The Search Page 10

  He had no idea how long he slept. When he woke the window was dark as a blackboard but apart from that nothing had changed. Even so, the fact that it was night outside made him feel even more trapped in the city. He got up and resumed his journey through the rooms and stairs and corridors. In a large ante-room – the term made no sense, every room here was an ante-room – he found what appeared to be a visitors’ book. It was half-full of names and signatures, the last of which was Malory’s. He added his own and walked on.

  He left Horizon as abruptly as he had arrived. He opened a door – identical to hundreds of others which he had opened during his stay in the city – and there, stretching ahead, was a road sloping into the distance.

  He closed the door behind him and walked on, enjoying the empty air and the wind combing the roadside trees. After half an hour he came to a railway station. The train was about to leave and he made it with seconds to spare: as soon as he slammed the door behind him he heard a whistle and the train moved out.

  He found an empty compartment but at the next station the door slid open and a tall man – thin, mid-thirties, hair clipped army-short at the back and sides – sat down opposite him. As soon as he had settled himself he put on a pair of tortoise-shell glasses and began reading: Tom Jones, a book Walker had half read so long ago he had forgotten almost everything about it – Tom was searching for his lost brother or mother or sweetheart. In any case, whoever he was looking for was really just an excuse to propel him on his adventures.

  Seeing the man absorbed in his novel like that made Walker aware that he no longer read books. He noticed posters, tickets, words on scraps of paper, odd things scribbled in bus shelters or in the margins of timetables, signs glimpsed from the window of the train, but it never occurred to him to read a book. Noticing Walker looking at the book in his hand the guy smiled and said, ‘Have you read it?’

  ‘No, no,’ said Walker smiling back, embarrassed. ‘Sorry, I was just looking. What’s it like?’

  ‘Boring as shit,’ the guy laughed before going back to his reading.

  Walker sat back and shut his eyes. Opened them again briefly and looked out of the window. The usual stuff: clouds, trees, fields, power lines, sometimes a road. He slept and dreamed of a memory he had never had, of Rachel swimming in a pool and climbing out, smiling, her wet hair dripping. As she walked towards him he looked down at the trail of footprints stretching towards him from the blue pool, turning quickly to damp smudges and then dissolving away to nothing.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The train had stopped. The guy reading Fielding had gone and the compartment was empty. He glanced out of the window and saw the station name, Independence. Groggy with sleep, he pulled his bag from the luggage rack and stepped down to the platform.

  The station was deserted. A clock showed the time as ten past four. Siesta shadows crept into the waiting room, empty except for an old man staring at the ground. The faded letters of a hoarding for a paint company said: ‘No colour loves the sun like yellow’. A station official was leaning out from a second-storey window, looking down the platform to where a woman was resting on a plinth-size suitcase.

  Surprised by how quiet it was, Walker made his way down the worn steps leading out of the station. A man in a suit was halfway up, not moving, apparently pausing in midstride. As Walker made his way further down the stairs he saw that the man’s left leg was actually poised an inch from the step, exactly as if he were frozen while racing for a train. Out by the ticket hall a heavy black woman and two children were buying tickets. A newspaper vendor was pointing out into the streets, offering directions to a man in a trilby who echoed the gesture with a furled newspaper. An old man leant on his broom.

  In the street the silence was even stranger, for the scene that met his eyes was ostensibly that of a busy city – except that here, too, nothing was moving. Cars were everywhere – about to pull out from the kerb, accelerating away from green lights. A tall man was awkwardly craning his neck as he folded himself into a taxi. Moving away from the station Walker looked up the incline of 3rd Avenue and saw an army of pedestrians swarming towards him, immobile, not moving even a fraction of an inch. He looked around, amazed at the detail of activity that normally passed unnoticed: coins falling from pale fingers to a beggar’s styrofoam cup. A labourer crouching at the knees to take the weight of a bag of cement which another man was tipping over the edge of a truck. Two men laughing together, one about to slap his knee with hilarity, the other leaning backwards, mouth open as if he had been shot. A woman gazing at herself in a small mirror, dabbing lipstick on to her mouth. A group of people clustered round a hot-dog stand, faces jutted forward to protect their shirts from the sauce that dripped almost to the ground. A smiling black girl reaching over to clean the windshield of a car waiting at the lights, the wipers flicked out like antennae, detergent bubbles foaming over the hood.

