Chronopolis

by J. G. Ballard

  It was this unvarying nature of their daily routines which Constantin found particularly depressing. Intermittently over the next few days, he played chess with Malek, invariably finding himself in a losing position, but the focus of his attention was elsewhere, upon the enigma cloaked by Malek’s square, expressionless face. Around him a thousand invisible clocks raced onward toward their beckoning zeros, a soundless thunder like the drumming of apocalyptic hoof irons.

  His mood of foreboding had given way to one of mounting fear, all the more terrifying because, despite Malek’s real role, it seemed completely sourceless. He found himself unable to concentrate for more than a few minutes upon any task, left his meals unfinished and fidgeted helplessly by the veranda window. The slightest movement by Malek would make his nerves thrill with anguish; if the supervisor left his customary seat in the lounge to speak to the orderly Constantin would find himself almost paralyzed by the tension, helplessly counting the seconds until Malek returned. Once, during one of their meals, Malek started to ask him for the salt and Constantin almost choked to death.

  The ironic humor of this near-fatality reminded Constantin that almost half of his two-month sentence had elapsed. But his crude attempts to obtain a pencil from the orderly and later, failing this, to mark the letters in a page torn from one of the novels were intercepted by Malek, and he realized that short of defeating the two policemen in single-handed combat he had no means of escaping his ever more imminent fate.

  Latterly he had noticed that Malek’s movements and general activity around the villa seemed to have quickened. He still sat for long periods in the armchair, observing Constantin, but his formerly impassive presence was graced by gestures and inclinations of the head that seemed to reflect a heightened cerebral activity, as if he were preparing himself for some long-awaited denouement. Even the heavy musculature of his face seemed to have relaxed and grown sleeker, his sharp mobile eyes, like those of an experienced senior inspector of police, roving constantly about the rooms.

  Despite his efforts, however, Constantin was unable to galvanize himself into any defensive action. He could see clearly that Malek and he had entered a new phase in their relationship, and that at any moment their outwardly formal and polite behavior would degenerate into a grasping ugly violence, but he was nonetheless immobilized by his own state of terror. The days passed in a blur of uneaten meals and abandoned chess games, their very identity blotting out any sense of time or progression, the watching figure of Malek always before him.

  Every morning, when he woke after two or three hours of sleep to find his consciousness still intact, a discovery almost painful in its relief and poignancy, he would be immediately aware of Malek standing in the next room, then waiting discreetly in the hallway as Constantin shaved in the bathroom (also without its door), following him downstairs to breakfast, his careful reflective tread like that of a hangman descending from his gallows.

  After breakfast Constantin would challenge Malek to a game of chess, but after a few moves would begin to play wildly, throwing pieces forward to be decimated by Malek. At times the supervisor would glance curiously at Constantin, as if wondering whether his charge had lost his reason, and then continued to play his careful exact game, invariably winning or drawing. Dimly Constantin perceived that by losing to Malek he had also surrendered to him psychologically, but the games had now become simply a means of passing the unending days.

  Six weeks after they had first begun to play chess, Constantin more by luck than skill succeeded in an extravagant pawn gambit and forced Malek to sacrifice both his center and any possibility of castling. Roused from his state of numb anxiety by this temporary victory, Constantin sat forward over the board, irritably waving away the orderly who announced from the door of the lounge that he would serve lunch.

  “Tell him to wait, Malek. I mustn’t lose my concentration at this point, I’ve very nearly won the game.”

  “Well. . .” Malek glanced at his watch, then over his shoulder at the orderly, who, however, had turned on his heel and returned to the kitchen. He started to stand up. “It can wait. He’s bringing the-”

  “No!” Constantin snapped. “Just give me five minutes, Malek. Damn it, one adjourns on a move, not halfway through it.”

  “Very well.” Malek hesitated, after a further glance at his watch. He climbed to his feet. “I will tell him.”

  Constantin concentrated on the board, ignoring the supervisor’s retreating figure, the scent of victory clearing his mind. But thirty seconds later he sat up with a start, his heart almost seizing inside his chest.

  Malek had gone upstairs! Constantin distinctly remembered his saying he would tell the orderly to delay lunch, but instead he had walked straight up to his bedroom. Not only was it extremely unusual for Constantin to be left unobserved when the orderly was otherwise occupied, but the latter had still not brought in their first luncheon course.

  Steadying the table, Constantin stood up, his eyes searching the open doorways in front of and behind him. Almost certainly the orderly’s announcement of lunch was a signal, and Malek had found a convenient pretext for going upstairs to prepare his execution weapon.

  Faced at last by the imminent nemesis he had so long dreaded,

  Constantin listened for the sounds of Malek’s feet descending the staircase. A profound silence enclosed the villa, broken only by the fall of one of the chess pieces to the tiled floor. Outside the sun shone intermittently in the garden, illuminating the broken flats tones of the ornamental pathway and the bare fifteen-foot-high face of the walls. A few stunted weeds flowered among the rubble, their pale colors blanched by the sunlight, and Constantin was suddenly filled by an overwhelming need to escape into the open air for the few last moments before he died. The east wall, lit by the sun’s rays, was marked by a faint series of horizontal grooves, the remnants perhaps of a fire escape ladder, and the slender possibility of using these as handholds made the enclosed garden, a perfect killing ground, preferable to the frantic claustrophobic atmosphere of the villa.

