Nodding his approval, Halloway noticed that the museum of cars was already showing signs of neglect. Dust filmed the once immaculate coachwork, leaves and tags of paper lay against the unwiped windshields. As Olds gazed at the sailplane the calculator in his hand flickered continuously.
Halloway, we’ll leave soon. When I’ve assembled the engine.
‘Of course,’ Halloway reassured him. ‘We’re going together, I know.’
Flying lessons?
There was panic in the quivering letters.
I can’t fly yet!
‘Olds, naturally. You won’t find it difficult – look at the way you handle machinery, you’re a genius.’
But Olds was only interested in the aircraft. In the aviation section of one of the city’s science museums he found a leather flying suit and helmet dating back to World War I. He took to wearing the costume, his slight figure and scarred head encased in this antique aviator’s gear.
For the time being, Halloway decided to humour him. Olds was essential to his plan to restart the city, and without his electrical and mechanical skills the metropolis would remain as dead as a tomb. In return for the promise of flying lessons, Olds drove in from the airport each afternoon, equipped with his generators, cables and tool-kit.
Sceptical of Halloway’s ambitious scheme, Stillman wandered through the densely forested park with his rifle, killing the birds. Meanwhile Olds fitted the apartment house with its own electricity supply. A gasolene-driven generator in the entrance hall was soon pounding away, its power supply plugged into the mains. Even this small step immediately brought the building alive. Halloway moved from one apartment to the next, flicking lights on and off, working the appliances in the kitchens. Mixers chattered, toasters and refrigerators hummed, warning lights glowed in control panels. Most of the equipment, barely used during the long period of power cuts twenty-five years earlier, was still in functioning order. Television sets came on, radios emitted a ghostly tonelessness interrupted now and then by static from the remote-controlled switching units of the tidal pumps twenty miles away along the Sound.
However, in the tape-recorders, stereo-systems and telephone answering machines Halloway at last found the noise he needed to break the silence of the city. At first, playing through these tapes of conversations recorded by husbands and wives in the last years of the Twentieth Century, Halloway was disturbed by the anxious queries and despairing messages that described the slow collapse of an entire world. The sense of gloom and psychic entropy that came through these reminders to queue for gasolene and cooking oil were the absolute opposite of the vigour and dynamism he had expected.
But the music was different. Almost every apartment seemed to be a broadcasting station of its own. Bursting with crude confidence, the music transformed these ghost-filled rooms into a battery of nightclubs. He moved from floor to floor, blowing the dust from records and cassettes, switching on each of the apartments in turn. Rock-and-roll, big band, jazz and pop boomed through the open windows at the silent park. Even Stillman was impressed, looking up in surprise from the waist-high grass, shotgun raised hesitantly to the air as if thinking twice about trying to make an equal noise.
‘Olds, it works!’ Halloway found him resting by the generator in the lobby. ‘If we can switch on this building we can switch on the whole city! Take off that flying cap and we’ll start now.’
Reluctantly, Olds peeled off his helmet. He smiled ungrudgingly at Halloway, clearly admiring the energy and enthusiasm of this excited young man, but at the same time he seemed to be estimating his degree of involvement with Halloway. Although surrounded by his tools and cables, ammeters and transformers, his mind was clearly miles away, in the cockpit of the glider on the roof of the car park. He looked bored by what he was doing, hardly the mechanic to the world whom Halloway needed.
Halloway noticed that Olds had found a second calculator. The two instruments lay side by side on the floor, the fragments of an extended private dialogue flicking to and fro under the Negro’s fingers. For the first time Halloway felt impatient.
‘Olds – do you want flying lessons or not? If you can’t help me I’ll find someone else.’ Enjoying his aggressive manner, he added, ‘Old Buckmaster will know someone.’
I’ll help you, Halloway.
For one flying lesson.
