TOM EATON: A terribly small Big Man meets an immovable object
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I can’t tell you exactly when he arrived because there is a point, somewhere between the third and fourth hour of standing in a queue, where nothing really matters any more.
To be fair, it’s not even a point. By that stage time is no longer a series of moments but rather an ocean, silent and becalmed, extending infinitely in all directions.
I could vaguely remember a before, back at about 7.30 that morning, when I had joined the queue outside the Cape Town municipal headquarters; back when I still believed time was linear and I might have my new car licence disc before noon; back when “noon” still meant something and wasn’t simply a nonsense word such as “schedule” and “efficiency” and “some of us have work to do”.
There had been a woman behind me, I remembered, a small woman, who had alarmed me by standing as close to me as was socially acceptable until I eventually realised she was using me as a windbreak.
Now she was gone. When had she left? And why? Had the wind changed direction and forced her to shelter behind someone else, or had she simply given up, quietly slipping over the side of our time-dingy to sink away into the great silence of this eternal now?
The sun set and rose again. Or else someone accidentally leant on the light switch. I could no longer tell.
The great variety of life, of the world as it had been before 7.30am, had been reduced and contracted and carved into a single, monolithic, unshakeable commandment: thou shalt obey one queue, and thou shalt queue in no other queue but this one, and if thou standeth in thine correct place in the one true queue, then nobody shall enter the Hall of Licence Disc Salvation before thee.
Which is why, as I say, I can’t tell you when he arrived, or from where. But I can tell you that when he arrived we stared, and then murmured into our masks, and glanced at each other with frightened eyes. Because he had strolled up to the front of the queue, past those of us who had been standing there since before the earth’s crust had cooled, and swanned up to the nearest counter.
No doubt some in the queue saw his pointy shoes and studied air of blasé contempt and assumed he was politically connected. ...
To be fair, it’s not even a point. By that stage time is no longer a series of moments but rather an ocean, silent and becalmed, extending infinitely in all directions.
I could vaguely remember a before, back at about 7.30 that morning, when I had joined the queue outside the Cape Town municipal headquarters; back when I still believed time was linear and I might have my new car licence disc before noon; back when “noon” still meant something and wasn’t simply a nonsense word such as “schedule” and “efficiency” and “some of us have work to do”.
There had been a woman behind me, I remembered, a small woman, who had alarmed me by standing as close to me as was socially acceptable until I eventually realised she was using me as a windbreak.
Now she was gone. When had she left? And why? Had the wind changed direction and forced her to shelter behind someone else, or had she simply given up, quietly slipping over the side of our time-dingy to sink away into the great silence of this eternal now?
The sun set and rose again. Or else someone accidentally leant on the light switch. I could no longer tell.
The great variety of life, of the world as it had been before 7.30am, had been reduced and contracted and carved into a single, monolithic, unshakeable commandment: thou shalt obey one queue, and thou shalt queue in no other queue but this one, and if thou standeth in thine correct place in the one true queue, then nobody shall enter the Hall of Licence Disc Salvation before thee.
Which is why, as I say, I can’t tell you when he arrived, or from where. But I can tell you that when he arrived we stared, and then murmured into our masks, and glanced at each other with frightened eyes. Because he had strolled up to the front of the queue, past those of us who had been standing there since before the earth’s crust had cooled, and swanned up to the nearest counter.
No doubt some in the queue saw his pointy shoes and studied air of blasé contempt and assumed he was politically connected. ...
