The Unlimited Dream Company

by J. G. Ballard

  However, after a night’s sleep, and surrounded now by the brilliant day, my confidence returned. I felt flattered by the sunlight that followed me through the trees like a spotlight keeping track of a celebrity. Besides, the clinic was the perfect place in which to lie low while my mind realigned itself – particularly if I was struck by a sudden blackout or brain haemorrhage – and I discovered the real meaning of the events taking place around me. I suspected that a blood-clot deep in my brain might be responsible for my strange visions and for the dislocations of time and space. I felt a keening excitement in the overlit grass and flowers, my mind too close for comfort to the singing filament of a dying light-bulb.

  As the sun rose behind me it seemed to overflow from the river, transforming the park and water-meadow into a retinal bayou. Fish of every kind filled the water, schools of roach and pike surged around the drowned Cessna as if glutted on the residue of my dream. I strode through the trees, stretching out my arm to catch the brilliant motes. By the tennis courts I broke into a run, spurred on by the huge increase in illumination. The white marker lines hovered several inches above the clay, as if about to detach themselves from the court and take off across the sky like the aerial matrix of a pilot’s head-up display. Catching my breath, I leaned against a jacaranda tree, a strange visitor to this temperate park. The leaves were engorged with illuminated sap, each of the trumpet-shaped flowers a halo of itself. Deer moved through a copse of silver birch, cropping at the electric bark. When I shouted to them their eyes twinkled at me as if the entire herd had been fitted with contact lenses.

  The sun was hallucinating, feasting eagerly on the Spanish moss that hung from the boughs of the dead elms. The woody tendrils of liana vines twisted around the sedate chestnut and plane trees. Lilies grew from the forest floor, transforming this formal park into a botanical garden seized and replanted during the night by some crazed horticulturalist.

  I leapt across a flower-bed of scarlet tulips overrun by huge ferns and liverworts. A startled macaw clambered into the air beside me. Crossing the park, it shook carapaces of light from its green and yellow wings. Fifty yards ahead of me, Miriam St Cloud walked through the trees towards the clinic, surrounded by a flurry of parakeets and orioles, a young doctor making a house-call on an over-fertile mother nature. Happy to see her, I felt that I had prepared this abundant life especially for her.

  ‘Miriam …!’ I ran through the parked cars and stopped in front of her, gesturing proudly at the brilliant foliage like a lover presenting a bouquet. ‘Miriam, what’s happened?’

  ‘It’s taken some kind of fertility drug, Blake.’ She was throwing berries into a chestnut tree, where a monkey-like creature with a bushy tail clung to a branch, surprised to find itself in this elegant park.

  Miriam waved a hand around her head, trying to restrain the overlit air.

  ‘Macaws, parakeets, now a marmoset – what else are you going to bring us, Blake?’ She sidled up to me, hands in the pockets of her white coat. ‘You’re like some kind of pagan god.’

  For all her good-humoured banter she looked at me with a certain wariness, thinking of the ambiguous nature of my special talents and not all that eager to face up to them.

  ‘A marmoset?’ Recognizing the creature, I jumped into the air, trying to seize its tail. ‘It’s escaped from Stark’s zoo.’

  ‘From the inside of your head, more likely …’ Miriam beckoned me towards the clinic. ‘You’ve come to work here – now, what exactly can you do?’

  Did she suspect that I was still making love to her mother? She strolled around the grassy verge of the carpark, glancing at her reflection in the polished door-panels and showing off her strong legs and hips to me. What could I do? I wanted to shout: I can fly, Miriam, and I can dream! Dream me, Miriam! Only a few steps behind her, I felt my sex thicken. A pagan god? For some reason I liked the phrase, it reassured me.

  Suddenly I was convinced: certainly I was not dead, but as well, I was not merely alive. I was twice alive!

  Barely able to restrain myself, I caught Miriam’s arm, eager to tell her the good news and embrace her in the back seat of the district midwife’s parked saloon.

