Chronopolis

by J. G. Ballard

  Alto folded the note carefully, left the dictaphone on the staircase and walked slowly back to the window.

  “This blackmail. Are you absolutely sure? Who, though, do you know?” Mangon nodded, but looked away. “Okay, I won’t press you. LeGrande, probably, eh?” Mangon turned round in surprise, then gave an elaborate parody of a shrug.

  “Hector LeGrande. Obvious guess. But there are no secrets there; it’s all public knowledge. I suppose she’s just threatening to make enough of an exhibition of herself to block his governorship.” Alto pursed his lips. He loathed LeGrande, not merely for having bribed him into a way of life he could never renounce, but also because, once having exploited his weakness, LeGrande never hesitated to remind Alto of it, treating him and his music with contempt. If Madame Gioconda’s blackmail had the slightest hope of success he would have been only too happy, but he knew LeGrande would destroy her, would probably take Mangon too.

  Suddenly he felt a paradoxical sense of loyalty for Madame Gioconda. He looked at Mangon, waiting patiently, big spaniel eyes wide with hope.

  “The idea of a closed circuit program is insane. Even if we went to all the trouble of staging it she wouldn’t be satisfied. She doesn’t want to sing, she wants to be a star. It’s the trappings of stardom she misses—the cheering galleries, the piles of bouquets, the back-stage parties. I could arrange a half-hour session on closed circuit with some trainee technicians—a few straight selections from Tosca and Butterfly, say, with even a sonic piano accompaniment—I’d be glad to play it myself—but I can’t provide the gossip columns and the theater reviews. What would happen when she found out?”

  She wants to SING

  Alto reached out and patted Mangon on the shoulder. “Good for you. All right, then, I’ll think about it. God knows how we’d arrange it. We’d have to tell her that she’ll be making a surprise guest appearance on one of the big shows—that’ll explain the absence of any program announcement and we’ll be able to keep her in an isolated studio. Stress the importance of surprise, to prevent her from contacting the newspapers . . . Where are you going?”

  Mangon reached the staircase, picked up the dictaphone and returned to Alto with it. He grinned happily, his jaw working wildly as he struggled to speak. Strangled sounds quavered in his throat.

  Touched, Alto turned away from him and sat down. “Okay, Mangon,” he snapped brusquely, “you can get on with your job. Remember, I haven’t promised anything.” He flicked on the dictaphone, then began: “Memo 11: Ray. . .”

  Three

  It was just after four o’clock when Mangon braked the sound truck in the alley behind the derelict station. Overhead the traffic hammered along the flyover, dinning down onto the cobbled walls. He had been trying to finish his rounds early enough to bring Madame Gioconda the big news before her headaches began. He had swept out the Oratory in an hour, whirled through a couple of movie theaters, the Museum of Abstract Art, and a dozen private calls in half his usual time, driven by his almost overwhelming joy at having won a promise of help from Ray Alto.

  He ran through the foyer, already fumbling at his wrist-pad. For the first time in many years he really regretted his muteness, his inability to tell Madame Gioconda orally of his triumph that morning.

  Studio 2 was in darkness, the rows of seats and litter of old programs and ice cream cartons reflected dimly in the single light masked by the tall flats. His feet slipped in some shattered plaster fallen from the ceiling and he was out of breath when he clambered up onto the stage and swung around the nearest flat.

  Madame Gioconda had gone!

  The stage was deserted, the couch a rumpled mess, a clutter of cold saucepans on the stove. The wardrobe door was open, dresses wrenched outward off their hangars.

  For a moment Mangon panicked, unable to visualize why she should have left, immediately assuming that she had discovered his plot with Alto.

  Then he realized that never before had he visited the studio 115

  until midnight at the earliest, and that Madame Gioconda had merely gone out to the supermarket. He smiled at his own stupidity and sat down on the couch to wait for her, sighing with relief.

  Suddenly the words struck him like the blows of a poleax!

  As vivid as if they had been daubed in letters ten feet deep, they leapt out from the walls, nearly deafening him with their force.