So Olds joined Halloway in his grand design. While Halloway drove over to the airport to collect the generators stored in the basement of the car park, Olds worked away at the apartment block, repairing the elevator and air-conditioning units. With almost magical ease he moved around the building, opening fuse-boxes, trailing cable from a second generator to the motors in the elevator head. When Halloway returned he found Olds serenely raising the elevator like a moody but elegant trapeze artist.
‘Olds – it’s unbelievable . . .’ Halloway congratulated him, careful to add, ‘Wait until you repair the jet planes at the airport.’
Olds shook his head, watching Halloway reflectively, not taken in by him for a moment.
A little too much – even for me.
‘Nothing is – now, we’ll help Mr Buckmaster.’
Leaving a dozen stereograms to blare their music into the empty streets, Halloway and Olds set off for the mausoleum. Buckmaster was resting in his bedroom. Flattered by Halloway’s concern, he watched with approval from his balcony as Olds manhandled a generator into the lobby and ran the cables up to his suite.
From the breakdown truck Halloway unloaded a battery of six arc-lights he had removed from the façade of the airport terminal building.
‘We’ll set them up around the square, sir,’ Halloway explained. ‘At night you’ll be able to see the whole monument floodlit.’
Buckmaster strolled across the square, his sharp eyes following Halloway with some curiosity as he darted enthusiastically around the cathedral of cars, setting the arc-lights in position. Deep in the nave of the monument Miranda was at work on the terraces of her hanging garden. Dressed today in blue jeans and a hippy jacket, a child’s beads around her wrists, she was placing petunias and nasturtiums among the radiator grilles thirty feet above the ground. During the previous days Halloway had been too busy to make contact with her. Besides, her fey manner unsettled him. There seemed to be something decadent about this obsessive planting of vines and flowers, an unconscious but all the more sinister attempt to bring back a lurid and over-bright nature red in tooth and claw. Halloway had begun to hate the carpets of blossoms, these creepers and climbing plants that threatened to strangle the city before he could release it. Already he was thinking of the defoliants he had noticed in a chemical supplies store.
‘I’m grateful to you, Halloway,’ Buckmaster told him as they walked back to the hotel. ‘There’s a sense of style about you that I like, all too rare these days, you belong to a vanished breed – Brunel, Eiffel, Lloyd Wright, Kaiser, Buckmaster. For once, though, don’t pitch your dreams too high. What happens when the gas runs out? You’re going to have a second energy crisis all your own.’
Halloway shook his head confidently. ‘Sir, there are millions of cars here. The tankers at the airport – some of them are half-full of aviation fuel, enough to keep us going for a year. After that’ – Halloway gestured at the air – ‘we’ll find something else.’
His hand on Halloway’s shoulder, Buckmaster listened to the sound of the generator coming to life in the lobby. He watched the arc-lights pulse briefly and then blaze out, almost over-heating the sunshine. For all the old industrialist’s caution, Halloway could sense Buckmaster’s excitement. Halloway was glad of this. For some reason he wanted to impress him. He was aware that the image of his father, which had propelled him towards the city, had recently begun to fade in his mind, confined to the sailplane tethered like an imprisoned bird on the roof of the car park.
Halloway pointed at the deserted streets around the square. ‘There’s so much that should have happened here that never did,’ he explained to Buckmaster. ‘I want to bring
everything alive again, and give back to the city all that lost time.’
During the next weeks Halloway embarked on his grandiose scheme to re-animate the city. From the start he knew that the task of literally bringing back to life the whole of this huge metropolis was beyond the skills of even a hundred men like Olds. However, in a symbolic sense the task could be achieved on a more modest scale.
Adjoining the northern side of the square was a cluster of side-streets that formed a self-sufficient neighbourhood cut off from the fifty-storey buildings surrounding it. By chance, this enclave, little more than a block in extent, contained the whole city in miniature. There were modest hotels and theatres, bars and restaurants, even a police station and one television studio. Wandering around these narrow streets in the afternoons, Halloway noticed that the stores and offices, banks and supermarkets had been built to a smaller scale than in the rest of the city, and at a time before the zoning ordinances which would have excluded the light factories erected in back-yards, the auto-repair shops in converted garages. On the first floors above the bars and shops were dozens of one-man businesses, minor printing works and travel agencies, tailors and TV repairers.
