Geoff Dyer - The Search

The lead was a flimsy one: the phone number from Malory’s hotel bill. He dialled again — amazingly the phone still worked — but, as before, got the high tone indicating it had been disconnected. His only option was to trawl through the phone book for Meridian until he found the address. He had nothing else to go on.

A post office near the hotel had directories from all over the country. The directory for Meridian was one of the thickest in the rack. The only way to go about it was systematically. He found an empty table and got started. It was mind-numbing work, requiring an appalling amount of concentration, more boring than anything he had ever done. After two hours he got to G. The law of averages meant that he should find the number before M. Most likely he would get to it at W. His eyes felt like a microscope. If his thoughts wandered off he went back a couple of columns and resumed his trudge through the book, forcing himself to think of nothing.

He found the number under M, under the name of Malory: Joanne Malory. He cursed himself for his stupidity in not looking there first. Checked three times, unable to believe that he had found it, then jotted down the address. Back at the hotel he lay on the bed and shut his eyes, columns of numbers marching through his head. He dozed and dreamed of numbers.

The telephone woke him — the manager of the hotel wanting to know if he was staying another night. It was six o’clock, way after check-out. Walker stared at the digits on the telephone, adding them up across and down. Apologized, said he was leaving immediately.

It started raining sixty miles out of town. An hour later the rain was falling so heavily that it was impossible to see the road ahead. One wiper had given up and twitched helplessly in the downpour. Walker bent forward, peering through the windshield at a truck swimming towards him. The windshield was ablaze with light and then, as the truck passed, there was a blind drench of spray. He braked and felt the car slither, the wiper clearing a segment of visibility.

He must have missed a sign or taken a wrong turning: either way he was lost. He clutched the wheel with one hand and skimmed through the radio, hoping for some kind of confirmation of where he was. An old song came and went in a sea-spray of static. He twisted the dial a fraction and a chubby voice said storms were ravaging the region. Storms and gale-force winds. Police advised people to stay home unless absolutely necessary, to drive with extreme caution. Several rivers had broken their banks, many minor roads in the region were flooded, the something bridge was down. The main roads between Belford and Oakham, Queenstown and Nelson, Darlington and Sable were closed.

These towns meant nothing to Walker. No mention was made of Meridian or Kingston. The way the announcer talked of ‘the region’ without specifying which region, made him feel more lost than ever, as if he were nowhere, not even in the middle of nowhere, on the edge of nowhere, stranded between nowhere towns. The voice announced that we would now return to ‘Melody through Midnight’ and Walker snapped the radio off.

Lightning jarred the darkness. There was a long silence, so long it seemed like the silence itself was waiting, and then thunder crashed all around. Easing through a curve he felt both right-side wheels bump off the road and begin dragging the car into whatever lay beyond. He hauled the car back on to the road but minutes later the same thing happened again — with the right wiper gone he could see nothing of what was happening over that side. It was dangerous to keep going and even more dangerous to stop: the first car to come by would plough straight into him.

He glanced down at the fuel gauge. Depending on the gradient the needle swung between the red strip indicating things were getting bad and the E indicating they couldn’t get any worse. The rain eased off and then came pounding back, harder than ever. Here and there the road was flooded and the car plunged through the waiting lakes. He moved his face closer to the windshield as the road curved left. Immediately beyond the bend a tree was lying half across the road. He veered round the trunk and crashed through flailing branches. Lightning jagged down towards a church or tower in the distance.

Later, long after he had given up hoping for such a thing, he drove past a turn-off and signpost. He slid to a halt and backed up. The rain was so heavy he had to wind down the window to make out the sign, startled by the noise of the storm hammering on the roof, hissing. Seventy miles ahead was the town of Flagstaff; ten miles off to the right was a town called Monroe. He cranked up the window, turned right. Even ten miles seemed optimistic: for the last twenty minutes the needle had been stretched out horizontally, only momentarily twitching from E. The engine was sounding worse and worse. By the outskirts of Monroe it was like the last drops of coke being sucked through a straw.

He drove into town along the main drag, past the water-logged forecourt of a darkened gas station. Black ponds had formed around every drain, sometimes stretching from one side of the street to the next. A faulty light in a shop blinked off and on. He parked opposite the only place that was open, the Monroe Diner. Killed the engine and listened to the rain, the wind creaking through signs. He pulled a coat from the back seat and cracked open the door. The rain sounded like fat frying in a pan. He plunged his foot into a puddle and levered himself out of the car. Waded across the street.

Every face turned on him as he entered, the glare that passes for welcome in bars all over the world. He felt like a traveller who stops at a tavern in Transylvania and asks if anyone knows the way to Castle Dracula. Shook his hair and rubbed his feet on the crew-cut mat. Behind the bar a woman was pouring beer into an angled glass.

She smiled ‘Hi’ as he perched himself on a stool by the bar. ‘What would you like?’

‘Hi. Coffee, please.’ Even before he asked for it, coffee was implicit in the idea of shelter offered by the diner.

Once he was sat at the bar no one took any notice of him. His hair dripped on the counter and into his coffee. 34 He ordered food, looked around. A dozen people, mostly alone or in pairs. Every now and again the window bleached white by lightning. The barwoman brought his food, asked where he was heading.

‘I’m on my way to Nelson,’ he lied reflexively. ‘I got lost in the rain some way back.’

‘That’s what it’s like this time of year. Never rains but it pours. Never pours but it floods. And it always rains.’

‘And you have rooms here?’ Walker was scooping up his food American-style, using just the fork, talking and chewing.

‘For one? For one night?’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s no problem. Matter of fact, it wouldn’t be a problem if you wanted rooms for eight people for a week.’

Walker paid for everything and took a beer upstairs. The room was on the top floor. He spent twenty minutes standing under a shower that was not quite hot enough, then sat on the edge of the bed, drinking beer and thinking about tomorrow, wrapped in a towel. Clothes drying over a fan-heater.

He finished the beer and walked over to the window, the town hunkered down under the rain. A car eased along the main street, slowed, pulled into the parking lot beside the diner. Walker flicked off the light and went back to the window. The car had disappeared from sight but he could see puddles stained red by the tail lights. Then the lights were switched off and there was the slam of doors opening and closing. He pulled on his clothes, warm from the heater, damp. He tossed a few things from the bathroom into his hold-all and moved out into the corridor, locking the door behind him. A sign said emergency exit. It had not been used in a long time and he had to wrench it noisily open. The fire escape was behind the neon welcoming you to the Monroe Diner. He pulled the emergency door shut and zig-zagged down the rusted steps. Rain purpled and greened around him. Hanging from the lowest rung he dropped to the wet tarmac. He moved round the parking lot to the car he had seen from his window. By now they would be on their way up to his room. All the doors were locked. He scanned the ground, found a large stone. Lightning flashed lazily. When the thunder came he hurled the stone through the driver’s window. As he opened the door the interior light flashed on for a moment, a dim echo of lightning. He swept glass from the seat, pulled the ignition wires from the steering column. As soon as he touched them together the engine sparked into life.