  “You grotesque old witch, you must be insane! You ever threaten me again and I’ll have you destroyed! LISTEN, you pathetic—”

  Mangon spun around helplessly, trying to screen his ears. The words must have been hurled out in a paroxysm of abuse. They were only an hour old, vicious sonic scars slashed across the immaculately swept walls.

  His first thought was to rush out for the sonovac and sweep the walls clear before Madame Gioconda returned. Then it dawned on him that she had already heard the original of the echoes—in the background he could just detect the muffled rhythms and intonations of her voice.

  All too exactly, he could identify the man’s voice.

  He had heard it many times before, raging in the same ruthless tirades, when, deputizing for one of the sound-sweeps, he had swept out the main board room at Video City.

  Hector LeGrande! So Madame Gioconda had been more desperate than he thought.

  The bottom drawer of the dressing table lay on the floor, its contents upended. Propped against the mirror was an old silver portrait frame, dull and verdigrised, some cotton wool and a tin of cleansing fluid next to it. The photograph was one of LeGrande, taken twenty years earlier. She must have known LeGrande was coming and had searched out the old portrait, probably regretting the threat of blackmail.

  But the sentiment had not been shared.

  Mangon walked around the stage, his heart knotting with rage, filling his ears with LeGrande’s taunts. He picked up the portrait, pressed it between his palms, and suddenly smashed it across the edge of the dressing table.

  “Mangon!”

  The cry riveted him to the air. He dropped what was left of the frame, saw Madame Gioconda step quietly from behind one of the flats.

  “Mangon, please,” she protested gently. “You frighten me.”

  She sidled past him toward the bed, dismantling an enormous purple hat. “And do clean up all that glass, or I shall cut my feet.” She spoke drowsily and moved in a relaxed, sluggish way that Mangon first assumed indicated acute shock. Then she drew from her handbag six white vials and lined them up carefully on the bedside table. These were her favorite confectionary—so LeGrande had sweetened the pill with another check. Mangon began to scoop the glass together with his feet, at the same time trying to collect his wits. The sounds of LeGrande’s abuse dinned the air, and he broke away and ran off to fetch the sonovac.

  Madame Gioconda was sitting on the edge of the bed when he returned, dreamily dusting a small bottle of bourbon which had followed the cocaine vials out of the handbag. She hummed to herself melodically and stroked one of the feathers in her hat.

  “Mangon,” she called when he had almost finished. “Come here.”

  Mangon put down the sonovac and went across to her.

  She looked up at him, her eyes suddenly very steady. “Mangon, why did you break Hector’s picture?” She held up a piece of the frame. “Tell me.”

  Mangon hesitated, then scribbled on his pad:

  I am sorry; I adore you very much. He said such foul things to you

  Madame Gioconda glanced at the note, then gazed back thoughtfully at Mangon. “Were you hiding here when Hector came?”

  Mangon shook his head categorically. He started to write on his pad but Madame Gioconda restrained him.

  “That’s all right, dear. I thought not.” She looked around the stage for a moment, listening carefully. “Mangon, when you came in could you hear what Mr. LeGrande said?”

  Mangon nodded. His eyes flickered to the obscene phrases on the walls and he began to frown. He still felt LeGrande’s presence and his attempt to humiliate Madame Gio
conda.

  Madame Gioconda pointed around them. “And you can actually hear what he said even now? How remarkable. Mangon, you have a wondrous talent.”

  I am sorry you have to suffer so much

  Madame Gioconda smiled at this. “We all have our crosses to bear. I have a feeling you may be able to lighten mine considerably.” She patted the bed beside her. “Do sit down, you must be tired.” When he was settled she went on. “I’m very interested,

  Mangon. Do you mean you can distinguish entire phrases and sentences in the sounds you sweep? You can hear complete conversations hours after they have taken place?”

  Something about Madame Gioconda’s curiosity made Mangon hesitate. His talent, so far as he knew, was unique, and he was not so naive as to fail to appreciate its potentialities. It had developed in his late adolescence and so far he had resisted any temptation to abuse it. He had never revealed the talent to anyone, knowing that if he did his days as a sound-sweep would be over.