  Walker moved between the cars, immobile but still animated by an inherent sense of speed, an invisible equivalent of the motion lines of a comic book, the slight ghosting of a photograph. He looked closely but could not see how this effect came about. With people it was easy – in every gesture you sensed the muscles straining in legs and arms – but cars looked exactly the same whether moving or stationary. Perhaps, since a car was designed to move, a sense of speed was implicit in the very idea of a car. A car in motion was simply a car; a car parked wasn’t a car, it was a parked car. Hence, thought Walker, smiling at the force and speed of his logic, the sense of momentum that animated the cars frozen in the street around him. He peered into the back window of a cab, one of the passengers pressed against the door, the other leaning heavily on him as the cab took a corner.

  Frozen like this every gesture had a certain perfection, each moment of a person’s day – however insignificant – was worthy of the consideration you would give to a great work of art. More so in fact, for here every nuance of experience was revealed: over there a couple embracing, a woman handing coins to a flower vendor, her fingers almost touching his palm; people smiling and saying ‘please’ or waving ‘hello’; two people who had just bumped into each other, a look of startled apology spreading over their faces.

  Walker had no idea what had happened – the city reminded him of Pompeii where people were frozen in the defensive attitudes they assumed when lava poured over the ancient city – but here there was no sense of calamity: everything had just stopped. Despite this, danger was everywhere. A woman walking up a flight of stairs, a cyclist leaning hard into a curve – actions like these required a hundred acts of gymnastic balance and judgement. The sight of a waiter paused in the act of threading his way between the tables of a kerbside café, a tray of food balanced in one hand, was suffused with a suspense that was all but unendurable. Every act was potentially catastrophic. Stepping off a kerb or bending to tie a shoe-lace, these were actions whose outcome was not certain: it was impossible to know the consequences of anything. Every action was poised on the brink of a precipice; any moment or action brought you to the edge of infinity.

  This feeling was brought home to him horribly a few blocks further on, outside a church in Jackson Square. The police had cordoned off the area and a large crowd had gathered, their eyes fixed on something going on several yards above their heads. As Walker drew near he saw an expression of horror on many of the onlookers’ faces. Some had turned away, were covering their faces with their hands. Silent though it was, a gasp of shock pervaded the whole scene. As soon as he came round the side of the church he saw why. A man had jumped from the bell tower where the arms of police and firemen reached out to restrain him. Six yards from the ground the desperate figure was frozen in his fall, a split second from the impact of his death. His jacket billowed, his hair streamed above him, his glasses, torn from his face by the speed of the fall, were suspended a foot above his head. One hand was thrust out reflexively to break his fall, to cushion the impact which perhaps would never come. Walker moved through the shocked crowd and stoo
d directly beneath the falling figure, transfixed and horrified by what he saw. Then, fearful that time would move on again and he would be crushed, he walked quickly away from the church.

  He wandered through the city in a daze, half expecting at any moment to find that his own movements were beginning to slur to a standstill. He wondered if Malory was here, if he would come across him frozen in some random attitude. Perhaps he had passed through this town before everything came to a halt, when it was simply another town where no one noticed anything. Or perhaps it had been frozen like this for a long while – if such an idea made any sense in a place where there was no time – and Malory too had come across it in the state that Walker encountered it now.

  He glanced at a clock and saw the time: almost ten past four. That was when the city had stopped. Knowing this told him nothing. It could have been any time. Establishing when a given event occurred – a murder or a break-in – was normally a major step forward in solving a mystery but here it revealed nothing. It constituted the mystery rather than explained it.

  He came to a corner diner and stepped inside. The naugahyde seats held patches of sunlight, the windows merged dim reflections of the scene inside with the cars out in the street. Because it was the middle of the afternoon the diner was almost empty. A lone drinker sat at the bar, watched by the bar-tend, wiping glasses. A couple of people sat at tables on their own, one of them reading a paper. Loneliness pervaded the place. Over by a window a waiter had just poured a cup of coffee for a man eating an omelette, knife raised as if to say ‘when’. Walker helped himself to the coffee and sat down opposite the omelette eater. He looked closely at the man, knife and fork in hand, about to start his meal. He had a look of virtual despair – but despair stripped of desperation. In an instant it would fade to the methodical resignation of men who eat meals alone, but preserved here was a look of near-desolation that passed unnoticed in the normal flow of action.

  Walker dawdled, when he left the diner, mesmerized by the complexity and abundance of activity suspended, silent as a photograph, around him. There was no narrative here – or there was a new kind of narrative, one that ran across time rather than through it. We seek explanation in terms of causality, in terms of one event succeeding another. Here simultaneity, the way every action and person in the city was linked to every other, was the only explanation. Either there was no such thing as coincidence or – and it amounted to the same thing – there was only coincidence.

  Tired suddenly, Walker crossed over to the Metropolitan Hotel. In the silent bustle of the lobby he helped himself to the key to a room on the top floor. The curtains were drawn in his room and he felt relieved by the comforting dimness. He showered and climbed between the white right-angles of sheets.

