The Complete Short Stories

by J. G. Ballard

  Forrester surveyed the lines of deserted hotels and apartment houses, the long-shuttered rotisseries and supermarkets. There was something reassuring about the emptiness. He felt more at ease here, almost alone in this forgotten town.

  As they stood together by the rail, sipping their drinks and gazing at the silent bay, Forrester held his wife around her full waist. For weeks now he had barely been able to take his hands off her. Once Gould had gone it would be pleasant here. They would lie around for the rest of the summer, making love all the time and playing with the baby - a rare arrival now, the average for normal births was less than one in a thousand. Already he could visualize a few elderly peasants coming down from the hills and holding some sort of primitive earth festival on the beach.

  Behind them the aircraft had reappeared over the town. For a moment he caught sight of the doctor's silver helmet - one of Gould's irritating affectations was to paint stripes on his helmet and flying-jacket, and on the fenders of his old Mercedes, a sophomore conceit rather out of character. Forrester had come across traces of the paint at various points around the town on the footbridge over the canal dividing the marina and airstrip at Ampuriabrava from the beach hotels in Rosas, at the corners of the streets leading to Gould's hotel. These marks, apparently made at random, were elements of a cryptic private language. For some time now Forrester had been certain that Gould was up to some nefarious game in the mountains. He was probably pillaging the abandoned monasteries, looting their icons and gold plate. Forrester had a potent vision of this solitary doctor, piloting his light aircraft in a ceaseless search of the Mediterranean littoral, building up a stockpile of art treasures in case the world opened up for business again.

  Forrester's last meeting with Gould, in the Dali museum at Figueras, seemed to confirm these suspicions. He had dropped Judith off at the ante-natal clinic, where the amniotic scanning would, they hoped, confirm the absence of any abnormalities in the foetus, and by an error of judgement strolled into this museum dedicated by the town to its most illustrious native artist. As he walked quickly through the empty galleries he noticed Gould lounging back on the central divan, surveying with amiable composure the surrealist's flaccid embryos and anatomical monstrosities. With his silverflecked jacket and long hair in a knot, Gould looked less like a doctor than a middle-aged Hell's Angel. Beside him on the divan were three canvases he had selected from the walls, and which he later took back to decorate his hotel rooms.

  'They're a little too close to the knuckle for me,' Forrester commented. 'A collection of newsreels from Hell.'

  'A sharp guess at the future, all right,' Gould agreed. 'The ultimate dystopia is the inside of one's own head.'

  As they left the museum Forrester said, 'Judith's baby is due in about three weeks. We wondered if you'd care to attend her?'

  Gould made no reply. Shifting the canvases from one arm to the other, he scowled at the trees in the deserted rambla. His eyes seemed to be waiting for something. Not for the first time, Forrester realized how tired the man was, the nervousness underlying his bony features.

  'What about the practicante? He's probably better qualified than I am.'

  'I wasn't thinking of the birth, so much, as the...'

  'As the death?'

  'Well...' Unsettled by Gould's combative tone, Forrester searched through his stock of euphemisms. 'We're full of hope, of course, but we've had to learn to be realistic.'

  'That's admirable of you both.'

  'Given one possible outcome, I think Judith would prefer someone like you to deal with it...'

  Gould was nodding sagely at this. He looked sharply at Forrester. 'Why not keep the child? Whatever the outcome.'

  Forrester had been genuinely shocked by this. Surprised by the doctor's aggression, he watched him swing away with an unpleasant gesture, the lurid paintings under his arm, and stride back to his Mercedes.

  Judith was asleep in the bedroom. From her loose palm Forrester removed the Valiums she had been too tired to take. He replaced them in the capsule, and then sat unsteadily on the bed. For the last hour he had been drinking alone in the sun on the balcony, partly out of boredom the time-scale of the human pregnancy was a major evolutionary blunder, he decided - and partly out of confused fear and hope.

