Volltext - ub-dok: der Dokumentenserver der UB Trier - Universität ...

coming in from the country, with all the country’s fruits. Upswept shafts like
the prows of boats. Straw piled on their awnings; the kids and dogs trotting
beside them.
Then, recalling how Koch placed the sun at the zenith in India before the onslaught of the
demons (ASW, 90), the Nurseryman asks:
Was it always noon when they came?
[…]
Yes: the noon hush. No guns to break it then; no sound of bombers.
Just the oxcarts, coming into town in lines a mile long. (HW, 283)
And yet, unlike the other journalists who prefer to let nostalgic memory take over from and
improve time, Mike Langford is driven ‘to freeze the moment’ (HW, 163), and not only with
his photographs. As Harvey Drummond postulates why Langford went back into Cambodia,
freezing the present is not enough: ‘He went to get back into the past’ (HW, 209).
13.6. Mike Langford—A Man Outside of Time; or A Ghost Caught in Time?
Harvey Drummond notices how Langford does not properly belong to the present,
though just where he does belong Koch leaves unsettled. Drummond says that Langford
belongs to the dreamscape of time. It is a description which harkens back to Koch’s allusion to
Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland, and clearly establishes Langford as a lonely wanderer from some
‘otherworld’:
Only out there, on that edge to which we were speeding, was I promised all the
answers I never seem to find: out there, where the world would at last change.
It’s an edge I often see in dreams: the only place where we ever actually reach
it. Langford has appeared in a number of these dreams, since he disappeared.
The highway runs at night then, with far, tiny lamps strung along its utmost
edge. I see Mike going there on foot, to a final windy rim: a place where he
belongs. I know he has his being there, in the dream: he’s one of those people
who do. Then he disappears. (HW, 222)
Mike Langford’s old colleague and friend, Rex Lockhart, who seems in his short
appearance to be a reincarnation of Wally O’Sullivan, introduces the central theme of
Highways to a War of the development in Langford of a post-modern heroic saviour figure
more designed according to Asian than to Western tradition. Like so many others, Lockhart
loved Mike Langford, though it is hinted that his love goes beyond the boundaries of the
acceptable. In fact, the relationship of Mike Langford with Rex Lockhart and Lockhart’s wife
- 347 -