“Good,” I said. “Start out at normal-no, at half speed-and when you slow down, when you’re in the most slowed-down bit of all, just hold the chord for as long as you can. Hit the keys again if you need to. Understood?”
My pianist looked down at the floor and nodded again. Then he started shuffling back towards the staircase.
“Wait!” I said.
He stopped, still staring down. I looked at his bald pate for a few more seconds and then told him:
“Okay, you can go.”
I turned now to the concierge.
“Now, you,” I told her, “are already static. I mean, you just stand there in the lobby doing nothing. Which is good. But now I want you to do nothing even slower.”
She looked confused, my concierge. She had her mask off and was holding it in her hand, but her face was kind of mask-like-like those theatre masks they had in ancient times: worried, haggard, filled with a low-level kind of dread.
“What I mean,” I told her, “is that you should think more slowly. Not just think more slowly, but relate to everything around you slower. So if you move your eyes inside your mask, then move them slowly and think to yourself: Now I’m seeing this bit of wall, and still this bit, and now, so slowly, inch by inch, the section next to it, and now an edge of door, but I don’t know it’s door because I haven’t had time to work it out yet-and think all this really slowly too. You see what I mean now?”
The dread on her face seemed to heighten slightly as she nodded back at me.
“It’s important,” I told her. “I’ll know if you’re doing it right. Do it right and I’ll make sure you get a bonus. I’ll give you all bonuses if you get it right.”
I broke the meeting up and told people to go to their positions. I went up to my flat and looked at the crack in the bathroom while I waited. I hadn’t gone through this in quite a while. A smell was hanging in the air: the smell of congealed fat. I poked my head out of the window and looked down at the liver lady’s out-vent. It had clogged up again. The fat caking its slats was turning black. New vapour was starting to squeeze its way out, accompanied by the sound of liver starting to sizzle. Within a few seconds the new liver’s smell had reached me. It still had that sharp and acrid edge, like cordite. We’d tried and tried to get rid of it, and failed-besides which, no one else but me smelt cordite. I did, though, beyond question: cordite.
The phone rang in my living room. It was Naz, telling me that everything was ready.
“Slowed right down, right?” I asked him.
“Slowed right down, just as you requested,” he replied.
I left my flat and walked down the first flight of stairs. I started walking down them really slowly; but then after a few steps I got bored, so I went back to normal speed. I wasn’t bound by the rules-everyone else was, but not me.
The pianist, playing at half speed as I’d asked him, made his first mistake and repeated the passage, then again, then again, more and more slowly each time. I stopped beside the window at the stairs’ first turning and looked out. I held my eyes level with a kink in the glass pane, then moved my head several millimetres down so that the kink enveloped a cat who was slinking along the facing rooftop. I let my head slide very slowly to the side so that the cat stayed in the centre of the kink, as though the kink were a gun’s viewfinder and the cat a target. By jolting my head slightly to one side and back again I found that I could make the cat move back to where it had been a second earlier. I did this for a while: the more the cat moved forwards, the more I kinked it back to where it had been before, minutely moving and jolting my head as I looped it. Eventually it disappeared from view and I moved on.
My liver lady was emerging from her flat. I slowed down on the staircase as her eyes caught mine. I looked at her and breathed in and out slowly. Moving at half speed, she lowered her rubbish bag to the floor, released her hold on it and turned her head to face me. I slowed down further and she slowed down too, so much that she was almost static-stooped, her right hand hovering half a foot above the rubbish bag. She didn’t say anything. Neither did I. The pianist’s notes had merged into a single chord which he was holding just as I’d instructed him. I stared at her and felt the edges of my vision widening. The walls around her door, the mosaicked floor that emanated from its base, the ceiling-all these seemed to both expand and brighten. I felt myself beginning to drift into them, these surfaces-and to drift once more close to the edges of a trance.
We were both moving so slowly by now that we were, technically speaking, not moving. We stayed that way for a long time; then, still holding the liver lady’s eyes with mine, I very slowly, very carefully moved my right foot backwards, up one step. My liver lady moved her right hand slowly back towards her rubbish bag. Still moving so slowly it was almost imperceptible, I changed direction again and brought my right foot back down. She moved her right hand away from the bag again, at the same speed. I repeated the sequence, kinking the fragment of the episode that we were lingering on back to just before it had begun; she came back with me. We did this several times-then became completely still, the two of us suspended in the midst of our two separate ongoing actions.
We stayed there for a very long time, facing one another. The pianist’s chords stretched out, elastic, like elastic when you stretch it and it opens up its flesh to you, shows you its cracks, its pores. The chords stretched and became softer, richer, wider; then they kinked back, reinstating themselves as he hit the keys again. I and my liver lady stood there. We were standing, and still standing-then I was back in my bath, watching hot steam swirl around the crack. Then I was being lifted, held, laid down. Then nothing.
The next day I went and watched the sunlight falling from the windows onto the patterned floor of the staircase. I lay on the small landing where the stairs turned between the second and third floors and stared. The sunlight filled the corridors of white between the pattern’s straight black lines like water flooding a maze in slow motion, like it had the first time I’d observed it some weeks back-but this time the light seemed somehow higher, sharper, more acute. It also seemed to flood it more quickly than it had before, not slower.
I didn’t slip into a trance this time-quite the opposite. I sat back up and wondered why it should seem faster when I’d made the whole building run slower. I decided to time it, went to borrow Annie’s watch-then realized I’d have to wait until tomorrow for the sunlight to flood across then leave that patch again. I stood the building down again, got some rest and staked out the spot at the same time the next day, Annie’s watch-with precision sports timer that measured down to tenths and hundredths of seconds-at hand.
When I’d timed it before, the whole process had taken three hours and fourteen minutes. I remembered. Today, when the light’s front edge arrived, I started the watch, then watched the edge trickle furtively across the landing like the advance guard of an army, the first scouts and snipers. In its wake the bolder, broader block, the light’s main column, moved in and occupied the floor making no secret of its presence, covering the whole plain with its dazzling brilliance, its trumpets and flags and cannons. I lay there watching and timing, letting the watch run right through to the moment, several minutes after the main column’s eventual departure, when the sunlight’s rearguard, its last stragglers, took one final look back over the deserted camp and, becoming frightened of the massing troops of darkness, scurried on.
When I’d timed this before it had taken three hours and fourteen minutes. This time it all took place within three hours. Within two hours, forty-three minutes and twenty-seven point four-five seconds, to be precise. I didn’t like this. Something had gone wrong. I called in Frank and Annie.