On your tail lights, continued

by John Sedgwick

Now that the book is done, however, I've reconsidered. After my years with Rollins, I too have grown curious about those seemingly anonymous cars out on the road -- what they're up to, where they're going. And it occurred to me that by spending an evening or two out "Rollinsing," I might make a last contact with my beloved protagonist before bidding him a final farewell.

AND SO I went. Armed with my own little Panasonic, I started out tailing cars around my house in Newton, then branched out. The first thing I discovered is that it's pretty easy to tail a car. Having followed a few dozen for distances ranging to nearly 30 miles, I can say with some assurance than none of my subjects have had a clue I've been on them. This, indeed, is a large part of the pleasure of the tail. It's one of life's few relationships that are purely one-way. (The only thing that comes close, possibly, is celebrity worship, although in that case the stars -- Britney Spears, Mark Wahlberg, et al. -- are obviously putting themselves out there for all to see: each one an exhibitionist as perfectly suited to the nation's voyeurism as a wall socket is to a plug.)

Enclosed in their seemingly impregnable bubbles of glass and steel, the subjects of my pursuits are convinced they're putting out no signals whatsoever beyond the indicator lights for left turns or right. It may be, in fact, that the car is the last place to offer at least the illusion of such privacy. Houses are thoroughly wired these days, and offices -- forget it. Even with cell phones, people think of their cars as their own private shower stalls. From what I've seen, I'd say most drivers can't imagine that anybody is looking. Lots of times they're singing away, or bobbing their heads inanely to rhythms only they can hear. And, especially in Boston, they often drive as if nobody else were there, too.

In my novel, Rollins likes to follow people back to their houses, to pin these drivers down to a particular locale. That's a lot easier to do in the suburbs than in the city. I made a point of going out at dusk, so that the gathering darkness would reduce me to just another pair of headlights on the road. At that hour, most everyone in the suburbs is heading home, and I tailed any number of people back to their front doors, the suspense mounting right up to the moment they entered their dark houses with (often) take-out in hand. Eerily, the very first car I tailed led me to a house across town that looked remarkably like the house that Rollins, in my book, returns to -- the one that becomes the Dark House of the title. I even went back there a few times, to check out the neighborhood and see what I could pick up about that Dark House's inhabitants. I stayed in the shadows, watching. But, oddly, I never detected any sign of life. It was as if the garage had swallowed the driver whole.

Still, nosing around that street, I discovered the demographic truth that marketers have long known perfectly well: cars fit houses and houses fit neighborhoods. So Mercedeses, for instance, invariably end up in what I came to think of Mercedesvilles, where there are Mercs galore. Volvos live in Volvoland, Hondas in Hondatown. It gave me a new sense of suburban traffic: that it's not about drivers, but simply about cars, all of them roaming ceaselessly in search of a niche.

But at night in the city, drivers are not heading home. They're going out -- to movies, nightclubs, restaurants, baseball games. And so my tails in Boston weren't linear, as they were in the suburbs, but frequently circular -- following cars that were roving about in search of a parking space, like planes wheeling in a holding pattern. In pursuit of one young man in a beat-up Taurus, I tailed him twice around Fenway Park -- glowing with a home game like Emerald City -- before he abruptly did a U-turn by a nightclub and then tried to back into a parking space that was only two-thirds the size of his car. He actually tried to enter the space almost perpendicularly.

Coming from the sleepy suburbs, where you can actually hear the trees rustling at night, everything in the city seems jammed-in, like protons in the atom's core. There's such blasting energy in a place like the Back Bay. On Boylston, by the Pru, the car in front of me was nearly rocking as the driver nodded his head to an electric rhythm, his girlfriend gazing over at him uncertainly, impervious to the beat. I followed them down Comm Ave, swung halfway around the Public Garden, then lost them at the light. But it didn't take a novelist to see how their whole relationship would play out -- the too-cool dude with the ice queen. Good luck.

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