Content
The enclosing boundary streets become blurred as he approaches them, will not come into focus or touch. As if the cars passing there are somehow all too numerous or fast, as if he is trapped within a slower time zone, lost as a shadow living in the moments between moments. He has become an undertone, a footnote, a stowaway within the everyday, the humdrum stream of ordinary time. He is out of phase with ordinary human heartbeats, common pulse, therefore undetectable. He is hum of electricity, crackle of black ice. Leaving the stone tenement zone at its periphery he falls onto his knees on Great Western Road and raises his hands towards the frozen stream of light that is the traffic. Feels the muffled heat and noise coming off it only as he approaches within centimetres, millimetres. His fingers, nose, touch the boundary, but cannot penetrate, are repelled with curiously cushioned force.