The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard

by J. G. Ballard

  This spherical chamber where he seemed to have spent his entire life, asleep and awake, by now supplied all his needs, both physical and psychological. The chamber was at once a gymnasium and bedroom, library and workplace (nominally Pangborn was a television critic, virtually the only job, apart from that of the maintenance engineers, in a society where everything else was done by machine). Mounted on the rear wall of the solarium was a cluster of exercise devices which he operated for half an hour each day while sitting in the chair.

  The bathroom was also equipped with a special cabinet containing a variety of sexual appliances, but for years Pangborn had been repelled by the thought of using them – they engaged him in too unsettling a way with the facts of his own body. He felt the same resistance towards the psychological maintenance devices which everyone was encouraged to air for at least an hour each day on the television screens – simulated confrontations and reconciliations with his parents, intelligence and personality tests, and a whole range of psychological games, pocket dramas in which he could play the starring role.

  But Pangborn had soon become bored with the limited repertory of these charades. Fantasy and the imagination had always played little part in his life, and he felt only at home within the framework of an absolute realism. The solarium was a fully equipped television studio, in which Pangborn was simultaneously the star, script-writer and director of an unending domestic serial of infinitely more interest than the programmes provided by the public channels. The news bulletins now were about his own body processes, the night’s heart rate, the rising and falling curves of his temperature. These images, and the analysis of certain key events from his library of feature films, seemed to have some kind of profound though yet mysterious connection. The strange geometry presiding over the actress in her shower stall provided a key to that absolute abstraction of himself he had sought since his arrival at the solarium, the construction of a world formed entirely from the materials of his own consciousness.

  During the next days Pangborn’s peace of mind was interrupted by his growing awareness of the intruder who had entered the solarium. At first he put down his suspicions to Vera Tilley’s arrival. The strongly scented cosmetics used by the young woman had released some repressed memory of his mother and sister, and of his brief and abortive marriage. But once again, as he lay back in his chair, analysing the ever larger blow-ups of the actress’s face pressed against the bathroom tiles, he felt the presence of an uninvited visitor somewhere behind him. With the sound turned down he could hear the occasional breathing, even a sigh as this mysterious intruder seemed to weary of his secret vigil. Now and then Pangborn would hear a metallic creak behind him, the tension of a leather harness, and detect the faint smell of another body.

  For once ignoring his television screens, Pangborn began a painstaking inspection of the solarium, starting with the hall and its storage cupboards. He pulled out the racks of cassettes, the cases filled with suits he had not worn for ten years. Satisfied that the hall provided no hiding place, he drove the wheelchair into the bathroom and kitchen, searched the medicine cabinet and shower, the narrow spaces behind the refrigerator and cooker. It occurred to him that the intruder might be some small animal which had slipped into the solarium during a visit by one of the cleaners. But as he sat motionlessly in the light-filled silence he could hear the steady breathing of a human being.

  By the time of Vera Tilley’s second visit Pangborn was waiting at the door of the solarium. He hoped to catch a glimpse of someone loitering outside, perhaps an accomplice of the intruder. Already he suspected that they might be members of a gang hoping to rig the television audience surveys.

  ‘You’re on my foot, Mr Pangborn! What’s the matter? Don’t you want me to come in today?’ Pushing the door against the wheelchair, Vera looked down at Pangborn. ‘You’re in a state.’

  Pangborn reversed into the centre of the solarium. The young woman’s make-up seemed less bizarre, as if she intended to reveal more of herself to him. Realizing suddenly that he was naked, he felt his skin prickle uncomfortably.

  ‘Did you see anyone outside? Waiting in a car, or watching the door?’

  ‘You asked me that last week.’ Ignoring his agitated condition, Vera opened her tool-kit and began to fit together the sections of the vacuum-cleaner. ‘Are you expecting someone to stay?’

  ‘No!’ The thought appalled Pangborn. Even the presence of the young woman exhausted him. He remembered the sounds of breathing behind the chair. Calming himself, he said: ‘Leave the cleaning until later and have a look at the aerials. I think one of the sets is picking up a strange sound-track – perhaps from the studio next door.’

