cyclonic wind tunnel and swept away past him, leaving him in darkness.
He sat now, still, quiet, too isolated to be frightened.
He thought perhaps clouds had covered the sun.
There was no sun.
He thought perhaps it had been an eclipse, that his deep concentration of his hopeless state had kept him from noticing.
There was no sun.
No sky. The ground beneath him was gone. He sat, merely sat, but on nothing, surrounded by nothing, seeing and feeling nothing save a vague chill. It was cold now, very cold now.
After a long time he decided to stand and
He could remember everything that had ever happened to him in his life. Every moment of it, with absolute clarity. It was something he had never experienced before. His memory had been no better or worse than anyone else’s, but he had forgotten all the details, many years in which nothing had happened, during which he had wasted time—almost as a mute witness at the dull rendition of his life.
But now, as he walked through the limbo that was all he had been left of the world, he recalled everything perfectly. The look of terror on his mother’s face when he had sliced through the tendons of his left hand with the lid from the tin can of pink lemonade: he had been four years old. The feel of his new Thom McAn shoes that had always been too tight, from the moment they had been bought, but which he had been forced to wear to school every day, even though they rubbed him raw at the back of his heels: he had been seven years old. The Four Freshmen standing and singing for the graduation dance. He had been alone. He had bought one ticket to support the school event. He had been sixteen. The taste of egg roll at Choy’s, the first time. He had been twenty-four. The woman he had met at the library, in the section where they kept the book on animals. She had used a white lace handkerchief to dry her temples. It had smelled of perfume. He had been thirty. He remembered all the sharp edges of every moment from his past. It was remarkable. In this nowhere.
And he walked through gray spaces, with the shadows of other times and other places swirling past. The sound of rushing wind, as thought the emptiness through which he moved was being constantly filled and emptied, endlessly, without measure or substance.
Had he known what emotions to call on for release, he would have done so. But he was numb in his skin. Not merely chilled, as this empty place was chilled, but somehow inured to feeling from the edge of his perceptions to the center of his soul. Sharp, clear, drawn back from the absolute past, he remembered a day when he had been eleven, when his mother had suggested that for his birthday they make a small party, to which he would invite a few friends. And so (he remembered with diamond-bright perfection) he had invited six boys and girls. They had never come. He sat alone in the house that Saturday, all his comic books laid out in case the cake and party favors and pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey did not hold their attention sufficiently. Never came. It grew dark. He sat alone, with his mother occasionally walking through the living room to make some consoling remark. But he was alone, and he knew there was only one reason for it: they had all forgotten. It was simply that he was a waste of time for those actually living their lives. Invisible, by token of being unimportant. A thing unnoticed: on a street, who notices the mailbox, the fire hydrant, the crosswalk lines? He was an invisible, useless thing.
He had never permitted another party to be thrown for him.
He remembered that Saturday now. And found the emotion, twenty-six years late, to react to this terrible vanishment of the world. He began to tremble uncontrollably, and he sat down where there was nothing to sit down on, and he rubbed his hands together, feeling the tremors in his knuckles and the ends of his fingers. Then he felt the constriction in his throat, he turned his head this way and that, looking for a nameless exit from self-pity and loneliness; and then he cried. Lightly, softly, because he had no experience at it.
A crippled old woman came out of the gray mist of nowhere and stood watching him. His eyes were closed, or he would have seen her coming.
After a while, he snuffled, opened his eyes, and saw her standing in front of him. He stared at her. She was standing. At a level somewhat below him, as though the invisible ground of this nonexistent place was on a lower plane that that on which he sat.
“That won’t help much,” she said. She wasn’t surly, but neither was there much succor in her tone.
He looked at her, and immediately stopped crying.
“Probably just got sucked in here,” she said. It was not quite a question, though it had something of query in it. She knew, and was going carefully.
He continued to look at her, hoping she could tell him what had happened to him. And to her? She was here, too.
“Could be worse,” she said, crossing her arms and shifting her weight off her twisted left leg. “I could’ve been a Saracen or a ribbon clerk or even one of those hairy prehumans.” He didn’t respond. He didn’t know what she was talking about. She smiled wryly, remembering. “First person I met was some kind of a retard, a little boy about fifteen or so. Must have spent what there’ d been of his life in some padded cell or a hospital bed, something like that. He just sat there and stared at me, drooled a little, couldn’t tell me a thing. I was scared out of my mind, ran around like a chicken with its head cut off. Wasn’t till a long time after that before I met someone spoke English.”
He tried to speak and found his throat was dry. His voice came out in a croak. He swallowed and wet his lips. “Are there many other, uh, other people… we’re not all alone… ?”
“Lots of others. Hundreds, thousands, God only knows; maybe whole countries full of people here. No animals, though. They don’t waste it the way we do.”
“Waste it? What?”
“Time, son. Precious, lovely time. That’s all there is, just time. Sweet, flowing time. Animals don’t know about time.”
As she spoke, a slipping shadow of some wild scene whirled past and through them. It was a great city in flames. It seemed more substantial than the vagrant wisps of countryside or sea-scenes that had been ribboning past them as they spoke. The wooden buildings and city towers seemed almost solid enough to crush anything in their path. Flames leaped toward the gray, dead skin sky; enormous tongues of crackling flame that ate the city’s gut and chewed the phantom image, leaving ash. (But even the dead ashes had more life than the grayness through which the vision swirled.)
Ian Ross ducked, frightened. Then it was gone.
“Don’t worry about it, son,” the old woman said. “Looked a lot like London during the big fire. First the plague, then the fire. I’ve seen its like before. Can’t hurt you. None of it can hurt you.”
He tried to stand, found himself still weak. “But what
She shrugged. “No one’s ever been able to tell me for sure. Bet there’s some around in here who can, though. One day I’ll run into one of them. If I find out and we ever meet again I’ll be sure to let you know. Bound to happen.” But her face grew infinitely sad and there was desolation in her expression. “Maybe. Maybe we’ll meet again. Never happens, but it might. Never saw that retarded boy again. But it might happen.”
She started to walk away, hobbling awkwardly. Ian got to his feet with difficulty, but as quickly as he could. “Hey, wait! Where are you going? Please, lady, don’t leave me here all alone. I’m scared to be here by myself.”
She stopped and turned, tilting oddly on her bad leg. “Got to keep moving. Keep going, you know? If you stay in one place you don’t get anywhere; there’s a way out… you’ve just got to keep moving till you find it.” She started again, saying, over her shoulder, “I guess I won’t be seeing you again; I don’t think it’s likely.”
He ran after her and grabbed her arm. She seemed very startled. As if no one had ever touched her in this place during all the time she had been. here.
“Listen, you’ve got to tell me some things, whatever you know. I’m awfully scared, don’t you understand? You have to have some understanding.”
She looked at him carefully. “ All right, as much as I can, then you’ll let me go?”
He nodded.
“I don’t know what happened to me… or to you. Did it all fade away and just disappear, and everything that was left was this, just this gray nothing?”
