Metro Winds (45 page)

‘You have business?' he asks with a touch of irony that suggests he has some inkling of my affliction, though it is virtually unnoticeable at night. I consider telling him that the turbulent history of his country, the stony eroded beauty of this city that is its heart, fascinated me. But in the end I say only, ‘Yes, business'.

Thinking: a strange business.

I do not know how I lost my shadow. After the first shock wore off, I told myself it was freak chance. My shadow might not even have known what it was doing when it severed itself from me. I could easily envisage myself walking and hesitating at some slight fork in the street, my shadow going on, sunk in its own thoughts, failing to notice that it did so without me. Seconds later, I would choose the other way. Maybe after a time it realised what had happened and retraced its path, but by then I was long gone.

That was one of my earliest theories – hopes, you might as well say. One does not like to admit the possibility that one's shadow has left on purpose. I consoled myself with a vision of my shadow, slipping frantically along walls and paths searching for me, wailing as forlornly as a lost child, occasionally plunging into pools of shadow and emerging with difficulty because it lacked a form to pull it from the larger shadow.

Now, I can more readily imagine its relief at being cut loose. It may have been a fortuitous accident that freed it, or maybe it saw its chance to be free, and took it. Either way, I blame my passivity for our estrangement. As a child, caught within the roaring machinery of the relationship between my parents, I had learned to defend myself with stillness. But having gained the habit of passivity, I could not rid myself of it, and so as an adult I found it almost impossible to engage with life. I was a fringe dweller of the most meek and timid ilk, and if someone had accused me of being a shadow in the world, I would have admitted it.

But that was before my shadow was lost, and I understood by the gaping void its absence left that it is we who need our shadows, not they us. Without it to anchor me to the earth, I became dangerously detached. I dreamed of the reassurance of its company, its small tug at my heels, its soft movement before me, feeling out my path like a blind man's cane. Without it to bind me to the earth, I was like one of those astronauts whose each step on the moon is so buoyant it seems they might at any second step into infinity. I feared that without my shadow I would soon make just such a step into oblivion. I had understood at last that I was diminishing without its darkness to balance me, and knew that something must be done.

The taxi swerves violently to avoid another taxi that has tried to pull out from a side street and the driver mutters what sounds like a curse.

I note indifferently that I had not felt the slightest fear at our near collision.

That numbing of emotions was as unexpected a side effect of my affliction as my detachment from linear time, and as easily as my grandmother slipped one stitch over another with her delicate, sharp needles, I slip.

I am sitting in a café booth beside floor-to-ceiling windows. Blinding light floods the table and presses against the frozen transparency that divides it from the darkness beyond. Somehow, the glass keeps them separate. Time is like this, I think, but for me there is no wall of glass. The light and dark are converging, consuming one another.

There is a young couple in the booth opposite sitting in such a way that, although they appear to be independent of each other, their bodies touch all along one side from shoulder down through the hip and thigh to the heels, their connection far more intimate than if they had been wound together explicitly. They are not foreign as I am, although even in a no-man's land like this establishment, where success depends upon its rejecting utterly any trace of the culture within which it exists, they belong in a way that I do not. Part of it may be because they are casually dressed, whereas I am wearing my formal but now somewhat crushed travelling clothes. Or maybe it is that they are young and I am not.

The girl is very tall and slender, as all of the women I have seen here seem to be – young women, anyway. The older women are as bulky as bears in their winter coats, their expressions forbidding and surly. The Asian stewardesses on the airline I flew with for the first part of the trip here were as small and fragile as blown-glass blossoms, while the German stewardesses on my second flight were young matrons with thick, competent arms and no-nonsense expressions. Here the faces of the young women are still and remote. One can see it is a general type and the girl opposite fits it. The waiter brings them two drinks – orangeade, perhaps – and a plate with two chocolate-coated cakes. A waiter is an anomaly in a place like this, a sign of the hybridisation of two cultures, perhaps, each trying to consume and subdue the other.

The girl takes up the plate and cuts into the cake, her expression unchanged. Inside the coating of chocolate is a pale, soft sponge or maybe some sort of creamy filling. She offers the laden fork to the boy, and my stomach spasms dully in what might be hunger. He is sitting very erect, although her spine is bent into a delicate bow and curled around the long, flat belly. She eats the remainder of the first cake and all of the second, licking her lips and talking, but never smiling, never showing any emotion. Her companion nods, and watches her with ravenous attention.

