The Atrocity Exhibition

by J. G. Ballard

  Non-Communicating Dialogue. As he entered the apartment she was sitting on the balcony, painting her nails. Drying in the sunlight beside her was the novel he had thrown into the bidet, its pages flowering into an elegant ruff. She looked up from her nail file. ‘Did you enjoy the film?’ He walked into the bathroom, wincing at himself in the mirror, that always more tired older brother. The half-hearted inflection of irony in her voice no longer irritated him. An enormous neutral ground now divided them, across which their emotions signalled like meaningless semaphores. If anything, her voice formed a module with the perspectives of wall and ceiling as abstract as the design on a detergent pack. She sat down beside him on the bed, splaying her wet nails in a gesture of intimacy. He stared at the transverse scar above her navel. What act between diem would provide a point of junction?

  A Krafft-Ebing of Geometry and Posture. He remembered these pleasures: the conjunction of her exposed pubis with the polished contours of the bidet; the white cube of the bathroom quantifying her left breast as she bent over the handbasin; the mysterious eroticism of the multi-storey car park, a Krafft-Ebing of geometry and posture; her flattened thighs on the tiles of the swimming pool below; her right hand touching the finger-smeared panel of the elevator control. Looking at her from the bed, he recreated these situations, conceptualizations of exquisite games.

  The Solarium. Beyond the cafe tables the beach was deserted, the white pumice fossilizing the heat and sunlight. He played with the beer mat, shaping the cigarette ash on the tables into a series of small pyramids. She waited behind her magazine, now and then flicking at the fly in her citrus juice. He pulled at the damp crotch of his trousers. On an impulse, as they lay in the small room near the car park, he had dressed and taken her down to the cafe, fed up with her chronic cystitis and sore urethra. For hours his hands had searched her passive flesh, hunting for some concealed key to their sexuality. He traced the contours of breast and pelvis inside the yellow linen dress, then looked round as a young man walked towards diem through the empty tables.

  Imaginary Perversions. He tipped the warm swill from his glass on to the ash-stained sand. ‘… it's an interesting question – in what way is intercourse per vagina more stimulating than with this ashtray, say, or with the angle between two walls? Sex is now a conceptual act, it's probably only in terms of the perversions that we can make contact with each other at all. Sexual perversions are morally neutral, cut off from any suggestion of psycho-pathology – in fact, most of the ones I've tried are out of date. We need to invent a series of imaginary sexual perversions just to keep our feelings alive …’ The girl's attention strayed to her magazine and then to the young man's sunburned wrist. The handsome loop of his gold bracelet swung above her knee. As he listened, the young man's uncritical eyes were sharpened by moments of humour and curiosity. An hour later, when she had left him, he saw them talking together by the kiosk of the open-air cinema.

  An Erotic Game. ‘Have we stopped?’ Waving at the dust that filled the cabin, she waited patiently as he worked away at the steering wheel. The road had come to a dead end among the ashy dunes. On the rear window ledge the novel had opened and begun to curl again in the heat like a Japanese flower. Around diem lay portions of the drained river, hollows tilled with pebbles and garbage, the remains of steel scaffolding. Yet their position in relation to the river was uncertain. All afternoon they had been following this absurd sexual whim of his, plunging in and out of basins of dust, tracking across beds of mud like nightmare chessboards. Overhead was the concrete span of the motor bridge, its arch as ambiguously placed as a rainbow's. She looked up wearily from her compact as he spoke. ‘You drive.’

  Elements of an Orgasm. (1) Her ungainly transit across the passenger seat through the nearside door; (2) the conjunction of aluminized gutter trim with the volumes of her thighs; (3) the crushing of her left breast by the door pillar, its self-extension as she swung her legs on to the sandy floor; (4) the overlay of her knees and the metal door flank; (5) the ellipsoid erasure of dust as her hip brushed the nearside fender; (6) the hard transept of the door mechanism within the absolute erosion of the landscape; (7) her movements distorted in the projecting carapace of the radiator assembly; (8) the conjunction of her thighs with the arch of the motor bridge, the contrast of smooth epithelium and corrugated concrete; (9) her weak ankles in the soft ash; (10) the pressure of her right hand on the chromium trim of the inboard headlamp; (11) the sweat forming a damp canopy in the cleavage of her blouse – the entire landscape expired within this irrigated trench; (12) the jut and rake of her pubis as she moved into the driving seat; (13) the junction of her thighs and the steering assembly; (14) the movements of her fingers across the chromium-tipped instrument heads.

