Geoff Dyer - The Search

Weighed down by eggs and grits, Walker left the café and headed back to the bus station. There was something strange about the city but he was unable to work out what. Then it came to him. There were no trees or pigeons or gardens. Yet all around were the sounds of leaves rustling and the beating of wings, the cooing of departed birds. He was so shocked that he stood at a street corner, listening. The effect was unsettling, less because it was so odd than because he was unable to decide whether it was depressing or uplifting: depressing because these things were absent or uplifting because, though absent, their sound remained. Thinking of the tape he had listened to last night he set the dictaphone on a wall and inserted the blank cassette. Pressed Record and let the machine soak up the sounds all around.

He had time, just before the bus left, to buy a pack of five blank tapes.

The bus station at Usfret was the size of a small city, a shanty town in its own right. Buses from all over the country converged and departed in a scene of relentless chaos. Buses roared in and out continually, drivers jockeyed for position, horns blaring. Conductors called and joked to each other, children who had climbed on to sell drinks leapt down into the dust, clutching crates of empty bottles.

Signs warned of pickpockets and every few moments Walker felt a body shove suspiciously into him. He asked where you could get taxis and a white-haired man, lacking a hand, gestured vaguely with his stump.

Walker set off in the general direction, not properly understanding where he was supposed to be heading. He needed a piss and found a toilet that smelled like the source of all epidemics in history. Over the years the city had sprawled further and further until it had ruined the surrounding land and this lavatory was a microcosm of the same process. The toilet had become progressively more clogged with effluent until it had encroached on to the floor, spilling out of the door and eventually forming ghettos of excrement and toilet paper for yards around. Walker tried to avoid looking but it was impossible to resist the conclusion that everyone here had more or less chronic diarrhoea the whole time: every conceivable kind of human shit was here — except that which suggested the normal working of healthy bowels. Even to piss here seemed as risky as drinking contaminated water. Everything was contaminated, even your sight.

He continued walking until he came to an area that seemed almost deserted compared with the bedlam of the main station. Old men levered themselves along on crutches. Dogs and men nosed through sprawling mounds of rubbish. Strewn all around were rusted tins, bottles and rags. Rubbish had acquired the permanence and character of architecture. There was so much rubbish that the idea of litter meant nothing. The landscape was made of litter — not defiled by it — and the litter was defiled by a film of oil oozed over everything by convoys of buses. Even the mud underfoot seemed composed of oil which had been compacted hard and pressed into the ground by the passage of time and tyres, as if the process which formed it three million years ago were slowly beginning again.

Walker had definitely come the wrong way: quite abruptly there were no more buildings, only coaches heading off across a wasteland of iron mud. It was strange that this sprawling city should so abruptly give way to nothing. He had assumed that the centrifugal crowding of the city had flung people to the edges, but now he wondered if it weren’t the other way round, if the surrounding emptiness had not impelled people centripetally to the centre of the town. So elemental was the fear bred by that emptiness that people wanted to crowd together in the filth of the city. The more crowded and debased their circumstances the more reassured they felt, as if living five or six to a room were actually one of the comforts the city promised.

As if in obedience to exactly this impulse Walker began making his way back towards the station. The sky was brilliant blue. Groups of men stood round burning braziers as the hot sunlight of the afternoon began turning quickly to the chill of evening. Two turbaned men tossed dice on to a handkerchief spread on the ground. Walker asked where to go for a taxi and they pointed off to the left. Several times youths asked Walker if he needed help and he muttered that he was OK, moving away if anyone persisted in offering assistance. He tried to look as if he were at ease and knew exactly where he was going, but thieves the world over must have been so familiar with this routine he wondered if it were not a more useful ploy to look helpless, terrified and lost. Perhaps then people would leave you alone. The only truly safe course was to have less than anybody else — but here everyone seemed worse off than everyone else. Even possessing a set of healthy limbs was to enjoy a position of relative privilege and therefore vulnerability.

He found the taxi rank on the edge of the station, next to a vast market. The driver was unwilling to leave until he had a full load of passengers and Walker sat wearily in the back of a dilapidated Mercedes, shoving himself a little further into the corner every time someone else climbed in. A woman was squeezed up next to him, clutching bags of bulging shopping. As the car turned a corner one of her bags spilled over and fruit and vegetables went rolling across the floor. Walker bent down to help retrieve things and saw that an egg box had come open and one egg had smashed over his shoe. As soon as he saw it he was overwhelmed by a feeling of giddiness. The woman apologized and began dabbing clumsily at his shoe with a clump of tissues. Walker forced himself to smile, insisted it didn’t matter. He breathed deeply, opened and closed his eyes, waiting for this sudden surge of giddiness, of vertigo, to pass.

Once he had booked into a hotel Walker sent a letter to Malory. In fact he sent ten of them, putting blank sheets of paper in envelopes and sending them to him care of American Express in towns he may have passed through. On each of the envelopes he wrote ‘Please forward if necessary’. If he had nothing else to go on — no idea of where Malory had gone next — he could stop at each of the towns and ask if there was any mail for him, Alex Malory. Nine times out of ten the letters would be waiting but occasionally, he hoped, they would have arrived at a place Malory had actually passed through. If the mail had been picked up, then Malory had been there between the letter’s arrival and Walker’s own. If they were sent to a place Malory had already left, it was possible that he would have arranged to have letters forwarded. In this way the letter served as a kind of tracking device, an advance scout.

Beyond that he had little idea what to do in Usfret, a dirty, crowded, sour-smelling town. He walked the streets looking for — for what? For a sign that Malory may have passed through, an indication of where he had gone. He felt pointless, absurd — and then, on his second day in the city, he saw Malory.

Walker was heading towards Americas Square in the middle of the city. As he got nearer to the square the streets became more and more crowded. In the Spanish quarter, where some kind of fiesta was in progress, it became difficult to move. That was as nothing, however, compared with the crush that Walker found himself in twenty minutes later in the area around the square itself. The streets here felt like the packed terraces of a soccer stadium. By the time Walker saw it was hopeless — that he would never get to the square — it was impossible to extricate himself from the crush; he could go only in the general direction of the crowd. In places — by the entrance to subway stations especially — the crowd had congealed completely. People trying to get out of the subway found the exit plugged by crowds attempting to come in. A woman lost her footing and disappeared from sight. It seemed certain she would be trampled underfoot but she emerged, ashen, weeping, a few seconds later.