by Jerry
Carpenter said, “We have booked no such person. You can inspect our records.” But the reporter was already gazing at the three boys clustered around Ed Gantro.
In a loud voice the reporter called, “Mr. Gantro?”
“Yes, sir,” Ed Gantro replied.
Christ, Carpenter thought. We did lock him in one of our official vehicles and transport him here; it’ll hit all the papers. Already a blue van with the markings of a TV station had rolled onto the lot. And, behind it, two more cars.
ABORTION FACILITY SNUFFS
STANFORD GRAD
That was how it read in Carpenter’s mind. Or
COUNTY ABORTION FACILITY FOILED IN ILLEGAL ATTEMPT TO . . .
And so forth. A spot on the 6:00 evening TV news. Gantro, and when he showed up, Ian Best who was probably an attorney, surrounded by tape recorders and mikes and video cameras.
We have mortally fucked up, he thought. Mortally fucked up. They at Sacramento will cut our appropriation; we’ll be reduced to hunting down stray dogs and cats again, like before. Bummer.
When Ian Best arrived in his coal-burning Mercedes-Benz, he was still a little stoned. To Ed Gantro he said, “You mind if we take a scenic roundabout route back?”
“By way of what?” Ed Gantro said. He wearily wanted to leave now. The little flow of media people had interviewed him and gone. He had made his point, and now he felt drained, and he wanted to go home.
Ian Best said, “By way of Vancouver Island, British Columbia.”
With a smile, Ed Gantro said, “These kids should go right to bed. My kid and the other two. Hell, they haven’t even had any dinner.”
“We’ll stop at a McDonald’s stand,” Ian Best said. “And then we can take off for Canada, where the fish are, and lots of mountains that still have snow on them, even this time of year.”
“Sure,” Gantro said, grinning. “We can go there.”
“You want to?” Ian Best scrutinized him. “You really want to?”
“I’ll settle a few things, and then, sure, you and I can take off together.”
“Son of a bitch,” Best breathed. “You mean it.”
“Yes,” he said. “I do. Of course, I have to get my wife’s agreement. You can’t go to Canada unless your wife signs a document in writing where she won’t follow you. You become what’s called a ‘landed Immigrant.’ ”
“Then I’ve got to get Cynthia’s written permission.”
“She’ll give it to you. Just agree to send support money.”
“You think she will? She’ll let me go?”
“Of course,” Gantro said.
“You actually think our wives will let us go,” Ian Best said as he and Gantro herded the children into the Mercedes-Benz. “I’ll bet you’re right; Cynthia’d love to get rid of me. You know what she calls me, right in front of Walter? ‘An aggressive coward,’ and stuff like that. She has no respect for me.”
“Our wives,” Gantro said, “will let us go.” But he knew better.
He looked back at the Facility manager, Mr. Sam B. Carpenter, and at the truck driver, Ferris, who, Carpenter had told the press and TV, was as of this date fired and was a new and inexperienced employee anyhow.
“No,” he said. “They won’t let us go. None of them will.”
Clumsily, Ian Best fiddled with the complex mechanism that controlled the funky coal-burning engine. “Sure they’ll let us go; look, they’re just standing there. What can they do, after what you said on TV and what that one reporter wrote up for a feature story?”
“I don’t mean them,” Gantro said tonelessly.
“We could just run.”
“We are caught,” Gantro said. “Caught and can’t get out. You ask Cynthia, though. It’s worth a try.”
“We’ll never see Vancouver Island and the great ocean-going ferries steaming in and out of the fog, will we?” Ian Best said.
“Sure we will, eventually.” But he knew it was a lie, an absolute lie, just like you know sometimes when you say something that for no rational reason you know is absolutely true.
They drove from the lot, out onto the public street.
“It feels good,” Ian Best said, “to be free . . . right?” The three boys nodded, but Ed Gantro said nothing. Free, he thought. Free to go home. To be caught in a larger net, shoved into a greater truck than the metal mechanical one the County Facility uses.
“This is a great day,” Ian Best said.
