The Unlimited Dream Company

by J. G. Ballard

  The whole of Shepperton was sickening, poisoned by the despair flowing from me. Soon after dawn the three children returned. Hoping to revive me, Jamie for the first time brought a live bird to me, a bruised robin which he released through the grass. Too frightened to approach me, the children crouched in the lice-filled grass. Jamie hooted plaintively to himself and ducked his head below the circling vultures who waited to feed on my corpse, that flesh from which they themselves had sprung. David placed his hands across Rachel’s eyes, concerned that even her blindness might not save her from these horrors.

  A few people wandered along the pallid streets, still dressed in their aviators’ costumes. Through me a town of pilots was dying, and through them I in turn was dying.

  Yet I was still alive.

  In the centre of the park the vultures were feeding on the carcases of the deer. A dark clutch of the raptors sat on the fuel pumps in the filling-station, while their leader devoured a dead dog. A grey wind stirred the thousands of crushed flowers as people backed away from the birds, watching them wanly from the doorways. Armed with knives and garden forks, they stared across the park, where the grass was covered with dying deer. A single stag stood weakly among his exhausted herd.

  I waited for the police to come and rescue me, eager now to admit that I had stolen the Cessna. But the world had lost interest in Shepperton, as if an invisible screen had been placed around this small town. The last of the police cars had driven off, and the crews of the television transmission vans were packing away their equipment.

  That afternoon no helicopters flew.

  From the dead elms I heard voices raised. Led by Stark, a party of hunters returned from an expedition to the river, dragging a bloody porpoise across the dead flower-beds. Through the shabby rhododendrons I saw Stark’s excited face and fraying hair. Covered with blood, he hung the fish on a hook outside the butcher’s shop by the war memorial. As the hungry housewives scurried in from the side-streets Stark stood on a metal barrel and cut steaks from the porpoise’s flesh.

  All afternoon the slaughter on the river banks continued. The damp grass in the park was slick with blood and scales as the dolphins and porpoises, the groupers and salmon were speared by a gang of killers working from Stark’s pontoon, bloody aviators revenging themselves on these creatures of another element. Stark waded waist-deep in the water and beat to death the white swordfish as it tried to hide in the drowned Cessna. I felt the last light of its spirit call to me in my tomb.

  That afternoon blood ran through the flowers and feathers in the streets of Shepperton. Greedy for food, the townspeople thronged the butchers’ shops, shouting for the raw meat which loaded the counters where Stark and his aviators gave away my flesh.

  Ferociously buzzing insects filled the grave, carrion wasps destroying their own wings in their greed for the dead birds. A mist of flies fled from my skin and descended on the living and the dead.

  CHAPTER 35

  Bonfires

  Snakes slid backwards across the sombre meadow. Birds flew upside-down through the dying trees. Ten feet from my grave a starving dog hunted for its dung, squatted on the ground and reabsorbed it hungrily.

  My blood lifted from my open heart in black crepes, streamers that trailed through the darkening forest. A strange fungus coated the feeble trees, feeding on the nitrogenous air. A foul miasma hung over the park and deformed the dying blossoms. I sat in the aircraft in a cockpit of dead birds. On all sides I was surrounded by a garden of cancers.

  Death ran out of me into the quiet meadow, and through the streets of Shepperton. I listened to the faint cries of the townspeople as they hunted the forest, shooting the last of the birds.

  In the late afternoon a small stag entered the arbour and tottered on skeleton legs towards the grave. It stared at me with wavering eyes, unable to focus the image of my dissolving face, and lay down in the dark grass. Watched by the vultures in the branches above my head, other animals began to gather around me, the last survivors of the little paradise I had brought to this town. A spaniel bitch appeared among the poppies, then crouched whimpering by the Cessna’s propeller. The aged chimpanzee I had fed when Stark abandoned his zoo squatted in the grass, striking its head as if to jolt the real world back into the meadow. Last of all, the marmoset rustled along the ground, climbed on to the fuselage and stared at me with huge eyes through the broken windshield.

