The Atrocity Exhibition

by J. G. Ballard

  CHAPTER NINE

  YOU AND ME AND THE CONTINUUM

  The attempt to break into the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier on Good Friday, 197—, first assumed to be the act of some criminal psychopath, later led to inquiries of a very different character. Readers will recall that the little evidence collected seemed to point to the strange and confusing figure of an unidentified Air Force pilot whose body was washed ashore on a beach near Dieppe three months later. Other traces of his ‘mortal remains’ were found in a number of unexpected places: in a footnote to a paper on some unusual aspects of schizophrenia published thirty years earlier in a since defunct psychiatric journal; in the pilot for an unpurchased TV thriller, ‘Lieutenant 70’; and on the record labels of a pop singer known as The Him – to instance only a few. Whether in fact this man was a returning astronaut suffering from amnesia, the figment of an ill-organized advertising campaign, or, as some have suggested, the second coming of Christ, is anyone's guess. What little evidence we have has been assembled below.

  Ambivalent. She lay quietly on her side, listening to the last bars of the scherzo as his hand hesitated on the zip. This strange man, and his endless obsession with Bruckner, nucleic acids, Minkowski space-time and God knows what else. Since meeting him at the conference on Space Medicine they had barely exchanged a word. Was he wholly there? At times it was almost as if he were trying to put himself together out of some bizarre jigsaw. She turned round, surprised by his dark glasses six inches from her face and the eyes burning through diem like stars.

  Brachycephalic. They stopped beneath the half-painted bowl of the radio-telescope. As the blunt metal ear turned on its tracks, fumbling at the sky, he put his hands to his skull, feeling the still-open sutures. Beside him Quinton, the dapper pomaded Judas, was waving at the distant hedges where the three limousines were waiting. ‘If you like we can have a hundred cars – a complete motorcade.’ Ignoring Quinton, he took a piece of quartz from his flying jacket and laid it on the turf. From it poured the code-music of the quasars.

  Coded Sleep. Dr Nathan looked up as the young woman in the white coat entered the laboratory. ‘Ah, Doctor Austin.’ He pointed with his cigarette to the journal on his desk. ‘This monograph – “Coded Sleep and Intertime” – they can't trace the author … someone at this Institute, apparently. I've assured diem it's not a hoax. By the way, where's our volunteer?’

  ‘He's asleep.’ She hesitated, but only briefly. ‘In my apartment.’

  ‘So.’ Before she left Dr Nathan said, ‘Take a blood sample. His group may prove interesting at a later date.’

  Delivery System. Certainly not an ass. Recent research, the lecturer pointed out, indicated that cosmic space vehicles may have been seen approaching the earth two thousand years earlier. As for the New Testament story, it had long been accepted that the unusual detail (Matt. XXI) of the Messiah riding into Jerusalem on ‘an ass and a colt the foal of an ass’ was an unintelligently literal reading of a tautological Hebrew idiom, a mere verbal blunder. ‘What is space?’ the lecturer concluded. ‘What does it mean to our sense of time and the images we carry of our finite lives? Are space vehicles merely overgrown V-2s, or are they Jung's symbols of redemption, ciphers in some futuristic myth?’

  As the applause echoed around the half-empty amphitheatre Karen Novotny saw his hands stiffen against the mirror on his lap. All week he had been bringing the giant mirrors to the empty house near the reservoirs.

  Export Credit Guarantees. ‘After all, Madame Nhu is asking a thousand dollars an interview, in this case we can insist on five and get it. Damn it, this is The Man …’ The brain dulls. An exhibition of atrocity photographs rouses a flicker of interest. Meanwhile, the quasars burn dimly from the dark peaks of the universe. Standing across the room from Catherine Austin, who watches him with guarded eyes, he hears himself addressed as ‘Paul’, as if waiting for clandestine messages from the resistance headquarters of World War HI.

