The Search (13 page)

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 stood 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 . . .

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.

The chimes haunted Walker, convincing him that he had been here before, but however hard he tried – in fact the harder he tried the more elusive the sense became – he was unable to
fathom the origin of this sensation. He wondered if Malory had experienced the same thing when he had passed through Crescent City. Perhaps it was experienced by everyone who came here and the
sensation of
déjà vu
– there was something familiar even about this sequence of reasoning – was the city’s distinguishing feature, like the canals of Venice,
the garbage dumps of Leonia or the spires of Christminster. Walker’s sense of following in his own footsteps grew steadily but no less subtly stronger.

Then, as he walked down Esplanade, each step adding to – without confirming – the feeling that he had done this before, he began to wonder if there were some way in which he could
use this to his advantage. Until now he had been dragging memories in his wake; he had to try to allow these hinted memories to lead him onwards, to show him what to do next. Since it became more
difficult to pin down the feeling the harder he concentrated, he had to make his mind blank, to cease being an active agent of his own intentions and allow the sensation to ebb and flow as he
wandered. The problem was that a sense of
déjà vu
pervaded the entire city and as time passed the hinted memories he sought to follow became overlaid by the actual memories of
the previous days. The strongest, deepest, most allusive sensations were the most elusive and least immediate.

He drifted through the city, tugged by shifting currents of memory, until he found himself outside an old wooden house, painted white. Windows, open shutters. Chimes hanging from the balcony,
stroked by a breeze no longer there.

He unlatched the wrought-iron gate and walked round the side of the house. Strewn with leaves, a lawn extended from a conservatory to some flower-beds, bare except for clipped rose bushes.
Beyond the flower-beds was a patch of rough ground and a grey-haired man scooping up armfuls of leaves and tossing them on to a bonfire. Walker stood in the middle of the lawn watching him. He
appeared lost in thought, pausing in his work and watching the flames, tugging at his right ear-lobe with thumb and forefinger. Thin smoke smudged the sky. The man turned and looked at him,
hesitated, and then resumed his work.

Repeating a sequence of events enacted before, Walker passed through the conservatory and into the house. From a ground-floor room he heard a crackly recording of a cello, a woman humming gently
in tune with it, the rattle of teacups. He went upstairs and into a small study. Typed pages were scattered over the floor. He looked out of the window and saw an old woman carrying a tray of cups
and plates over to a weather-worn table in the garden. The man looked up, saw her, smiled.

Beneath the window was an open roll-top desk. Propped on one side of the desk was an old postcard showing a silent piazza, empty except for a statue and striding shadows. On the back, in his own
handwriting, was the name of the city in the picture: Imbria.

He travelled there the next day. It was a city of empty piazzas, red towers and the endless perfect arches of arcades. Mustard-coloured walls, ochre streets. He noticed red
towers and arcades but mainly he was aware of the space between things, as if there were more space here than was possible. There was no distance or direction, only perspective and white walls,
mustard-coloured streets. The city looked the same in every direction – arcades, piazzas, towers, long shadows – but each new view was unfamiliar, strange. Whenever he turned a corner a
new but identical vista of arcades and towers opened up before him. Only one sense mattered here. Everything was arranged for the eye.