a tremulous jewel of vibrating coral that suddenly flushed within its own red sea. The ruby light that radiated from every surface within the laundromat was charged by his own bloodstream as it merged into the flicker of multiplying images.
Staring at his translucent hands, Sheppard left the pavilion and set off along the street through the intense sunlight. Beyond the tilting fences he could see the drained swimming pools of Cocoa Beach, each a complex geometry of light and shadow, canted decks encoding the secret entrances to another dimension. He had entered a city of yantras, cosmic dials sunk into the earth outside each house and motel for the benefit of devout time- travellers.
The streets were deserted, but behind him he heard a familiar laboured pad. The old retriever plodded along the sidewalk, its coat shedding a tremulous golden fur. Sheppard stared at it, for a moment certain that he was seeing the unicorn Elaine had described in her last letter. He looked down at his wrists, at his incandescent fingers. The sun was annealing plates of copper light to his skin, dressing his arms and shoulders in a coronation armour. Time was condensing around him, a thousand replicas of himself from the past and future had invaded the present and clasped themselves to him.
Wings of light hung from his shoulders, feathered into a golden plumage drawn from the sun, the reborn ghosts of his once and future selves, conscripted to join him here in the streets of Cocoa Beach.
Startled by Sheppard, an old woman stared at him from the door of a shack beside the boat-house. Brittle hands felt her blue-rinsed hair, she found herself transformed from a shabby crone into a powdered beauty from the forgotten Versailles of her youth, her thousand younger selves from every day of her life gladly recruited to her side, flushing her withered cheeks and warming her stick-like hands. Her elderly husband gazed at her from his rocker chair, recognizing her for the first time in decades, himself transformed into a conquistador half-asleep beside a magical sea.
Sheppard waved to them, and to the tramps and derelicts emerging into the sunlight from their cabins and motel rooms, drowsy angels each awaking to his own youth. The flow of light through the air had begun to slow, layers of time overlaid each other, laminae of past and future fused together. Soon the tide of photons would be still, space and time would set forever.
Eager to become part of this magnetic world, Sheppard raised his wings and turned to face the sun.
‘Were you trying to fly?’
Sheppard sat against the wall beside his bed, arms held tight like crippled wings around his knees. Near by in the darkened bedroom were the familiar pieces of furniture, the Marey and Magritte reproductions pinned to the dressingtable mirror, the projector ready to screen its black coil of film on to the wall above his head.
Yet the room seemed strange, a cabin allocated to him aboard a mysterious liner, with this concerned young psychologist sitting at the foot of the bed. He remembered her jeep in the dusty road, the loudhailer blaring at the elderly couple and the other derelicts as they were all about to rise into the air, a flight of angels. Suddenly a humdrum world had returned, his past and future selves had fled from him, he found himself standing in a street of shabby bars and shacks, a scarecrow with an old dog. Stunned, the tramps and the old couple had pinched their dry cheeks and faded back to their dark bedrooms.
So this was present time. Without realizing it, he had spent all his life in this grey, teased-out zone. However, he still held the paperweight in his hand. Though inert now, raised to the light it began to glow again, summoning its brief past and limitless future to its own side.
Sheppard smiled at himself, remembering the translucent wings — an illusion, of course, a blur of multiple selves that shimmered from his arms and shoulders, like an immense electric plumage. But perhaps at some time in the future he became a winged man, a glass bird ready to be snared by Martinsen? He saw himself caged in the condortraps, dreaming of the sun…
Anne Godwin was shaking her head to herself. She had turned from Sheppard and was examining with evident distaste the pornographic photographs pinned to the wardrobe doors. The glossy prints were overlaid by geometric diagrams which this strange tenant of the motel had pencilled across the copulating women, a secondary anatomy.
‘So this is your laboratory? We’ve been watching you for days. Who are you, anyway?’
Sheppard looked up from his wrists, remembering the golden fluid that had coursed through the now sombre veins.
‘Roger Sheppard.’ On an impulse he added: ‘I’m an astronaut.’
