Eventually even the drunken, nocturnal desire to leave began to evaporate — and this, oddly, was what prompted him to leave: the knowledge that if he stayed any longer he would never escape. He knew he would have to go tomorrow. It was his last chance. That night he had a troubled sleep, full of images of regret and things he had left behind: women, jobs, homes, things he’d never had in the first place. He woke early, the sun still struggling to clear his window sill. The bus would arrive in thirty minutes. Everything was as he hoped — except he did not want to leave. It was not that he had no desire to leave: no, he actually wanted to stay, that was what he wanted. He liked it here, it wasn’t such a bad place.
By mid-afternoon he was wretched with despair and that night he hit the bar early. He sat next to a guy who had been living in Despond for the last fifteen years. He had just been passing through but, gradually, had taken a kind of liking to the place. There were plenty worse places.
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.
CHAPTER TWELVE
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.