  Madame Gioconda was watching him, an expectant smile on her lips. Her thoughts, of course, were solely of revenge. Mangon listened again to the walls, focused on the abuse screaming out into the air.

  Not complete conversations. Long fragments, up to twenty syllables. Depending on resonances and matrix. Tell no one. I will help you have revenge on LeGrande.

  Madame Gioconda squeezed Mangon’s hand. She was about to reach for the bourbon bottle when Mangon suddenly remembered the point of his visit. He leapt off the bed and started frantically scribbling on his wrist-pad.

  He tore off the first sheet and pressed it into her startled hands, then filled three more, describing his encounter with the musical director at V.C., the latter’s interest in Madame Gioconda and the conditional promise to arrange her guest appearance. In view of LeGrande’s hostility he stressed the need for absolute secrecy.

  He waited happily while Madame Gioconda read quickly through the notes, tracing out Mangon’s childlike script with a long scarlet fingernail. When she finished he nodded his head rapidly and gestured triumphantly in the air.

  Bemused, Madame Gioconda gazed uncomprehendingly at the notes. Then she reached out and pulled Mangon to her, taking his big faunlike head in her jeweled hands and pressing it to her lap.

  “My dear child, how much I need you. You must never leave me now.”

  As she stroked Mangon’s hair her eyes roved questingly around the walls.

  The miracle happened shortly before eleven o’clock the next morning.

  After breakfast, sprawled across Madame Gioconda’s bed with her scrapbooks, an old Gramophone salvaged by Mangon from one of the studios playing operatic selections, they had decided to drive out to the stockades—the sound-sweeps left for the city at nine and they would be able to examine the sonic dumps unmolested. Having spent so much time with Madame Gioconda and immersed himself so deeply in her world, Mangon was eager now to introduce Madame Gioconda to his. The stockades, bleak though they might be, were all he had to show her.

  For Mangon, Madame Gioconda had now become the entire universe, a source of certainty and wonder as potent as the sun. Behind him his past life fell away like the discarded chrysalis of a brilliant butterfly, the gray years of his childhood at the orphanage dissolving into the magical kaleidoscope that revolved around him. As she talked and murmured affectionately to him, the drab flats and props in the studio seemed as brightly colored and meaningful as the landscape of a mescaline fantasy. The air tingled with a thousand vivid echoes of her voice.

  They set off down F Street at ten, and soon left behind the dingy warehouses and abandoned tenements that had enclosed Madame Gioconda for so long. Squeezed together in the driving cab of the sound truck they were an incongruous pair—the gangling Mangon, in zip-fronted yellow plastic jacket and yellow peaked cap, at the wheel, dwarfed by the vast flamboyant Madame Gioconda, wearing a parrot-green cartwheel hat and veil, her huge creamy breast glittering with pearls, gold stars, and jeweled crescents, a small selection of the orders that had been showered upon her in her heyday.

  She had breakfasted well, on one of the vials and a large glass of bourbon. As they left the city she gazed out amiably at the fields stretching away from the highway, and trilled out a light recitative from Figaro.

  Mangon listened to her happily, glad to see her in such good spirits. Determined to spend every possible minute with Madame Gioconda, he had decided to abandon his calls for the day, if not for the next week and month. With her he at last felt completely secure. The pressure of her hand and the warm swell of her shoulder made him feel confident and invigorated, all the more proud that he was able to help her back to fame.

  He tapped on the windshield as they swung off the highway onto the narrow dirt track that led toward the stockades. Here and there among the dunes they could see the low ruined outbuildings of the old explosives plant, and the white galvanized iron roof of one of the sound-sweeps’ cabins. Desolate and unfrequented, the dunes ran on for miles. They passed the remains of a gateway that had collapsed to one side of the road; originally a continuous fence had ringed the stockade, but no one had any reason for wanting to penetrate it. A place of strange echoes and festering silences, overhung by a gloomy miasma of a million compacted sounds, it remained remote and haunted, the graveyard of countless private babels.

