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.