  He felt sure that he was getting nearer to Malory – but it was just as likely that he was further away than ever. He had no way of knowing. There was no longer any correlation between time and distance; each meant nothing in terms of the other. Perhaps Malory was a week ahead, or a day, or perhaps he was months or a year away by now. He could have been a mile away or he could have been a hundred, a thousand miles away . . . Maybe the search would never end and he would continue hunting for Malory until he was an old man, until he died. Unable to move, penniless, reduced to scanning the articles in archives. Tolerated and mocked by the library staff, perhaps managing to persuade a young enthusiast of the importance of his work, bequeathing him a deranged mass of notes, leaving future generations to complete the task to which he had dedicated his life.

  He thought of people who spent their lives tracking down the Abominable Snowman or the Loch Ness Monster. The whole point of these things was that they existed only in sightings. You could never get scientific proof of their existence. That was their purpose: they were a lure, a metaphor for the Himalayas of the unknown. As soon as the Yeti was sighted it would cease to exist. Yeti was probably Tibetan for a being whose existence is constantly hinted at – footprints, droppings – but cannot be proved . . . He was drifting on the edge of sleep, his thoughts becoming flecked with dreams. Time and distance. Footprints in water. Traces of dream . . .

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The clock next to his bed was still showing 4.09 when he woke. Drawing back the curtain he found the city still flooded with afternoon sunshine. Outside his window a bird was frozen in flight, wind ruffling its feathers, wings arched perfectly, eyes full of sky. He looked down into the street, the immobile crowds still there.

  He took food from the kitchen and left the hotel. Nothing had changed but his internal rhythm insisted that it was morning: the streets seemed infused with the energetic bustle of people commencing their days. As he moved through the living statues he again became absorbed in the wealth of detail revealed around him. He saw a coke can poised in mid-air between a cyclist’s hand and the waiting bin. Across the way a workman was leaning over a pneumatic drill, another watching him, tilting back his yellow safety helmet.

  In a shop window Walker saw his reflection shimmer through racks of camera equipment. He wanted to head out of town, to move on, but it was difficult to know how. There were plenty of cars but with the traffic gridlocked in time it would be impossible to move.

  He continued walking until he came across a guy locking his bike to a sign. Walker extricated the bike and cycled through the city, cutting across a park where people were frozen in the act of jogging or chasing after balls, staring up at a blue disc of frisbee. A dog was leaping to catch a ball between its teeth and the trees waited for the wind to pass through their leaves. On the far side of the park there were fewer people and Walker moved more quickly towards the outskirts of the city where old people waited at bus stops and mothers pushed prams. He gave no thought to where he was heading. Motives and purpose had dissolved within him. He cast no shadow.

  After cycling for an hour he had still seen no movement – no cars, no people. He crossed a bridge and cycled through a landscape of gentle hills and tree-shaped trees. A sign said CRESCENT CITY 25 MILES. He became aware of a breeze, a few clouds. A flock of birds, drifting smoke. A car came roaring towards him, passed in a swirl of grit and fumes. He saw a dog padding along the roadside, tail wagging. Minutes later he waved at a woman and a child who smiled and waved back. Their gestures – and especially the child’s red bobble hat – were surprisingly familiar and as he cycled towards Crescent City little details of the landscape also touched elusive chords in his memory.

  In the city itself he was constantly assailed by a sense of déjà vu. Although he had never been here before every street corner and house was steeped in memories. Entering the bakery, asking for croissants, handing over coins, the way the assistant smiled and said, ‘Merci, au revoir’ – each gesture was like an echo of one that had already occurred. When the desk clerk showed him to his room at a boarding house he knew, fractionally before the door was opened, how it would be arranged: the bed tucked into an alcove, a porcelain jug and bowl on a chest of drawers, sunlight pouring into the dim room when the shutters were opened. In the days that followed a single detail often brought back a whole sequence of events: seeing two birds perched on a phone line recalled a previous time when he had walked down exactly this street, at precisely this time of the evening, with the elderly couple limping towards him.

  And then there were the wind-chimes which hung from the balconies of houses. All over the city the air was full of the sound of fragile tinkling. It was a beautiful sound and Walker was startled by how deeply these chimes affected him. The breeze connected houses to each other like phone lines, brushing one set of chimes fractionally before another as it made its way through the streets.

  More than anything else it was these chimes that filled him with déjà vu. Each chime was less like the actual noise of the metal tubes touching than the memory of that moment, of that sound, endlessly renewed. He made a recording of the chimes but the tape made them sound like wire hangers jangling in a wardrobe, preserving none of their resonance.