  Where the hell was the practicante? Forrester walked on to the balcony again and scanned the road to Figueras, past the abandoned nightclubs and motorboat rental offices. The aircraft had gone, disappearing into the mountains. As he searched the airstrip Forrester noticed the dark-robed figure of a young woman in the doorway of Gould's hangar. He had seen her mooning around there several times before, and openly admitted to himself that he felt a slight pang of envy at the assumed sexual liaison between her and Gould. There was something secretive about the relationship that intrigued him. Careful not to move, he waited for the young woman to step into the sun. Already, thanks to the alcohol and an over-scrupulous monogamy, he could feel his loins thickening. For all his need to be alone, the thought that there was another young woman within half a mile of him almost derailed Forrester's mind.

  Five minutes later he saw the girl again, standing on the observation roof of the Club N‡utico, gazing inland as if waiting for Gould's silver aircraft to return.

  ***

  As Forrester let himself out of the suite his wife was still asleep. Only two of the suites on the tenth floor were now maintained. The other rooms had been locked and shuttered, time capsules that contained their melancholy cargo, the aerosols, douche-bags, hairpins and sun-oil tubes left behind by the thousands of vanished tourists.

  The waiters' service elevator, powered by a small gasolene engine in the basement, carried him down to the lobby. There was no electric current now to run the air-conditioning system, but the hotel was cool. In the two basketwork chairs by the steps, below the postcard rack with its peeling holiday views of Rosas in its tourist heyday, sat the elderly manager and his wife. Se–or Cervera had been a linotype operator for a Barcelona newspaper during the years when the population slide had first revealed itself, and even now was a mine of information about the worldwide decline.

  'Mrs Forrester is asleep - if the practicante comes send him up to her.'

  'I hope it's good news. You've waited a long time.'

  'If it is we'll certainly celebrate tonight. Judith wants to open up all the nightclubs.'

  Forrester walked into the sunlight, climbing over the first of the dunes that filled the street. He stood on the roof of a submerged car and looked at the line of empty hotels. He had come here once as a child, when the resort was still half-filled with tourists. Already, though, many of the hotels were closing, but his parents had told him that thirty years earlier the town had been so crowded that they could barely see the sand on the beach. Forrester could remember the Club N‡utico, presiding like an aircraft-carrier over the bars and nightclubs of Ampuriabrava, packed with people enjoying themselves with a frantic fin de sicle gaiety. Already the first of the so-called 'Venus hotels' were being built, and coachloads of deranged young couples were coming in from the airport at Gerona.

  Forrester jumped from the roof of the car and set off along the beach road towards Ampuriabrava. The immaculate sand ran down to the water, free at last of cigarette-ends and bottle-tops, as clean and soft as milled bone. As he moved past the empty hotels it struck Forrester as strange that he felt no sense of panic at the thought of these vanished people. Like Judith and everyone else he knew, like the old linotype operator and his wife sitting alone in the lobby of their hotel, he calmly accepted the terrifying logic of this reductive nightmare as if it were a wholly natural and peaceful event.

  Forty years earlier, by contrast, there had been an uncontrolled epidemic of fear as everyone became aware of the marked fall in the world's population, the huge apparent drop in the birth-rate and, even more disquieting, the immense increase in the number of deformed foetuses. Whatever had set off this process, which now left Forrester standing alone on this once-crowde
d Costa Brava beach, the results were dramatic and irreversible. At its present rate of decline Europe's population of 200,000 people, and the United States' population of 150,000, were headed for oblivion within a generation.

  At the same time, by an unhappy paradox, there had been no fall in fertility, either in man or in the few animal species also affected. In fact, birth-rates had soared, but almost all the offspring were seriously deformed. Forrester remembered the first of Judith's children, with their defective eyes, in which the optic nerves were exposed, and even more disturbing, their deformed sexual organs - these grim parodies of human genitalia tapped all kinds of nervousness and loathing.

  Forrester stopped at the end of the beach, where the line of hotels turned at right angles along the entrance channel of the marina. Looking back at the town, he realized that he was almost certainly its last visitor. The continued breakdown of the European road-systems would soon rule out any future journeys to Spain. For the past five years he and Judith had lived in Geneva. Working for a United Nations agency, he moved from city to city across Europe, in charge of a team making inventories of the huge stockpiles of foodstuffs, pharmaceuticals, consumer durables and industrial raw materials that lay about in warehouses and rail terminals, in empty supermarkets and stalled production-lines - enough merchandise to keep the dwindling population going for a thousand years. Although the population of Geneva was some two thousand, most of Europe's urban areas were deserted altogether, including, surprisingly, some of its great cathedral cities - Chartres, Cologne and Canterbury were empty shells. For some reason the consolations of religion meant nothing to anyone. On the other hand, despite the initial panic, there had never been any real despair. For thirty years they had been matter-of-factly slaughtering their children and closing down the western hemisphere like a group of circus workers dismantling their tents and killing their animals at the season's end.

