The Unlimited Dream Company

by J. G. Ballard

  Desperate to escape from them before I was burned to death, I rallied myself and dived towards Walton Bridge like a berserk test pilot. But once again I was deflected by my passengers and curved back upon myself. Angrily I swerved away from the solid air. I pretended to climb towards the sun, and then plunged into the empty shopping mall, ready to dash us all against the ornamental tiles, scatter the corpses of myself and these townspeople across the appliances and furniture suites.

  The ground rose through the rushing air. At the last moment I again felt the steadying affection of the people within me, a warm hand that steered me safely across the roof of the car-park. Releasing them into the air behind me, I gave up any attempt to escape and brought the huge train down to a breathless stop outside the supermarket.

  As everyone happily dismounted from the air I leaned helplessly against a parked car, like some demented roller-coaster driver who has secretly planned to plunge his passengers to their deaths but is calmed by a friendly child. The entire breathless population of Shepperton was landing around me, led by the shrieking children. The old soldier tottered on unsteady feet, waving reprovingly at the sky with the wrong end of his shooting stick. Giddy housewives pulled down their skirts, young men straightened their hair. Winded, but pink-cheeked, the village policeman sat in an armchair outside the furniture store. Everywhere people were pointing to the sky, whose high vaults were crisscrossed by the vapour trails we had left behind us, elaborate cat’s-cradles that stitched the air together into the choreography of an archangelic ballet. I could see clearly the curved wakes that marked my futile attempts to escape, dissolving into the unsettled air above Walton Bridge and the film studios.

  Despite my anger, I knew that I was bound to this town, both by the inhabitants’ need of me, their growing recognition that I had unlocked the doors to their real world, and by the finite universe of my own self. Yet as I looked at these happy people with their singing skins, smiling and waving to me as they had done high above the town, I knew that if I were to gain my freedom I must first escape from them, from their care and affection.

  They moved away arm-in-arm through the quiet streets, urging the frightened birds at their feet to fly again. As they passed me they smiled shyly with the sweetness of lovers who had known the most intimate places of my body. Their chilled skins let corridors of cool air through the humid afternoon.

  However, there were no longer as many of them as there had been before the flight. Two windswept mothers searched the now deserted shopping mall, peering into the sky above their heads as if their children still hovered there.

  ‘Sarah, come down, dear …’

  ‘Bobby, it’s the birds’ turn to fly …’

  I walked past them, naked in the rags of my flying suit. Within me I could feel the bodies of ten-year-old Sarah and her little brother, and of a teenage boy. Jealous of their freedom, I had not released them when we landed. I needed their young bodies and spirits to give me strength. They would play forever within me, running across the dark meadows of my heart. I had still not eaten, although this was the fourth day since my arrival, but I had tasted the flesh of these children and knew that they were my food.

  CHAPTER 28

  Consul of This Island

  The sun was setting fire to the sky. I climbed to the top deck of the car-park and looked out over the rooftops of Shepperton. Below me the vivid forest was filled with thousands of birds, transforming this humdrum town into a tropic paradise conjured so easily from my mind. But over my head the wavering signature of some senile skywriter marked my futile attempt to escape. Whoever had marooned me here had made me consul of this island, had given me the power to fly and to turn myself into any creature I wished, the power to conjure flowers and birds from my fingertips. However, I knew now just how meagre those powers were, as if I had been casually banished to some remote Black Sea port and given the right to make the stones on the beach sing to me.

  Was I supposed merely to amuse myself? I watched the unhappy mothers wander away through the late afternoon. One of them stopped to speak to the peacocks sitting on the portico of the bank, asking them if they had seen her son and daughter playing among the clouds. But I could hear their faint voices in my bones.

  The last of the townspeople had walked home through the jungle streets. No one had noticed that I was naked, taking for granted that the pagan god of their suburbia, the presiding deity of these television sets and kitchen appliances, would be dressed in nothing but the costume of his skin.

  At my feet was the semen-stained suit, this cast-off of the dead priest which the three children must have brought here for me while I took everyone else on our aerial jaunt. Looking down at it, I knew that I would never wear it again. I kicked the trousers and jacket over the ledge into the street below, deciding that from now on I would go naked, expose my body to these people until they at last recognized it.

  From that skin came all my powers. The more I showed it to the air and the sky the greater my hope of winning them to my side. I resented being trapped in this small town. Sooner or later, I would have to challenge the invisible forces which had exiled me to Shepperton, pit the resources of my deviant imagination against theirs.

  And already I dreamed of extending my small authority to the world beyond Shepperton, to the other towns of the Thames Valley, even to London itself. I almost welcomed the arrival of the television cameras and newspaper reporters. The jungle dusk bathed my skin in a green and gold light, as if my body were being oiled by strange lusts. The streets were lit by the plumage of the scarlet ibis sitting on the roofs like so many exotic lanterns lighting my way. Roused by my will to fight back, I stroked my bruised ribs. I decided to exploit my powers to the full, and if necessary in the most ruthless and perverse ways, perhaps stumble on undiscovered talents that would set me free.

