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.
He looked through a leather ledger before consulting with his secretary, and after some negotiating, we agreed that he should have a modest retainer for a week. If after that time his enquiries had produced no promising clues, our contract would end. If he did find a lead, I would pay him a hundred dollars a day there-after, including expenses, until he found my shadow or my money was gone.
I gulped a little at the size of his daily fee, but a modest, hard-working life has enabled me to put aside a very good sum, and to comfort myself, I reckoned that ten thousand dollars spent on finding my shadow would still leave ample for my old age, and perhaps would even run to a restorative trip to the Greek Islands in the off-season after it was all over, so that my shadow and I could re-evaluate our relationship.
Perhaps it seems absurd to go to such lengths, but I was desperate.
Unfortunately, after a week, the investigator could report nothing. He confessed that my inability to remember when I had lost my shadow was a stumbling block. I blushed when he spoke of this, for his words seemed to me to suggest that I had been negligent. Though I continued to argue that the loss could only have happened a little before I noticed it,
he clearly doubted me, and made me doubt myself. Brooding over what he’d said, it struck me that I could not remember the last time I had noticed my shadow. I ran my mind over the days before my retirement, and then the weeks and months leading up to it. Finally, frantically, I began to run my mind over the preceding years, but still I could not recall seeing my shadow on any specific occasion. I envisaged all the bright sunny days I had lived through, from forest walks in the autumn to a dip in the blazing summer heat, to no avail.
I could recall seeing my reflection many times, but not my shadow. I told myself at one point that, after all, it was only a shadow, and then was chilled, for perhaps it was just such carelessness that had driven it off. If that were so, I vowed remorsefully, I would show how much I valued it by the fervour of my search.
Fortunately my retirement meant I had no appointments or ties to hold me back. In fact, the investigator had the gall to suggest a link between my retirement and the day I noticed my shadow missing. Ridiculous, especially since he could not substantiate his notion with anything aside from the most simplistic chronological link. Was he suggesting my retirement had provoked the departure of my shadow, I demanded? He bridled at my tone, and though we parted politely, I did not go back to him.
‘Behind there, gardens,’ the taxi driver said, nodding at a high wall slashed with graffiti. I wondered why the garden was walled. Perhaps it was a zoological garden and some sort of wildlife dwelt in it. I saw the driver watching me.
‘Gardens,’ I said. But I was thinking of my shadow, the hunt for which had brought me across the world. In my own country the search had come to seem farcical, yet my sense of loss and desperation had grown. Finally it came to me that there was little tolerance for or interest in shadows in my country, with its excess of sunlight and brightness. Even the violent abuses committed upon its shores were like the violence of a depraved toddler, mindless acts motivated by primitive fears and incomprehension; they were devoid of true darkness. My shadow would never have remained there. It would have sought out an older, deeper place with crannies and corners where darkness fermented and ripened.
One evening not long after my last encounter with the detective, I was sitting in the communal television room of my boarding house and the person with the remote control changed channels. I found myself watching the end of a documentary in which the camera showed a series of views of an ancient city. The last shot was of a cracked wall, where a child’s shadow walked along the shadow of another wall, beneath a scrolling list of names. The documentary ended abruptly and I gave a cry of disappointment.
‘What is that place? Do you know where it is?’ I asked the other residents seated about in the mismatched chairs. A flat-faced, sombre-eyed man grunted that he ought to know, since he had been a child there before the occupation, before his parents had escaped and emigrated. I asked if they understood shadows in that place. It was a risky question, but there was a surreal quality to the light in the room which allowed it.
‘There was a time when people had to be shadows there,’ the man said.
My landlady reproached me for my selfishness when I told her of my intended journey. ‘What would your grandmother think?’ She had known my grandmother and had taken me in on her account. Now she was affronted by my decision to leave, as only a woman like her can be, a woman whose masochism was so convoluted that she regarded everything that occurred in the world as somehow directed at her. Nothing that happened, not a car crash in another city in which a stranger died, nor the razing of a park to build a racecourse, nor the swearing of a drunk weaving from a pub, was exempt from being gathered into her aggrieved personal worldview. Of course it was a stunningly self-centred, even socio-pathic way to regard the world.
I answered mildly that, if anything, my grandmother would understand best what I was doing, for she had been a woman of incredible wisdom. Spitefully, my landlady observed that it must have been the weight of all that wisdom that cracked her mind open like an egg. She meant to abash me, for it was true that my grandmother had been quite insane at the end of her life, but instead I remembered with sudden wonder how, not long before the end, she had appeared to become disorientated. She was always imagining she was in the house of her father, no matter where she was; that my home, or the hotel or mental institution or public toilet, were somehow connected to it, if she could just find the right door. She frequently exclaimed over a picture or vase, insisting that it had been moved from the mantelpiece in her father’s study, or from the hall table, and worrying that it would trouble him.