  ‘Blake, now hold on …’

  Avoiding my eyes, she pushed me away. I gripped the windshield of her sports car, shaking with sexual violence at myself. As I stared at the ground I noticed that the shoots of some lurid tropical plant were springing through the cracked cement. The blood-milk flowers, like the blossom of ah aberrant gladiolus, effloresced between my legs, as if in response to my own sex. I had seen the same flowers outside Father Wingate’s church.

  All around me the bright flutes poked their blood-tipped spears among the wheels of the parked cars, from my footsteps in the grass verge.

  ‘Blake, they’re extraordinary … Dear, they’re beautiful.’

  ‘Miriam – I’ll give you any flowers you want!’ Rhapsodizing over the thousand scents of her body, I exclaimed: ‘I’ll grow orchids from your hands, roses from your breasts. You can have magnolias in your hair …!’

  ‘And in my heart?’

  ‘In your womb I’ll set a fly-trap!’

  ‘Blake … Do you always get so excited by everything?’ Still unaware of the motive force driving these sexual fuses, Miriam knelt between the cars and began to pluck the flowers. Calm now, I watched proudly as this beautiful young woman carried my sex in her hands towards the clinic. Again I sensed the power that I had felt all day, a power that had poured into me during my last vision. After my dream of flying I had behaved like an injured bird stranded in a small suburban garden, just as I had been trapped in this nondescript town. But after my vision of swimming as a right whale I had been transformed, marking my triumph in having escaped from the drowned aircraft. Now my strength was fed by the invisible power of great oceans that reached up the minute vein of this modest river. I had emerged on to the land reborn, like my amphibian forbears millions of years before me who left the sea to stride across the waiting parklands of the young earth. Like them, I carried memories of those seas in my bloodstream, memories of the deep time. I had brought with me the majesty of the right whales, the age and wisdom of all cetaceans.

  That morning I moved grandly around the clinic with my mop and pail, wheeled the soiled linen to the laundry van, ran errands for the receptionists. I watched contentedly as Miriam carried my blossoms around the surgeries and offices, filling the vases which I collected for her from a cupboard. Among the patients in the waiting-room, the expectant mothers and infertile wives, she set out the vivid flowers of my sex.

  Two of the patients were middle-aged women whom I had last seen leaping into the river during my vision of the fish. I remembered them, the local hairdresser and a lawyer’s wife, sailing grandly through the crowded water, part of my aquatic congregation. Now they sat among my flowers, concerned only with their varicose veins and menopausal flushes. As I polished the floor around their feet neither of them took her eyes off me.

  Later, when the morning clinic had ended, Dr Miriam called me into her office to empty her surgical bin. Pinned to the illuminated screen were the X-ray plates of my head. Miriam stood with her back to the window. A brilliant light filled the park with an almost electric glare, as if one of the location units from the film studios had set up its arc lights.

  ‘The birth-rate here is about to soar, Blake – do you realize that almost every patient this morning was obsessed with the idea of pregnancy? There was even a grandmother asking about a donor insemination.’

  She took off her coat and looked at me in a concerned but unamused way. Perhaps she expected me to pull out my penis and get to work? I wanted to reassure her, give her courage to face me and our coming future.

  I hovered around her with my refuse pail. The sights and scents of her body flooded my senses. Her clear teeth tapping as she stared at the X-ray plates, her left nostril sniffing at a painted finger-nail, her strong hips on which she rocked from side to side, all these obsessed me. I wa
nted the franchise on every breath she took, on every thought in her head, I wanted to record her small laughs and absent-minded gazes, I wanted to distil her perspiration into the most jealous perfumes …

  ‘Have you never had any children, Miriam?’

  ‘Of course I haven’t! Though Stark and I –’ Aggressively she waved me away, and on a sudden impulse followed me to the door. She held my arm in a sharp grip. ‘As a matter of fact, since you arrived I’ve thought of nothing else. I’m as obsessed as those stupid women …’

  ‘Miriam, don’t you understand …?’ I tried to embrace her, but she held me off with remarkable strength. ‘It’s the crash … you’re-’

  ‘Blake, for God’s sake … Last night-you were rehearsing some kind of death. Whether for you or me, I don’t want to know.’

