Free The Search by Geoff Dyer

train. He had gone two steps when he thought he
heard a faint rustle from the booth. He hurried back, checked the empty tray and ran for his train.

CHAPTER SEVEN
    Buildings, people, streets and shops: beyond that Alemain had little to recommend it – especially since Walker had such trouble finding his way around.
    He had picked up a street plan at the station and set off for the Am Ex office. For an hour now he had been pacing the streets, scrutinizing the map at almost every corner, but was still nowhere
near his destination. The smaller streets were not shown on the map but it was detailed enough to reveal that he was lost. This was the true purpose of maps: without one it was impossible to say
with certainty that you were lost, with one you
knew
you were lost.
    Walker persisted for a long while, becoming steadily more frustrated as streets changed name, distances expanded or contracted and expected turnings and landmarks failed to appear. Gradually he
became convinced that the map bore no relation to his surroundings. The fact that here and there reality and representation corresponded was entirely coincidental. It took Walker a long time to
accept this: so entrenched was his faith in the integrity of maps that his first reaction was to assume that the map was right and the city somehow wrong. The whole point about a map was that it
was a more or less accurate representation of reality. He had heard of towns where streets and buildings were being demolished and built so fast that maps, lagging behind reality, were obsolete by
the time they were printed, but this map either deliberately distorted reality or ignored it.
    He threw the map away and walked on. Once he had got used to the idea that the town was not as the map had led him to expect, it was surprisingly easy to find his way around.
    At the Am Ex office a pretty Chinese woman trotted off to look for his mail. A minute later she came back with the letter he had sent from Usfret. He thanked her and headed back to the station,
caught the next train to Avlona.
    He had noticed bicycles being wheeled on to the train at stations
en route
, but when it pulled into Avlona he was surprised at how many people had bicycles. As he walked
towards the centre of town, cyclists were coming and going in all directions. All around was the angular flash and blur of spokes and frames.
    It was a warm spring afternoon and Walker dawdled on his way to the Am Ex office. Relieved to be somewhere pleasant after Usfret and Ascension, he decided to spend the rest of the day there,
even though the letter from Usfret was waiting for him. He walked back out into the last sunshine of the day. Leaves fluttered like bunting.
    Outside a bric-a-brac store he spun a squeaking rack of postcards. An old photograph of London caught his attention. It was taken in the nineteenth century when London was a teeming and bustling
centre of commerce and trade – but the city was deserted. Walker puzzled over the image for several minutes before realizing that the long exposure time had emptied the scene of all moving
objects: people, trams, horses.
    He walked and considered what to do next, where to go. Again, when he looked back, this moment would represent another important shift in the nature of his search for Malory. For the first time
he had formulated the question in terms of where he should go rather than where Malory had gone. It was not that the question of Malory’s whereabouts no longer mattered – but that
question had been absorbed so totally into his own decision-making process that he no longer needed to ask it. It was as if the only way of duplicating Malory’s movements was to anticipate
them. Inevitably he would make mistakes but these mistakes might lead him to the right track eventually. The right path might be, precisely, a culmination of mistakes, of detours. As soon as you
recreated it on a map or set it down in a book, even the most idiosyncratic random movements