The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard

by J. G. Ballard

  STOP AND GO

  Speculating on the total significance of this statement, Faulkner let his mind relax, his eyes staring blankly at the houses. Gradually their already obscured outlines began to merge and fade, and the long balconies and ramps partly hidden by the intervening trees became disembodied forms, like gigantic geometric units.

  Breathing slowly, Faulkner steadily closed his mind, then without any effort erased his awareness of the identity of the house opposite.

  He was now looking at a cubist landscape, a collection of random white forms below a blue backdrop, across which several powdery green blurs moved slowly backwards and forwards. Idly, he wondered what these geometric forms really represented – he knew that only a few seconds earlier they had constituted an immediately familiar part of his everyday existence – but however he rearranged them spatially in his mind, or sought their associations, they still remained a random assembly of geometric forms.

  He had discovered this talent only about three weeks ago. Balefully eyeing the silent television set in the lounge one Sunday morning, he had suddenly realized that he had so completely accepted and assimilated the physical form of the plastic cabinet that he could no longer remember its function. It had required a considerable mental effort to recover himself and re-identify it. Out of interest he had tried out the new talent on other objects, found that it was particularly successful with over-associated ones such as washing machines, cars and other consumer goods. Stripped of their accretions of sales slogans and status imperatives, their real claim to reality was so tenuous that it needed little mental effort to obliterate them altogether.

  The effect was similar to that of mescaline and other hallucinogens, under whose influence the dents in a cushion became as vivid as the craters of the moon, the folds in a curtain the ripples in the waves of eternity.

  During the following weeks Faulkner had experimented carefully, training his ability to operate the cut-out switches. The process was slow, but gradually he found himself able to eliminate larger and larger groups of objects, the mass-produced furniture in the lounge, the over-enamelled gadgets in the kitchen, his car in the garage – de-identified, it sat in the half-light like an enormous vegetable marrow, flaccid and gleaming; trying to identify it had driven him almost out of his mind. ‘What on earth could it possibly be?’ he had asked himself helplessly, splitting his sides with laughter – and as the facility developed he had dimly perceived that here was an escape route from the intolerable world in which he found himself at the Village.

  He had described the facility to Ross Hendricks, who lived a few houses away, also a lecturer at the Business School and Faulkner’s only close friend.

  ‘I may actually be stepping out of time,’ Faulkner speculated. ‘Without a time sense consciousness is difficult to visualize. That is, eliminating the vector of time from the de-identified object frees it from all its everyday cognitive associations. Alternatively, I may have stumbled on a means of repressing the photo-associative centres that normally identify visual objects, in the same way that you can so listen to someone speaking your own language that none of the sounds has any meaning. Everyone’s tried this at some time.’

  Hendricks had nodded. ‘But don’t make a career out of it, though.’ He eyed Faulkner carefully. ‘You can’t simply turn a blind eye to the world. The subject-object relationship is not as polar as Descartes’ “Cogito ergo sum” suggests. By any degree to which you devalue the external world so you devalue yourself. It seems to me that your real problem is to reverse the process.’

  But Hendricks, however sympathetic, was beyond helping Faulkner. Besides, it was pleasant to see the world afresh again, to wallow in an endless panorama of brilliantly coloured images. What did it matter if there was form but no content?

  A sharp click woke him abruptly. He sat up with a jolt, fumbling with the alarm clock, which had been set to wake him at 11 o’clock. Looking at it, he saw that it was only 10.55. The alarm had not rung, nor had he received a shock from the battery. Yet the click had been distinct. However, there were so many servos and robots around the house that it could have been anything.

  A dark shape moved across the frosted glass panel which formed the side wall of the lounge. Through it, into the narrow drive separating his house from the Penzils’, he saw a car draw to a halt and park, a young woman in a blue smock climb out and walk across the gravel. This was Penzil’s sister-in-law, a girl of about twenty who had been staying with them for a couple of months. As she disappeared into the house Faulkner quickly unstrapped his wrist and stood up. Opening the veranda doors, he sauntered down into the garden, glancing back over his shoulder.

  The girl, Louise (he had never spoken to her), went to sculpture classes in the morning, and on her return regularly took a leisurely shower before going out onto the roof to sunbathe.