  ‘Not death.’ For the first time the word failed to frighten me. ‘A new kind of life, Miriam.’

  When she had gone, setting off on her rounds in the sports car, I stood in her office, and examined the X-ray plates on the display screen, these photographs of my head through which a ceaseless light flowed. It seemed to me that the whole world outside, the trees and the meadow where the children were constructing my grave, the quiet streets with their sedate houses, formed an immense transparent image exposed on the screen of the world, through which the rays of a more searching reality were now pouring in an unbroken fountain.

  CHAPTER 18

  The Healer

  By noon the clinic was empty, except for myself and the receptionist, a volunteer housewife. While I rested in the waiting-room, impatient for Miriam St Cloud to return from her calls, a woman arrived with her ten-year-old son. The boy had broken his arm climbing a tree. The mother complained away neurotically, unsettling the receptionist as she tried to fix a temporary splint.

  Unhappy at the child’s crying, I went into the surgery to see if I could help, in time to hear the mother remark angrily:

  ‘He’s been climbing the banyan tree outside the supermarket. All the children in Shepperton seem to be there. Shouldn’t the police do something about it? – it’s blocking the traffic.’

  The boy was still crying, refusing to look at his reddened forearm with its painful veins. Intending to comfort him, I took his hand. The boy winced, and as he pulled away from me his free fist struck my knuckles. Immediately one of the cuts opened and a drop of blood fell on to his arm, which he smeared frantically across himself.

  ‘Who are you? What are you doing to him?’ The mother tried to push me away, but the the boy had stopped crying.

  He gave a whoop of delight. Proudly he showed the slim and unblemished arm to his mother, and then darted into the corridor, swinging himself from the door-handles.

  The mother stood amazed. Staring at me, she said accusingly: ‘You cured him.’ Like Dr Miriam, she seemed angry, with the same resentful expression I had seen on the faces of Father Wingate’s parishioners.

  When she and the child had gone the receptionist gestured me towards Miriam’s chair. Her eyes fixed on my scabbed knuckles, moist with their healing tincture of blood, she asked matter-of-factly:

  ‘Mr Blake, are you ready to see the rest of your patients?’

  An hour later a large queue had formed inside the clinic. Mothers with their children, an old man in a wheelchair, a telephone linesman with a flash-burn on his face, a young woman with her leg in a bandage, they sat patiently in the waiting-room as I continued to wax and polish the linoleum floors. In some way the news of my miraculous cure had spread throughout Shepperton. Now and then I paused from my work – I wanted the clinic to be spotless for Dr Miriam – and beckoned the next of the patients into the surgery: a teenage girl with acne, an air hostess with menstrual pains, an incontinent cinema commissionaire.

  For all of them I put on a show of examining them closely, ignoring their grimaces as I touched them with my blood-flecked hands. In their eyes, clearly, I was some kind of unqualified medicine-man whose reputation had brought them here, where they found themselves appalled by my lack of hygiene.

  Even when I had cured them they still looked at me with the same distaste, as if they resented my power over them and refused to come to terms with the impulse that had propelled them here. I soon saw that almost all their ailments were mental in origin – my fall from the sky had clearly fulfilled some profound need which each of them expressed in these sprains and rashes. Most of them were patients on Dr Miriam’s house-list. As I waxed the floor around the telephone switchboard I heard her calling in repeatedly to ask the receptionist what had happened to them.

  The last of the patients left me, a garage mechanic with an infected throat, his surly voice clearing as he thanked me grudgingly. Behind him, on the steps outside, was the tail of the queue. The three crippled children had come in from their secret meadow and hung about the doors. The boys pressed their noses to the glass panes as I returned to my mop and wax. Whispering a commentary to Rachel, David peered up in a hopefully knowledgeable way at the health service notices on immunization, venereal disease and ante-natal care.