  Above him, Malek’s measured tread moved across the ceiling to the head of the staircase. He paused there and then began to descend the stairs, his steps chosen with a precise and careful rhythm.

  Helplessly, Constantin searched the veranda for something that would serve as a weapon. The French windows leading to the garden were locked, and a slotted pinion outside secured the left-hand member of the pair to the edge of the sill. If this were raised there was a chance that the windows could be forced outward.

  Scattering the chess pieces onto the floor with a sweep of his hand, Constantin seized the board and folded it together, then stepped over to the window and drove the heavy wooden box through the bottom pane. The report of the bursting glass echoed like a gunshot through the villa. Kneeling down, he pushed his hand through the aperture and tried to lift the pinion, jerking it up and down in its rusty socket. When it failed to clear the sill he forced his head through the broken window and began to heave against it helplessly with his thin shoulders, the fragments of broken glass falling on his neck.

  Behind him a chair was kicked back, and he felt two powerful hands seize his shoulders and pull him away from the window. He struck out hysterically with the chess box, and then was flung headfirst to the tiled floor.

  His convalescence from this episode was to last most of the following week. For the first three days he remained in bed, recovering his physical identity, waiting for the sprained muscles of his hands and shoulders to repair themselves. When he felt sufficiently strong to leave his bed he went down to the lounge and sat at one end of the sofa, his back to the windows and the thin autumn light.

  Malek still remained in attendance, and the orderly prepared his meals as before. Neither of them made any comment upon Constantin’s outburst of hysteria, or indeed betrayed any signs that it had taken place, but Constantin realized that he had crossed an important Rubicon. His whole relationship with Malek had experienced a profound change. Th
e fear of his own imminent death, and the tantalizing mystery of its precise date which had so obsessed him, had been replaced by a calm acceptance that the judicial processes inaugurated by his trial would take their course and that Malek and the orderly were merely the local agents of this distant apparatus. In a sense his sentence and present tenuous existence at the villa were a microcosm of life itself, with its inherent but unfeared uncertainties, its inevitable quietus to be made on a date never known in advance. Seeing his role at the villa in this light, Constantin no longer felt afraid at the prospect of his own extinction, fully aware that a change in the political wind could win him a free pardon.

  In addition, he realized that Malek, far from being his executioner, a purely formal role, was in fact an intermediary between himself and the hierarchy, and in an important sense a potential ally of Constantin’s. As he reformed his defense against the indictment preferred against him at the trial—he knew he had been far too willing to accept the fait accompli of his own guilt—he calculated the various ways in which Malek would be able to assist him. There was no doubt in his mind that he had misjudged Malek. With his sharp intelligence and commanding presence, the supervisor was very far from being a hatchet-faced killer—this original impression had been the result of some cloudiness in Constantin’s perceptions, an unfortunate myopia which had cost him two precious months in his task of arranging a retrial.

  Comfortably swathed in his dressing gown, he sat at the card table in the lounge (they had abandoned the veranda with the colder weather, and only a patch of brown paper over the window reminded him of that first circle of purgatory) concentrating on the game of chess. Malek sat opposite him, hands clasped on one knee, his thumbs occasionally circling as he pondered a move. Although no less reticent than he had ever been, his manner seemed to indicate that he understood and confirmed Constantin’s reappraisal of the situation. He still followed Constantin around the villa, but his attentions were noticeably more perfunctory, as if he realized that Constantin would not try again to escape.

  From the start, Constantin was completely frank with Malek.

  “I am convinced, Malek, that the Prosecutor-General was misdirected by the Justice Department, and that the whole basis of the trial was a false one. All but one of the indictments were never formally presented, so I had no opportunity to defend myself. You understand that, Malek? The selection of the capital penalty for one count was purely arbitrary.”

  Malek nodded, moving a piece. “So you have explained, Mr. Constantin. I am afraid I do not have a legalistic turn of mind.”

  “There’s no need for you to,” Constantin assured him. “The point is obvious. I hope it may be possible to appeal against the court’s decision and ask for a retrial.” Constantin gestured with a piece. “I criticize myself for accepting the indictments so readily. In effect I made no attempt to defend myself. If only I had done so I am convinced I should have been found innocent.”

  Malek murmured noncommittally, and gestured toward the board. Constantin resumed play. Most of the games he consistently lost to Malek, but this no longer troubled him, and if anything, only served to reinforce the bonds between them.

  Constantin had decided not to ask the supervisor to inform the Justice Department of his request for a retrial until he had convinced Malek that his case left substantial room for doubt. A premature application would meet with an automatic negative from Malek, whatever his private sympathies. Conversely, once Malek was firmly on his side he would be prepared to risk his reputation with his seniors, and indeed his championing of Constantin’s cause would be convincing proof in itself of the latter’s innocence.

