Infinity

A grey-blue falling, a landing, inches from the road. Yellow lines parallel recede to infinity, where they meet. They blur, merge, and close thermoplastic new-bright paint raised two, three millimetres above tarmac, splashes, quartz flecks, all sharp, dust, a screw, glass, ants fighting or mating, my hand. The granite kerb, so smooth. I reach for the blurred perspective. People pass, scuff my feet. A car hiss tyres suck. I'm lifted, calling, bundled onto bench slats wet and hard on vertebrae. Breath mists the evening air. Consequences. The evening air. Cool, soft, a siren. Rest, wait, breathe.

The next day was better, I can't remember why, and, slowly, I came back, looking through the window, a refraction of double glazing twinned everything - two branches, leaves, twigs.

I've been telling my children about the moon - it's phases and how, like tonight, low on the horizon, it grows huge, magnified by the globes curving atmosphere. But high in the sky it shrinks. Who lives there? they ask. We all do. The moon is the earth. They collided, millions of years ago, and the earth was smashed out into space. We live on the moon, which stayed. Was that when all the plants and animals got here? my daughter asks. I don't know. Probably. Anyway, we're here now. Go to sleep. Don't be scared, I'll stay.

I return to work a few days later. Housing, tenants registers, some face to face, or should be - I'm being kept off that for a while. I'm filing a preliminary report on a missing tenant - last known whereabouts, next of kin, age, sex. I'll pass it on and update as new facts emerge. These cases stay on file for a while, (how long?) then we can re-let. But I've been away. Clean desk. My employers are sub-contracted from a company who won the tender put out by a housing association, acting for the council. There's so little time. I find the work surprisingly demanding and I'm exhausted, most days. I wish the office was quieter. His photo disturbs me.

That night I tell my children about neutrino's. How they fill the universe, billions upon billions, everywhere in space, flying, inert, passing through the earth, through us, not reacting to the dance of electrons or quarks, ignoring magnetism, gravity, other forces. Our youngest starts to cry. His mother comforts him. He didn't like all those things going through him, she says, don't worry, they're not real.

I have to take sessions on the front desk now, face to face to face to face to face... they morph - blackwhitewomenmen - and their clothes. I look up from the computer screen, through safety glass, and catch a young man transforming, his sex and religion changing before my eyes, to a woman, who can't speak english, and when I return with a translator, an elderly man is waiting, with his dog. They say I'm doing well, and put me there from two till five each day.

The file waits, grows - more clues, observations - the police are involved. It's unusual - an educated man, married, paid his rent, not the predictable downward spiral, when we quickly assume the worst and move on, or a customs raid late at night. This one has family, estranged wife, but its amicable, a bank account in profit, which we cannot touch. I want to leave it but must fill in forms, send letters, officially evict the missing man. The family threaten lawsuits, it drags on. More photo's now - middle aged, bald, bespectacled - Indian? Always this barely suppressed smile, which I find annoying.

I tell my son about chaos theory, the butterfly effect, and how its fine today because a monarch butterfly, maybe, in Mexico, worn out by its long flight south, didn't flap it's wings to start a hurricane. It's no compensation, I can tell. We're on the heath, waiting for some wind, his new kite's vivid colours lifeless on the grass. Its the first time we've been here in months and a real sign of progress - my wife said it was not safe before, with the drugs I was on. I've never told her how dangerous it was anyway, like the first time I let my son hold the power-kite and he was lifted into the air, floating over the heath, amazingly steady, a few feet above the grass. I'd run alongside and we'd laughed, elated.

I have to visit the empty house for an inventory of fixtures and fittings. All personal effects have long gone. A small seventies house in a terrace, brick-built. All around are similar and I know some of these properties house eight, ten, twenty people crammed into two bedrooms - some transient, some huge extended families, maybe illegal. If they are quiet, so are we. Low cut grass runs from the road to the front walls. Inside its silent. Greying lines show where pictures hung, some hooks protrude, a curtain. There's not much. I fill in the lists, room to room. Downstairs, last, I check the boiler. Then I open the door to the back garden and catch my breath. The garden is bursting, glowing, brilliant. Orange poppies throb in the afternoon air, impossible cornflower blue, swaying, yellow nasturtiums, others. I feel a shift, start to sweat, sit down, try to remember what happened.

It would absorb me - summer evenings, weekends, when the wind, tugging at flags, pulling trees, seemed right, I'd go, manoeuvre the kite to the top of the wind window, feeling tendons stretch, shoulders, arms a straight line extending through strings to taught rip-stop nylon, flickering, cells catching every breeze, when, strong enough to lift me away, I'd let it run across and down the wind, following the uplift to a moment weightless, just uncontrolled, joyful. But it was not that. You be careful, a neighbour said, remember your age. And I did, mainly keeping my body earthbound, but something in my mind was letting go. One clear evening, leaning, supported in equilibrium with the wind, my eyes looking through the strings fanning out to the the kite's cells and making bars across the sun, the sky, the wind in branches, ripping, blinding, my hands lifted. I let the handles go and the kite flapped useless downwind, the sun, the sky, the air, receding. That was the start.

I'd been talking to my neighbour about our fence. I'd erected it some years ago, but it was leaning alarmingly toward their garden, rotting at the base. He says there's no hurry. But it would be nice if it were done. It is my fence, but if its a problem, he'll help pay. I say its OK. Its entropy I say, the steady decay of order. He smiles weakly. Soon after something shifts, comes loose. Houses, trees, people, cars, all around break down to constituent cellls, molecules, atoms, streaming down and away. Something holds - bright parallel lines, a yellow path stretching away which I could follow, till they meet.

The house is let some weeks later to a family from Estonia. They give me sweet tea as they sign the lease, two children staring at me, laughing, the father's pockmarked face, the bright mother younger, a hairdresser, the baby asleep, a television incessant. I continue to spend afternoons at the front desk, hearing through the glass so many accents, dialects, languages of the borough. The faces had stopped changing and through the questions and demands I was trying to follow, I saw just one person - a man, maybe Indian, sitting with a barely suppressed smile and I knew that there was, if I could remember, if there was a break just for a moment, something I desperately needed to ask that man.