The Complete Short Stories, Volume 2

by J. G. Ballard

  Halliday walked up the stairway to the mezzanine, and stood by the cracked plateglass window beyond the tables. Already half submerged by the sand, what remained of the town seemed displaced by the fractured glass into another set of dimensions, as if space itself were compensating for the landscape’s loss of time by forcing itself into this bizarre warp.

  Already decided that he would stay in the hotel, Halliday went out to search for water and whatever food supplies had been left behind. The streets were deserted, choked with the sand advancing toward the drained river. At intervals the clouded windows of a Citroën or Peugeot emerged from the dunes. Stepping along their roofs, Halliday entered the drive of the Fine Arts School. Against the cerise pall of the dusk, the angular building rose into the air like a white bird.

  In the students’ gallery hung the fading reproductions of a dozen schools of painting, for the most part images of worlds without meaning. However, grouped together in a small alcove Halliday found the surrealists Delvaux, Chirico and Ernst. These strange landscapes, inspired by dreams that his own could no longer echo, filled Halliday with a profound sense of nostalgia. One above all, Delvaux’s ‘The Echo’, which depicted a naked Junoesque woman walking among immaculate ruins under a midnight sky, reminded him of his own recurrent fantasy. The infinite longing contained in the picture, the synthetic time created by the receding images of the woman, belonged to the landscape of his unseen night. Halliday found an old portfolio on the floor below one of the trestles and began to strip the paintings from the walls.

  As he walked across the roof to the outside stairway above the auditorium music was playing below him. Halliday searched the faces of the empty hotels, whose curtain walls lifted into the sunset air. Beyond the Fine Arts School the chalets of the students’ quarter were grouped around two drained swimming pools.

  Reaching the auditorium, he peered through the glass doors across the rows of empty seats. In the centre of the front row a man in a white suit and sunglasses was sitting with his back to Halliday. Whether he was actually listening to the music Halliday could not tell, but when the record ended three or four minutes later he stood up and climbed onto the stage. He switched off the stereogram and then strolled over to Halliday, his high face with its slightly inquisitorial look hidden behind the dark glasses.

  ‘I’m Mallory – Dr Mallory.’ He held out a strong but oblique hand. ‘Are you staying here?’

  The question seemed to contain a complete understanding of Halliday’s motives. Putting down his portfolio, Halliday introduced himself. ‘I’m at the Oasis. I arrived this evening.’

  Realizing that the remark was meaningless, Halliday laughed, but Mallory was already smiling.

  ‘This evening? I think we can take that for granted.’ When Halliday raised his wrist to reveal the old 24-hour Rolex he still wore, Mallory nodded, straightening his sunglasses as if looking at Halliday more closely. ‘You still have one, do you? What is the time, by the way?’

  Halliday glanced at the Rolex. It was one of four he had brought with him, carefully synchronized with the master 24-hour clock still running at Greenwich Observatory, recording the vanished time of the once-revolving earth. ‘Nearly 7.30. That would be right. Isn’t this Columbine Sept Heures?’

  ‘True enough. A neat coincidence. However, the dusk line is advancing; I’d say it was a little later here. Still, I think we can take the point.’ Mallory stepped down from the stage, where his tall figure had stood over Halliday like a white gallows. ‘Seven-thirty, old time – and new. You’ll have to stay at Columbine. It’s not often one finds the dimensions locking like that.’ He glanced at the portfolio. ‘You’re at the Oasis. Why there?’

  ‘It’s empty.’

  ‘Cogent. But so is everything else here. Even so, I know what you mean, I stayed there myself when I first came to Columbine. It’s damned hot.’

  ‘I’ll be on the dusk side.’

  Mallory inclined his head in a small bow, as if acknowledging Halliday’s seriousness. He went over to the stereogram and disconnected a motor car battery on the floor beside it. He placed the heavy unit in a canvas carryall and gave Halliday one of the handles. ‘You can help me. I have a small generator at my chalet. It’s difficult to re-charge, but good batteries are becoming scarce.’

  As they walked out into the sunlight Halliday said, ‘You can have the battery in my car.’