  Five Hundred Feet High. The Madonnas move across London like immense clouds. Painted on clapboard in the Mantegna style, their composed faces gaze down on the crowds watching from the streets below. Several hundred pass by, vanishing into the haze over the Queen Mary Reservoir, Staines, like a procession of marine deities. Some remarkable entrepreneur has arranged this tour de force; in advertising circles everyone is talking about the mysterious international agency that now has the Vatican account. At the Institute Dr Nathan is trying to sidestep the Late Renaissance. ‘Mannerism bores me. Whatever happens,’ he confides to Catherine Austin, ‘we must keep him off Dali and Ernst.’

  Gioconda. As the slides moved through the projector the women's photographs, in profile and full face, jerked one by one across the screen. ‘A characteristic of the criminally insane,’ Dr Nathan remarked, ‘is the lack of tone and rigidity of the facial mask.’

  The audience fell silent. An extraordinary woman had appeared on the screen. The planes of her face seemed to lead towards some invisible focus, projecting an image that lingered on the walls, as if they were inhabiting her skull. In her eyes glowed the forms of archangels. ‘That one?’ Dr Nathan asked quietly. ‘Your mother? I see.’

  Helicopter. The huge fans of the Sikorsky beat the air fifty feet above them as they drove into the town, a tornado of dust subsiding through the shattered trees along the road. Quinton sat back at the wheel of the Lincoln, now and then signalling over his shoulder at the helicopter pilot. As the music pounded from the radio of the car Quinton shouted, ‘What a beat! Is this you as well? Now, what else do you need?’ ‘Mirrors, sand, a time shelter.’

  Imago Tapes.

  Tanguy: ‘Jours de Lenteur.’

  Ernst: ‘The Robing of the Bride.’

  de Chirico: ‘The Dream of the Poet.’

  Jackie Kennedy, I See You in My Dreams. At night the serene face of the President's widow hung like a lantern among the corridors of sleep. Warning him, she seemed to summon to her side all the legions of the bereaved. At dawn he knelt in the grey hotel room over the copies of Newsweek and Paris-Match. When Karen Novotny called he borrowed her nail scissors and began to cut out the photographs of the model girls. ‘In a dream I saw them lying on a beach. Their legs were rotting, giving out a green light.’

  Kodachrome. Captain Webster studied the prints. They showed: (1) a thick-set man in an Air Force jacket, unshaven face half hidden by the dented hat-peak; (2) a transverse section through the spinal level T-12; (3) a crayon self-portrait by David Feary, seven-year-old schizophrenic at the Belmont Asylum, Sutton; (4) radio-spectra from the quasar CTA 102; (5) an antero-posterior radiograph of a skull, estimated capacity 1500 cc; (6) spectro-heliogram of the sun taken with the K line of calcium; (7) left and right handprints showing massive scarring between second and third metacarpal bones. To Dr Nathan he said, ‘And all these make up one picture?’

  Lieutenant 70. An isolated incident at the Strategic Air Command base at Omaha, Nebraska, December 25th, 197–, when a landing H-bomber was found to have an extra pilot on board. The subject carried no identification tags and was apparently suffering from severe retrograde amnesia. He subsequently disappeared while being X-rayed at the base hospital for any bio-implants or transmitters, leaving behind a set of plates of a human foetus evidently taken some thirty years previously. It was assumed that this was in the nature of a hoax and that the subject was a junior officer who had become fatigued while playing Santa Claus on an inter-base visiting party.

  Minkowski Space-Time. In part a confusion of mathematical models was responsible, Dr Nathan decided. Sitting behind his desk in the darkened laboratory, he drew slowly on the gold-tipped cigarette, watching the shadowy figure of a man seated opposite him, his back to the watery light from the aquarium tanks. At times part of his head seemed to be missing, like some disintegrating executive from a Francis Bacon nightmare. As yet irreconcilable data: his mother was a sixty-five-year-old terminal psychopath at Broadmoor, his father a still-unborn child in a Dallas lying-in hospital. Other fragments were
beginning to appear in a variety of unlikely places: textbooks on chemical kinetics, advertising brochures, a pilot for a TV puppet thriller. Even the pun seemed to play a significant role, curious verbal crossovers. What language could embrace all these, or at least provide a key: computer codes, origami, dental formulae? Perhaps in the end Fellini would make a sex fantasy out of this botched second coming: 1½.