“Yes,” Ed Gantro agreed. “A great day in which a noble and effective blow has been struck for all helpless things, anything of which you could say, ‘It is alive.’ ”
Regarding him intently in the narrow trickly light, Ian Best said, “I don’t want to go home; I want to take off for Canada now.”
“We have to go home,” Ed Gantro reminded him. “Temporarily, I mean. To wind things up. Legal matters, pick up what we need.”
Ian Best, as he drove, said, “We’ll never get there, to British Columbia and Vancouver Island and Stanley Park and English Bay and where they grow food and keep horses and where they have the ocean-going ferries.”
“No, we won’t,” Ed Gantro said.
“Not now, not even later?”
“Not ever,” Ed Gantro said.
“That’s what I was afraid of,” Best said and his voice broke and his driving got funny. “That’s what I thought from the beginning.”
They drove in silence, then, with nothing to say to each other. There was nothing left to say.
1975
LOW-FLYING AIRCRAFT
J.G. Ballard
‘The man’s playing some sort of deranged game with himself.’
From their balcony on the tenth floor of the empty hotel, Forrester and his wife watched the light aircraft taking off from the runway at Ampuriabrava, half a mile down the beach. A converted crop-sprayer with a silver fuselage and open cockpits, the biplane was lining up at the end of the concrete airstrip. Its engine blared across the deserted resort like a demented fan.
‘One of these days he’s not going to make it—I’m certain that’s what he’s waiting for . . .’ Without thinking, Forrester climbed from his deck-chair and pushed past the drinks trolley to the balcony rail. The aircraft was now moving rapidly along the runway, tail-wheel still touching the tarmac marker line. Little more than two hundred feet of concrete lay in front of it. The runway had been built thirty years earlier for the well-to-do Swiss and Germans bringing their private aircraft to this vacation complex on the Costa Brava. By now, in the absence of any maintenance, the concrete pier jutting into the sea had been cut to a third of its original length by the strong offshore currents.
However, the pilot seemed unconcerned, his bony forehead exposed above his goggles, long hair tied in a brigand’s knot. Forrester waited, hands gripping the rail in a confusion of emotions—he wanted to see this reclusive and standoffish doctor plunge on to the rocks, but at the same time his complicated rivalry with Gould made him shout out a warning.
At the last moment, with a bare twenty feet of runway left, Gould sat back sharply in his seat, almost pulling the aircraft into the air. It rose steeply over the broken concrete causeway, banked and made a low circuit of the sea before setting off inland.
Forrester looked up as it crossed their heads. Sometimes he thought that Gould was deliberately trying to provoke him—or Judith, more likely. There was some kind of unstated bond that linked them.
‘Did you watch the take-off?’ he asked. ‘There won’t be many more of those.’
Judith lay back in her sun-seat, staring vaguely at the now silent airstrip. At one time Forrester had played up the element of danger in these take-offs, hoping to distract her during the last tedious months of the pregnancy. But the pantomime was no longer necessary, even today, when they were waiting for the practicante to bring the results of the amniotic scan from Figueras. After the next summer storm had done its worst to the crumbling runway, Gould was certain to crash. Curiously, he could have avoided all t
his by clearing a section of any one of a hundred abandoned roads.
‘It’s almost too quiet now,’ Judith said. ‘Have you seen the practicante?
He was supposed to come this morning.’
‘He’ll be here—the clinic is only open one day a week.’ Forrester took his wife’s small foot and held it between his hands, openly admiring her pale legs without any guile or calculation. ‘Don’t worry, this time it’s going to be good news.’
‘I know. It’s strange, but I’m absolutely certain of it too. I’ve never had any doubts, all these months.’
Forrester listened to the drone of the light aircraft as it disappeared above the hills behind the resort. In the street below him the sand blown up from the beach formed a series of encroaching dunes that had buried many of the cars to their windows. Fittingly, the few tyre-tracks that led to the hotel entrance all belonged to the practicante’s Honda. The clacking engine of this serious-faced male nurse sounded its melancholy tocsin across the town. He had tended Judith since their arrival two months earlier, with elaborate care but a total lack of emotional tone, as if he were certain already of the pregnancy’s ultimate outcome.
