Geoff Dyer - The Search

He edged round the diner and out on to the rain-slick street. Two hundred yards down the road he flicked on the headlights. In a film now, he thought to himself, someone hidden in the back seat would put a gun to his head and whisper, ‘Freeze.’ Suddenly nervous, he looked over his shoulder, almost disappointed to find no one there.

Wind and rain howled through the broken window. He was chilled from his damp clothes. Twenty miles out of town he pulled over and clambered awkwardly into a sweater and jeans. He stretched the wet shirt over the broken window. It bulged and sagged and made no difference, but with dry clothes and the heater blowing he felt better.

As soon as he was warm he became sleepy. When he felt himself nodding off he slapped his face and turned off the heater until he was cold and alert, miserable again. Alternating between shivers and yawns. There was no question of stopping — he had to put as much distance as possible between himself and Carver before morning. Assuming it was Carver. He went over the scene back in Monroe and realized that for all he knew the occupants of the car were simply travellers who had decided to rest up for the night instead of pressing on through the storm. Rather than being a stroke of luck that he had been at the window as the car drove in, it could equally have been whatever was the opposite of a stroke of luck — he was too tired to think of the word, maybe there wasn’t one — that they came along when they did and set off his paranoia like an alarm. Shit! He pounded the steering wheel and accidentally sounded the horn. He reassured himself by playing the scene over again, this time focusing on his reactions — on how it hadn’t occurred to him even for a moment that the car hadn’t come for him. Even if they didn’t convince, the double negatives at least obscured the issue. Anyway, there was no going back. There was no going back but either way, he thought, going back over the same question again, he should get rid of the car as soon as he could — but wherever he left it it would still point in his direction. As soon as they found the car, any lead he had built up effectively counted for nothing — but he couldn’t abandon the car in an unfindable place without marooning himself. The relentless orbit of thoughts tired him but at least, he reasoned, setting off the whole process again, at least it kept him from falling asleep.

The rain showed no sign of letting up. When he could barely keep his eyes open he pulled off the road and squelched up a narrow lane. He turned off the engine, climbed over the seat and curled up in the back.

Rain hammered on the roof of his dreams.

He was woken by the alarm of bird calls, a wet sun squinting through branches. He opened the door and pissed yellow into the trees. All around was the slow drip of last night’s rain. His mouth was dry and he cupped a few drops in his hand to moisten his tongue.

He touched the loose ignition wires and the engine came to life immediately, heaving clear of the suck of mud. Back on the road the sun shone hard through the windshield. In the distance was a blue line of mountains.

A sign said MERIDIAN 120 MILES. The highway glistened.

Meridian, as the thickness of the phone book had suggested, was a big city. He drove downtown and parked the car beneath the track of the Elevated Train. It was a perfect spot to leave the car: abandoned vehicles were strewn all around, many already stripped down to rusty frames as if picked clean by vultures. Walking away he looked into the back of a burnt-out station wagon and noticed the remains of a road atlas: a core of red highways, smoke-grimed, becoming charred, leading to ashes.

He bought coffee and a street plan. Rampart Street was eight stops along the line but after so long in the car he preferred to walk. He followed the El, walking beneath the giant concrete legs that strode through the city. The sun streamed through the track, cross-hatching the ground with shadows. Patches of sky blazed through the angles of wood and metal. Every ten minutes a train thundered overhead, obliterating everything. In his childhood the future had been depicted in terms of white capsules zipping noiselessly along rails suspended over the efficient life of a gleaming city. What had actually resulted was graffiti-mottled trains rattling over a landscape of rusting vehicles that no one wanted.

Rampart was a dilapidated street running parallel to the El, a couple of blocks to the south, number seventeen a faded one-storey place. A green-and-yellow FOR RENT sign added colour. He tried the bell and waited. A bird, bright as a goldfish, was perched on the phone line. Walker clambered over a fence and made his way round the back. Wooden steps led up to a door which opened when he tried it. He looked around and moved inside, shutting the door behind him, eyes adjusting. A tap dripping. He walked through the kitchen and into the hallway. Mail was piled up by the front door, junk mostly, a couple of letters and — he recognized the handwriting instantly — a card from Malory. Two lines: ‘Hope this reaches you before you move. Thanks for everything.’ Unsigned, postmarked Iberia, the date too smudged to read.

There was nothing in any of the ground-floor rooms. Upstairs, the bathroom cabinet was empty except for a yellow beaker. His face in the mirror was pimpled with mould. There were two bedrooms, one with a bare double, the other with a single and an old desk. When he opened a closet metal hangers jangled briefly. A tingle of déjà vu. He shut the door and opened it again, hoping he could define the sensation more exactly but this time there was nothing.

The desk drawers smelled of graphite. Paper-clips, a broken pencil, blank pages of paper. He sat on the bed, forearms resting on his legs, hands dangling between his knees, one foot tapping out the pulse of a thought. He lowered his head, ran his fingers through his hair. As he did so he noticed, behind his feet, almost under the bed, a micro-cassette case. There was a tape inside but, except for the manufacturer’s label, no indication as to what was on it. He pocketed the tape and peered beneath the bed on his hands and knees. The only thing there was a dusty magazine open at an article about the cathedral in Nemesis, a photo of a stained-glass window.

He went through the house again, unable to form any idea of what Malory might have been doing here. Tightened the tap as hard as he could, stopping the drip. Then let himself out of the back door, locking it behind him.

Out on the street a dog padded by. Its tail, balls and ears had all been clipped off, giving it the wicked, harmless look of a medieval gargoyle. From a pay-phone on the corner Walker called the number of the realtors on the sign. Thinking he was considering renting the place — ‘the property’ — they were very friendly until he asked if they had any information about the previous tenant. They lost interest immediately and Walker had to move quickly to hang up before they did.

Near the El station he stood indecisively in the sunshine. Hitched his bag over his shoulder and said, quietly, to himself, ‘So. . What shall I do?’

Cars glinted past. What could he do?

He bought a ticket and walked up to the platform as the El train pulled in. It rattled past crumbling verandas, painted stoops, the open windows of kitchens and bedrooms. Water towers were visible in the middle distance. On old walls, the faded ghosts of advertisements.

The mainline train to Iberia didn’t leave for an hour. He walked a couple of blocks from the station and saw a massive crane looming over the city. In a cut-price electronics store he bought a micro-cassette recorder. Stepping outside he looked up and saw the crane arm swinging round — though it took him several seconds to express it in these terms for he experienced the movement of the crane as a sensation rather than a perception. In that burst of panic he felt the air reeling — centrifugal, sickening — as if the crane were stationary and the street spinning around it, like a fairground ride or a record on a turntable. Then the correct relationship of stability and motion re-established itself, with the crane arm sweeping above the street. He tried to re-evoke the earlier sensation but now reason was firmly entrenched again and would not be caught off balance by something it knew to be an illusion. The experience disconcerted him all the same. If things could be sent reeling so easily, if momentarily, it would take only a slightly more elaborate arrangement of effects to throw the world more radically out of kilter.