  Narcissistic. Many things preoccupied him during this time in the sun: the plasticity of visual forms, the image maze, the need to re-score the central nervous system, pre-uterine claims, the absurd – i.e., the phenomenology of the universe … The crowd at the plage, however, viewing this beach Hamlet, noticed only the scars which disfigured his chest, hands and feet.

  Ontologically Speaking. In slow motion the test cars moved towards each other on collision courses, unwinding behind them the coils that ran to the metering devices by the impact zone. As they collided the gentle debris of wings and fenders floated into the air. The cars rocked slightly, worrying each other like amiable whales, and then continued on their disintegrating courses. In the passenger seats the plastic models transcribed graceful arcs into the buckling roofs and windshields. Here and there a passing fender severed a torso, the air behind the cars was a carnival of arms and legs.

  Placenta. The X-ray plates of the growing foetus had shown the absence of both placenta and umbilical cord. Was this then, Dr Nathan pondered, the true meaning of the immaculate conception – that not the mother but the child was virgin, innocent of any Jocasta's clutching blood, sustained by the unseen powers of the universe as it lay waiting within its amnion? Yet why had something gone wrong? All too obviously there had been a complete cock-up.

  Quasars. Malcolm X, beautiful as the trembling of hands in tabes dorsalis; Claude Eatherly, migrant angel of the Pre-Third; Lee Harvey Oswald, rider of the scorpion.

  Refuge. Gripping the entrenching tool in his bloodied hands, he worked away at the lid of the vault. In the grey darkness of the Abbey the chips of cement seemed to draw light from his body. The bright crystals formed points like a half-familiar constellation, the crests of a volume graph, the fillings in Karen Novotny's teeth.

  Speed-King. The highest speed ever achieved on land by a mechanically-propelled wheeled vehicle was 1004.247 m.p.h. reached at Bonneville Salt Flats on March 5th, 197–, by a twenty-seven-foot-long car powered by three J-79 aircraft engines developing a total of 51,000 h.p. The vehicle disintegrated at the end of the second run, and no trace was found of the driver, believed to be a retired Air Force pilot.

  The Him. The noise from the beat group rehearsing in the ballroom drummed at his head like a fist, driving away the half-formed equations that seemed to swim at him from the gilt mirrors in the corridor. What were they - fragments of a unified field theory, the tetragrammaton, or the production sequences for a deodorant pessary? Below the platform the party of teenagers the Savoy doormen had let in through the Embankment entrance were swaying to the music. He pushed through them to the platform. As he pulled the microphone away from the leader a girl jeered from the floor. Then his knees began to kick, his pelvis sliding and rocking. ‘Ye… yeah, yeah, yeah!’ he began, voice rising above the amplified guitars.

  U.H.F. ‘Considerable interference has been noted with TV reception over a wide area during the past three weeks,’ Webster explained, pointing to the map. ‘This has principally taken the form of modifications to the plot lines and narrative sequences of a number of family serials. Mobile detection vans have been unable to identify the source, but we may conclude that his central nervous system is acting as a powerful transmitter.’

  Vega. In the darkness the half-filled reservoirs reflected the starlight, the isolated heads of pumping gear marking the distant catwalks. Karen Novotny moved towards him, her white skirt lifted by the cold air. ‘When do we see you again? This time, it's been …’ He looked up at the night sky, then pointed to the blue star in the solar apex. ‘Perhaps in time. We're moving there. Read the sand, it will tell you when.’

  W.A.S.P. Without doubt there had been certain difficulties after the previous incarnation resulting from the choice of racial stock. Of course, from one point of view the unhappy events of our own century might be regarded as, say, demonstration ballets on the theme ‘Hydrocarbon Synthesis’ with strong audience participation. This time, however, no ethnic issues will be raised, and the needs for social mobility and a maximum acceptance personality profile make it essential that a subject of Gentile and preferably Protestant and Anglo-Saxon …

  Xoanon. These small plastic puzzles, similar to the gewgaws given away by petroleum and detergent manufacturers, were found over a wide area, as if they had fallen from the sky. Millions had been produced, although their purpose was hard to see. Later it was found that unusual objects could be made from them.

