Shroud by John Banville Page B

to crash, I can feel it dipping out of its headlong course, can feel the metal floor shivering with the strain. The world was rushing up to meet me, the objects in it growing bigger in sudden, ratcheted expansions, like a series of photographic enlargements being laid rapidly one over the other. At last I got myself upright, my leg severing itself painlessly at the hip and releasing me, and as I hopped bleeding down the aisle I saw that it was not an aeroplane I was travelling in but the open back of a lorry that bucked and swayed as it hurtled driverless through the smoke and blare of the midday traffic. There was a cry, and someone shouted something, and I woke, cold with sweat and clutching the edge of the mattress, my teeth clenched and my legs tangled in the sheets.
    I rose unsteadily and went and shut the window, seeking to block out the noise of the street. It was not yet seven and already the day was in full, clamorous swing; I thought wistfully of Arcady 's somnolent mornings. On the bedside table behind me the telephone rang. I grew up without telephones, and have never managed to become accustomed to the instrument, the way it sits there, the same in every house and hotel room, ready to break out at any moment without warning, petulant and demanding as a wailing infant. I went back and sat on the side of the bed and picked up the receiver cautiously, and cautiously applied it to my ear, and for a moment saw myself as my father, with all his wariness of the world's machinery. My father. How strange. I had not thought about him in… how long? A voice was speaking in my ear, from the reception desk, to inform me that "una persona" was waiting for me downstairs. I nodded, as if the receptionist were standing in front of me. Then I put the receiver down again, exhaling a breath. So.
    I ate breakfast in my room, unhurriedly, and afterwards lay in a scalding bath for a long time. Now that she was here, now that the moment of confrontation had arrived, I had drifted into a state of lethargy and lazy contemplation. That momentary vision of my father had stirred up all manner of unexpected memories from the far past, of my childhood, of my family, of the Vander household with its many cousins, uncles, aunts. It was as if I were drowning, calmly, with my life not so much flashing before me as playing out selected scenes for me in dreamy slow motion. At length I rose and towelled myself briskly and put on my linen suit, hopelessly wrinkled now, and my stubby tie. Grimly I grinned at myself in the mirror: the drowned man dresses for his own funeral. In the corridor there was a mortal hush. The lift arrived with its clangings and mashings and I stepped into the box and descended, with one hand in my pocket rubbing a coin – the ferryman's levy! – between a finger and thumb.
    Odd, that Arcady should have been the place where I ended up, so far from everything that I had once known. It was in the wrong direction entirely; by rights, I should have been borne the opposite way, like so many others, into the heart of the calamity, the toppling towers, the fire storms, the children shrieking in the burning lake. When I got to Arcady and looked back, however, I saw that everything I had done had been pushing me relentlessly toward it, as if the essays published, the addresses delivered, the honours won, had been so many zephyrs wafting me irresistibly westward, from Europe to Manhattan, to Pennsylvania, to the plains of Indiana, to bleak Nebraska – such harsh poetry in those names! – and then in a last, high leap, over the mountains and down to that narrow strip of sunlit coast where I came to rest with a soundless, dusty thump, like a spaceman stepping on to an unknown planet. Unknown, that is the apt word. The place was always alien to me, or at least I was an alien in it. The fact is, I was never there, not really. I took no part in town life, such as it was. I did not buy a car. I never went on that delicate, spindly,