The waiter brings them a tall glass of fruit salad topped with a fat, loose whorl of impossibly white cream. The boy's turn, I think, but he gestures at the glass and the girl pushes aside the empty plate and again offers a spoonful of fruit and cream to the young man, who shakes his head. As before, the girl eats the whole parfait with the same dreamy absorption. When she sets the glass down, the boy runs his hand over her belly possessively, and then slides it around to pull her to him to be kissed. When he releases her, I see that her hands have not moved throughout the embrace and her body retracts automatically to its former languid bow.

The boy has become aware of my regard, and gives me a curious look. I do not glance away, embarrassed. I feel almost no self-consciousness. The affliction that brought me to this strange outpost has advanced to the point where I hardly feel any need to pretend to be normal. The boy calls the waiter and pays the bill and, as they leave, the young woman settles her limp, expressionless gaze on me. There is no way of knowing what is going on in her mind. Perhaps nothing. When they have gone, my exhaustion returns and I begin to think of leaving.

Beyond the windows is a utilitarian rank of spotlit petrol bowsers, and beyond the asphalt surrounding them a narrow road curves back to join the highway bounded on either side by a dense pine forest, passing into shadow.

I did not know what it meant to lose my shadow.

After my initial blank disbelief upon discovering it, I sought help. Ironically, I went to a doctor first, a general practitioner more accustomed to removing warts and administering antibiotics and tranquillisers than to treating a man with an ailment as rare and arcane as mine. She offered me a calmative and, seeing her disdain, I told her somewhat haughtily that she need not suppose that anything was wrong with my mind. Could she not accept the evidence of her eyes as I had done? I lacked a shadow. What could be more empirical, more concrete? Yet she simply pretended to be confused by my symptoms.

‘What exactly do you want?' she demanded finally.

I asked her coldly to refer me to a specialist in shadows, since her own training seemed to have left her ill-equipped for such exotic conditions. Somewhat maliciously, I suspect, she sent me to a radiologist, whose view of shadows was shaped entirely by his daily quest for the shadows that signified cancers and tumours on his X-rays. I can only say that his mind had been seriously warped by his profession.

When I told him of my problem, his eyes blazed and he clutched my arm hard enough to leave a bruise, proclaiming that I was the first human to have escaped the curse of shadows. He confided his belief that they were not bestowed by God, as was generally supposed, but had been visited upon us by some force which he refused to name. His mania was apparent when I questioned him about the purpose of shadows. He gave me an affronted look and asked what sort of man I thought he was, to ask him such a question, exactly as if I had asked the shade of his pubic hair. He had insisted on taking and developing an X-ray plate, which he examined suspiciously, finally announcing in a slightly resentful tone that he saw no shadow.

After that, I gave up on the medical profession. I was not really ill, I reasoned. Having lost a shadow I was more like a man whose wife leaves him, clearing out their apartment with mysterious speed and efficiency. With this in mind, I consulted a private investigating firm. The man who ran the agency gave his name as Andrews, which might as well be his surname as his first name. It occurred to me that a normal person would immediately be able to tell, but the nuance was too subtle for me so I contrived not to call him anything.

‘I've never been asked to shadow a shadow before,' he said when I had laid the matter before him. I can only suppose he meant it as a joke, but I did not laugh. I am not good at humour, and I told him this. He squinted at me, seeming suddenly sobered.

‘Perhaps that's the whole point,' he said. ‘Your lack of humour. Think of it from the point of view of a shadow having to endure being dragged about, never having a chance to exert its own mind or will or taste. And on top of that, to be forced to live with someone who has no sense of humour. It must be unendurable.' He seemed very sincere, but a certain reticence in my own character prevented me breaking down and confessing my fear of precisely this eventuality – that some profound lack in me had driven away my shadow. That was a matter to be resolved between my shadow and me. ‘They're worse than slaves,' he went on, ‘because they can only emulate. Nothing they do is original. There must be millions of them constantly plotting a coup, fed by dreams of freedom . . .'

‘Can you find it?' I asked him flatly.