  Faulkner hung around the bottom of the garden, flipping stones into the pond and pretending to straighten some of the pergola slats, then noticed that the McPhersons’ 15-year-old son Harvey was approaching along the other garden.

  ‘Why aren’t you at school?’ he asked Harvey, a gangling youth with an intelligent ferretlike face under a mop of brown hair.

  ‘I should be,’ Harvey told him easily. ‘But I convinced Mother I was overtense, and Morrison’ – his father – ‘said I was ratiocinating too much.’ He shrugged. ‘Patients here are overpermissive.’

  ‘For once you’re right,’ Faulkner agreed, watching the shower stall over his shoulder. A pink form moved about, adjusting taps, and there was the sound of water jetting.

  ‘Tell me, Mr Faulkner,’ Harvey asked. ‘Do you realize that since the death of Einstein in 1955 there hasn’t been a single living genius? From Michelangelo, through Shakespeare, Newton, Beethoven, Goethe, Darwin, Freud and Einstein there’s always been a living genius. Now for the first time in 500 years we’re on our own.’

  Faulkner nodded, his eyes engaged. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I feel damned lonely about it too.’

  When the shower was over he grunted to Harvey, wandered back to the veranda, and took up his position again in the chair, the battery lead strapped to his wrist.

  Steadily, object by object, he began to switch off the world around him. The houses opposite went first. The white masses of the roofs and balconies he resolved quickly into flat rectangles, the lines of windows into small squares of colour like the grids in a Mondrian abstract. The sky was a blank field of blue. In the distance an aircraft moved across it, engines hammering. Carefully Faulkner repressed the identity of the image, then watched the slim silver dart move slowly away like a vanishing fragment from a cartoon dream.

  As he waited for the engines to fade he was conscious of the sourceless click he had heard earlier that morning. It sounded only a few feet away, near the French window on his right, but he was too immersed in the unfolding kaleidoscope to rouse himself.

  When the plane had gone he turned his attention to the garden, quickly blotted out the white fencing, the fake pergola, the elliptical disc of the ornamental pool. The pathway reached out to encircle the pool, and when he blanked out his memories of the countless times he had wandered up and down its length it reared up into the air like a terracotta arm holding an enormous silver jewel.

  Satisfied that he had obliterated the Village and the garden, Faulkner then began to demolish the house. Here the objects around him were more familiar, highly personalized extensions of himself. He began with the veranda furniture, transforming the tubular chairs and glass-topped table into a trio of involuted green coils, then swung his head slightly and selected the TV set inside the lounge on his right. It clung limply to its identity. Easily he unfocused his mind and reduced the brown plastic box, with its fake wooden veining, to an amorphous blur.

  One by one he cleared the bookcase and desk of all associations, the standard lamps and picture frames. Like lumber in some psychological warehouse, they were suspended behind him in vacuo, the white armchairs and sofas like blunted
rectangular clouds.

  Anchored to reality only by the alarm mechanism clamped to his wrist, Faulkner craned his head from left to right, systematically obliterating all traces of meaning from the world around him, reducing everything to its formal visual values.

  Gradually these too began to lose their meaning, the abstract masses of colour dissolving, drawing Faulkner after them into a world of pure psychic sensation, where blocks of ideation hung like magnetic fields in a cloud chamber . . .

  With a shattering blast, the alarm rang out, the battery driving sharp spurs of pain into Faulkner’s forearm. Scalp tingling, he pulled himself back into reality and clawed away the wrist strap, massaging his arm rapidly, then slapped off the alarm.

  For a few minutes he sat kneading his wrist, re-identifying all the objects around him, the houses opposite, the gardens, his home, aware that a glass wall had been inserted between them and his own psyche. However carefully he focused his mind on the world outside, a screen still separated them, its opacity thickening imperceptibly.

  On other levels as well, bulkheads were shifting into place.

  His wife reached home at 6.00, tired out after a busy intake day, annoyed to find Faulkner ambling about in a semistupor, the veranda littered with dirty glasses.