  I strolled around the roof of the car-park in the dusk, this concrete ramp from which I had launched myself into the air. I decided not to return to the St Clouds’ mansion, but to make my home here in this labyrinth of canted floors.

  However, for all my will to succeed, I knew that my time might be running out. I remembered the warning vision of the holocaust. For all my anger, I still wanted to save these people who had first saved me, above all Miriam St Cloud. I was sorry that she was not with me here. I thought of her smile and scent, her scuffed heels and broken nails, a limitless inventory of excitements and possibilities. In some way the key to my escape lay within the common lives of the townspeople of Shepperton. Already I had remade their lives, unsettled their notions of marriage and parenthood, their sense of thrift and pride in work well done. But I needed to go further, to undermine the trust between wives and husbands, between fathers and sons. I wanted them to cross the lines that divided children and parents, species and biological kingdoms, the animate and inanimate. I wanted to destroy the restraints that separated mother and son, father and daughter.

  I remembered my bizarre attempt to suffocate Mrs St Cloud, the strange way in which I had tried to rape the little blind girl, and the unconscious young woman I had nearly murdered in her apartment near London Airport. These crimes and lusts were the first stirrings of the benign forces revealed to me in Shepperton. My schoolboy mating with the earth, my attempt to revive the cadaver, my Pied Piper obsession with some nearby children’s paradise, had all been premonitions of these powers, which I could share in turn with the people of this placid town.

  Thinking of Mrs St Cloud, my adopted mother who had shared my bed, I touched my bruised mouth. Suddenly I wanted everyone in Shepperton to merge together, mothers to mate with sons, fathers with their daughters, to meet within the brothel of my body as they had done so happily in flight.

  Above all, I wanted them to praise me, so that I could draw from that praise the strength to escape from this town. I wanted them to praise my breath and sweat, the air that had even briefly touched my skin, my semen and urine, the imprints of my feet on the ground, the bruises on my mouth and chest. I w
anted them all in turn to lay their hands on me so that I would know who had revived me. I needed them to bring their children to this labyrinth, to give me their wives and mothers.

  Remembering Father Wingate’s words, I was certain now that vice in this world was a metaphor for virtue in the next, and that only through the most extreme of those metaphors would I make my escape.

  CHAPTER 29

  The Life Engine

  The day swept on towards a barbarous evening.

  From the roof of the car-park I watched the forest canopy closing above the town. Hundreds of palm trees rose from the suburban gardens, their yellow fronds overlaying each other and sealing the rooftops below a vivid tropic blaze. Everywhere the vegetation glowed with an extraordinary luminescence, as if the sun had become a lens and all the light falling through the universe had been focused upon Shepperton.

  I smiled into the crowded air, thinking of all the failures in my past life – the police harassment and third-rate jobs, the dreams running off at half-cock. Now an urgent nature was rising on all sides in response to me. Clouds of electric dragonflies and huge butterflies with wings like clapping hands swerved around me. Every leaf and flower, every feather in the plumage of the scarlet ibis standing below me on the roof of the filling-station was charged with a fierce light.

  Shepperton had become a life engine.

  Around the outskirts of the town dense groves of bamboo and prickly pear sealed off the roads to London and the airport. Half a mile from the station an incoming train stood stranded on its track, unable to penetrate the cacti and palmettos that had sprung between the rails. A line of police vehicles waited at the foot of Walton Bridge, their crews trying to force their way through the bamboo palisades which speared forward as quickly as they were cut back. A fireman with a heavy axe began to hack a path through the stout bamboo. Within a dozen steps he was surrounded by fresh shoots and wrist-thick lianas that laced him into the bars of a jungle cage from which he was released only by the winches of the exhausted police.

  By the late afternoon the sun’s disc at last touched the forest canopy above the film studios, and the jungle light flowed in a blood tide across the roof of Shepperton. Two helicopters circled the perimeter of the town, a police Sikorski and a smaller machine hired by a television company. Cameras peered down at me, and the sounds of a loud-hailer reverberated through the dense foliage. The Sikorski clattered along the high street, fifty feet above my head, but the clouds of birds rising and falling in the liquid air drove the aircraft back, its crew confused by the hundreds of people waving happily from their gardens. Naked in the rags of my flying suit, I saluted them grandly from the roof of the car-park, this labyrinth and hanging garden from which I presided over Shepperton.

  At dusk, when a thousand cerise and cyclamen lights moved through the forest canopy, the flickering plumage of bizarre birds, the first naked people began to move along the streets of Shepperton. As they strolled arm-in-arm down the suburban roads, smiling unselfconsciously at each other, I was sure that they were naked, not because they felt a sudden wish to expose their bodies, but merely because they had become aware that they were clothed. There were families with their children, men with their wives, elderly couples and gangs of teenagers. They sauntered casually through the flocks of orioles that crowded the pavements, and relaxed in the dusk light on the settees outside the furniture store.

