The Unlimited Dream Company

by J. G. Ballard

  ‘There’s a spare suit at the clinic, though your pupils at the flying school won’t recognize you in it.’ She added in a droll way: ‘I’m deliberately being cryptic – you might decide to jump out of this car.’

  ‘As long as the suit didn’t belong to someone who died. Tempting providence twice the same afternoon isn’t the kind of thing your priest would approve of.’

  ‘Blake, you didn’t tempt providence.’ Choosing her words, she went on matter-of-factly: ‘Actually, people don’t die at the clinic, it’s for out-patients only. Believe me, I’m glad you weren’t our first recruit. There’s a geriatric unit attached to it – the three children are temporarily there on referral, no one else would take them. I’m sorry they were being silly, but before they came here they’d been terribly abused.’

  She pointed to a three-storey building beyond the clinic’s car-park. On the terrace a line of elderly patients sat in their wheelchairs, nodding at the sun. As soon as they saw my ragged flying suit they immediately revived, began to point at me and argue with each other. I assumed that they had seen the burning Cessna fly over and hit the trees along the river.

  We waited in the car-park for the three children to run up to us. Unaware that I was watching her closely, Dr Miriam leaned against one of the cars and picked at a fleck of dirt under her thumbnail. For some reason, perhaps the heat reflected from the polished cellulose and my own half-naked body, I felt suddenly obsessed with this young woman, with the chipped varnish on her toe-nails, the grass-stains on her heels, the heady smell of her thighs and armpits, and even the cryptic residue of some patient’s bodily functions on her white coat. She flicked the dirt from her nail on to the grass, as if returning to the park part of that bountiful nature welling up ceaselessly through her pores. I felt that her grubby feet and air of untidiness stemmed not from any lack of hygiene but from her complete absorption in all the commonplaces of nature. I knew that she cured her patients with poultices of earth and spit, rolled together in her strong hands and warmed between her thighs. Infatuated with her smell, I wanted to mount her like a stallion taking a meadow-rich mare.

  ‘Blake …?’ She was watching me in a not unfriendly way, as if she knew that I was no ordinary pilot and was deliberately letting herself be attracted to me. When the children reached us she bent down and embraced them warmly in turn, smiling unflinchingly when the little girl’s sticky fingers searched her mouth.

  The child was blind. I realized now why these three handicapped children stayed so close – in this way they pooled their abilities. The girl was the brightest of the trio, with an alert, pointed face and a lively, questing nose. The larger of the two boys, the stocky mongol with his massive forehead like an air-raid shelter, was her devoted guide-dog, always within hands’-reach and careful to steer her between the parked cars. He kept up a continuous murmured commentary on everything, presenting to his blind companion what must have been the picture of a dream-like and affable world.

  The third child was a small, sandy-haired boy who squinted at the sky with tremendous excitement as if rediscovering each second the sheer joy of all that went on around him. As he gazed at the sun-filled park every leaf and flower seemed to hold the promise of a special treat. He used the leg-iron shackled to his right foot as a pivot, swinging around on it with some style.

  I watched them scuttle around me, in and out of the cars. I liked this self-reliant threesome, and wished that I could help them. I remembered my Pied Piper complex. Somewhere in this park there might well be a miniature paradise, a secret domain where I could give the blind girl her sight, strong legs to the spastic, intelligence to the mongol.

  ‘What is it, Rachel …?’ Dr Miriam bent down to catch her whisper. ‘Rachel’s very keen to know what you look like. I haven’t quite convinced her that you’re not a personal messenger from the archangel Michael.’

  The girl’s agile hands, with their acute flexion at the wrists, were already tracing out the contours of a face. Like the two boys, she seemed to cross reality at an angle. I lifted her and held her against my chest, partly to confirm that her small hands could not have bruised my ribs. Her thin breath panted into my face as her fingers raced like excited moths over my cheeks and forehead, poked into my mouth and nostrils. I almost enjoyed the sharp pain as she touched my lips. I held her tightly, squeezing her hips against my abdomen.

  The mongol was tugging at my wrists, alarmed eyes under his overloaded forehead. The girl cried out, shaking her blind face away from my lips.

