He was one of our regular neighborhood walkers, unusual for his doglessness and for his stoic commitment to his own company. I never knew his name, but came to think of him as Mr. Walker. He was, I suppose, of East Indian descent, a little above medium height, balding, rather stout, somewhere in his thirties, and hatless in all weather. He never carried bags or appeared to be on an errand, and he was the farthest cry from your common power walker. His pace was always the same stubborn, dejected trudge, his head down, unsmiling, mouth a little open, seemingly uninterested in the world around him, but not wired up to drown it out, either, which set him apart from the usual device-happy herd animal. 

He made me curious, and in lieu of facts, I imagined him as the misfit son of an Indian-American family in the neighborhood, unemployed and almost certainly unmarried, living as a dependent of his aging parents, who probably weren’t expecting a stay-at-home son. Ostensibly a loner, he didn’t seem mentally impaired or disturbed; at worst, deficient in happiness. I noted Mr. Walker’s presence for at least seven years before he disappeared, and never once did I see him talking to anyone. It was as if he’d created a zone of indifference around himself, and no one besides me seemed to pay him the slightest attention. 

Not that I followed him around. I just encountered him from time to time, either while driving to and from errands, or during my daily late-afternoon walks through our pedestrian-friendly streets. He often ventured beyond the neighborhood, and didn’t seem to mind taking main roads, something I avoided on my walks. On the rare times we passed each other walking, we would mirror a diffident nod, but never spoke. Staying on the move was an apparent necessity, and I’m fairly sure that his walks could last for hours. I never saw him behind the wheel of a car, on a bicycle, in a food store, or doing anything other than his incessant walking.  

I imagined a friendly encounter on a snowy day, both of us breathing hard from the exertion of high-stepping through drifts, our one and only pretext for conversation realized, but it never happened. Maybe I was afraid that once we started talking, his strangeness would evaporate. Or that he wouldn’t, or couldn’t, talk to me. I think I preferred him as he was, a quiet mystery in motion, his ponderous gait, steady as a dripping faucet, taking him slowly out of the frame.  

That’s what it was: he was young, but he walked old, maintaining his joyless slog, as if nothing short of a pack of velociraptors could spur him into a run. A person’s gait is a tell. What did his tell me? Hard to answer without sounding judgmental. Although walking seemed to be his only outdoor activity, he did it like a man trying to trek out of the desert, a punishing matter of pure will. Unfairly, I imagined him spending at least as much time indoors parked in front of a big-screen TV, his parents bookending him on a soft couch while he made his way, with the same patient resignation, through all five hundred channels and/or a quart of ice cream. 

Then, as I said, he disappeared. For five years. In that time, I lost my wife to cancer, had a mild stroke, and aged rather shockingly. My life, activities, hobbies, circle of friends, everything, began to sift away, like barrier islands. I experienced a number of, well, misconceptions. Or delusions. The most troubling was that my house was shrinking, the windows getting smaller, the ceilings lowering, millimeters at a time. Familiar objects disappeared. Clothes I was sure I still owned were no longer in my closet. Was my brain going? It didn’t seem so. I could manage my affairs, if apathetically, remember dates, knew who the president was. 

Maybe my health was failing even faster than I realized, and I was suffering the death of a thousand absences. Old age wore me like a giant’s coat. Most of our street’s original colonists had either died off or migrated to condos or assisted living, and the neighborhood was once again a hatchery, which was nice to see, even through cataract clouds. As my father before me, I’d become a ghost of the living, haunting myself.

One day in early spring, I was jolted to my feet by the sight of Mr. Walker passing by my house, looking exactly the same. I hobbled downstairs, threw on a jacket and started after him, grateful for his pace that even I could keep up with. There were dog people on the street, skateboarders, baby minders. He and I, the invisibles, headed uphill, fifty yards apart. I’d decided it was time for introductions, at long last. I speeded up, he metronomed at his usual setting, yet I couldn’t close the gap. I poured it on, flushed and panting.  

Then, without turning his head, he made a following gesture, and slowed just enough for me to catch up. We walked side by side for the first time, still not speaking. There was no need for words; I understood. We were going to his house.  

We still are.