  From the bank of the canal Forrester peered up at the white hull of the Club N‡utico. There were no signs of the young woman. Behind him, facing the airstrip, was a roadside restaurant abandoned years before. Through the saltstained windows he could see the rows of bottles against the mirror behind the bar, chairs stacked on tables.

  Forrester pushed back the door. The interior of the restaurant was like a museum tableau. Nothing had been moved for years. Despite the unlocked door there had been no vandalism. From the footprints visible in the fine sand blown across the floor it was clear that over the years a few passing travellers had refreshed themselves at the bar and left without doing any damage. This was true of everywhere Forrester had visited. They had vacated a hundred cities and airports as if leaving them in serviceable condition for their successors.

  The air in the restaurant was stale but cool. Seated behind the bar, Forrester helped himself to a bottle of Fundador, drinking quietly as he waited for the young woman to reappear. As he gazed across the canal he noticed that Gould had painted two continuous marker lines in fluorescent silver across the metal slats and wire railing of the footbridge. From the door he could see the same marker lines crossing the road and climbing the steps to Gould's hotel, where they disappeared into the lobby.

  Standing unsteadily in the road, Forrester frowned up at the garish faade of the hotel, which had been designed in a crudely erotic Graecian style. Naked caryatids three storeys high supported a sham portico emblazoned with satyrs and nymphs. Why had Gould chosen to live in this hotel, out of all those standing empty in Rosas? Here in what amounted to the red-light quarter of the town, it was one of a group known euphemistically all over the world as the 'Venus hotels', but which Judith more accurately referred to as 'the sex-hotels'. From Waikiki to Glyfada Beach, Rio to Recife, these hotel complexes had sprung up in the first years of the depopulation crisis. A flood of governmentsubsidised tourists had poured in, urged on into a last frantic festival of erotomania. In a misguided attempt to rekindle their fertility, every conceivable kind of deviant sexual activity had been encouraged. Pornographic hotel decor, lobbies crammed with aids and appliances, ceaseless sex-films shown on closed-circuit television, all these reflected an unhappy awareness by everyone that their sex no longer mattered. The sense of obligation, however residual, to a future generation was no longer present. If anything, the 'normal' had become the real obscenity. In the foyer of one of these hotels Forrester and Judith had come across the most sinister pornographic image of all - the photograph of a healthy baby obscenely retouched.

  Judith and her husband had been too young to take part in these despairing orgies, and by the time of their marriage there had been a general revulsion against perverse sex of every kind. Chastity and romantic love, pre-marital celibacy and all the restraints of monogamy came back in force. As the world's populations continued to fall, the last married couples sat dutifully together like characters from a Vermeer interior.

  And all the while the sexual drive continued unabated. Feeling the alcohol surge through him, Forrester swayed through the hot sunlight. Somewhere around the hangar beside the airstrip the young woman was waiting for him, perhaps watching him at this moment from its dark interior. Obviously she knew what he was thinking, and almost seemed to be encouraging him with her flirtatious dartings to and fro.

  Forrester stepped on to the bridge. Behind him the line of garish hotels was silent, a stage-set designed for just this adventure. The metal rungs of the bridge rang softly under his feet. Tapping them like the keys of a xylophone, Forrester stumbled against the rail, smearing his hands against the still-wet stripe of silver paint.

  Without thinking, he wiped his hands on his shirt. The lines of fluorescent paint continued across the bridge, winding in and out of the abandoned cars in the parking lot beside the airstrip. Following Gould's illuminated pathway, Forrester crossed the canal. When he reached the fuel store he saw that the young woman had emerged from the hangar. She stood in the open doorway, her feet well within the rectangle of sunlight. Her intelligent but somehow mongoloid face was hidden as usual behind heavy sunglasses - a squat chin and high forehead fronted by a carapace of black glass. For all this concealment, Forrester was certain that she had been expecting him, and even more that she had been hoping for him to appear. Inside her black shawl she was moving her hands about like a schoolgirl - no doubt she was aware that he was the only man in the resort, apart from Gould, away on his endless solo flying, and the old linotype operator.