  They were waiting for me to make them well, I who had laid the streets with flowers and fed them with breadfruit. Unable to move, I sat in the cockpit of the grave. My frozen veins were pencil leads in my arms. The exhausted sky was lit by bonfires as the townspeople tried to burn the jungle from their shops and houses.

  I saw the members of my family, ghosts on a dreamed lawn, watching me from the St Clouds’ mansion. Father Wingate stood on the blood-soaked grass in an immaculate cassock. But his face and arms were gaunt, and I knew that he had been starving himself to protect his body against me. The three children were with him, Rachel standing asleep with her head on David’s shoulder. In the open window of my bedroom was Mrs St Cloud, her pale face wasted on to its bones. She wore her grey nightdress like a shroud, as if she had left her sick-bed to ask me to die.

  Even Stark had taken his place in a gondola of his Ferris wheel. A brace of macaws in a gaudy garland around his neck, he gazed at the rusty pontoon moored above the Cessna, stained with blood that seemed to have leaked from the aircraft’s cockpit.

  They were waiting for me to die and set them free. I remembered the holocaust I had seen as I stepped from the aircraft, a vision of my own death under a bonfire sky. Despite all my efforts to prove myself, I was now a corpse propped in its tomb.

  The spaniel snuffled closer to me, trying to take from me my last strength. The chimpanzee lay on his side in the grass, eyes fixed on me. Ignoring them, I listened to the shrieking of the raptors. Somewhere close to me was the shifting of a vulture’s wings. I looked across the river, hoping that a helicopter would come to save me.

  Despairing at last, I decided to die.

  CHAPTER 36

  Strength

  Even as I was dying I felt a surge of strength. A hand had clasped itself around my heart. Gently it squeezed the ruptured chambers, easing a brief flow of blood through my vessels. My skin warmed, blood seeped again through my frozen capillaries.

  For the first time I was able to lift my right arm. As I reached out to the vulture on the branch above me, inviting it to feed on my flesh, I felt the hand press again on my heart. Then I saw the face of the old chimpanzee, and the darkness in his open eyes. At the moment before he died I felt again a surge of life in my chest, as if his heart had been transplanted into my own. I sat up, my chest drumming to this strange heart-beat. I saw the deer’s legs give their last kick and I felt my pulse quicken as this dying animal’s blood was transfused into my arteries.

  I looked down at myself, naked in my ragged flying suit. My skin had lost its ashen tone. When I lifted the head-dress from my shoulders the pennants of blood broke away from my scars and fluttered off through the shabby poppies.

  My wound had stopped bleeding. One by one the animals were dying in the grass around the tomb. Each was giving something of itself to me, its blood, its tissues, a vital organ. I felt the chimpanzee’s heart beat strongly within my chest, I felt the deer’s blood rush through my empty veins, spring flood through a maze of parched conduits, I felt the marmoset’s lungs draw the air through my mouth, I felt the spaniel’s dim brain at the base of my own, faithful beast carrying her wounded master.

  Together they died around me in the grass, surrendering their own lives for me. I stood up in the cockpit of the grave. Once again I had freed myself from the aircraft.

  The forest was motionless. Every activity had ceased, the leaves and grass suspended in silence. I could feel the life flowing into me from all sides, willed to me by the smallest creatures and the lowliest. Together these simple beings were remaking me. The sparrows and thrushes passe
d their miniature retinas into my eyes, the voles and badgers within their burrows gave me their teeth, the elms and chestnuts willed their sap to me, grave wet-nurses running their milk into my body. Even the leeches on the propeller of the aircraft, the worms under my feet, the myriad bacteria in the soil were moving in a huge congregation through my flesh. A vast concourse of living beings crowded my arteries and veins, transforming the mortuary of my body with their life and goodwill. The cool moisture of snails irrigated my joints, I felt my muscles eased by the flexing of a thousand branches, my flesh balmed in the warm capillaries of a million sun-filled leaves.

  I walked across the meadow, surrounded by a strange haze of light, as if my real self was diffusing through the air and lay within the bodies of all these creatures who had given part of themselves to me. I was reborn within them, and within their love for me. Every leaf and blade of grass, every bird and snail was pregnant with my spirit. The forest felt me quicken within its tissues.