  ‘Blake! Put her down!’ Dr Miriam pulled the child from my arms. She stared at me in a shocked way, unsure whether this was how I ordinarily behaved. Fifty yards away, Father Wingate was crossing the park. He had stopped under the trees, the canvas chair and wicker hamper in his strong hands, watching me as if I were some kind of escaped criminal. I knew that he had seen me seize the girl.

  Dr Miriam lowered the child to the ground. ‘David, Jamie – take Rachel with you.’

  The girl tottered away from me, safe within the mongol’s protective gaze. Clearly he was unable to decide whether Rachel had really been frightened by me. They ran off into the park together. Rachel’s hands were tracing out the profiles of some extraordinary face.

  ‘What did she see?’

  ‘By the looks of it, a kind of bizarre bird.’

  Dr Miriam stood between me and the children, making sure that I did not take it into my head to run after them. My arms were still shaking from the effort of embracing the child. I knew that Dr Miriam was well aware of the brief sexual frenzy that had gripped me, and half-expected me to wrestle her into the back seat of the nearest car. How fiercely would she have fought me off? She stayed close to me when we entered the clinic, wary that I might assault one of the elderly patients shuffling into the waiting room.

  But once we were in her office she deliberately turned her back to me, almost inviting me to hold her waist. She was still confused by the excitement of my crash-landing. For all her modesty, as she listened to my heart and lungs her hands never left me. I watched her in an almost dream-like way while she pressed my shoulders against the X-ray machine. The exquisite mole like a beautiful cancer below her left ear, the handsome black hair swept back out of harm’s way, the unsettled eyes ruled by her high forehead, the blue vein in her temple that pulsed with some kind of erratic emotion – I wanted to examine all these at my leisure, savour the scent of her armpits, save for ever in a phial hung around my neck the tag of loose skin on her lip. Far from being a stranger, I felt that I had known her for years.

  She brought me the spare suit she had promised and watched me while I changed, staring frankly at my naked body and half-erect penis. I pulled on the black worsted trousers and jacket, the dry-cleaned suit of a priest or funeral mute, fitted with unusual pockets designed to conceal a secret rosary or the bereaved’s tips.

  When she returned with the developed X-ray plates she handed me a pair of tennis shoes.

  ‘I’ll look like an undertaker out for a quiet run.’ I waited as she examined these photographs of my skull. ‘For a year I was a medical student. Who owns the copyright? They may be valuable.’

  ‘We do. They probably are. Thank God there’s nothing there. Will you come back for the aeroplane?’

  I paused at the door, glad that she wanted to see me again. Avoiding my eyes, she was gently rubbing her fingers, stroking the faint traces of my skin. But was all this some kind of unconscious ruse? I knew that I had identified this young doctor with my safe escape from the Cessna. How far was my attraction to her self-serving, the grave’s-love of an infatuated patient? All the same, I wanted to warn her of the danger threatening this small town. However grotesque, my vision of the imminent holocaust had gained a powerful conviction in my mind. Perhaps in moments of extreme crisis we stepped outside the planes of everyday time and space and were able to catch a glimpse of all events that had ever occurred in both past and future.

  ‘Miriam, wait. Before I go … has there eve
r been a major disaster in Shepperton? A factory explosion, or a crashing airliner?’

  When she shook her head, looking at me with a suddenly professional interest, I pointed through the window at the calm sky, at the park filled with bland summer light where the crippled children played, circling each other like aircraft with outstretched arms. ‘After the crash I had a premonition that there was going to be some kind of disaster – perhaps even a nuclear accident. There was an enormous glow in the sky, an intense light. Come with me …’ I tried to take her arm. ‘I’ll look after you.’

  She placed her hands on my chest, her fingers overlaying the bruise-marks. She had not revived me. ‘It’s nothing, Blake, nothing unusual. It’s common for the dying to see bright lights. At the end the brain tries to rally itself, to free itself from the body. I suppose it’s where we get our ideas of the soul.’

  ‘I wasn’t dying!’ Her fingers stung my ribs. I was tempted to seize her by the neck, force her to take a long look at my still erect penis. ‘Miriam, look at me – I swam from the aircraft!’

