I constantly took pictures of them. I now wanted them to acknowledge my interest. I was determined that they should see me. This, too, they tolerated, and so I couldn’t escape them. My only option was to imitate them, to let them see me copying everything they did. I cleaned and scrubbed my jetty and raked the reeds and swept the mud under the water. I pulled spiders’ webs off the branches of my shrubs and pruned their withered leaves. Before, I had been a night owl, but now when they appeared at the crack of dawn, I was already lying in wait.

We looked at the same view, heard the same noises. We shared a common world and were separated by it. Great crested grebes nested in the reeds, ducks landed near them and near me. In the noise of children from the nearby swimming pool, my own childhood called to me. The same silence, the same noise. So much surrounded us, the waves, the fishermen going about their business out on the lake, and the water, the shore, the reeds. Did they see all this, I wondered, and if so, what did they make of it all?

I sat on my jetty and stared over at them, only to see them staring into the reeds. They were like two beetles that had fallen on their backs, with no desire to be on their feet again. When I left my jetty after a long day, I went into the house and closed the door behind me, and closed the shutters and the curtains, and turned off the light. It was dark and I closed my eyes but I still saw them in their spot, in the sun, in the rain, in the cold and wind, as if they had become one with their deckchairs. One day, they would lie on those chairs forever. As I lay in my bed, I thought about them lying there and, through them, about my own situation. Because no matter how obsessed I had become, I had really only stalked myself. In truth, it was myself I was now looking at, and I realized that if I kept watching them, that is what I would become.