Geoff Dyer - The Search

It was a warm night. He sipped water and chewed hunks of bread, wished he had saved some of the strawberries. Later the momentum of the train lulled him to sleep. He dreamed of Rachel doing ordinary things, things he had never seen: cleaning her teeth, deciding which clothes to wear, reading, drying herself after a bath. He dreamed of her sleeping, dreaming of him.

Throughout the night he woke uncomfortably on the hard boards, looked out at the star-clogged sky until the clack of wheels tugged him asleep again.

By morning the train was passing through a silent expanse of wheat. When the sun moved over the roof and slid in through the open door Walker retreated to the back of the car, into the cool. From here, with the golden fields and blue sky framed by the black doors, the view was exactly like the projected image of a movie screen, an endless panning shot of prairie.

Then, slowly, the view began to shrink. Houses began to appear, roads; in the distance, factories. By late afternoon the train was heaving into the outskirts of Eagle City. The number of tracks visible from the freight increased until they stretched away like a wide river.

Walker’s train clanked and squealed over points, drawing parallel to other trains and then sliding away again. Beyond the railroad tracks was an actual river. A bridge squatted iron-heavy in the distance. Cranes, warehouses, water towers and brooding clouds. Faded signs with speed limits and warnings that no longer mattered. Old stock that had been plundered for spares and left to rust in sidings. The broken windows of an abandoned signal house. Littered with gulls, even the sky looked old, run-down.

The train slowed almost to a crawl. Walker jumped down and waited for it to pass, guessing that the centre of the town was on the other side, away from the river. Some way off a gang of workers in orange bibs walked across the tracks, shovels and picks over their shoulders.

When the train had passed, Walker began making his way across the expanse of tracks, ducking under the bumpers of stationary coaches, stepping ahead of departing freights. Beyond the station rose the office blocks of the city’s business district, high glass buildings made from cubes of sky.

Next to the railroad was a car park, cordoned off by a high perimeter fence. Walker waited behind a stationary shunter until there was no one in sight and then tossed over his bag and hauled himself up, the fence sagging and bulging with his weight. He dropped to the other side and walked out of the car park and into the town.

Eagle City had grown up as a crossing-point and small port on the Eagle River; with the coming of the railroads it became the commercial centre of the region and was now a large, depressed town on the edge of the prairie. Walker spent two days asking after Malory or Carver without success. He had lost track of them both. Which meant that he himself was lost. He thought about leaving and going on to Despond, a couple of hundred miles away, but did not have the confidence to rationalize this in his usual way: if he felt like leaving, then the chances were that Malory had felt the same. Besides, what would he find there? Sitting on the steps of an abandoned building, drinking milk from a bottle, he glanced up and saw, on the wall opposite, a torn poster for a Western. In films cowboys spoke of the trail going cold, but he had no way of knowing if the trail had gone cold or had actually frozen over. And what trail was there except the one that he left in his wake? What else was there to guide him?

He tossed the empty milk bottle into a bin and began walking. Soon after embarking on the search he had given up trying to guess the real significance of what Rachel had asked him to do. He had concentrated instead on the smallest things, on a trail of imagined footprints. He had given no thought to where they might ultimately lead because the question overwhelmed him, dwarfed his efforts and made them seem futile, absurd — whatever that meant. Now that he was pondering the larger purpose of the search he felt, for the first time, like giving up, abandoning it. And then what? Abandoning things was all very well but what did you do once you had abandoned them? Something else. It was impossible to walk out on one thing without walking into another. . What Rachel had asked him to do. Perhaps it was as simple as that. He had left so that he could return. All this shit just so he could fuck her. Like a story he’d heard in prison, using up the nothing days.

He had come to a network of steam-drift streets, crowded with cafés, bars and clubs. He walked past a club where a new kind of music was playing loudly. A bottle smashed a few yards in front of him. Whoops of laughter and a voice calling out: ‘Sorry, man, just an accident.’ Walker looked up to a second-floor balcony: a guy with his arms around a giggling woman, the pair of them so huge it seemed likely that the next thing to come down would be the balcony itself. ‘Take a full one with my apologies,’ he said, letting a beer bottle drop from his hand. Walker caught it, twisted off the top and took a gulp, held it up appreciatively. He smiled and walked on, pleased with himself for catching the bottle, ears ringing with the laughter of the pair on the balcony.

Pounding from the entrances to clubs, different kinds of music thumped together in a disjointed beat. The streets were littered with vomit, glass, even, Walker realized with revulsion, a bloody clump of teeth. A drunk lurched towards him, his face reeling yellow and blue in the flash of lights. His hands were on Walker’s lapels. Walker began pushing him away but already his battered mouth was spraying words: ‘He’s in Despond. That’s where you’ll find him. He’s waiting for you.’

From across the street a guy came crashing through the window of a bar. The shower of glass held a thousand scattered glimpses of the scene before falling like hail over the figure sprawled on the sidewalk, blood laking around him. The drunk had let go of Walker, had vanished in the boozesodden crowd. Walker looked round, could see no sign of him. There was a cheer from the bar and then silence, passers-by standing clear as the guy on the sidewalk dragged himself to his knees, shambled to his feet. He swayed uncertainly, gazing into the bar until a stool came spinning through the window and knocked him back into the angled grit of glass. Another cheer from the bar. This time he didn’t have the strength to get to his feet and he crawled away from the window on his hands and knees. Another stool came sailing out, followed by a chair, glasses and more stools, the remains of the window. The man sagged under the bombardment and lay motionless, one arm curled protectively around his head, surrounded by a broken mass of furniture. A dapper man from the bar stepped through the window frame and stood over him, counting him out — one-ah, two-ah — all the way to ten until he waved his arms to declare the bout oyer and stepped back through the window. All around from the street and bar were whoops, cheers and applause until people drifted away.

Walker moved on, replaying the drunk’s few words over and over. The crowds thinned out. He came to the river and gazed across at an area of derelict buildings. The girders and pillars of burnt-out tower blocks showed stark against the sunset. Something in the nature of skyscrapers suggested that these bare skeletons of metal represented the final flourishing of their vertiginous aspiration: this is how they had been intended to look.

The river was dappled red by the sun as Walker made his way along the tow-path. Further along the path was barricaded off and he entered the fringes of the Latin Quarter. Lines of washing hung between cramped balconies, the late silhouettes of birds were hemmed in by the redness of the sky. Preoccupied with the drunk’s startling appearance Walker had been paying little attention to exactly where he was. He had been told to be careful in certain parts of the Quarter at night and became abruptly anxious. A pair of youths in ripped jeans and biker jackets appeared from around a corner, nodded as they passed by.