Sitting on a stool in an empty bar, Halloway calculated that the working population of this city-in-miniature would have been little more than 2000 in its heyday. Even now, a hundred people like himself would be able to get most of its activities going again.
Through the weeks that followed, Halloway and Olds, with grudging help from Stillman, began the task of bringing this neighbourhood back to life. Olds drove in from the airport with a yellow-hulled fuel tanker, filled with enough aviation spirit to power a hundred generators for a month. Tirelessly, he moved in and out of the inspection tunnels below the sidewalks, opening up the electricity sub-stations and feeding down fresh cable. Meanwhile Halloway cut away the tangle of overhead wires that crossed the streets in steel webs, and then he and Olds began the laborious task of re-wiring the roadways. First the street lights came on, filling these deserted thoroughfares with an eerie brilliance, then the traffic signals and pedestrian control signs. Stillman cleared away the hundreds of derelict cars that lined the streets, leaving some twenty vehicles that Olds decided he could renovate.
Supervising all this activity, Halloway drove around in a black-andwhite police car whose engine the young Negro had brought to life. Halloway had made the local police station his operational headquarters. The lavish wall-maps and communications equipment, the electric alarm signals that ran to so many of the stores and businesses, even the clandestine listening devices which the police had bugged in to many of the bars and hotels, made the station a natural headquarters.
Often working a dozen hours a day, Halloway pressed on, too tired in the evenings to do more than fall asleep in his apartment two floors below Stillman’s. Despite all their efforts, however, the chaos seemed to grow rather than diminish. Piles of garbage covered the sidewalks, dozens of generators and fuel drums blocked the doorways of the bars and supermarkets, everywhere there were sections of dismantled switchboards and circuitry.
But one afternoon, after returning from the airport with a small lathe for Olds, he knew that he had succeeded.
A hundred yards from the station he was approaching a minor street intersection when the traffic lights turned from green to red. Laughing aloud at himself for obeying this solitary signal in an empty city of ten thousand intersections, in which he was its only traffic policeman, Halloway nonetheless pulled to a halt and waited until the lights changed to green. An important principle was at stake. Later, as he sat in the cabin of Stillman’s tractor, bulldozing the piles of garbage and collapsed electric signs out of the streets, Halloway reflected that he was not working for himself alone. In the three supermarkets within the reclamation zone he drained the freezer compartments, swept the aisles and re-stacked the pyramids of canned goods, like a dedicated resort hotelier preparing for an invasion army of tourists. Three taxi-cabs, each in running order, stood outside the neighbourhood’s leading hotel. One by one the streets were cleared of debris and abandoned cars, the sidewalks were free from garbage, the plate-glass shopfronts gleamed anew.
Amused but impressed by the transformation, Stillman at last decided to take part. At first, Halloway was reluctant to recruit this deviant figure. Every day Halloway heard him moving around the city, the violent explosions of breaking steel and glass as he dragged down another department-store portico and ran his tracks over the mannequins. In the evenings, as they sat together on the flood-lit terrace of the penthouse, Stillman would gaze resentfully across the roasting deer, as if annoyed that the dark dream of the city which had sustained him for so long should be brought to life in so naive a fashion by this idealistic youth. Then, one evening when Halloway was rhapsodizing about the harshness and vitality of his neat and immaculate streets, Stillman brusquely shut him up and announced that he would join the reclamation project. Clearly he had decided to inject some real life into this toy-town neighbourhood. He curtly turned down Halloway’s suggestion that he take over the renovation of a store selling kitchen equipment.
‘That’s not my style, Halloway. I leave the domestic sciences to you. My expertise lies in other areas . . .’
In no time Stillman had staked out two amusement arcades, several bars and a small nightclub in the basement of an office block. Once Olds had supplied electric current Stillman set to work with a will, moving at a far swifter pace than his usual surly languor had ever previously allowed. The amusement arcades were soon a blaze of garish lights. Pinball machines chattered and clanged, score numerals stuttered. In the communications room of the police station Halloway sat by the monitor screen of the traffic-control television system, watching the multicoloured lights ripple across the sidewalks.