  Ypres Reunion. Webster waded through the breaking surf, following the tall man in the peaked cap and leather jacket who was moving slowly between the waves to the submerged sandbank two hundred yards away. Already pieces of the dying man were drifting past Webster in the water. Yet was this the time-man, or did his real remains lie in the tomb at the Abbey? He had come bearing the gifts of the sun and the quasars, and instead had sacrificed them for this unknown soldier resurrected now to return to his Flanders field.

  Zodiac. Undisturbed, the universe would continue on its round, the unrequited ghosts of Malcolm X, Lee Harvey Oswald and Claude Eatherly raised on the shoulders of the galaxy. As his own identity faded, its last fragments glimmered across the darkening landscape, lost integers in a hundred computer codes, sand-grains on a thousand beaches, fillings in a million mouths.

  Ambivalent

  Throughout The Atrocity Exhibition its central character has appeared in a succession of roles, ranging across a spectrum of possibilities available to each of us in our interior lives. In the most abstract role. ‘You; Coma: Marilyn Monroe’, he behaves like an element in a geometric equation, In The Summer Cannibals' he is his most mundane and everyday serf. Here, in ‘You and Me and the Continuum’, he is at his most apocalyptic, appearing as the second coming of Christ.

  Delivery System.

  Deserts possess a particular magic, since they have exhausted their own futures, and are thus free of time. Anything erected there, a city, a pyramid, a motel, stands outside time, it's no coincidence that religious leaders emerge from the desert Modem shopping malls have much the same function, A future Rimbaud, Van Gogh or Adolf Hitler will emerge from their timeless wastes.

  Some of the best American thrillers have been set in the desert - The Getaway The Hitcher, Charley Varrick Blood Simple. Given that there is no time past and no future, the idea of death and retribution has a doubly threatening force.

  Five Hundred Feet High.

  The reservoirs. Shepperton, noted for its film studios, lies on the River Thames some 15 miles to the west of London. All around are the high embankments of huge water reservoirs. Their contents remain completely hidden, until one flies into Heathrow Airport ft always surprises me to see that I live on the floor of an immense marine landscape.

  The same sense of a concealed marine world occurs when I drive up into the hills above the French Riviera. Leaving behind the coastal strip of marinas and autoroutes, one seems to enter the Provence of a hundred years ago, a Cézanne country of secluded villas with terracotta roofs. Then, from an observation post high above Grasse, there is the astounding sight of scores of blue rectangles cut into the mountain sides – swimming pools. 100,000 years from now, when the human race has vanished, visitors from the stars will observe these drained concrete pits, many decorated with tritons and solar emblems. What were they-submerged marine altars? All that is left of the time-machines which these people used to escape from their planet? Three-dimensional symbols in a ritual geometry, models of a state of mind, votive offerings to the distant sea? One has the same impression flying over Beverly Hills.

  Imago Tapes.

  In 1966, when I wrote this chapter, the
surrealists had not yet achieved critical respectability, but the hidden logic of that decade made complete sense in terms of their work. Readers will have noticed that by contrast, there are almost no references to literary works. The realist novel still dominant then had exhausted itself.

  Lieutenant 70.

  During the Apollo flights I half-hoped that one of the spacecraft would return with an extra crew-man on board, wholly accepted by the others, who would shield him from a prying world. Watching the astronauts being interviewed together, one almost senses that they constitute a secret fraternity, and may be guarding some vital insight into the nature of time and space which it would be pointless to reveal to the rest of us. Unless the space programme resumes, the secret may the with

  Quasars.

  Claude Eatherly was the pilot of the reconnaissance B-29 which flew ahead of the Enola Gay during the A-bomb attack on Hiroshima. Eatherly had an unhappy later career, plagued by mental trouble and petty crime, which he attributed to his feelings of guilt My guess is that he recognized, unconsciously or not the public's need in the 1950s for someone who would incarnate their own sense of unease, and deflect their even greater fears of the H-bomb.