  Post-coitum Triste. He sat in the darkened bedroom, listening to her cleaning the shower stall. ‘Do you want a drink? We could go down to the beach.’ He ignored her voice, with its unconvinced attempt at intimacy. Her movements formed a sound body like a nervous bird's. Through the window he could see the screen of the open-air cinema, and beyond it the canted decks of the multi-storey car park.

  Foreplay. Above the pay kiosk the sections of shoulder and abdomen shifted across the screen, illuminating the late afternoon sky. He waited in the arcade behind a wall of wicker baskets. As they left the cubicle beside the kiosk he followed them towards the car park. The angular floors rose through the fading light, the concrete flanks lit by the neon signs of the bars across the street. As they drove from the town the first billboard appeared – Cinemascope of breast and thigh, deceit and need terraced in the contours of the landscape. In the distance was the silver span of the motor bridge. The lunar basin of the river lay below. Contours of Desire. In the dusk light he studied the contours of the embankment. The concrete caissons sank through the discoloured sand, forming lines of intersection whose focus was the young woman stepping from the parked car. Headlamps sped towards him. Without thinking, he drove across the road into the oncoming lane. The perspectives of the landscape shifted with the changing camber.

  Some Bloody Accident. She stared at the blood on her legs. The heavy liquid pulled at her skirt. She stepped over the shirtless body lying across a car seat and vomited on to the oily sand. She wiped the phlegm from her knees. The bruise under her left breast reached behind her sternum, seizing like a hand at her heart. Her bag lay beside an overturned car. At the second attempt she picked it up, and climbed with it on to the road. In the fading light the silver girders of the motor bridge led towards the beach and a line of billboards. She ran clumsily along the road, eyes fixed on the illuminated screen of the open-air cinema, while the huge shapes disgorged themselves across the rooftops.

  Love Scene. Steering with one hand, he followed the running figure along the bridge. In the darkness he could see her broad hips lit by the glare of the headlamps. Once she looked back at him, then ran on when he stopped fifty yards from her and reversed the car. He switched off the headlamps and moved forward, steering from side to side as he varied her position against the roadside hoardings, against the screen of the open-air cinema and the inclined floor of the multi-storey car park.

  Zone of Nothing. She took off her Polaroid glasses. In the sunlight the oil spattered across the windscreen formed greasy rainbows. As she waited for him to return from the beach she wiped her wrists with a cologne pad from the suitcase in the rear seat. What was he doing? After his little affairs he seemed to enter a strange zone. A young man in red trunks came up the track, arching his toes in the hot sand. Deliberately he leaned against the car as he walked by, staring at her and almost touching her elbow. She ignored him without embarrassment. When he had gone she looked down at the imprints of his feet in the white pumice. The fine sand poured into the hollows, a transfer of geometry as delicate as a series of whispers. Unsettled, she put away her novel and took the newspaper from the dashboard locker. She studied the photographs of an automobile accident – overturned cars, bodies on ambulance trolleys, a bedraggled girl. Fi
ve minutes later he climbed into the car. Thinking of the photographs, she put her hand on his lap, watching the last of the footprints vanish in the sand.