  ‘Yes, you did, Blake. We saw you.’ She touched me again, reminding herself that I was still with her. Confused by her feelings for me, she said: ‘Blake, while you were trapped in the cockpit I actually prayed for you. We weren’t sure you were alone. Just before you escaped there seemed to be two people there.’

  I remembered the deep light that suffused the air above the town, as if some fiercely incandescent vapour had been about to ignite. Had there been someone else in the Cessna’s cockpit? Just beyond the margin of my vision there seemed to be the figure of a seated man.

  ‘I swam from the aircraft,’ I repeated doggedly. ‘Some fool gave me artificial respiration. Who was it!’

  ‘No one. I’m certain.’ She straightened the clutter of pens on her desk, so many confusing pointers, watching me with the same expression I had seen on her mother’s face. I realized that she was attracted to me but at the same time almost disgusted, as if fascinated by something in an open grave.

  ‘Miriam …’ I wanted to reassure her.

  But in a sudden access of lucidity she came towards me, buttoning her white coat.

  ‘Blake, haven’t you grasped yet what happened?’ She stared into my eyes, willing a dull pupil to get the point. ‘When you were trapped in the cockpit you were under water for more than eleven minutes. We all thought you’d died.’

  ‘Had I?’

  ‘Yes!’ Almost shouting, she angrily struck my hand. ‘You died …! And then came alive again!’

  CHAPTER 6

  Trapped by the Motorway

  ‘The girl’s mad!’

  I slammed the clinic door behind me.

  Across the park a white flag signalled an urgent message. The section of the Cessna’s tailplane hung from the upper boughs of the dead elm, whipped to and fro by the wind. Fortunately the police had still failed to find me, and none of the tennis players was showing any interest in the downed aircraft. I drummed my fists on the roofs of the parked cars, annoyed with Miriam St Cloud – this likeable but confused woman doctor showed all the signs of turning into a witch. I decided to lose myself among the afternoon housewives and catch the first bus back to the airport.

  At the same time I found that I was laughing out loud at myself – the abortive flight had been a double fiasco. Not only had I crashed and nearly killed myself, but the few witnesses who might have tried to save me had developed a vested interest in believing that I had died. The notion of my death in some deranged way fulfilled a profound need, perhaps linked with their sterile lives in this suffocating town – anyone who came within its clutches was unconsciously assumed to have ‘died’.

  Thinking of Dr Miriam – I would have liked to show her just how dead I was, and seed a child between those shy hips – I strode past the war memorial and open-air swimming-pool. The town centre consisted of little more than a supermarket and shopping mall, a multi-storey car-park and filling station. Shepperton, known to me only for its film studios, seemed to be the everywhere of suburbia, the paradigm of nowhere. Young mothers steered small children in and out of the launderette and supermarket, refuelled their cars at the filling-station. They gazed at their reflections in the appliance-store windows, exposing their handsome bodies to these washing machines and television sets as if setting up clandestine liaisons with them.

  As I stared at this array of thighs and breasts I was aware of my nervous sex, set off by the crash, by Miriam St Cloud and the blind child. All my senses seemed to be magnified – scents collided in the air, the shop-fronts flashed gaudy signs at me. I was moving among these young women with my loins at more than half cock, ready to mount them among the pyramids of detergent packs and free cosmetic offers.

  Over my head the sky brightened, bathing the placid roofs in an auroral light, transforming this suburban high street into an avenue of temples. I felt queasy and leaned against the chestnut tree outside the post office. I waited for this retinal illusion to pass, unsure whether to halt the passing traffic and warn these ruminating women that they and their offspring were about to be annihilated. Already I was attracting attention. A group of teenagers stopped as I blinked and clenched my fists. They laughed at my grotesque costume, the priest’s shiny black suit and the white sneakers.

  ‘Blake – wait for me!’

  As I swayed helplessly, surrounded by these tittering youths, I heard Father Wingate shouting at me. He crossed the street, holding back the cars with a strong hand, his forehead glaring like a helmet in the overbright air. He ordered the teenagers away and then stared at me with the same expression of concern and anger, as if I were some deviant usurper he was bound by a strange tie to assist.

