The Search (12 page)

Walker bought two more beers and clunked glasses with the guy. Looking at him he understood how unhappy marriages could last tens of years, how people survived amputations and debilitating
illness. He thought of rushing back to his room, packing his bag and just walking out of town. No sooner had he formulated it than he recognized the ludicrousness of the scheme. There were weeks of
desert in every direction. That was the thing about this place, it was impossible to take yourself by surprise; always you thought of an action before doing it and then, immediately, there ensued a
reason for not doing it. He was distracted from this reverie by the old man nudging his arm.

‘Ready for another,’ he said. Walker looked at the old man, saw himself reflected in his eyes. He shook his head, slugged back the rest of his drink and left.

He needed to collect his belongings from his room but was almost frightened to set foot in there. He gathered up his things quickly but even in those few seconds he could feel the urge to lie
down and sleep. What was the point in spending the night outside in the cold? He could stay here – not sleep, just sit up until daybreak. Shaking these thoughts from his head he moved into
the bathroom to get the last of his belongings. Glimpsed his bearded face in the mirror, shattered it with his fist and closed his palm around a shard until the pain cut through his lethargy.

Outside he looked up at the desert sky where the stars hung in the same places night after night. He stood at the bus stop, already chilled to the bone. A few people came out of the diner but
after a while there was no more movement and the town appeared deserted except for buildings and sky. He squatted down on the sidewalk but that was too cold so he stood through the long night, too
tired to move, too cold to sleep.

It took weeks to get light. First the darkness diminished, then the sky became grey and the shapes of things came alive. Trees appeared against the orange-blue light. It was no warmer but the
day was finally arriving. The diner opened and he thought he would go inside for a coffee – and immediately drove the thought from his mind.

Eventually he heard the bus rumble into town, a slow curl of dust in its wake. Four people got off. He was the only person waiting to board. The driver looked at him with surprise when he asked
for a ticket to wherever the bus was going.

‘That’ll be Bad Axe.’

‘Bad Axe is perfect.’

Walker made his way to the back of the bus. There were few other passengers – a couple with rucksacks, an old Mexican woman, a man with a cane. He stretched out in the back seat, sun
slanting in through one of the side windows. He wanted to sleep but wanted also to savour this view of the city which so few had shared. Most buildings were flat and pale brown, enlivened only by
the neon signs of shops that paled in the gathering sunlight. He was struck by the sprawling extent of the town, by the number of homes that each year encroached a little further into the desert.
He found it hard to believe that he had been there – how long? It hardly mattered – however long he had been there he was lucky it was coming to an end. Everything came down to luck.
The search was a matter of luck, a test of luck – and luck was a test of character. You could gauge yourself by the quality of your luck. Luck was everything. He breathed a sigh of relief as
the bus pulled past a half-built office block, a fence that would never be creosoted.

Walker shaved and cleaned his teeth in the station washrooms at Bad Axe. He felt sluggish but the lassitude that had overwhelmed him in Despond had evaporated and he was
thinking once again about the search, anxious to make up for the time he had wasted. In the information office the word Horizon came into his mind – out of nowhere, for no reason. Spores were
blown around by the wind and plants sprang up where they happened to settle. Maybe words and ideas were a kind of spore: they were in the air and sometimes they settled on you. Feeling foolish he
asked the woman at the desk if there was a place called Horizon nearby.

‘A bus leaves in twenty minutes,’ she said, unstartled, un-smiling.

As he paid for the ticket he told himself this decision was based on a hunch, on intuition, but he knew this was not true. Intuition suggested an instinctive version of thought, but really he
was proceeding by impulse, by whim, impatient to get moving again.

When he arrived there he thought it was not a city but one building in the city. Then, as he began to get a sense of the scale of the place, he realized that although there
were no roads or streets, corridors and hallways served as thoroughfares, vast ballrooms as parks, rooms as houses. Here and there he found windows but all he could see from them, except for the
damp courtyard many yards below, were the walls and windows of the rest of the building, the rest of the city. He opened doors which led to more rooms. Sometimes these were huge with high ceilings,
empty except for a dark table, chairs, chandeliers. Other rooms were small with armchairs and a fireplace. A few were carpeted but most had floors of polished wood that clanged and echoed
underfoot. When he stopped walking he heard other footsteps but, in the vast interiors and winding corridors, he wondered if these were the echoes of his own steps. He walked into a room with a
great gilt-edged mirror, enormous as a painting of a battle or biblical scene. The mirror made the room unfathomably huge, empty of everything except its own reflected image and his tiny figure in
one corner. From there he moved into a room with an oil painting over the fireplace. It showed a vast room, not dissimilar to many of those he had passed through. As he walked on through the city
he saw more paintings, always of interiors. Whenever he came across a painting he hoped it might be a landscape but there was never a hint of the outdoors. He resisted any feeling of panic but
gradually the sense of being trapped by the vastness of his surroundings began to alarm him. Generally, you were either lost in a wilderness – a desert or an ocean – or trapped in a
confined space – a dungeon. Here Walker was simultaneously trapped in a dungeon and lost in the vastness of his confines. It would have been possible to climb out of a window and down one of
the thin drain-pipes that clung to the walls like rope but there was no point – they led only to the courtyard that was like an open-air dungeon. Leaning out of some windows and craning
upwards he could see a colourless patch of sky but most did not afford even this prospect. Instead they simply opened on to another room. He could go where he pleased but wherever he went he came
to more rooms. Like this one, empty except for a long conference table and thin black chairs. On the table was a decanter of red wine, glasses. The austerity and scale of the room made him feel
like he had come for a meeting with an all-powerful bureaucrat. He poured a glass of wine, the slight tinkling of the glass magnified many times over by the acoustic vastness. Held the glass up to
the light and watched the red liquid flare like a volcano erupting under the sea. He pulled a chair out and sipped the wine. It was inconceivable that a city like this – or building or
whatever this place was – could go on for much longer. Even assuming it was the size of London he could still cross it in . . . how long? A couple of days? That was two days without food
– there was water and wine, but so far he had seen nothing to eat – yet the prospect was daunting rather than frightening. The only thing to do was keep walking. On impulse, as he was
leaving, he picked up the decanter of wine and hurled it at a wall. Knowing he could trash the place was somehow reassuring and a few moments later he carved his initials in a big oak table. Then,
for no reason, he added
FUCK OFF
in jagged ugly letters. This act of childish vandalism cheered him up considerably and he walked out of the room with his hands in his
pockets, smiling. Soon he felt sleepy from the wine and lay down on an embroidered sofa. It was difficult to sleep with nothing to cover him, so he yanked down one of the curtains and curled up
beneath it.

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.

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.