  Locus Solus

  Named after another work by Raymond Roussel, the locus solus might be Miami Beach, but in fact is a generalized vision of San Juan, near Alicante in Spain, where I once pushed my tank-like Armstrong-Siddeley to 100 mph on the beach road, and where my wife died in 1964. The curious atmosphere of the Mediterranean beach resorts still awaits its chronicler. One could regard them collectively as a linear city, some 3000 miles long, from Gibraltar to Glyfada beach north of Athens, and 300 yards deep. For three summer months the largest city in the world, population at least 50 million, or perhaps twice that The usual hierarchies and conventions are absent; in many ways it couldn't be less European, but it works, ft has a unique ambience – nothing, in my brief experience, like Venice, California, or Malibu. At present it is Europe's Florida, an endless parade of hotels, marinas and apartment houses, haunted by criminals running hash from North Africa, stealing antiquities or on the lam from Scotland Yard.

  Could it ever become Europe's California? Perhaps, but the peculiar geometry of those identical apartment houses seems to defuse the millenarian spirit Living there, one is aware of the exact volumes of these generally white apartments and hotel rooms. After the more sombre light of northern Europe, they seem to focus an intense self-consciousness on the occupants. Sex becomes stylized, relationships more oblique. The office workers and secretaries all behave like petty criminals vaguely on the run, so many topless Janet Leighs who have decided not to take that shower and can't remember where they left their lives The growing numbers of full-time residents seem almost decorticated. My dream is to move there permanently. But perhaps I already have.

  During beach holidays I devour foreign-language news magazines, though I can't speak a word of French, Italian or Spanish, and always rent a TV set. In England I watch most TV with the sound turned down, but in France or Spain I boost the volume, particularly of news bulletins. A study of hijackers revealed that they are generally poor linguists (and often suffer from vestibular disturbances of the inner ear, the balancing organ – perhaps the hijack is in part an unconscious attempt to cure the defect). They prefer not to understand what is going on around them, so they can impose their own subjective image upon the external world – a trait common to all psychotics.

  Soft Geometry.

  The white light has bleached out the identities of the characters, even deleting their names (reminding me a little of Miami Beach, where no one seemed to know who they were, realizing that it no longer mattered). This is Traven again, or a saner version of himself, veering between his wife and the young woman who works at the open-air movie theatre, but a Traven devoid of those larger concerns that preoccupy him elsewhere in the book.

  A Krafft-Ebing of Geometry and Posture.

  These mental Polaroids form a large part of our library of affections. Carried around in our heads, they touch our memories like albums of family photographs. Turning their pages, we see what seems to be a ghostly and alternative version of our own past filled with shadowy figures as formalized as Egyptian tomb-reliefs.

  Imaginary Perversions.

  Traven has a point and the process may receive an unhappy impetus from AIDS. It's hard to visualize, but the day may come when genital sex is a seriously life-threatening health hazard (not for the first time, when one thinks of 19th-century syphilis – the Goncourt brothers' journal resembles the last years of the Warhol diaries). At that point the imagination may claim the sexual impulse as its own, an inheritance wholly free of any biological entail. As always with such inheritances, there will be any number of new friends eager to help in its spending.

  Elements of an Orgasm.

  The sex act is emotionally the richest and the most imaginatively charged event in our lives, comparable only to the embrace of our children as a source of affection and mystery. But no kinaesthetic language has yet been devised to describe it in detail, and without one we are in the position of an unqualified observer viewing an operation for brain surgery, Ballet gymnastics. American football and judo are furnished with elaborate kinaesthetic languages, but it's still easier to describe the tango or the cockpit take-off procedures for a 747 than to recount in detail an act of love.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  TOLERANCES OF THE HUMAN FACE

  Five Minutes 3 Seconds. Later, Travers remembered the camera crew which had visited the Institute, and the unusual documentary they had filmed among the cypress-screened lawns. He had first noticed the unit as he loaded his suitcases into the car on the afternoon he resigned. Avoiding Catherine Austin's embarrassed attempt to embrace him, he stepped on to the lawn below the drive. The patients sat like mannequins on the worn grass, while the film crew moved between diem, guiding the camera about like a myopic robot. ‘Why did Nathan invite diem here? For a so-called documentary on dementia praecox it's going to be surprisingly elegant and perverse.’ Catherine Austin strode towards the unit, remonstrating with the director as he pointed a woman patient towards the camera. She took the girl's loose hands. The director stared at her in a bored way, deliberately exposing the chewing gum between his lips. His eyes turned to inspect Travers. With an odd gesture of the wrist, he beckoned the camera unit forward.