  After locking away my mop and bucket, I debated whether to treat them. My talents as a healer I took completely for granted, part of the inheritance bequeathed to me by the unseen powers who had presided over my crash. At the same time I felt almost light-headed about everything, like a groom before his wedding, a burgeoning sense of hunger, lust and power, as if I were about to marry the whole of Shepperton and its people.

  The three children waited patiently for me. Despite my affection for them, I feared them. I feared that I might not be able to cure them. I feared the grave they were building for me, and which they might complete sooner than I was ready if I gave them back their powers.

  ‘Jamie, come in. I’ve got a present for each of you. David, bring Rachel with you.’

  Rachel, your eyes.

  Jamie, your legs.

  David, your brain.

  I stood in the doorway, calling them towards me. Strangely, they seemed reluctant now to come to me, nervous of these gifts. As I knelt down, readying three drops of blood on my knuckles, the red sports car drove noisily up to the clinic entrance. Dr Miriam, in high temper, pointed to me from behind the steering wheel.

  ‘Blake – leave them alone!’

  She frowned angrily at the brilliant air, trying to shut out the light that poured off the trees and flowers in the park. Even the floors of the clinic, which I had waxed so lovingly for her, reflected the same glowing air.

  Unwilling to confront this beautiful young woman with whom I dreamed of flying, I ran past the crippled children and set off between the parked cars towards the illuminated town.

  CHAPTER 19

  ‘See!’

  The air was bright with flowers and children. Without realizing it, Shepperton had become a festival town. As I strode past the open-air swimming-pool I could see that the entire population was out in the streets. A noisy holiday spirit rose from thousands of voices. Sunflowers and garish tropical plants with fleshy fruits had sprung up in the well-tended gardens like vulgar but happy invaders of an over-formal resort. Creepers hung from the neon sills above the shop-fronts, trailed lazy blooms among the discount offers and bargain slogans. Extraordinary birds crowded the sky. Macaws and scarlet ibis watched from the roof of the multi-storey car-park, and a trio of flamingos inspected the cars outside the automobile showroom, eager for these burnished vehicles to join the vivid day.

  Everywhere a brilliant light spilled across the town, as if from the excited palette of a naive painter of jungles. The open-air swimming-pool was packed with people, diving through the rainbows lifted by the bright spray. I counted a dozen gaudy kites flying over the rooftops, one of them with a six-foot wing-span and the emblem of an aircraft on its white fabric.

  Accepting all these compliments to myself, and relieved that Miriam St Cloud had decided not to follow me, I set off towards the town centre. I felt strangely grand, well aware that in some way I had made all this possible. My
earlier fears had gone, and nothing that happened here would in the least surprise me. I enjoyed my sense of power over this small town, my knowledge that sooner or later I would mate with all these women in their bright summer dresses strolling and talking around me. I sensed the same impulse, perversely, towards the young men and the children, even to the dogs running along the crowded pavements, but this no longer shocked me. I knew that I had so much to do here, so many changes to make, and that I had barely begun.

  Already I was thinking of my next vision, certain now that it would not be a dream at all, but a re-ordering of reality in the service of a greater and more truthful design, where the most bizarre appetites and the most wayward impulses would find their true meaning. I remembered Father Wingate’s reassuring comment that vices in this world were metaphors for virtues in the next. But of what strange creatures were these butterflies the metaphors, the smiles on these children’s faces, the happy shriek of the small boy I had cured? Perhaps they in their turn masked some sinister truth?

  In the centre of the high street, between the supermarket and the filling-station, an enormous banyan tree had appeared. Its broad trunk had split the tarmac, throwing up pieces of torn macadam the size of manhole covers. The wide branches overhung the road and had rooted themselves in the sidewalks. A huge throng of people had gathered around the tree, mothers waving to the high branches, where some thirty children sat among the macaws and parakeets. The tree had blocked all traffic through the centre of the town, and a parked car had been trapped by the rooting branches, already as thick as elephant trunks. The old soldier with the shooting stick stood by his caged vehicle, shouting orders to his elderly wife penned in the rear seat.