apartment fifteen minutes earlier, but he was still trying to calm himself. He thought of the rotating blade that had devoured the darkness. Delayed all afternoon, his fugue had begun as he tripped over the tyre, and had lasted almost an hour. For her own reasons Marion was pretending that the fugue had not occurred, but when he woke his skin was frozen. What had she and Slade been doing during the lost time? Too easily, Franklin imagined them together in Marion’s car, or even in the cockpit of the aircraft, watched by the sightless husband. That would please Slade, put him in just the mood to scare the wits out of Franklin as he took off.
Through the open door Franklin stared at his wife’s naked body in the white cube of the bathroom. A wet cigarette smouldered in the soap dish. There were clusters of small bruises on her thighs and hips, marks of some stylized grapple. One day soon, when the time drained out of her, the contours of her breasts and thighs would migrate to the polished walls, calm as the dunes and valleys of the perimeter photographs.
Sitting down at the dressing table, Marion peered over her powdered shoulder with some concern. ‘Are you going to be all right? I’m finding it difficult enough to cope with myself. That wasn’t an attack…?’
‘Of course not.’ For months now they had kept up the pretence that neither of them was affected by the fugues. Marion needed the illusion, more in Franklin’s case than in her own. ‘But I may not always be immune.’
‘Robert, if anyone’s immune, you are. Think of yourself, what you’ve always wanted — alone in the world, just you and these empty hotels. But be careful of Slade.’
‘I am.’ Casually, Franklin added: ‘I want you to see more of him. Arrange a meeting.’
‘What?’ Marion looked round at her husband again, her left contact lens trapped under her eyelid. ‘He was naked, you know.’
‘So I saw. That’s part of his code. Slade’s trying to tell me something. He needs me, in a special way.’
‘Needs you? He doesn’t need you, believe me. But for you he would have gone to the moon. You took that away from him, Robert.’
‘And I can give it back to him.’
‘How? Are the two of you going to start your own space programme?’
‘In a sense we already have. But we really need you to help us.’
Franklin waited for her to reply, but Marion sat raptly in front of the mirror, lens case in one hand, fingers retracting her upper and lower eyelids around the trapped lens. Fused with her own reflection in the finger-stained glass, she seemed to be shooting the sun with a miniature sextant, finding her bearings in this city of empty mirrors. He remembered their last month together after the end at Cape Kennedy, the long drive down the dead Florida coast. The space programme had expressed all its failure in that terminal moraine of deserted hotels and apartment houses, a cryptic architecture like the forgotten codes of a discarded geometric language. He remembered Marion’s blood flowing into the hand-basin from her slashed palms, and the constant arguments that warped themselves out of the air.
Yet curiously those had been happy days, filled with the quickening excitements of her illness. He had dreamed of her promiscuity, the deranged favours granted to waitresses and bellboys. He came back alone from Miami, resting beside the swimming pools of the empty hotels, remembering the intoxications of abandoned parking lots. In a sense that drive had been his first conscious experiment with time and space, placing that body and its unhappy mind in a sequence of bathrooms and pools, watching her with her lovers in the diagrammed car parks, emotions hung on these abstract webs of space.
Affectionately, Franklin placed his hands on Marion’s shoulders, feeling the familiar clammy skin of the fugue. He lowered her hands to her lap, and then removed the contact lens from her eyeball, careful not to cut the cornea. Franklin smiled down at her blanched face, counting the small scars and blemishes that had appeared around her mouth. Like all women, Marion never really feared the fugues, accepting the popular myth that during these periods of lapsed time the body refused to age.
Sitting beside her on the stool, Franklin embraced her gently. He held her breasts in his palms, for a moment shoring up their slipping curvatures. For all his fondness for Marion, he would have to use her in his duel with Slade. The planes of her thighs and shoulders were segments of a secret runway along which he would one day fly to safety.
Not one of my best days. Five long fugues, each lasting over an hour. The first started at 9 am as I was walking around the pool towards the car. Suddenly I found myself standing by the deep end in much steeper sunlight, the old geologist poking me in a concerned way. Marion had told him not to disturb me, I was deep in thought! I must remember to wear a hat in future, the sunlight brought out a viral rash on my lips. An excuse for Marion not to kiss me, without realizing it she’s eager to get away from here, can’t pretend for much longer that the fugues don’t exist. Does she guess that in some way I plan to exploit that keening sex of hers?
These long fugues are strange, for the first time since the airplane attack I have a vague memory of the dead time. The geometry of that drained pool acted like a mirror, the sky seemed to be full of suns. Perhaps Marion knew that she was doing when she sunbathed there. I ought to climb down that rusty chromium ladder into a new kind of time? Lost time total: 6 hours 50 mm.
A dangerous fugue today, and what may have been another attempt on my life by Slade. I nearly killed myself driving to the clinic, must think hard about going there again. The first fugue came at 8.15 a.m., synchronized with Marion’s — our sole connubial activity now. I must have spent an hour opening the bathroom door, staring at her as she stood motionless in the shower stall. Curious after-images, sections of her anatomy seemed to be splayed across the walls and ceiling, even over the car park outside. For the first time I felt that it might be possible to stay awake during the fugues. A weird world, spatial change perceived independently of time.
Fired by all this, I set off for the clinic, eager to try something out on the perimeter camera. But only a mile down the highway I must have gone straight off the road, found myself in the parking lot of some abandoned hypermarket, surrounded by a crowd of staring faces. In fact, they were department store mannequins. Suddenly there was a volley of gunshots, fibreglass arms and heads were flying everywhere. Slade at his games again, this time with a pump-gun on the roof of the hypermarket. He must have seen me stranded there and placed the mannequins around me. The timeless people, the only mementoes of homo sapiens when we’ve all gone, waiting here with their idiotic smiles for the first stellar visitor.
How does Slade repress the fugues? Perhaps violence, like pornography, is some kind of evolutionary standby system, a last-resort device for throwing a wild joker into the game? A widespread taste for pornography means that nature is alerting us to some threat of extinction. I keep thinking about Ursula, incidentally… Total time lost 8 hours 17 mm.
Must get out of this motel more often. A curious by-product of the fugues is that I’m losing all sense of urgency. Sat here for the last three days, calmly watching time run through my fingers. Almost convinces me that the fugues are a good thing, a sign that some great biological step forward is about to take place, set off by the space flights. Alternatively, my mind is simply numbing itself through sheer fear This morning I forced myself into the sunlight. I drove slowly around Las Vegas, looking out for Marion and thinking about the links between gambling and time. One could devise a random world, where the length of each time interval depended on chance. Perhaps the high-rollers who came to Vegas were nearer the truth than they realized. ‘Clock time’ is a neurophysiological construct, a measuring rod confined to homo sapiens. The old labrador owned by the geologist next door obviously has a different sense of time, likewise the cicadas beside the pool. Even the materials of my body and the lower levels of my brain have a very different sense of time from my cerebrum — that uninvited guest within my skull.
Simultaneity? It’s possible to imagine that everything is happening at once, all the events'past’ and ‘future’ which constitute the universe are taking place together. Perhaps our sense of time is a primitive mental structure that we inherited from our less intelligent forebears. For prehistoric man the invention of time (a brilliant conceptual leap) was a way of classifying and storing the huge flood of events which his dawning mind had opened for him. Like a dog burying a large bone, the invention of time allowed him to postpone the recognition of an eventsystem too large for him to grasp at one bite.
If time is a primitive mental structure we have inherited, then we ought to welcome its atrophy, embrace the fugues — Total time lost 9 hours 15 min.
Everything is slowing down, I have to force myself to remember to eat and shower. It’s all rather pleasant,