  Hidden Faces. Travers vaulted over the concrete balustrade and pushed through the swing doors of the lecture theatre. Behind him the film crew were manhandling their camera trolley across the gravel. Hands on the hips of his white safari suit the director watched Travers with his unpleasant eyes. His aggressive stare had surprised Travers – seeing himself confused with the psychotic patients was too sharp a commentary on his own role at the Institute, a reminder of his long and wearisome dispute with Nathan. In more than one sense he had already left the Institute; the presence of his colleagues, their smallest gestures, formed an anthology of irritations. Only the patients left him at ease. He crossed the empty seats below the screen. Each afternoon in the deserted cinema Travers was increasingly distressed by the images of colliding motor cars. Celebrations of his wife's death, the slow-motion newsreels recapitulated all his memories of childhood, the realization of dreams which even during the safe immobility of sleep would develop into nightmares of anxiety. He made his way through the exit into the car park. His secretary's car waited by the freight elevator. He touched the dented fender, feeling the reversed contours, the ambiguous junction of rust and enamel, geometry of aggression and desire.

  Fake Newsreels. Catherine Austin unlocked the door and followed Travers into the deserted laboratory. ‘Nathan did warn me not to …’ Ignoring her, Travers walked towards the display screens. Disconnected headphones hung inside the cubicles, once occupied by the volunteer panels of students and housewives. Fingers fretting at the key in her pocket, she watched Travers search through the montage photographs which the volunteers had assembled during anaesthesia. Disquieting diorama of pain and mutilation: strange sexual wounds, imaginary Vietnam atrocities, the deformed mouth of Jacqueline Kennedy. Until Nathan ordered the experiment to end it had become a daily nightmare for her, a sick game which the volunteers had increasingly enjoyed. Why was Travers obsessed by these images? Their own sexual relationship was marked by an almost seraphic tenderness, transits of touch and feeling as serene as the movements of a dune.

  From the Casualty Ward. Nostalgia of departure. Through the windshield Travers glanced for the last time at the window of his office. The glass curtain-walling formed an element in a vertical sky, a mirror of this deteriorating landscape. As he released the handbrake a young man in a shabby flying jacket strode towards the car from the freight elevator. He fumbled at the door, concentrating on the latch mechanism like a psychotic patient struggling with a spoon. He sat down heavily beside Travers, beckoning at the steering wheel with a gesture of sudden authority. Travers stared at the flame-like scars on his knuckles, residues of an appalling act of violence. This former day-patien
t, Vaughan, he had often seen in the back row of his classes, or moving through the other students in the library forecourt at some private diagonal. His committal to the Institute, an elaborate manoeuvre by Nathan, had been a first warning. Should he help Vaughan to escape? The dented plates of his forehead and the sallow jaw were features as anonymous as any police suspect's. The musculature of his mouth was clamped together in a rictus of aggression, as if he were about to commit a crude and unsavoury crime. Before Travers could speak, Vaughan brushed his arm aside and switched on the ignition.

  Hard Edge. Dr Nathan gestured to the young woman to unbutton her coat. With a murmur of surprise he stared at the bruises on her hips and buttocks. ‘Travers …?’ He turned to Catherine Austin, standing primly by the window. Nodding to himself, he searched the broken blood-vessels in the young woman's skin. She showed no hostility to Travers, at first sight an indication of the sexual nature of these wounds. Yet something about the precise cross-hatching suggested that their true role lay elsewhere. He waited by the window as the young woman dressed. ‘What these girls carry about under their smiles – you saw her little art gallery?’ Catherine Austin snapped shut the roller blind. ‘They're hardly in Travers's style. Do you believe her?’ Dr Nathan gestured irritably. ‘Of course. That's the whole point. He was trying to make contact with her, but in a new way.’ A car moved down the drive. He handed the girl ajar of ointment, happy to be present at a vernissage no larger than the skin area of a typist.