  ‘Well, clean it up!’ she snapped when Faulkner vacated his chair for her and prepared to take off upstairs. ‘Don’t leave the place like this. What’s the matter with you? Come on, connect!’

  Cramming a handful of glasses together, Faulkner mumbled to himself and started for the kitchen, found Julia blocking the way out when he tried to leave. Something was on her mind. She sipped quickly at her martini, then began to throw out probes about the school. He assumed she had rung there on some pretext and had found her suspicions reinforced when she referred in passing to himself.

  ‘Liaison is terrible,’ Faulkner told her. ‘Take two days off and no one remembers you work there.’ By a massive effort of concentration he had managed to avoid looking his wife in the face since she arrived. In fact, they had not exchanged a direct glance for over a week. Hopefully he wondered if this might be getting her down.

  Supper was slow agony. The smells of the auto-cooked pot roast had permeated the house all afternoon. Unable to eat more than a few mouthfuls, he had nothing on which to focus his attention. Luckily Julia had a brisk appetite and he could stare at the top of her head as she ate, let his eyes wander around the room when she looked up.

  After supper, thankfully, there was television. Dusk blanked out the other houses in the Village, and they sat in the darkness around the set, Julia grumbling at the programmes.

  ‘Why do we watch every night?’ she asked. ‘It’s a total time waster.’

  Faulkner gestured airily. ‘It’s an interesting social document.’ Slumped down into the wing chair, hands apparently behind his neck, he could press his fingers into his ears, at will blot out the sounds of the programme. ‘Don’t pay any attention to what they’re saying,’ he told his wife. ‘It makes more sense.’ He watched the characters mouthing silently like demented fish. The close-ups in melodramas were particularly hilarious; the more intense the situation the broader was the farce.

  Something kicked his knee sharply. He looked up to see his wife bending over him, eyebrows knotted together, mouth working furiously. Fingers still pressed to his ears, Faulkner examined her face with detachment, for a moment speculated whether to complete the process and switch her off as he had switched off the rest of the world earlier that day. When he did he wouldn’t bother to set the alarm . . .

  ‘Harry!’ he heard his wife bellow.

  He sat up with a start, the row from the set backing up his wife’s voice.

  ‘What’s the matter? I was asleep.’

  ‘You were in a trance, you mean. For God’s sake answer when I talk to you. I was saying that I saw Harriet Tizzard this afternoon.’ Faulkner groaned and his wife swerved on him. ‘I know you can’t stand the Tizzards but I’ve decided we ought to see more of them . . .’

  As his wife rattled on, Faulkner eased himself down behind the wings. When she was settled back in her chair he moved his hands up behind his neck. After a few discretionary grunts, he slid his fingers into his ears and blotted out her voice, then lay quietly watching the silent screen.

  By 10 o’clock the next morning he was out on the veranda again, alarm strapped to his wrist. For the next hour he lay back enjoying the disembodied forms suspended around him, his mind free of its anxieties. When the alarm woke him at 11.00 he felt refreshed and relaxed. For a few moments he was able to survey the nearby houses with the visual curiosity their architects had intended. Gradually, however, everything began to secrete its poison again, its overlay of nagging associations, and within ten minutes he was looking fretfully at his wristwatch.

  When Louise Penzil’s car pulled into the drive he disconnected the alarm and sauntered out into the garden, head down to shut out as many of the surrounding houses as possible. As he was idling around the pergola, replacing the slats torn loose by the roses, Harvey McPherson suddenly popped his head over the fence.

  ‘Harvey, are you still around? Don’t you ever go to school?’

  ‘Well, I’m on this relaxation course of Mother’s,’ Harvey explained. ‘I find the competitive context of the classroom is –’

  ‘I’m trying to relax too,’ Faulkner cut in. ‘Let’s leave it at that. Why don’t you beat it?’

  Unruffled, Harvey pressed on. ‘Mr Faulkner, I’ve got a sort of problem in metaphysics that’s been bothering me. Maybe you could help. The only absolute in space-time is supposed to be the speed of light. But as a matter of fact any estimate of the speed of light involves the component of time, which is subjectively variable – so, bam, what’s left?’

  ‘Girls,’ Faulkner said. He glanced over his shoulder at the Penzil house and then turned back moodily to Harvey.