  Pangborn waited while she worked away at the sets. Afterwards he followed her around the solarium in his wheelchair, watching as she cleaned the bathroom and kitchen. He peered between her legs into the shower stall and garbage disposal chute, confirming for himself that there was no one hiding there.

  ‘You’re all alone, Mr Pangborn. Just you and the TV screens.’ As she locked her valise Vera watched him in a concerned way. ‘Have you ever been to the zoo, Mr Pangborn?’

  ‘What . . . ? There are wild-life programmes I sometimes review.’ Pangborn waited impatiently for her to leave, relieved that he could get on with his work. Watching the dozen television screens, which the girl had tuned to a needle-like sharpness, he was suddenly convinced that the notion of an intruder had all been a delusion fostered by the unsettled presence of this young woman.

  However, only a few minutes after she had gone Pangborn once again heard the sounds of the intruder behind him, and the noise of the man’s breathing, even louder now as if he had decided no longer to conceal his presence from Pangborn.

  Controlling himself, Pangborn took stock of the solarium. An unvarying light fell through the glass vents into this world without shadows, bathing the chamber in an almost submarine glow. He had been reviewing a programme of redubbed films – a huge repertory of transcribed classics now existed, their story lines and dialogue totally unconnected with their originals. Pangborn had been watching a tinted and redubbed version of Casablanca, now a new instructional film in a hotel management course on the pitfalls and satisfactions of overseas nightclub operation. Ignoring the trite dialogue, Pangborn was enjoying the timelessly elegant direction when a colour fault on the master screen began to turn the characters’ faces green.

  As he switched off the wall of screens, about to call the maintenance company, Pangborn heard the distinctive sounds of breathing. He froze in his chair, listening to the characteristic rise and fall of human respiration. As if aware that Pangborn was listening to him, the intruder began to breathe more heavily, the harsh, deep breaths of a man in fear.

  Coolly, Pangborn kept his back to the intruder, who was hiding either in the hall or bathroom. He could not only hear but smell the man’s fear, the vaguely familiar scent he had noticed the previous week. For some reason he was almost sure that the man had no intention of attacking him, and was only trying to escape from the solarium. Perhaps he was an exhausted fugitive from some act of mis-justice, a wrongly incarcerated mental patient.

  For the rest of the afternoon Pangborn pretended to watch the defective television screens, while systematically devising a method of dealing with the intruder. First of all he needed to establish the man’s identity. He switched on the monitor camera that surveyed the solarium and set it on continuous traverse across the bathroom, kitchen and hall.

  Pangborn then turned to setting a number of small traps. He unlocked the medicine cabinet in the bathroom, marking the positions of the antiseptic cream and Band-aids. After a deliberately early supper he left untouched a small filet steak and a bowl of salad. He placed a fresh bar of soap in the shower tray and scattered a fine mist of talc on the bathroom carpet.

  Satisfied, he returned to the television screens and lay half-awake until the small hours, listening to the faint breathing somewhere behind him as he carried out his endless analysis
of the murder sequence from Psycho. The immaculate and soundless junction of the film actress’s skin and the white bathroom tiles, magnified in a vast close-up, contained the secret formulas that somewhere united his own body to the white fabric and soft chrome of his contour couch.

  When he woke the next morning he once again heard the intruder’s breathing, so rested that his mysterious visitor seemed almost to be part of everyday life in the solarium. Sure enough, as Pangborn had expected, all the modest traps had been sprung. The man had washed his hands with the fresh bar of soap, a small portion of the steak and salad had been eaten, a strange footprint marked the talc in the bathroom.

  Unsettled by this tangible proof that he was not alone in the solarium, Pangborn stared at the footprint. The man’s foot was almost the size of his own, with the same overlarge and questing big toe. Something about this similarity brought a flush of irritation to Pangborn. He felt a sudden sense of challenge, provoked by this feeling of identity with the man.