None the less, Forrester found himself still clinging to hope. Once he had feared these fruitless pregnancies, the enforced trips from Geneva, and the endless circuit of empty Mediterranean resorts as they waited for yet another seriously deformed foetus to make its appearance. But he had looked forward to this last pregnancy, seeing it almost as a challenge, a game played against enormous odds for the greatest possible prize. When Judith had first told him, six months earlier, that she had conceived again he had immediately made arrangements for their drive to Spain. Judith conceived so easily—the paradox was bitter, this vigorous and unquenched sexuality, this enormous fertility, even if of a questionable kind, at full flood in an almost depopulated world.
‘Richard—come on. You look dead. Let’s drink a toast to me.’ Judith pulled the trolley over to her chair. She sat up, animating herself like a toy. Seeing their reflections in the bedroom mirror, Forrester thought of their resemblance to a pair of latter-day Scott Fitzgeralds, two handsome and glamorous bodies harbouring their guilty secret.
‘Do you realize that we’ll know the results of the scan by this evening? Richard, we’ll have to celebrate! Perhaps we should have gone to Benidorm.’
‘It’s a huge place,’ Forrester pointed out. ‘There might be fifteen or twenty people there for the summer.’
‘That’s what I mean. We ought to meet other people, share the good news with them.’
‘Well . . .’ They had come to this quiet resort at the northern end of the Costa Brava specifically to get away from everyone—in fact, Forrester had resented finding Gould here, this hippified doctor who lived in one of the abandoned hotels on the playa and unexpectedly turned up in his aircraft after a weekend’s absence.
Forrester surveyed the lines of deserted hotels and apartment houses, the long-shuttered rotisseries and supermarkets. There was something reassuring about the emptiness. He felt more at ease here, almost alone in this forgotten town.
As they stood together by the rail, sipping their drinks and gazing at the silent bay, Forrester held his wife around her full waist. For weeks now he had barely been able to take his hands off her. Once Gould had gone it would be pleasant here. They would lie around for the rest of the summer, making love all the time and playing with the baby—a rare arrival now, the average for normal births was less than one in a thousand. Already he could visualize a few elderly peasants coming down from the hills and holding some sort of primitive earth festival on the beach.
Behind them the aircraft had reappeared over the town. For a moment he caught sight of the doctor’s silver helmet—one of Gould’s irritating affectations was to paint stripes on his helmet and flying-jacket, and on the fenders of his old Mercedes, a sophomore conceit rather out of character. Forrester had come across traces of the paint at various points around the town on the footbridge over the canal dividing the marina and airstrip at Ampuriabrava from the beach hotels in Rosas, at the corners of the streets leading to Gould’s hotel. These marks, apparently made at random, were elements of a cryptic private language. For some time now Forrester had been certain that Gould was up to some nefarious game in the mountains. He was probably pillaging the abandoned monasteries, looting their icons and gold plate. Forrester had a potent vision of this solitary doctor, piloting his light aircraft in a ceaseless search of the Mediterranean littoral, building up a stockpile of art treasures in case the world opened up for business again.
Forrester’s last meeting with Gould, in the Dali museum at Figueras, seemed to confirm these suspicions. He had dropped Judith off at the ante-natal clinic, where the amniotic scanning would, they hoped, confirm the absence of any abnormalities in the foetus, and by an error of judgement strolled into this museum dedicated by the town to its most illustrious native artist. As he walked quickly through the empty galleries he noticed Gould lounging back on the central divan, surveying with amiable composure the surrealist’s flaccid embryos and anatomical monstrosities. With his silverflecked jacket and long hair in a knot, Gould looked less like a doctor than a middle-aged Hell’s Angel. Beside him on the divan were three canvases he had selected from the walls, and which he later took back to decorate his hotel rooms.
‘They’re a little too close to the knuckle for me,’ Forrester commented. ‘A collection of newsreels from Hell.’