  Harvey frowned, trying to straighten his hair. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Girls,’ Faulkner repeated. ‘You know, the weaker sex, the distaff side.’

  ‘Oh, for Pete’s sake.’ Shaking his head, Harvey walked back to his house, muttering to himself.

  That’ll shut you up, Faulkner thought. He started to scan the Penzils’ house through the slats of the pergola, then suddenly spotted Harry Penzil standing in the centre of his veranda window, frowning out at him.

  Quickly Faulkner turned his back and pretended to trim the roses. By the time he managed to work his way indoors he was sweating heavily. Harry Penzil was the sort of man liable to straddle fences and come out leading with a right swing.

  Mixing himself a drink in the kitchen, Faulkner brought it out onto the veranda and sat down waiting for his embarrassment to subside before setting the alarm mechanism.

  He was listening carefully for any sounds from the Penzils’ when he heard a familiar soft metallic click from the house on his right.

  Faulkner sat forward, examining the veranda wall. This was a slab of heavy frosted glass, completely opaque, carrying white roof timbers, clipped onto which were slabs of corrugated polythene sheeting. Just beyond the veranda, screening the proximal portions of the adjacent gardens, was a ten-foot-high metal lattice extending about twenty feet down the garden fence and strung with japonica.

  Inspecting the lattice carefully, Faulkner suddenly noticed the outline of a square black object on a slender tripod propped up behind the first vertical support just three feet from the open veranda window, the disc of a small glass eye staring at him unblinkingly through one of the horizontal slots.

  A camera! Faulkner leapt out of his chair, gaping incredulously at the instrument. For days it had been clicking away at him. God alone knew what glimpses into his private life Harvey had recorded for his own amusement.

  Anger boiling, Faulkner strode across to the lattice, prised one of the metal members off the support beam and seized the camera. As he dragged it through the space the tripod fell away with a clatter and he
heard someone on the McPhersons’ veranda start up out of a chair.

  Faulkner wrestled the camera through, snapping off the remote control cord attached to the shutter lever. Opening the camera, he ripped out the film, then put it down on the floor and stamped its face in with the heel of his shoe. Then, ramming the pieces together, he stepped forward and hurled them over the fence towards the far end of the McPhersons’ garden.

  As he returned to finish his drink the phone rang in the hall.

  ‘Yes, what is it?’ he snapped into the receiver.

  ‘Is that you, Harry? Julia here.’

  ‘Who?’ Faulkner said, not thinking. ‘Oh, yes. Well, how are things?’

  ‘Not too good, by the sound of it.’ His wife’s voice had become harder. ‘I’ve just had a long talk with Professor Harman. He told me that you resigned from the school two months ago. Harry, what are you playing at? I can hardly believe it.’

  ‘I can hardly believe it either,’ Faulkner retorted jocularly. ‘It’s the best news I’ve had for years. Thanks for confirming it.’

  ‘Harry!’ His wife was shouting now. ‘Pull yourself together! If you think I’m going to support you you’re very much mistaken. Professor Harman said –’

  ‘That idiot Harman!’ Faulkner interrupted. ‘Don’t you realize he was trying to drive me insane?’ As his wife’s voice rose to an hysterical squawk he held the receiver away from him, then quietly replaced it in the cradle. After a pause he took it off again and laid it down on the stack of directories.

  Outside, the spring morning hung over the Village like a curtain of silence. Here and there a tree stirred in the warm air, or a window opened and caught the sunlight, but otherwise the quiet and stillness were unbroken.

  Lying on the veranda, the alarm mechanism discarded on the floor below his chair, Faulkner sank deeper and deeper into his private reverie, into the demolished world of form and colour which hung motionlessly around him. The houses opposite had vanished, their places taken by long white rectangular bands. The garden was a green ramp at the end of which poised the silver ellipse of the pond. The veranda was a transparent cube, in the centre of which he felt himself suspended like an image floating on a sea of ideation. He had obliterated not only the world around him, but his own body, and his limbs and trunk seemed an extension of his mind, disembodied forms whose physical dimensions pressed upon it like a dream’s awareness of its own identity.