  The sweat rose from Forrester's skin, a hot pelt across his forehead. Standing beside the fuel hydrant, he wiped away the sweat with his hands. The young woman seemed to respond to these gestures. Her own hands emerged from the shawl, moving about in a complex code, a semaphore signalling Forrester to her. Responding in turn, he touched his face again, ignoring the silver paint on his hands. As if to ingratiate himself, he smeared the last of the paint over his cheeks and nose, wiping the tacky metal stains across his mouth.

  When he reached the young woman and touched her shoulder she looked with sudden alarm at these luminous contours, as if aware that she had been forming the elements of the wrong man from these painted fragments - his hands, chest and features.

  Too late, she let herself be bundled backwards into the darkness of the hangar. The sunglasses fell from her hands to the floor. Forrester's luminous face shone back at him like a chromiumed mask from the flight-office windows. He looked down at the sightless young woman scrabbling at his feet for her sunglasses, one hand trying to hide her eyes from him. Then he heard the drone of a light aircraft flying over the town.

  Gould's aircraft circled the Club N‡utico, the panels of its silver fuselage reflecting the sun like a faceted mirror. Forrester turned from the young woman lying against the rear wall of the hangar, the glasses with their fractured lenses once more over her face. He stepped into the afternoon light and ran across the runway as the aircraft came in to land.

  Two hours later, when he had crossed the deserted streets to his hotel, he found Se–or Cervera standing on the dune below the steps, hand
s cupped to his eyes. He waved Forrester towards him, greeting him with relief. Forrester had spent the interval in one of the hotels in the centre of Rosas, moving restlessly from one bathroom to the next as he tried to clean the paint off his face and hands. He had slept for half an hour in a bedroom.

  'Mrs Forrester -, The old man gestured helplessly.

  'Where is she?' Forrester followed Cervera to the hotel steps. His wife was hovering in an embarrassed way behind her mahogany desk. 'What's happened?'

  'The practicante arrived - just after you left.' The old man paused to examine the traces of silver paint that still covered Forrester's face. With a wave of the hand, as if dismissing them as another minor detail of this aberrant day, he said, 'He brought the result to Mrs Forrester..

  'Is she all right? What's going on?'

  Forrester started towards the elevator but the old woman waved him back. 'She went out - I tried to stop her. She was all dressed up.'

  'Dressed? How?'

  'In... in a very extravagant way. She was upset.'

  'Oh, my God...' Forrester caught his breath. 'Poor Judith - where did she go?'

  'To the hotels.' Cervera raised a hand and pointed reluctantly towards the Venus hotels.

  Forrester found her within half an hour, in the bridal suite on the third floor of one of the hotels. As he ran along the canal road, shouting out Judith's name, Gould was walking slowly across the footbridge, flying helmet in hand. The dark figure of the young woman, the lenses of her fractured sunglasses like black suns, followed him sightlessly from the door of the hangar as Gould moved along the painted corridor.

  When at last he heard Judith's cry Forrester entered the hotel. In the principal suite on the third floor he discovered her stretched out on the bridal bed, surrounded by the obscene murals and bas-reliefs. She lay back on the dusty lam bedspread, dressed in a whore's finery she had put together from her own wardrobe. Like a drunken courtesan in the last hours of pregnancy, she stared glassily at Forrester as if not wanting to recognize him. As he approached she picked up the harness beside her on the bed and tried to strike him with it. Forrester pulled it from her hands. He held her shoulders, hoping to calm her, but his feet slipped in the vibrators and film cassettes strewn about the bed. When he regained his balance Judith was at the door. He ran after her down the corridor, kicking aside the display stands of pornographic magazines outside each bedroom. Judith was fleeing down the staircase, stripping off pieces of her costume. Then, thankfully, he saw Gould waiting for her on the landing below, arms raised to catch her.