  Mallory stopped. ‘That’s kind of you, Halliday. But are you sure you won’t want it? There are other places than Columbine.’

  ‘Perhaps. But I take it there’s enough food for us all here.’ Halliday gestured with his wristwatch. ‘Anyway, the time is right. Or both times, I suppose.’

  ‘And as many spaces as you want, Halliday. Not all of them around you. Why have you come here?’

  ‘I don’t know yet. I was living at Trondheim; I couldn’t sleep there. If I can sleep again, perhaps I can dream.’

  He started to explain himself but Mallory raised a hand to silence him. ‘Why do you think we’re all here, Halliday? Out of Africa, dreams walk. You must meet Leonora. She’ll like you.’

  They walked past the empty chalets, the first of the swimming pools on their right. In the sand on the bottom someone had traced out a huge zodiac pattern, decorated with shells and pieces of fractured tile. They approached the next pool. A sand dune had inundated one of the chalets and spilled into the basin, but a small area of the terrace had been cleared. Below an awning a young woman with white hair sat on a metal chair in front of an easel. Her jeans and the man’s shirt she wore were streaked with paint, but her intelligent face, set above a strong jaw, seemed composed and alert. She looked up as Dr Mallory and Halliday lowered the battery to the ground.

  ‘I’ve brought a pupil for you, Leonora.’ Mallory beckoned Halliday over. ‘He’s staying at the Oasis – on the dusk side.’

  The young woman gestured Halliday towards a reclining chair beside the easel. He placed the portfolio against the back rest. ‘They’re for my room at the hotel,’ he explained. ‘I’m not a painter.’

  ‘Of course. May I look at them?’ Without waiting she began to leaf through the reproductions, nodding to herself at each one. Halliday glanced at the half-completed painting on the easel, a landscape across which bizarre figures moved in a strange procession, archbishops wearing fantastic mitres. He looked up at Mallory, who gave him a wry nod.

  ‘Interesting, Halliday?’

  ‘Of course. What about your dreams, doctor? Where do you keep them?’

  Mallory made no reply, gazing down at Halliday with his dark sealed eyes. With a laugh, dispelling the slight tension between the two men, Leonora sat down on the chair beside Halliday.

  ‘Richard won’t tell us that, Mr Halliday. When we find his dreams we’ll no longer need our own.’

  This remark Halliday was to repeat to himself often over the subsequent months. In many ways Halliday’s presence in the town seemed a key to all their roles. The white-suited physician, moving about silently through the sand-filled streets, seemed like the spectre of the forgotten noon, reborn at dusk to drift like his music between the empty hotels. Even at their first meeting, when Halliday sat beside Leonora, making a few automatic remarks but conscious only of her hips and shoulder touching his own, he sensed that Mallory, whatever his reasons for being in Columbine, had adjusted himself all too completely to the ambiguous world of the dusk line. For Mallory, Columbine Sept Heures and the desert had already become part of the inner landscapes that Halliday and Leonora Sully still had to find in their paintings.

  However, during his first weeks in the town by the drained river Halliday thought more of Leonora and of settling himself in the hotel. Using the 24-hour Rolex, he still tried to sleep at ‘midnight’, waking (or more exactly, conceding the fact of his insomnia) seven hours later. Then, at the start of his ‘morning’, he would make a tour of the paintings hung on the walls of the seventh-floor suite, and go out into the town, searching the hotel kitchens and pantries for
supplies of water and canned food. At this time – an arbitrary interval he imposed on the neutral landscape – he would keep his back to the eastern sky, avoiding the dark night that reached from the desert across the drained river. To the west the brilliant sand beneath the over-heated sun shivered like the last dawn of the world.

  At these moments Dr Mallory and Leonora seemed at their most tired, as if their bodies were still aware of the rhythms of the former 24-hour day. Both of them slept at random intervals – often Halliday would visit Leonora’s chalet and find her asleep on the reclining chair by the pool, her face covered by the veil of white hair, shielded from the sun by the painting on her easel. These strange fantasies, with their images of bishops and cardinals moving in procession across ornamental landscapes, were her only activity.

