Chronopolis

by J. G. Ballard

  “Of course they haven’t,” Ward pointed out. “It’s obvious. There’s no door into the room. We’re looking through it now. They must have paneled over this door years ago and forgotten about it. Look at that filth everywhere.”

  Rossiter was staring into the room, his mind staggered by its vastness.

  “You’re right,” he murmured. “Now, when do we move in?”

  Panel by panel, they pried away the lower half of the door, nailed it onto a wooden frame so that the dummy section could be replaced instantly.

  Then, picking an afternoon when the house was half empty and the manager asleep in his basement office, they made their first foray into the room, Ward going in alone while Rossiter kept guard in the cubicle.

  For an hour they exchanged places, wandering silently around the dusty room, stretching their arms out to feel its unconfined emptiness, grasping at the sensation of absolute spatial freedom. Although smaller than many of the subdivided rooms in which they had lived, this room seemed infinitely larger, its walls huge cliffs that soared upward to the skylight.

  Finally, two or three days later, they moved in.

  For the first week Rossiter slept alone in the room, Ward in the cubicle outside, both there together during the day. Gradually they smuggled in a few items of furniture: two armchairs, a table, a lamp fed from the socket in the cubicle. The furniture was heavy and Victorian; the cheapest available, its size emphasized the emptiness of the room. Pride of place was taken by an enormous mahogany wardrobe, fitted with carved angels and castellated mirrors, which they were forced to dismantle and carry into the house in their suitcases. Towering over them, it reminded Ward of the microfilms of Gothic cathedrals, with their massive organ lofts crossing vast naves.

  After three weeks they both slept in the room, finding the cubicle unbearably cramped. An imitation Japanese screen divided the room adequately and did nothing to diminish its size. Sitting there in the evenings, surrounded by his books and albums, Ward steadily forgot the city outside. Luckily he reached the library by a back alley and avoided the crowded streets. Rossiter and himself began to seem the only real inhabitants of the world, everyone else a meaningless by-product of their own existence, a random replication of identity which had run out of control.

  It was Rossiter who suggested that they ask the two girls to share the room with them.

  “They’ve been kicked out again and may have to split up,” he told Ward, obviously worried that Judith might fall into bad company. “There’s always a rent freeze after revaluation, but all the landlords know about it so they’re not reletting. It’s getting damned difficult to find a room anywhere.”

  Ward nodded, relaxing back around the circular redwood table. He played with a tassel of the arsenic-green lampshade, for a moment felt like a Victorian man of letters, leading a spacious, leisurely life among overstuffed furnishings.

  “I’m all for it,” he agreed, indicating the empty corners. “There’s plenty of room here. But we’ll have to make damn sure they don’t gossip about it.”

  After due precautions, they let the two girls into the secret, enjoying their astonishment at finding this private universe.

  “We’ll put a partition across the middle,” Rossiter explained, “then take it down each morning. You’ll be able to move in within a couple of days. How do you feel?”

  “Wonderful!” They goggled at the wardrobe, squinting at the endless reflections in the mirrors.

  There was no difficulty getting them in and out of the house. The turnover of tenants was continuous and bills were placed in the mail rack. No one cared who the girls were or noticed their regular calls at the cubicle.

  However, half an hour after they arrived neither of them had unpacked her suitcase.

  “What’s up, Judith?” Ward asked, edging past the girls’ beds into the narrow interval between the table and wardrobe.

  Judith hesitated, looking from Ward to Rossiter, who sat on his bed, finishing off the plywood partition. “John, it’s just that . . .”

  Helen Waring, more matter of fact, took over, her fingers straightening the bedspread. “What Judith’s trying to say is that our position here is a little embarrassing. The partition is—”

  Rossiter stood up. “For heaven’s sake, don’t worry, Helen,” he assured her, speaking in the loud whisper they had all involuntarily cultivated. “No funny business, you can trust us. This partition is as solid as a rock.”

  The two girls nodded. “It’s not that,” Helen explained, “but it isn’t up all the time. We thought that if an older person were here, say Judith’s aunt—she wouldn’t take up much room and be no trouble, she’s really awfully sweet—we wouldn’t need to bother about the partition—except at night,” she added quickly.

  Ward glanced at Rossiter, who shrugged and began to scan the floor.

  “Well, it’s an idea,” Rossiter said. “John and I know how you feel. Why not?”

  “Sure,” Ward agreed. He pointed to the space between the girls’ beds and the table. “One more won’t make any difference.”

  The girls broke into whoops. Judith went over to Rossiter and kissed him on the cheek. “Sorry to be a nuisance, Henry.” She smiled at him. “That’s a wonderful partition you’ve made. You couldn’t do another one for Auntie—just a little one? She’s very sweet but she is getting on.”

  “Of course,” Rossiter said. “I understand. I’ve got plenty of wood left over.”

  Ward looked at his watch. “It’s seven-thirty, Judith. You’d better get in touch with your aunt. She may not be able to make it tonight.”

  Judith buttoned her coat. “Oh, she will,” she assured Ward. “I’ll be back in a jiffy.”

  The aunt arrived within five minutes, three heavy suitcases soundly packed.

  “It’s amazing,” Ward remarked to Rossiter three months later. “The size of this room still staggers me. It almost gets larger every day.”