  This close involvement with the intruder was redoubled when Pangborn discovered that the man had taken a book from his shelf – the almost unobtainable text of the original dialogue of The Third Man, now a cautionary tale put out by the world tourist authority on the perils of the language barrier. Pangborn thumbed through the pages of the scenario, half-hoping to find a further clue to the man’s identity. He carefully replaced the book on the shelf. These first hints of the intruder’s nature – the shared literary tastes, the shape of his feet, the sounds of his breathing and his body smell – both intrigued and provoked him.

  As he played at high speed through the hours of film the solarium camera had recorded, he now and then caught what seemed to be brief glimpses of the intruder – the flash of an elbow behind the bathroom door, a shoulder framed against the medicine cabinet, the back of a head in the hall. Pangborn gazed at these magnifications, expanding them beside the stills from Psycho, the systems of two parallel but coinciding geometries.

  This never explicit but civilized duel between them continued during the next days. At times Pangborn felt that he was running a ménage a` deux. He effectively cooked meals for them both – the intruder fortunately approved of Pangborn’s tastes in wine, and often reinforced the night with small measures of Pangborn’s brandy. Above all, their intellectual tastes coincided – their interests in film, in abstract painting, and in the architecture of large structures. Indeed, Pangborn almost visualized them openly sharing the solarium, embarking together on their rejection of the world and the exploration of their absolute selves, their unique time and space.

  All the more bitter, therefore, were Pangborn’s reactions when he discovered the intruder’s attempt to kill him.

  Too stunned to reach for the telephone and call the police, Pangborn stared at the bottle of sleeping tablets. He listened to the faint breathing somewhere behind him, lower now as if the intruder were holding his breath, waiting for Pangborn’s response.

  Ten minutes earlier, while drinking his morning coffee, Pangborn had at first ignored its faintly acrid flavour, presumably some new spice or preservative. But after a few more sips he had almost gagged. Carefully emptying the cup into the wash-basin, he discovered the half-dissolved remains of a dozen plastic capsules.

  Pangborn reached into the medicine cabinet and opened the now empty bottle of sleeping tablets. He listened to the faint breathing in the solarium. At some point, while his back was turned, the intruder had slipped the entire contents into his coffee.

  He forced himself to vomit into the basin, but still felt queasy when Vera arrived an hour later.

  ‘You look fed up,’ she told him cheerfully. She nodded at the books scattered around the place. ‘I can see you’ve been reading again.’

  ‘I’m lending some books to a friend,’ Pangborn reversed his chair away from her as she ambled around the chamber with her valise. Under the seat of his chair he held the handle of a vegetable knife. Looking up at the girl’s over-bright make-up and guileless eyes it was hard to believe that she might be in collusion with the intruder. At the same time he was surprised that she could not hear the obvious sounds of the man’s breathing. Once again Pangborn was amazed by his nimbleness, his ability to move from one end of the solarium to the other without leaving more than a few fragments of his presence on the monitor film. He assumed that the man had found a secure hiding place, perhaps in a service shaft unknown to Pangborn.

  ‘Mr Pangborn! Are you awake?’

  With an effort, Pangborn rallied himself. He looked up to find Vera kneeling in front of him. She had pushed back her cap and was shaking his knees. He searched for the knife handle.

  ‘Mr Pangborn – all those pills in the bathroom. What are they doing?’

  Pangborn gestured vaguely. Concerned only to find a weapon, he had forgotten to wash away the capsules.

  ‘I dropped the bottle in the basin – be careful you don’t cut your hands.’

  ‘Mr Pangborn –’ Confused, Vera stood up and straightened her cap. She glanced disapprovingly at the huge blow-ups from Psycho on the television screens, and at the blurred fragments of shoulder and elbow recorded by the solarium camera. ‘It’s like a jig-saw. Who is it? You?’

  ‘Someone else – a friend who’s been visiting me.’

  ‘I thought so – the place is in a mess. The kitchen . . . Have you ever thought of getting married, Mr Pangborn?’