  I was born again from the lowest of the creatures, from the amoeba dividing in the meadow ponds, from the hydra and spirogyra. I was spawned by amphibians in the creek beside the meadow, and in the river as a dogfish from the body of my mother-shark. I was dropped by the pregnant deer on to the deep grass of the meadow. I emerged from the warm cloaca of birds. I was born by a thousand births from the flesh of every living thing in the forest, the father of myself. I became my own child.

  CHAPTER 37

  I Give Myself Away

  The forest was bright again. Vivid blossoms shone out among the once sombre trees. A familiar light moved through the leaves, as if the divine gardener who supervised this dimmed paradise had suddenly arrived after a late start to his day and switched on its lights. A flying fish leapt from the river, a silver flint that rekindled the day.

  At the entrance to the meadow the three children knelt in the grass, their small smiles among the waving poppies. They seemed exhausted but content, tired by the struggle of willing their strength to me, some small part of their deformed bodies – David, perhaps his stoicism; Jamie his excitement in everything; Rachel her curiosity and calm.

  The whole of Shepperton seemed to be resting, as if after an immense effort. The townspeople were no longer trying to destroy the vegetation and sat on their doorsteps, axes and saws discarded. Quietly they watched the forest revive.

  Everything waited for me. I looked down at my chest, at the healed wound. Even the scar had vanished. Within my breast I felt the organs given to me by all these creatures. I carried a thousand lungs and hearts, a thousand livers and brains, a thousand genitalia of every sex, potent enough to populate the new world that I was about to enter.

  I was certain now that I could escape from Shepperton.

  I crossed the car-park of the clinic. On the terrace of the geriatric unit sat the old people, the cripples and the senile. The three children followed me, faces lowered to the ground, aware that I was about to leave them. A frown puckered David’s massive forehead while he tried manfullv to decide time of goodbyes. Only Jamie kept up his spirits. He hooted at the air over his head, testing the sky in the hope that it might send him another aviator.

  An old man on the sun-terrace raised his hand, waving to me for the last time. An elderly woman ravaged by leukaemia smiled from her cot, thanking me for the flowers in the garden, the vivid plumage of the birds.

  Out of affection for the children, I went back to them. Kneeling in front of them among the parked cars, I took Jamie’s hands. I waited until his nervous hoots subsided and his eyes were fixed on mine. Through our clasped fingers I let flow into his body the strength and suppleness given to my legs by the dying deer.

  I released his hands. Staring into his eyes, I struck the shackles from his legs. Jamie gasped at his knees, amazed by his sturdy legs. Laughing to himself, he swayed playfully, pretending to fall over. He gave a last whoop, dismissed the sky and ran off across the park, leaping over the flowerbeds.

  All the while, Rachel listened intently, turning her eyes to the excited grass, unable to read its scurrying codes. Frightened, she backed away from me, releasing her hand from David’s shoulder. But then, in a sudden access of courage, she ran forward and seized my knees. She held me tightly, trying to return to me the strength that had flowed into Jamie.

  I took her head in my hands and pressed it against my thighs. I touched the dead windows of her eyes. Through my fingers I passed to her the sight of the hawks and eagles, the sure judgment of the condors. Her eyeballs raced under my fingertips, as if she were rapidly dreaming through all the lost sights of her childhood. I felt the quickening nerves rise from her brain like the stems of an orchid, and blossom into the gentle petals of her retinas. Exasperated with herself, she happily tossed her head from side to side, overwhelmed by the light pouring into the dark chambers of her skull.

  ‘Blake, yes …!’

  She pulled away from me and stared wide-eyed at the meadow, at the sky and the leaves. She gazed up at me in a level way, and for a brief moment saw her lover and her father.

  Jamie darted between us, swerving among the cars, and then danced around David, who stoically stood his ground, pleased for his friends but unable to understand what had happened to them.

