Days by James Lovegrove Read Free Book Online Page A

transcendent bliss.
     
     
    8.01 a.m.
     
    T HE QUIET HALF-HOUR.
    Over the dollar-green marble floor of the entrance hall Frank goes, over the smooth opal-and-onyx cobbles of the Days logo mosaic, past banks of lifts waiting with their doors open, past conga-lines of wire shopping trolleys, past parked rows of motorised shopping carts, beneath an unlit chandelier like a waterfall captured in glass, towards the parade of arches that afford access to the store proper.
    He is trying to work out how many times he has crossed this hall and at the same time trying to remember when he started trampling the jewelled logo beneath his feet instead of skirting it respectfully as most people do. The answer to the first question runs into so many thousands that he swiftly and incredulously abandons the calculation. The answer to the second is easier: he started walking over the logo instead of around it the day he realised that he could, that there was no specific rule against doing so, that all that kept people off the circle of precious stones was their belief in the sanctity of wealth – a belief he had ceased to share, or, more accurately, realised had never been part of his personal credo.
    This was around the time when he first started to notice that he had lost his reflection. The loss was so gradual, in fact, it was only in retrospect that he realised that it had occurred at all. Every day he would look in the mirror and a little bit more of himself would be absent, and every day he would dismiss this as a trick of the light or the mind – to acknowledge it as an empirical fact would have been to entertain madness. Eventually, however, the truth was impossible to deny. He was forgetting what he looked like and who he was. He was slipping away, slowly, in increments.
    The day that he became aware of this was the same day that he dared to set foot on the jewelled mosaic, and also the same day that the idea of leaving Days first stirred in the furthest reaches of his mind. He can almost pin down the genesis of his decision to quit to the moment he first rested his right foot on the tip of the opal semicircle and was not fried to a crisp by a lightning bolt from Mammon’s fingertip.
    Arriving at the arches, Frank halts, takes out his wallet, and yet again unsheathes his Iridium. Each arch is fitted with a set of vertical stainless steel bars two centimetres thick that slot snugly into the lintel. The uprights between the arches have terminals mounted on them at waist-level. The terminals are conical, with oval screens and chrome shells. Each invites Frank in large green letters to insert his card into its slot. He does so with the one nearest to him, and the screen swiftly bitmaps a Days logo, then runs a green message across it:
     
    CARD INCORRECTLY INSERTED
    PLEASE TRY AGAIN
     
    Frank removes the ejected card, flips it over so that its logo is facing up, and reinserts it, tutting at his own carelessness.
    A new message appears:
     
    HUBBLE, FRANCIS J.
    EMPLOYEE #1807-93N
    ACCOUNT STATUS: IRIDIUM
    CARD NO.: 579 216 347 1592
     
    This is erased and replaced with:
     
    LOG-ON TIME: 8.03 A.M.
    HAVE A GOOD DAY’S WORK, MR HUBBLE
     
    The card is ejected again, and the stainless steel bars of the arch to the left of the terminal retract upwards with a sharp pneumatic burp. He passes through, returning the card to his wallet. He knows metal detectors are scanning him, but as he has nothing metallic on him larger than his house keys and his fillings, alarms do not whoop. The bars descend again smoothly and swiftly like mercury rushing down transparent pipes.
    The quiet half-hour.
    As far as Frank is concerned the time between now and 8.30 is sacred. The store is still, its overhead lights at half-power. The night watchmen have gone off duty and the shop assistants have not yet arrived. Days is neither closed nor open but somewhere in between, in a semi-lit limbo of transition. Neither one thing nor the other, neither darkened and