The tower was in an ordinary road with ordinary houses on a long lane that disappeared into a single point like lines in a perspective drawing denoting three dimensional space. The houses were pink and white marshmallows – he had seen them before – but a penetrating sense of deja vu suggests he’d seen them before that.
It was evening.
Dressed in donated clothing, the man walked down the island in the center of the raid where the streetlights were dimmest, towards the tower with its white floodlights that swung up and down the starry sky like a Van Gogh painting.
On a street lamp, he saw his face plastered on the front page of a newspaper. The headline read, “Unknown Cast In the Greatest Show on Earth.” Another came past his feet like tumbleweed. “Who is David Matthews?” The wind caught and lifted the poster and he watched it carried high over the heads of the crowd in the street beneath the tower, up up and away like a Chinese lantern.
The street lights flickered and turned off as he neared and the people, their faces shadowed and indistinguishable, parted as he neared. As he moved deeper he heard whispers beginning, felt as if with a 6th sense the heads turning and the eyes following him as he made his way towards the tower. There was a light wind coming over the top of the crowd, warm and without menace. He was touching people now, brushing them on his passage, and they in turn brushed him, with fingertips at first and then hands; hands, hands that grew more impatient as the unconscious emotion rose among them and he was held by his arms, and then lifted, a sea of hands propelling him towards the tower.
He did not resist them. He could feel the sea of people carrying him and the tower loomed huge, and then suddenly his feet hit solid wood. He stood up and walked to the microphone that stood alongside a guillotine on stage. The floodlights snapped on, blinding him. He stood tall and mute, his face projected massive and godlike on all sides of the tower around him.
The crowd cheered and screamed and laughed like thunder.
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