‘It is very vexing when things are moved around,’ she would sigh and scrub at her forehead fretfully with a tiny clenched fist.
Only now, in this moment, did I understand that her apparent confusion was an awareness of links that had been buried under life, hidden from reason. Children see these links between things very clearly, I believe. It is why they weep at one stranger and smile at another. So do the elderly, some of whom slough off reason with the same gusto with which many of them throw off their clothes, welcoming back the Eden-like simplicity and clarity of childhood. My grandmother’s confusion had been nothing less than a deeper seeing of the world, and the documentary had suggested to me that finding my shadow might require such vision. That frightened me, because such a manner of seeing cannot be learned or simulated, for that which allows one to see such links of necessity blinds one to other things. Nevertheless, I vowed that at least I would follow this one strange clue without question.
The airport was very crowded, or so it seemed to me, but perhaps it is always like that in the international terminal. I presented my ticket and little bag to the departure desk, feeling unexpectedly exhilarated. I thought of a quote I had read on my desk calendar the day I left work. What does not kill you makes you stronger. It can only have been a warning, for it had been little more than an hour later, walking to the tram stop in bright afternoon sunlight, when I had noticed the absence of my shadow.
I stared down at the ground in front of me, feeling the sun pouring on the back of my head and shoulders. I turned and looked up, intrigued and puzzled, to find out what other light sources could have erased my shadow. Then I noticed that the shadow of the light pole alongside me fell on the ground and up the wall. With a feeling of unreality, I held up a hand to the wall, but it cast no shadow.
I rushed home, staggering with terror, clutching my briefcase loaded with the paraphernalia from my emptied desk.
Another taxi swerves across in front of us, forcing the driver to run over the tramlines. The cobbles make the wheels drum under the seat, and I close my eyes, remembering intimately the way I was pressed into my seat as the plane left the earth and launched itself into a long, drawn-out, vibrating dusk in which the sun seemed to hang for hours half submerged by the horizon.
I decline the proffered tray of food, despite my hunger, and resolve to treat the long flight as a period of fasting and mental preparation for my search. I accept only water, as if I were on a religious pilgrimage. Night falls, and twelve hours later it is still night. I feel, disembarking into a day so darkly overcast and befogged, as if I have entered an endless night that will not be broken until I am reunited with my shadow.
Inside the terminal all is chaos because of the fog. People exclaim and speculate and there is talk of long delays for connecting flights. When a man from my flight complains, the woman at the transfer desk explains reproachfully that we were lucky to have been permitted to land at all. I step forward and name my destination and there is a flicker of interest in her weary eyes.
‘That’s becoming very popular. Some say it is the Paris of the 1920s all over again.’ Her vowels are so plump they are like fruit waiting to be picked.
Day passes imperceptibly into night and still there is no call to board. I resist suggestions to leave the airport and stay a night or two in a hotel, not wishing to be diverted from my purpose. The smell of food makes me feel faint and I decide to break my fast with a leisurely meal in one of t
he better restaurants the airport has to offer. The last meal I ate was a dinner of cabbage and boiled potatoes prepared by my tight-lipped landlady the night before I left. I am suddenly so hungry that the thought of even that grudging meal makes my stomach rumble. Nevertheless, I am grimy and sweaty after the long hours of travel and decide to bathe before eating. I exchange my last banknotes for a few English pounds, and manage to locate an attendant to unlock the shower and give me soap and a towel.
In the booth, I undress slowly and take a hot shower, enjoying the water on my tired skin. Another effect of the loss of my shadow has been to render my skin dreadfully dry and itchy. After what seems a very short interlude, the shower attendant hammers on the door and in an indescribable argot gives what can only be a command to make haste. I obey, surrendering the soiled towel and giving her a pound tip to demonstrate both my disapproval and my high-mindedness.
This transaction reminds me that I will need to change a traveller’s cheque if I want to eat. Coming out of the shower, I pat my pockets, searching for my wallet. Unable to find it, I decide I must have left it in the shower cubicle. Then it comes to me. I removed my jacket in the plane so it could be hung up, taking out both the wallet and the travel agency pouch containing my passport and travel documents, and sliding both into the seat pocket. On arrival, I had taken out the pouch, but I have no recollection of retrieving the wallet.
I go to the information desk, noting my lack of apprehension. I put the curious deadening of my feelings down to jet lag, but wonder if the atrophy of lesser emotions is a further symptom of my affliction.
‘If only you had realised immediately,’ the man tells me regretfully, a touch of Jamaica in his tone. Nevertheless he will make some calls. Can I come back in an hour. Not a question. I sit down for a while near his desk, then decide I can simply report the cheques stolen and arrange to have them replaced. My cards and other papers can be dealt with at another time.