On your tail lights

A novelist tries his hand at automotive stalking

by John Sedgwick

The car's a silver Audi, with a Massachusetts plate that ends JB, and it's dead ahead of me on Beacon Street as we pass through Coolidge Corner. I've been following it since Chestnut Hill. Staying right on it, in fact; going where it goes. And I've gotten to know JB a little. The windows are tinted all around, so I can barely see in. But I can tell that the Audi is occupied only by the driver, and a slight bushiness to the brown hair visible above the headrest suggests that the driver is a young woman.

It's a kind of dance we do, the two of us. She leads, I follow. I stay close enough not to lose her, but not so tight that she'd sense my presence. Now, as she hurries down Beacon, she hooks a sudden left onto a side street. I stay with her, my headlights brightening her rear-view mirror as we weave through Brookline's back roads, past joggers, pedestrians, police cars. No one pays me any particular notice, and why should they? Mine is just another car on the road.

The streets turn quieter, trees arc overhead, the houses rise in price. Finally, her taillights flare -- a seductive reddening that pierces me -- and she slows, trolling for a parking space, finds one and backs in. I drive by slowly, craning my neck for a good look at her. She is in her late 20s, with features that suggest some sophistication. A slim necklace curves around her neck; a jewel hangs from her ear. I peg her as a young professional, an architect maybe, with a bit of style. I pull over a quarter of a block down, watch her through the rear-view, my motor running.

She emerges from her car, smoothes out her skirt. Why, I wonder: is she about to see someone? Without noticing me, she heads across the street. She mounts the stairs of a small frame house, pulls out a key that she fits into the lock. She opens the door, passes inside to the unlit interior, shuts the door behind her. I click off the engine, step out of my car. I glance about, see that no one is watching. I quickly cross to the sidewalk by her house, my sandals slapping against the pavement. I feel myself pressing against something that's more than air as I approach her front steps, gaze up at her house. The windows are open to the street, the filmy curtains sway in the breeze . . .

I'm not a stalker, in case you're wondering. I'm a novelist. After more than 20 years of magazine journalism and an occasional nonfiction book, I switched over to the other side and wrote a psychological thriller about a man named Rollins who likes to follow people in his car. He's the stalker, you might say. Except that he, too, would resist the term. He is simply curious. As he tells a young female colleague who tries to befriend him, "Haven't you ever wondered about people? What they . . . do?" To get some answers, Rollins takes to the road to tail people, tape recorder in hand to keep a record of what he sees.

Why did I get so involved with a crypto-stalker? Because he was a version of me, I suppose. All journalists are stalkers of a sort, pursuing their quarry. And I'd done my share of watching and waiting. But I also sensed -- long before the shows Big Brother and The Real World made this thought a commonplace -- that a voyeuristic relationship to the world was gradually becoming the norm. As Rollins peers out through his windshield, he is simply dramatizing the strange new detached engagement, for lack of a better term, that is now nearly universal. Virtually everyone now stares at life through one screen or another, right? Rollins takes to the road; we cruise the information superhighway. But I regarded his detached engagement only as a place to start, and I'd like to think that Rollins is gradually humanized as the tale proceeds. He comes to understand why he is the way he is, and he struggles to do something about it.

Curiously enough, I'd never actually tailed anyone in my car myself, and I didn't feel the need to do it for the book. Years ago, I used to go out on surveillance with Gil Lewis, a local private investigator who became the subject of my first nonfiction book, Night Vision. I'd ride with him as he tailed errant spouses, or an occasional murder witness, in his Toyota Celica, a Muriel Coronella going between his jaws. But no, I never actually went out driving. Partly I was chicken, of course. I didn't want to be embarrassed -- or arrested. Also, I wasn't sure that I could stay with a car all that successfully. But I suppose the real reason was that the pursuits -- as Rollins terms his nocturnal rambles -- were something my character would do; they weren't something I would do. And I needed to believe there was a difference.

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John Sedgwick's psychological thriller The Dark House has just been published by HarperCollins.