. He slept where he fell, ate what he could. He was constantly on the move, staying always one step ahead of that gaze that always seemed on the verge of finding him.
III.
It might have gone on like that forever if it hadn’t been that one night, sleeping in the Bayview section of San Francisco under a dead tree that looked as if it had been meticulously decorated with garbage, he looked out and saw across the street something that looked familiar.
It should look familiar, he told himself, I’ve been looking across this street every night for four nights now. Time to move on.
But as he gathered his few things and loaded the three-wheeled shopping cart, something clicked for him. He hadn’t seen it before because it hadn’t been there before. It had only started being there that night.
Limping, he pushed his cart across the street for a closer look. It was a building unlike the others around it. New construction, he thought at first; then he touched it and thought, No. It was old, the bricks scratched and worn, the mortar between bricks crumbling. It was a building he had seen before, he thought again, he just wasn’t quite sure where or when.
And then, suddenly, he realized where and when it was.
He went and pushed open the door and shuffled his way into the building. Even though it was night outside, the interior was brightly lit, with sunlight spilling through the windows. This made him more nervous than he had been in a long time.
He shuffled his way to the elevator and climbed in. Though there were people on the elevator with him they neither looked at him nor acknowledged him. Perhaps it was how he looked, how he smelled. Perhaps it was something more.
He got out on the proper floor and walked through the room filled with cubicles until he found the one that used to belong to him. In a sense, it did still belong to him: there he was, his younger self, sitting at the computer, his back to him.
Rask just stood, staring. For a moment he thought, Now I will be able to see who it was watching me, and then, when the younger Rask, irritated, turned and stared straight through him, he realized, It was me.
He followed himself to the bathroom, watching his panic increase. He couldn’t stop watching. He followed himself home. He watched himself eat dinner with his girlfriend. He could still, though years had gone by for him, taste the lukewarm lasagna on his tongue. He watched. He stayed there, leaning over the bed as his younger, saner self stared up into the night and began to pace back and forth and eventually left the apartment. It would be years, this Rask knew, before he would return.
It might have gone differently after that. Rask might have followed himself out, kept watching himself, but there was his girlfriend, awake and out of bed. When she saw him, she screamed. He moved toward her, trying to explain, trying to get her to recognize that it was him, Rask, only a decade older, but she was already hitting him with anything that came to hand. He tolerated the blows for a moment, still trying to speak, and then she hit him in the head with an empty wine bottle and even though the bottle didn’t break the blow knocked him off his feet. His head buzzed. He tried to get up and found it easier to lie there. He heard her dialing 911 and tried again to get to his feet. He was still trying when something struck him hard in the head and knocked him out.
IV.
It took him some time to gather his equilibrium. At first, he was confused and panicked. He found it unbearable that he couldn’t continue wandering. There was an incident with an orderly, and then a bigger one with several orderlies, and then he was screaming and strait-jacketed and lying on the floor of a padded room and unable to move. Not moving was killing him, he was sure it would kill him. He had to keep wandering, keep one step ahead of the watching eyes.
But then, slowly, he calmed down. He thought it through. Did he feel anyone watching him? No, nobody. Besides, now that he knew he was watching himself, that made it something altogether different, didn’t it?
The meds kept him groggy. Groggy wasn’t so bad. He didn’t mind being groggy and in here if he couldn’t get to his younger self, couldn’t haunt who he used to be.
Doctor Singh periodically met with him and evaluated him. Slowly he was coached to relinquish the story he had told when he was admitted and came to offer up something else, something more “believable.” He was not Rask, he had never been Rask—he was much older than that Rask had been. Yes, he was willing to accept that. But who was he, then? Why couldn’t he remember?
“Do you know what had happened to Rask?” asked Doctor Singh. “What did you do to him?”
He shook his head. “Rask is fine,” he claimed. “He’s safe.”
“Would you like to get out of here someday?” the doctor asked.
“No,” he said. “It’s safer here.”
“Safer? Safer than what?”
“Than out there,” he said.
“What do you have to fear?” asked the doctor.
He looked at the doctor a long moment, trying to decide how to respond. “I’m afraid of myself,” he finally offered.
“But you’re in here with you,” the doctor said.
“Yes and no,” said Rask.
But in the end, there were few grounds to keep him. There was no real reason to think that he had done something to Rask, no proof, and when neither his doctor nor the policemen were able to ruffle him, they only kept him on because he was “disturbed.” And yet, he was a model citizen, no difficulties at all. As long as he took his medication he saw only the things that other people agreed were there. As long as he took his medication, he did just fine.
“We can’t keep you here forever,” claimed Doctor Singh.
“Why not?” he asked, but the doctor had already made up his mind.
He was released to a halfway house. He had a room of his own and shared a bathroom, a kitchen. During the day, he worked at the public library wiping the covers of the recently returned books with a sanitized rag. It was less a job than the same repeated motion of an arm, although it was something, it got him through the day. He brought his lunch in a paper bag, two pieces of limp white bread with a slice of American cheese between, an apple, a carrot that had been washed but not peeled. He always ate the same thing. It was easier that way.
His days of wandering, he told himself, were over.
But his younger self, he knew, was still out there, wandering, unable to stop. If that self stopped, it would only be because the younger self of that self would be wandering in his place. A younger version of him would always be wandering. There was no getting around it.
He wiped the cover of a book. He sprayed the rag with more sanitizer. He set the book to one side.
Before he went on to the next one, he waited a moment to see if he would experience a prickling at the back of his neck, the feeling that he was being watched.
There was nothing.
He picked up the next book, wiped it down, and set it aside. He waited.
Still nothing.
Still nothing.
Still nothing.