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. .
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.