‘A sharp guess at the future, all right,’ Gould agreed. ‘The ultimate dystopia is the inside of one’s own head.’
As they left the museum Forrester said, ‘Judith’s baby is due in about three weeks. We wondered if you’d care to attend her?’
Gould made no reply. Shifting the canvases from one arm to the other, he scowled at the trees in the deserted rambla. His eyes seemed to be waiting for something. Not for the first time, Forrester realized how tired the man was, the nervousness underlying his bony features.
‘What about the practicante? He’s probably better qualified than I am.’
‘I wasn’t thinking of the birth, so much, as the . . .’
‘As the death?’
‘Well . . .’ Unsettled by Gould’s combative tone, Forrester searched through his stock of euphemisms. ‘We’re full of hope, of course, but we’ve had to learn to be realistic.’
‘That’s admirable of you both.’
‘Given one possible outcome, I think Judith would prefer someone like you to deal with it . . .’
Gould was nodding sagely at this. He looked sharply at Forrester. ‘Why not keep the child? Whatever the outcome.’
Forrester had been genuinely shocked by this. Surprised by the doctor’s aggression, he watched him swing away with an unpleasant gesture, the lurid paintings under his arm, and stride back to his Mercedes.
Judith was asleep in the bedroom. From her loose palm Forrester removed the Valiums she had been too tired to take. He replaced them in the capsule, and then sat unsteadily on the bed. For the last hour he had been drinking alone in the sun on the balcony, partly out of boredom the time-scale of the human pregnancy was a major evolutionary blunder, he decided—and partly out of confused fear and hope.
Where the hell was the practicante? Forrester walked on to the balcony again and scanned the road to Figueras, past the abandoned nightclubs and motorboat rental offices. The aircraft had gone, disappearing into the mountains. As he searched the airstrip Forrester noticed the dark-robed figure of a young woman in the doorway of Gould’s hangar. He had seen her mooning around there several times before, and openly admitted to himself that he felt a slight pang of envy at the assumed sexual liaison between her and Gould. There was something secretive about the relationship that intrigued him. Careful not to move, he waited for the young woman to step into the sun. Already, thanks to the alcohol and an over-scrupulous monogamy, he could feel his loins thickening. For all his need to be alone, the thought that there was another young woman wi
thin half a mile of him almost derailed Forrester’s mind.
Five minutes later he saw the girl again, standing on the observation roof of the Club Nutico, gazing inland as if waiting for Gould’s silver aircraft to return.
* * *
As Forrester let himself out of the suite his wife was still asleep. Only two of the suites on the tenth floor were now maintained. The other rooms had been locked and shuttered, time capsules that contained their melancholy cargo, the aerosols, douche-bags, hairpins and sun-oil tubes left behind by the thousands of vanished tourists.
The waiters’ service elevator, powered by a small gasolene engine in the basement, carried him down to the lobby. There was no electric current now to run the air-conditioning system, but the hotel was cool. In the two basketwork chairs by the steps, below the postcard rack with its peeling holiday views of Rosas in its tourist heyday, sat the elderly manager and his wife. Señora Cervera had been a linotype operator for a Barcelona newspaper during the years when the population slide had first revealed itself, and even now was a mine of information about the worldwide decline.
‘Mrs Forrester is asleep—if the practicante comes send him up to her.’
‘I hope it’s good news. You’ve waited a long time.’
‘If it is we’ll certainly celebrate tonight. Judith wants to open up all the nightclubs.’
Forrester walked into the sunlight, climbing over the first of the dunes that filled the street. He stood on the roof of a submerged car and looked at the line of empty hotels. He had come here once as a child, when the resort was still half-filled with tourists. Already, though, many of the hotels were closing, but his parents had told him that thirty years earlier the town had been so crowded that they could barely see the sand on the beach. Forrester could remember the Club Nutico, presiding like an aircraft-carrier over the bars and nightclubs of Ampuriabrava, packed with people enjoying themselves with a frantic fin de sicle gaiety. Already the first of the so-called ‘Venus hotels’ were being built, and coachloads of deranged young couples were coming in from the airport at Gerona.