  ‘Blake, what are you looking at? Blake—!’

  Trying to escape the light, and this odd clergyman, I jumped an ornamental rail and ran off down the side-street of sedate bungalows behind the post office. Father Wingate’s voice faded behind me, lost among the car horns and overhead aircraft. Here everything was calmer. The pavements were deserted, the well-tended gardens like miniature memorial parks consecrated to the household gods of the television set and dishwasher.

  The light faded as I reached the northern outskirts of the town. Two hundred yards beyond an untilled field ran the broad deck of the motorway. A convoy of trucks was turning off into the nearby exit ramp, each pulling a large trailer that carried a wood and canvas replica of an antique aircraft. As this caravan of aerial fantasies entered the gates of the film studios, dusty dreams of my own flight, I crossed the perimeter road and set off for the pedestrian bridge that spanned the motorway. Poppies and yellow broom brushed my legs, hopefully leaving their pollen on me. They flowered among the debris of worn tyres and abandoned mattresses. To my right was a furniture hypermarket, its open courtyard packed with three-piece suites, dining-tables and wardrobes, through which a few customers moved in an abstracted way, like spectators in a boring museum. Next to the hypermarket was an automobile repair yard, its forecourt filled with used cars. They sat in the sunlight with numerals on their windshields, the advance guard of a digital universe in which everything would be tagged and numbered, a doomsday catalogue listing each stone and grain of sand under my feet, each eager poppy.

  Now that I was at last escaping from Shepperton – within moments I would cross the bridge and catch the bus to the airport – I felt confident and light-footed, skipping along in my white sneakers. I paused by a concrete post embedded in the soil, a digit marking this waste land. Looking back for the last time at this stifling town where I had nearly lost my life, I thought of returning to it one night and aerosolling a million ascending numbers on every garden gate, supermarket trolley and baby’s forehead.

  Carried away by this extravaganza, I ran along, shouting numbers at everything around me, at the drivers on the motorway, the modest clouds in the sky, the hangar-like sound stages of the film studios. Already, despite the crash, I was thinking of my new career in aviation – a course of lessons at a fl
ying school, a eommission in the air force, I would either bring off the world’s first man-powered circumnavigation or become the first European astronaut …

  Out of breath, I unbuttoned the clerical jacket, about to throw it aside. It was then, fifty yards from the motorway, that I made an unsettling discovery. Although I was walking at a steady pace across the uneven soil, I was no longer drawing any closer to the pedestrian bridge. The sandy ground moved past me, the poppies swayed more urgently against my pollen-covered knees, but the motorway remained as far away as ever. If anything, this distance between us seemed to enlarge. At the same time, Shepperton receded behind me, and I found myself standing in an immense field filled with poppies and a few worn tyres.

  I watched the cars speed along the motorway, the faces of their drivers clearly visible. In a sudden sprint, trying to confuse and overrun whatever deranged sense of direction had taken root in my mind, I darted forward and then swerved behind a line of rusting fuel drums.

  Again the motorway receded further from me.

  Gasping at the dusty air, I stared down at my feet. Had Miriam St Cloud deliberately given me this defective pair of running shoes, part of her witch’s repertory?

  I carefully tested myself against the silent ground. Around me the waste land remained as I had found it, yielding and unyielding, in league with the secret people of Shepperton. Foxglove grew through the rusting doors of a small car. An unvarying light calmed the waiting nettles along the motorway palisade. A few drivers watched me from their cars, demented priest in my white sneakers. I picked up a chalky stone and set out a line of numbered stakes with pieces of driftwood, a calibrated pathway that would carry me to the pedestrian bridge. But as I walked forward they encircled me in a spiral arm that curved back upon itself, a whorl of numerals that returned me to the centre of the field.

  Half an hour later I gave up and walked back to Shepperton. I had exhausted all the stratagems I could devise – crawling, running backwards, shutting my eyes and hand-holding my way along the air. As I left behind the derelict car and the old tyres the streets of the town approached me, as if glad to see me again.