  By contrast, Mallory would vanish like a white vampire into his chalet, then emerge, refreshed in some way, a few hours later. After the first weeks Halliday came to terms with Mallory, and the two men would listen to the Webern quartets in the auditorium or play chess near Leonora beside the empty swimming pool. Halliday tried to discover how Leonora and Mallory had come to the town, but neither would answer his questions. He gathered only that they had arrived separately in Africa several years earlier and had been moving westward from town to town as the terminator crossed the continent.

  On occasion, Mallory would go off into the desert on some unspecified errand, and then Halliday would see Leonora alone. Together they would walk along the bed of the drained river, or dance to the recordings of Masai chants in the anthropology library. Halliday’s growing dependence on Leonora was tempered by the knowledge that he had come to Africa to seek, not this white-haired young woman with her amiable eyes, but the night-walking lamia within his own mind. As if aware of this, Leonora remained always detached, smiling at Halliday across the strange paintings on her easel.

  This pleasant ménage à trois was to last for three months. During this time the dusk line advanced another half mile toward Columbine Sept Heures, and at last Mallory and Leonora decided to move to a small refinery town ten miles to the west. Halliday half expected Leonora to stay with him at Columbine, but she left with Mallory in the Peugeot. Sitting in the back seat, she waited as Mallory played the last Bartok quartet in the auditorium before disconnecting the battery and carrying it back to the car.

  Curiously, it was Mallory who tried to persuade Halliday to leave with them. Unlike Leonora, the still unresolved elements in his relationship with Halliday made him wish to keep in touch with the younger man.

  ‘Halliday, you’ll find it difficult staying on here.’ Mallory pointed across the river to the pall of darkness that hung like an immense wave over the town. Already the colours of the walls and streets had changed to the deep cyclamen of dusk. ‘The night is coming. Do you realize what that means?’

  ‘Of course, doctor. I’ve waited for it.’

  ‘But, Halliday …’ Mallory searched for a phrase. His tall figure, eyes hidden as ever by the dark glasses, looked up at Halliday across the steps of the hotel. ‘You aren’t an owl, or some damned desert cat. You’ve got to come to terms with this thing in the daylight.’

  Giving up, Mallory went back to the car. He waved as they set off, reversing onto one of the dunes in a cloud of pink dust, but Halliday made no reply. He was watching Leonora Sully in the back seat with her canvas and easels, the stack of bizarre paintings that were echoes of her unseen dreams.

  Whatever his feelings for Leonora, they were soon forgotten with his discovery a month later of a second beautiful neighbour at Columbine Sept Heures.

  Half a mile to the north-east of Columbine, across the drained river, was an empty colonial mansion, once occupied by the manager of the refinery at the mouth of the river. As Halliday sat on his balcony on the seventh floor of the Oasis Hotel, trying to detect the imperceptible progress of the terminator, while the antique clocks around him ticked mechanically through the minutes and hours of their false days, he would notice the white façades of the house illuminated briefly in the reflected light of the sandstorms. Its terraces were covered with dust, and the columns of the loggia beside the swimming pool had toppled into the basin. Although only four hundred yards to the east of the hotel, the empty shell of the house seemed already within the approaching night.

  Shortly before one of his attempts to sleep Halliday saw the headlamps of a car moving around the house. Its beams revealed a solitary figure who walked slowly up and down the terrace. Abandoning any pretence at sleep, Halliday climbed to the roof of the hotel, ten storeys above, and lay down on the suicide sill. A chauffeur was unloading suitcases from the car. The figure on the terrace, a tall woman in a black robe, walked with the random, uncertain movements of someone barely aware of what she was doing. After a few minutes the chauffeur took the woman by the arm, as if waking her from some kind of sleep.

  Halliday watched from the roof, waiting for them to reappear. The strange trancelike movements of this beautiful woman – already her dark hair and the pale nimbus of her face drifting like a lantern on the incoming dusk convinced him that she was the dark lamia of all his dreams – reminded Halliday of his own first strolls across the dunes to the river, the testing of ground unknown but familiar from his sleep.

  When he went down to his suite he lay on the brocaded settee in the sitting room, surrounded by the landscapes of Delvaux and Ernst, and fell suddenly into a deep slumber. There he saw his first true dreams, of classical ruins under a midnight sky, where moonlit figures moved past each other in a city of the dead.