  The first of the sonic dumps appeared two or three hundred yards away on their right. This was reserved for aircraft sounds swept from the city’s streets and municipal buildings, and was a tightly packed collection of sound-absorbent baffles covering several acres. The baffles were slightly larger than those in the other stockades; twenty feet high and fifteen wide, each supported by heavy wooden props, they faced each other in a random labyrinth of alleyways, like a stored lot of advertising billboards. Only the top two or three feet was visible above the dunes, but the changed air hit Mangon like a hammer, a pounding niagara of airlines blaring down the glideway, the piercing whistle of jets jockeying at takeoff, the ceaseless mind-sapping roar that hangs like a vast umbrella over any metropolitan complex.

  All around, odd sounds shaken loose from the stockades were beginning to reach them. Over the entire area, fed from the dumps below, hung an unbroken phonic high, invisible but nonetheless as tangible and menacing as an enormous black thundercloud. Occasionally, when supersaturation was reached after one of the summer holiday periods, the sonic pressure fields would split and discharge, venting back into the stockades a nightmarish cataract of noise, raining onto the sound-sweeps not only the howling of cats and dogs, but the multilunged tumult of cars, express trains, fairgrounds, and aircraft, the cacophonic musique concrète of civilization.

  To Mangon the sounds reaching them, though scaled higher in the register, were still distinct, but Madame Gioconda could hear nothing and felt only an overpowering sense of depression and irritation. The air seemed to grate and rasp. Mangon noticed her beginning to frown and hold her hand to her forehead. He wound up his window and indicated to her to do the same. He switched on the sonovac mounted under the dashboard and let it drain the discordancies out of the sealed cabin.

  Madame Gioconda relaxed in the sudden blissful silence. A little further on, when they passed another stockade set closer to the road, she turned to Mangon and began to say something to him.

  Suddenly she jerked violently in alarm, her hat toppling. Her voice had frozen! Her mouth and lips moved frantically, but no sounds emerged. For a moment she was paralyzed. Clutching her throat desperately, she filled her lungs and screamed.

  A faint squeak piped out of her cavernous throat, and Mangon swung around in alarm to see her gibbering apoplectically, pointing helplessly to her throat.

  He stared at her, bewildered, then doubled over the wheel in a convulsion of silent laughter, slapping his thigh and thumping the dashboard. He pointed to the sonovac, then reached down and turned up the volume.

  “. . . aaauuuoooh,” Madame Gioconda heard herself groan. She grasped her hat and secured it. “Mangon, what a
dirty trick! You should have warned me.”

  Mangon grinned. The discordant sounds coming from the stockades began to fill the cabin again, and he turned down the volume. Gleefully, he scribbled on his wrist-pad:

  Now you know what it is like!

  Madame Gioconda opened her mouth to reply, then stopped in time, hiccupped and took his arm affectionately.

  Four

  Mangon slowed down as they approached a side road. Two hundred yards away on their left a small pink-stuccoed cabin stood on a dune overlooking one of the stockades. They drove up to it, turned into a circular concrete apron below the cabin and backed up against one of the unloading bays, a battery of red-painted hydrants equipped with manifold gauges and release pipes running off into the stockade. This was only twenty feet away at its nearest point, a forest of door-shaped baffles facing each other in winding corridors, like a set from a surrealist film.

  As she climbed down from the truck Madame Gioconda expected the same massive wave of depression and overload that she had felt from the stockade of aircraft noises, but instead the air seemed brittle and frenetic, darting with sudden flashes of tension and exhilaration.

  As they walked up to the cabin Mangon explained:

  Party noises—company for me

  The twenty or thirty baffles nearest the cabin he reserved for these, screening himself from the miscellaneous chatter that filled the rest of the stockade. When he woke in the mornings he would listen to the laughter and small talk, enjoy the gossip and wisecracks as much as if he had been at the parties himself.

  The cabin was a single room with a large window overlooking the stockade, well insulated from the hubbub below. Madame Gioconda showed only a cursory interest in Mangon’s meager belongings, and after a few general remarks came to the point and went over to the window. She opened it slightly, listened experimentally to the stream of atmospheric shifts that crowded past her.