The sky is overcast and as Rael looks back a dark cloud is descending like a balloon into Times Square. It rests on the ground and shapes itself into a hard edged flat surface, which solidifies and extends itself all the way East and West along 47th Street and reaching up to the dark sky. As the wall takes up its tension it becomes a screen showing what had existed in three dimensions, on the other side just a moment before. The image flickers and then cracks like painted clay and the wall silently moves forward, absorbing everything in its path.
Peter Gabriel:"So I was just walking along the street when this big cloud comes down. It becomes solid, like a screen showing up pictures of what existed around it before on the back side of it."
[Looking back, he sees the cloud take shape into what appears to be a movie screen, "showing what had existed in three dimensions, on the other side". This movie screen he alone sees is much like the one in the movie palace. The one in the theater shows a world created by someone in Hollywood who wishes the movie-goers to believe in the reality of something which is obviously false. The romance of the movie is that it takes something unreal and presents it in a form which people not only can believe, but really want to believe. The screen that is moving in the street (behaving much like "The Langoliers" in the short story of the same name by Stephen King) is taking what Rael "knew" to be reality and turning it into a movie. Are we to believe what is on this screen? If what once was thought real is now a movie, is what was a movie now real?]
There's something solid forming in the air,
The wall of death is lowered in Times Square.
The unsuspecting New Yorkers are apparently blind to what is going on.
No-one seems to care,
They carry on as if nothing was there.
Rael starts to run away towards Columbus Circle. Each time he dares to take a look, the wall has moved another block. At the moment when he thinks he's maintaining his distance from the wall, the wind blows hard and cold slowing down his speed. The wind increases, dries the wet street and picks up the dust off the surface, throwing it into Rael's face.
Peter Gabriel:"And I was walking along seeing this wall closing up on me behind me, me on the wall."
The wind is blowing harder now, Blowing dust into my eyes.
More and more dirt is blown up and it begins to settle on Rael's skin and clothes, making a solid layered coat that brings him gradually to a terrified stillness. A sitting duck.
[Rael struggles against the wind blowing dust into his eyes, obscuring his vision of what he once thought was real. He fights himself into a standstill, completely encrusted in the dust. Like us, he is a "sitting duck" a "fly waiting for the windshield". His difference is that he sees it coming; and although he is not prepared, he is spared immediate death, at least how he sees it. From his viewpoint, everyone else who gets swallowed by the wall/screen dies, but this is just a symbolic death of the reality he once knew.]
The dust settles on my skin, Making a crust I cannot move in
And I'm hovering like a fly, waiting for the windshield on the freeway.