  He stared at her, aware that she was deliberately being coquettish, trying to unsettle him for his own sake. Once again his skin began to scream.

  ‘You ought to get out of here more,’ she was telling him sensibly. ‘Visit your friend. Do you want me to come tomorrow? It’s on my route. I can say your aerials need tuning.’

  Pangborn reversed around her, keeping an eye on the bathroom and kitchen. Vera hesitated before leaving, searching for an excuse to prolong her stay. Pangborn was certain that this amiable scatter-brain was not an accomplice of the intruder, but if he once divulged the man’s presence, let alone the murder attempt, she would probably panic and then provoke an openly homicidal assault.

  Controlling his temper, he waited until she left. But any irritation he felt was soon forgotten when a second attempt was made on his life.

  As with the first murder attempt, Pangborn noticed that the method chosen was both devious and clumsy. Whether because he was still half-doped by the sleeping pills, or out of sheer physical bravado, he felt no sense of panic, but only a calm determination to beat the intruder at his own game. A complex duel was taking place between them, its fragmentary course displayed in a lengthening series of giant blow-ups on the screens – his own suspicious hands a few feet from the camera, the intruder’s angular shoulder silhouetted against the kitchen door, even a portion of an ear reflected in the mirror of the medicine cabinet. As Pangborn sat in his chair, comparing sections of this visual jig-saw with the elements from the shower sequence in Psycho, he knew that sooner or later he would assemble a complete picture of the intruder.

  Meanwhile, the man’s presence became ever more evident. The smell of his body filled the solarium and stained the towels in the bathroom. He openly helped himself to the food in the refrigerator, scattering shreds of salad on the floor. Tirelessly, Pangborn maintained his round-the-clock surveillance, trying to shake off the effects of the sleeping pills. So determined was he to defeat the intruder that he took for granted that the water in the bathroom tank had been fouled with cleaning soda. Later, in the kitchen, as he bathed his stinging face with mineral water, he could hear the self-satisfied breathing of the intruder, celebrating another small deceit.

  Later that night, as he lay half-asleep in front of the television screens, he woke with a start to feel the hot breath of the stranger against his face. Startled, he looked round in the flickering light to find the vegetable knife on the carpet and a small wound on his right knee.

  For the first time a foul smell pervaded the solarium, an unpleasant blend of disinfectant, excrement and physical rage,
like the atmosphere of some ill-maintained psychiatric institution.

  Retching on to the carpet beside his chair, Pangborn turned his back to the television screens. Holding the vegetable knife in front of him, he headed for the hall. He unlocked the front door, waiting for the cool night air to invade the solarium. Leaving the door ajar, he wheeled himself to the telephone beside the screens.

  As he held the severed flex in his hands he heard the hall door close quietly. So the intruder had decided to leave, resigning from their duel even though Pangborn was now unable to contact the outside world.

  Pangborn looked at the screens, regretting that he would never complete the jig-saw. The foul smell still hung on the air, and Pangborn decided to take a shower before going out to use a neighbour’s telephone.

  But as he entered the bathroom he could see clearly the bloody rents in the shower curtain. Pulling it back, he recognized the body of the young repair-woman, lying face down on the tiled floor, and the familiar postures he had analysed in a thousand blow-ups.

  Appalled by the calm expression in Vera’s eyes, as if she had known full well the role in which she had been cast, Pangborn reversed his chair into the solarium. He gripped the knife, feeling her wounds in the pain in his leg, and aware once again of the deep breathing around him.

  Everything now, in this final phase, was in close-up. After recording the position of the girl’s body with his portable camera – the film would be vital evidence for the investigating police – Pangborn sat in front of the wall of screens. He was certain that the last confrontation was about to take place between himself and the intruder. Holding the knife in his hand, he waited for the imminent attack. The sounds in the solarium seemed amplified, and he could hear the intruder’s pumping lungs and feel his frightened pulse drumming through the floor into the arms of his chair.