  Aware of me standing above them on the roof of the car-park, a group of middle-aged women began to construct a circle of small shrines to me in the shopping mall. Outside the supermarket they arranged a pyramid of detergent packs, and assembled a miniature tabernacle from the washing-machines and television sets. Flattered by this show of gratitude, I tore small tags from the scorched fabric of my flying suit and threw them down to these naked women. Happily they placed the oil-stained rags within the shrines and decked them with flowers and feathers. As the dusk deepened I watched these handsome women move around the centre of Shepperton, building little temples of oil cans in the filling-station forecourt, pyramids of transistor radios outside the appliance stores, deodorant aerosols in the entrance to the chemists. I was proud to preside over them, to be the local deity of the car-wash, the launderette and television rental office. I had graced their modest lives with impossible dreams.

  All over Shepperton, as night fell across the jungle streets, people were taking off their clothes. They strolled through the warm air, below street-lights coloured by orchids and magnolia, plucking flowers from the vines and decorating each other’s bodies with chains of blossom. Outside the furniture store the old soldier with the shooting stick had thrown away his tweed jacket and trousers. He set up a small booth behind a reproduction escritoire, where he adorned the bodies of teenage girls, dressing their small breasts with flowers. The bank manageress, a naked Juno of the dusk, stood outside her bank among the coins reflected in the coloured lights, handing flowers to the young men who passed by.

  The last of the helicopters had retreated into the darkness, taking their noise with them across the reservoirs and poppy fields. The headlamps of the distant traffic lit up the bamboo stockades that surrounded Shepperton. Then, as Mrs St Cloud appeared naked from the shadows of the banyan tree, I knew that I had finally imposed my wayward imagination on this small town. Unaware that I was watching her from the car-park, she walked along the pavement behind a group of adolescent boys, her white body still marked by the bruises of our sex together. For all her heavy breasts and fallen buttocks she had a splendid and brutal beauty.

  The centre of Shepperton was filled with hundreds of naked people, strolling to and fro like the crowd on an evening ramble. I saw Father Wingate, naked but for his straw hat, in the forecourt of the filling-station, marvelling at the flowers and birds. As Mrs St Cloud approached he greeted her with a charming salute, hung a lei of myrtle flowers around her neck. When they saw me they waved together to me, smiling like guests in a dream snared half-willingly into some strange game.

  But I alone knew that they were naked.

  All evening a strong and open sexuality stole through the happy streets, never once revealing its true purpose. As I looked down at these guileless people I knew that none of them realized they were being prepared for their parts in an unusual and perhaps depraved orgy. Already I wanted to provoke the unseen forces who had elevated me to this state of grace.

  Husbands and wives separated without ceremony and strolled arm-in-arm with other partners; fathers dallied with their daughters in the leafy arbours outside their houses; mothers caressed their sons as they sauntered across the shopping precinct. A group of teenage girls lolled like amiable courtesans on the divan beds outside the furniture store, beckoning to the men passing by. People wandered in and out of one another’s homes, helped themselves to whatever took their fancy, wives decorated themselves with their neighbour’s jewellery.

  Two people alone remained aloof from these festive games. After dusk, when it became too dark for him to continue his salvage of the Cessna, Stark moored his dredger and returned to Shepperton. Through the late afternoon he had worked the capstan and jib, manoeuvring the pontoon above the submerged aircraft. Giving up for the day, he sat at the wheel of his hearse and roved up and down the back streets of the town, ransacking the houses abandoned by their owners. I watched him load the hearse with rolls of carpet, television sets and kitchenware, an obsessed removal man single-handedly evacuating this jungle-threatened Amazon town. As he drove through the evening throng in the high street he saluted me frankly and without guile. Already his zoo had become a substantial depot of looted equipment, and a gleaming pyramid of dish-washers and deep freezers rose among the cages of the aviary.

  I admired Stark, with his dream of appliances, but I was thinking of Miriam St Cloud and waiting for her to wear her wedding dress for me. I was afraid that she too might appear naked in these evening streets. Although I had taken her into my body, felt the knuckles of her bones knock against mine, her vagina clasp my penis
, my sexual desire for her had gone, leached away by our flight together. I wanted to embrace her only in the same way that I wished to merge with all the living creatures of this town.

  ‘Blake, will you teach us to fly …?’

  ‘Night-flying, Blake … teach us to night-fly.’

  The teenage girls lounging on the divan outside the furniture store had crossed the street, their flower-bedecked bodies glaring in the coloured lights. Yet for all their giggles and coyness, even they were unaware of their nakedness. Pushed through the strolling crowd by a party of boys, they waved up to me.

  ‘Come up here,’ I called to them. ‘One at a time – I’ll teach you to fly.’

  As they argued with one another, unable to agree who should have the first flight, a woman’s voice rang out over the noise of the crowd.

  ‘Emily, now go home! Vanessa and the rest of you, keep away from Blake!’

  Miriam St Cloud crossed the street from the supermarket, beckoning the girls away. She had put on her doctor’s white coat, buttoned firmly across her blouse. She smiled a hard smile at the naked bystanders, deliberately unshocked by these nude patients assembled here as if for some midnight venereal inspection.

  She signalled the girls away from the jungle decks of the car-park, a maze of vines and bougainvilia, and looked up at me with a measured gaze. From the set of her strong chin I knew that she had decided to overcome all her confusions and make a last stand against me. Did she remember that she had already flown with me, and had briefly passed through the gateway of my body into the real world?