  Quickly, knowing that I would soon leave, Rachel took David by the hands and pulled him briskly towards me. I held his massive head against my loins. I felt his strong heart beating, nervous that its role might be taken over by some cerebral usurper. Through the sutures of his skull I passed small slivers of intelligence, thin torch-beams that pierced the dark lumber-room of his brain. As his mind responded, it felt its own way in the ebbing shadows, remaking its broken looms. Last of all I gave him understanding, the good sense of the old fish and the wise snakes.

  His head reverberated against my loins, a humming planetarium filled with an astronomy of dreams. He pushed himself away from me, and then looked up with dignified calm.

  ‘Blake, thank you … Can I help you?’

  Courteously, he moved away, strolling shyly between the dusty cars as if embarrassed by this alert and clear-minded tenant who had taken up residence in his head.

  Dazed by these efforts, and aware that my mind and body had paid a price for them, I decided to leave. At any moment the first sightseers would flock into Shepperton, followed by the police hunting for the downed Cessna. I rested against Miriam St Cloud’s red sports car, remembering the young doctor and the help she had given me after my arrival. In the dust around the door were the marks of her fingers, a last coded message to me.

  David was waiting for me. My vision had faded, but I could see his clear blue eyes watching the old people on the sun-terrace.

  ‘Blake, before you go …’ He spoke in an almost adult voice. ‘Would you say goodbye to them?’

  Following this calm and dignified boy, I walked across the car-park to the terrace. From their cots and wheel-chairs the old folk waved to me, glad to be out in the sun. As I looked up at these moribund beings, sitting here in the doorways of their own deaths, I was tempted to turn and run, fly off for ever across the trees. I knew that if I once gave to them that strength passed to me by the birds and plants I would never be able to flee from Shepperton.

  Again I was about to be trapped here.

  David waited for me, smiling reassuringly as I began to tremble. He could see how angry I was with these old people, and was leaving it to me to choose whether or not I helped them.

  ‘Thank you again, Blake.’

  I climbed the steps to the terrace. One by one I moved among the elderly patients, taking their worn hands. To the old woman with leukaemia, a smiling and ashen bundle, I gave my blood, passing on the gift of the deer and the elms. I held her tiny hands, and the blood flowed into her through the hoses of my wrists. As David beamed with delight, she revived before our eyes. Her warm fingers squeezed my elbow.

  ‘I’ll ask the nurse to bring your make-up case, Mrs Sanders.’ Laughingly, David separated us and moved me to the next patient.
To this old man with senile dementia I gave a second part of my brain, that which I had taken from the hawks and eagles. His lolling head steadied in my hands, his eyes stared at me with the dawning light of a sleepy chess-player waking to see a winning move.

  ‘A few more, Blake.’ David steadied me as I moved along the wheelchairs. To the infirm and arthritic, to the diabetic man and the schizophrenic woman I made the gifts of reason and health. My sight blurred as they clambered from their chairs and sick-beds, and clustered around me in their dressing-gowns. A demented old man pummelled my shoulder, grasping for the first time the logic of time and space. The schizophrenic woman trilled some odd song to a nearby tree. The youthful bloom of an adolescent girl suffused her lace-like skin, as if I had transformed her into her own grand-daughter.

  David calmly steered me among them as I handed out the gifts of sight and sense, health and grace to these crippled people, dismantling pieces of my mind and body and passing them to anyone who clutched at my hands.

  Last of all, to a man with cancer of the mouth, I made the gift of my tongue.

  ‘Blake, you’ve been kind …’ Although David was at my right hand, his voice seemed to come from the far side of the park. I was unable to speak.

  Happily, I gave myself away.

  CHAPTER 38

  Time to Fly

  Alone now, blind and almost deaf, the tongue missing from my throat, I shuffled through the busy streets, holding the crutch handed to me by one of the old men I had cured. I was aware of the people of Shepperton around me, and I knew that they were happy at last. Strangely, I was glad to have given myself to them, to have passed on those qualities lent to me by the birds and the snakes and the voles, by the smallest creatures in the soil, lent to me in the same way that the universe had twice lent my life to me. I had escaped from Shepperton, by submerging myself in their bodies, leaving myself in the pink bloom of the old woman’s skin, in the bright eyes of the once senile old man.