  As Constantin soon found from his one-sided discussions with Malek, arguing over the legal technicalities of the trial, with their infinitely subtle nuances and implications, was an unprofitable method of enlisting Malek’s support, and he realized that he would have to do so by sheer impress of personality, by his manner, bearing and general conduct, and above all by his confidence of his innocence in the face of the penalty which might at any moment be imposed upon him. Curiously, this latter pose was not as difficult to maintain as might have been expected; Constantin already felt a surge of conviction in his eventual escape from the villa.

  Sooner or later Malek would recognize the authenticity of this inner confidence.

  To begin with, however, the supervisor remained his usual phlegmatic self. Constantin talked away at him from morning to evening, every third word affirming the probability of his being found “innocent,” but Malek merely nodded with a faint smile and continued to play his errorless chess.

  “Malek, I don’t want you to think that I challenge the competence of the court to try the charges against me, or that I hold it in disrespect,” he said to the supervisor as they played their usual morning board some two weeks after the incident on the veranda. “Far from it. But the court must make its decisions within the context of the evidence presented by the prosecutor. And even then, the greatest imponderable remains—the role of the accused. In my case I was, to all intents, not present at the trial, so my innocence is established by force majeure. Don’t you agree, Malek?”

  Malek’s eyes searched the pieces on the board, his lips pursing thinly. “I’m afraid this is above my head, Mr. Constantin. Naturally I accept the authority of the court without question.”

  “But so do I, Malek. I’ve made that plain. The real question is simply whether the verdict was justified in the light of the new circumstances I am describing.”

  Malek shrugged, apparently more interested in the end game before them. “I recommend you to accept the verdict, Mr. Constantin. For your peace of mind, you understand.”

  Constantin looked away with a gesture of impatience. “I don’t agree, Malek. Besides, a great deal is at stake.” He glanced up at the windows, which were drumming in the cold autumn wind. The casements were slightly loose, and the air lanced around them. The villa was poorly heated, only the single radiator in the lounge warming the three rooms downstairs. Already Constantin dreaded the winter. His hands and feet were perpetually cold and he could find no means of warming them.

  “Malek, is there any chance of obtaining another heater?” he asked. “It’s none too warm in here. I have a feeling it’s going to be a particularly cold winter.”

  Malek looked up from the board, his bland gray eyes regarding Constantin with a flicker of curiosity, as if this last remark were one of the few he had heard from Constantin’s lips which contained any overtones whatever.

  “It is cold,” he agreed at last. “I will see if I can borrow a heater. This villa is closed for most of the year.”

  Constantin pestered him for news of the heater during the following week—partly because the success of his request would have symbolized Malek’s first concession to him—but it failed to materialize. After one palpably lame excuse Malek merely ignored his further reminders. Outside, in the garden, the leaves whirled about the stones in a vortex of chilling air, and overhead the low clouds raced seaward. The two men in the lounge hunched over their chessboard by the radiator, hands buried in their pockets between moves.

  Perhaps it was this darkening weather which made Constantin impatient of Malek’s slowness in seeing the point of his argument, and he made his first suggestions that Malek should transmit a formal request for a retrial to his superiors at the Department of Justice.

  “You speak to someone on the telephone every morning, Malek,” he pointed out when Malek demurred. “There’s no difficulty involved. If you’re afraid of compromising yourself—though I would have thought that a small price to pay in view of what is at stake—the orderly can pass on a message.”

  “It’s not feasible, Mr. Constantin.” Malek seemed at last to be tiring of the subject. “I suggest that you—”

  “Malek!” Constantin stood up and paced around the lounge. “Don’t you realize that you must? You’re literally my only means of contact. If you refuse I’m absolutely powerless, there’s no hop
e of getting a reprieve!”

  “The trial has already taken place, Mr. Constantin,” Malek pointed out patiently.

  “It was a mistrial! Don’t you understand, Malek, I accepted that I was guilty when in fact I was completely innocent!”

  Malek looked up from the board, his eyebrows lifting. “Completely innocent, Mr. Constantin?”

  Constantin snapped his fingers. “Well, virtually innocent. At least in terms of the indictment and trial.”

  “But that is merely a tactical difference, Mr. Constantin. The Department of Justice is concerned with absolutes.”

  “Quite right, Malek. I agree entirely.” Constantin nodded approvingly at the supervisor and privately noted his quizzical expression, the first time Malek had displayed a taste for irony.

  * * *

  He was to notice this fresh leitmotiv recurringly during the next days; whenever he raised the subject of his request for a retrial Malek would counter with one of his deceptively naive queries, trying to establish some minor tangential point, almost as if he were leading Constantin on to a fuller admission. At first Constantin assumed that the supervisor was fishing for information about other members of the hierarchy which he wished to use for his own purposes, but the few tidbits he offered were ignored by Malek, and it dawned upon him that Malek was genuinely interested in establishing the sincerity of Constantin’s conviction of his own innocence.