  The dreams were to recur each time Halliday slept. He would wake on the settee by the picture window, the darkening floor of the desert below, aware of the dissolving boundaries between his inner and outer worlds. Already two of the clocks below the mantelpiece mirror had stopped. With their end he would at last be free of his former notions of time.

  At the end of this week Halliday discovered that the woman slept at the same intervals as he did, going out to look at the desert as Halliday stepped onto his balcony. Although his solitary figure stood out clearly against the dawn sky behind the hotel the woman seemed not to notice him. Halliday watched the chauffeur drive the white Mercedes into the town. In his dark uniform he moved past the fading walls of the Fine Arts School like a shadow without form.

  Halliday went down into the street and walked towards the dusk. Crossing the river, a drained Rubicon dividing his passive world at Columbine Sept Heures from the reality of the coming night, Halliday climbed the opposite bank past the wrecks of old cars and gasoline drums illuminated in the crepuscular light. As he neared the house the woman was walking among the sand-covered statuary in the garden, the crystals lying on the stone faces like the condensation of immense epochs of time.

  Halliday hesitated by the low wall that encircled the house, waiting for the woman to look towards him. Her pale face, its high forehead rising above the dark glasses in some ways reminded him of Dr Mallory, the same screen that concealed a potent inner life. The fading light lingered among the angular planes of her temples as she searched the town for any signs of the Mercedes.

  She was sitting in one of the chairs on the terrace when Halliday reached her, hands folded in the pockets of the silk robe so that only her pale face, with its marred beauty – the sunglasses seemed to shut it off like some inward night – was exposed to him.

  Halliday stood by the glass-topped table, uncertain how to introduce himself. ‘I’m staying at the Oasis – at Columbine Sept Heures,’ he began. ‘I saw you from the balcony.’ He pointed to the distant tower of the hotel, its cerise façade raised against the dimming air.

  ‘A neighbour?’ The woman nodded at this. ‘Thank you for calling on me. I’m Gabrielle Szabo. Are there many of you?’

  ‘No – they’ve gone. There were only two of them anyway, a doctor and a young woman painter, Leonora Sully – the landscape here suited her.’

  ‘Of course. A doctor, though?’ The woman had taken her hand
s from her robe. They lay in her lap like a pair of fragile doves. ‘What was he doing here?’

  ‘Nothing.’ Halliday wondered whether to sit down, but the woman made no attempt to offer him the other chair, as if she expected him to drift away as suddenly as he had arrived. ‘Now and then he helped me with my dreams.’

  ‘Dreams?’ She turned her head towards him, the light revealing the slightly hollowed contours above her eyes. ‘Are there dreams at Columbine Sept Heures, Mr –’

  ‘Halliday. There are dreams now. The night is coming.’

  The woman nodded, raising her face to the violet-hued dusk. ‘I can feel it on my face – like a black sun. What do you dream about, Mr Halliday?’

  Halliday almost blurted out the truth but with a shrug he said, ‘This and that. An old ruined town – you know, full of classical monuments. Anyway, I did last night …’ He smiled at this. ‘I still have some of the old clocks left. The others have stopped.’

  Along the river a plume of gilded dust lifted from the road. The white Mercedes sped towards them.

  ‘Have you been to Leptis Magna, Mr Halliday?’

  ‘The Roman town? It’s by the coast, five miles from here. If you like, I’ll go with you.’

  ‘A good idea. This doctor you mentioned, Mr Halliday – where has he gone? My chauffeur … needs some treatment.’

  Halliday hesitated. Something about the woman’s voice suggested that she might easily lose interest in him. Not wanting to compete with Mallory again, he answered, ‘To the north, I think; to the coast. He was leaving Africa. Is it urgent?’

  Before she could reply Halliday was aware of the dark figure of the chauffeur, buttoned within his black uniform, standing a few yards behind him. Only a moment earlier the car had been a hundred yards down the road, but with an effort Halliday accepted this quantal jump in time. The chauffeur’s small face, with its sharp eyes and tight mouth, regarded Halliday without comment.