The Search

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.

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.