Stillman had stripped down the punctured neon signs above the bars and arcades. From a warehouse discovered somewhere he brought in a truckload of intact signs, massive pieces of electrographic architecture that dominated the whole of Halloway’s neighbourhood. Giant letters dripped across the night sky, cascades of pink light fell mushily across the façade of his nightclub, the winged emblems of long-vanished airlines pulsed through the overloaded air, the roof-sills of bars and amusement arcades were trimmed with tubes of racing fluorescence.
Watching uneasily on his TV monitor, Halloway wondered how to put a stop to this lurid invasion. At dusk, as the surrounding city grew dark, he left the police station and cruised the streets in his squad-car, listening to the generators beating in the basements and alleyways, the tireless hearts pumping out this haemorrhage of light. He knew now why Stillman had been so dismissive of his laborious restocking of offices and supermarkets. It was only now, in this raucous light and noise, that the city was being its true self, only in this flood of cheap neon that it was really alive.
Halloway parked outside a bank he had begun to reclaim. Olds’ tool-bags and equipment trolleys were by the doorway. He had been working on the electrically operated vault doors before leaving for the airport, and the piles of old banknotes lay exposed in their metal trays. Halloway looked down at the bales of notes, worthless now but a fortune thirty years earlier. In Garden City money was never used, and had given way to a sophisticated system of barter and tithes-giving that eliminated the abuses of credit, instalment-buying and taxation.
Touching the banknotes, with their subtle progression from one denomination to the next, a means of quantifying the value of everything, its promise and obligation, Halloway watched the garish lights of the neon signs in the street flicker across his hands. He was glad that Stillman had transformed this staid and well-swept thoroughfare. They needed workers for the stores and offices and production lines, and they needed visitors for the hotels and bars. They would need money, as well, to oil the engine of competition.
Halloway locked away the trays of banknotes and slipped the keys into his pocket. There were thousands of other banks in the city, but in the printing shop next to the police stat
ion Olds would over-print the notes with Halloway’s frank. The thought pleased him – to have reached the point of issuing his own currency meant that success was really at hand.
He ended his evening rounds at the square. Lit by the arc-lights, Buckmaster’s memorial of cars rose over three hundred feet into the air, a cathedral of rust. The vines and flowers that climbed its sides looked dead in the fierce light. Halloway was glad to see that their once vivid colours were blanched out by the powerful glare. A dozen reflections in the dark buildings around the square transformed it into a mortuary plain of illuminated tombs.
Buckmaster stood on the steps of his hotel, looking with obvious pleasure at this huge spectacle. Miranda, however, watching from a window above, stared at Halloway with equally clear hostility. That afternoon Halloway had stripped the last of the poppies and forget-me-nots from the avenues around the reclamation zone. As he crossed the square at the controls of the tractor, the bale of flowers in the metal scoop like a multicoloured haystack, Miranda followed him through the streets, catching in her white hands the loose petals that drifted in the air.
Now, on her balcony, she was dressed in a bizarre Barbarella costume of silver metal and glass, like a science-fiction witch about to take her revenge on Halloway.
Unaware of his daughter’s anger, Buckmaster took Halloway’s arm and pointed to a building across the square, the offices of a former newspaper. A frieze of electric letters that had once carried a continuous news strip had been repaired by Olds, a city-sized replica of the display panels of his pocket calculators. Letters began to race from right to left.
‘Halloway, they ought to hand you the mayoral chain, my boy, and put your name up there, high, wide and handsome!’
But already the first message was flashing past.
OLDS! OLDS! OLDS! OLDS! OLDS!
Delighted by this, Halloway joined Buckmaster and rode the elevator with the old industrialist to the observation platform beside his cathedral. As they stepped out, however, a new message was racing across the display sign.
The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard Page 132