‘Really?’ Like a concerned nurse, she sat on the edge of the bed, tempted to touch Sheppard’s forehead. ‘It’s surprising how many of you come to Cape Kennedy — bearing in mind that the space programme ended thirty years ago.’
‘It hasn’t ended.’ Quietly, Sheppard did his best to correct this attractive but confused young woman. He wanted her to leave, but already he saw that she might be useful. Besides, he was keen to help her, and set her free from this grey world. ‘In fact, there are thousands of people involved in a new programme — we’re at the beginnings of the first true Space Age.’
‘Not the second? So the Apollo flights were.
‘Misconceived.’ Sheppard gestured at the Marey chronograms on the dressing-table mirror, the blurred time- lapse photos so like the images he had seen of himself before Anne Godwin’s arrival. ‘Space exploration is a branch of applied geometry, with many affinities to pornography.’
‘That sounds sinister.’ She gave a small shudder. ‘These photographs of yours look like the recipe for a special kind of madness. You shouldn’t go out during the day. Sunlight inflames the eyes — and the mind.’
Sheppard pressed his face against the cool wall, wondering how to get rid of this over-concerned young psychologist. His eyes ran along the sills of light between the plastic blinds. He no longer feared the sun, and was eager to get away from this dark room. His real self belonged to the bright world outside. Sitting here, he felt like a static image in a single frame hanging from the coil of film in the projector on the bedside table. There was a sense of stop-frame about the whole of his past life — his childhood and schooldays, McGill and Cambridge, the junior partnership in Vancouver, his courtship of Elaine, together seemed like so many clips run at the wrong speed. The dreams and ambitions of everyday life, the small hopes and failures, were attempts to bring these separated elements into a single whole again. Emotions were the stress lines in this over-stretched web of events.
‘Are you all right? Poor man, can’t you breathe?’
Sheppard became aware of Anne Godwin’s hand on his shoulder. He had clenched his fingers so tightly around the paperweight that his fist was white. He relaxed his grip and showed her the glassy flower.
Casually, he said: ‘There’s some curious architecture here — filling stations and laundromats like Siamese temples. Have you seen them?’
She avoided his gaze. ‘Yes, to the north of Cocoa Beach. But I keep away from there.’ She added reluctantly: ‘There’s a strange light by the Space Centre, one doesn’t know whether to believe one’s eyes.’ She weighed the flower in her small hand, the fingers still bruised by Martinsen’s wingmirror. ‘That’s where you found this? It’s like a fossil of the future.’
‘It is.’ Sheppard reached out and took it back. He needed the security of the piece, it reminded him of the luminous world from which this young woman had disturbed him. Perhaps she would join him there? He looked up at her strong forehead and high-bridged nose, a cut-prow that could outstare the time-winds, and at her broad shoulders, strong enough to bear a gilded plumage. He felt a sudden urge to examine her, star her in a new video film, explore the planes of her body like a pilot touching the ailerons and fuselage of an unfamiliar aircraft.
He stood up and stepped to the wardrobe. Without thinking, he began to compare the naked figure of his wife with the anatomy of the young woman sitting on his bed, the contours of her breasts and thighs, the triangles of her neck and pubis.
‘Look, do you mind?’ She stood between Sheppard and the photographs. ‘I’m not going to be annexed into this experiment of yours. Anyway, the police are coming to search for that aircraft. Now, what is all this?’
‘I’m sorry.’ Sheppard caught himself. Modestly, he pointed to the elements of his ‘kit’, the film strips, chronograms and pornographic photos, the Magritte reproduction. ‘It’s a machine, of a kind. A timemachine. It’s powered by that empty swimming pool outside. I’m trying to construct a metaphor to bring my wife back to life.’
‘Your wife — when did she die?’
‘Three months ago. But she’s here, in the forest, somewhere near the Space Centre. That was her doctor you saw the other evening, he’s trying to turn into a bird.’ Before Anne Godwin could protest Sheppard took her arm and