  Rossiter agreed readily, averting his eyes from one of the girls changing behind the central partition. This they now left in place as dismantling it daily had become tiresome. Besides, the aunt’s subsidiary partition was attached to it and she resented the continuous upsets. Ensuring she followed the entrance and exit drills through the camouflaged door and cubicle was difficult enough.

  Despite this, detection seemed unlikely. The room had obviously been built as an afterthought into the central well of the house and any noise was masked by the luggage stacked in the surrounding corridor. Directly below was a small dormitory occupied by several elderly women, and Judith’s aunt, who visited them socially, swore that no sounds came through the heavy ceiling. Above, the fanlight let out through a dormer window, its lights indistinguishable from the hundred other bulbs burning in the windows of the house.

  Rossiter finished off the new partition he was building and held it upright, fitting it into the slots nailed to the wall between his bed and Ward’s. They had agreed that this would provide a little extra privacy.

  “No doubt I’ll have to do one for Judith and Helen,” he confided to Ward.

  Ward adjusted his pillow. They had smuggled the two armchairs back to the furniture shop as they took up too much space. The bed, anyway, was more comfortable. He had never got completely used to the soft upholstery.

  “Not a bad idea. What about some shelving around the wall? I’ve got nowhere to put anything.”

  The shelving tidied the room considerably, freeing large areas of the floor. Divided by their partitions, the five beds were in line along the rear wall, facing the mahogany wardrobe. In between was an open space of three or four feet, a further six feet on either side of the wardrobe.

  The sight of so much space fascinated Ward. When Rossiter mentioned that Helen’s mother was ill and badly needed personal care he immediately knew where her cubicle could be placed—at the foot of his bed, between the wardrobe and the side wall.

  Helen was overjoyed. “It’s awfully good of you, John,” she told him, “but wou
ld you mind if Mother slept beside me? There’s enough space to fit an extra bed in.”

  So Rossiter dismantled the partitions and moved them closer together, six beds now in line along the wall. This gave each of them an interval of two and a half feet wide, just enough room to squeeze down the side of their beds. Lying back on the extreme right, the shelves two feet above his head, Ward could barely see the wardrobe, but the space in front of him, a clear six feet to the wall ahead, was uninterrupted.

  Then Helen’s father arrived.

  Knocking on the door of the cubicle, Ward smiled at Judith’s aunt as she let him in. He helped her swing out the made-up bed which guarded the entrance, then rapped on the wooden panel. A moment later Helen’s father, a small gray-haired man in an undershirt, braces tied to his trousers with string, pulled back the panel.

  Ward nodded to him and stepped over the luggage piled around the floor at the foot of the beds. Helen was in her mother’s cubicle, helping the old woman to drink her evening broth. Rossiter, perspiring heavily, was on his knees by the mahogany wardrobe, wrenching apart the frame of the central mirror with a jimmy. Pieces of the wardrobe lay on his bed and across the floor.

  “We’ll have to start taking these out tomorrow,” Rossiter told him. Ward waited for Helen’s father to shuffle past and enter his cubicle. He had rigged up a small cardboard door, and locked it behind him with a crude hook of bent wire.

  Rossiter watched him, frowning irritably. “Some people are happy. This wardrobe’s a hell of a job. How did we ever decide to buy it?”

  Ward sat down on his bed. The partition pressed against his knees and he could hardly move. He looked up when Rossiter was engaged and saw that the dividing line he had marked in pencil was hidden by the encroaching partition. Leaning against the wall, he tried to ease it back again, but Rossiter had apparently nailed the lower edge to the floor.

  There was a sharp tap on the outside cubicle door—Judith returning from her office. Ward started to get up and then sat back. “Mr. Waring,” he called softly. It was the old man’s duty night.

  Waring shuffled to the door of his cubicle and unlocked it fussily, clucking to himself.

  “Up and down, up and down,” he muttered. He stumbled over Rossiter’s tool bag and swore loudly, then added meaningly over his shoulder: “If you ask me there’s too many people in here. Down below they’ve only got six to our seven, and it’s the same size room.”

  Ward nodded vaguely and stretched back on his narrow bed, trying not to bang his head on the shelving. Waring was not the first to hint that he move out. Judith’s aunt had made a similar suggestion two days earlier. Since he left his job at the library (the small rental he charged the others paid for the little food he needed) he spent most of his time in the room, seeing rather more of the old man than he wanted to, but he had learned to tolerate him.

  Settling himself, he noticed that the right-hand spire of the wardrobe, all he had been able to see for the past two months, was now dismantled.

  It had been a beautiful piece of furniture, in a way symbolizing this whole private world, and the salesman at the store told him there were few like it left. For a moment Ward felt a sudden pang of regret, as he had done as a child when his father, in a mood of exasperation, had taken something away from him and he knew he would never see it again.

  Then he pulled himself together. It was a beautiful wardrobe, without doubt, but when it was gone it would make the room seem even larger.

  Chronopolis

  His trial had been fixed for the next day. Exactly when, of course, neither Newman nor anyone else knew. Probably it would be during the afternoon, when the principals concerned—judge, jury, and prosecutor—managed to converge on the same courtroom at the same time. With luck his defense attorney might also appear at the right moment, though the case was such an open and shut one that Newman hardly expected him to bother—besides, transport to and from the old penal complex was notoriously difficult, involved endless waiting in the grimy depot below the prison walls.

  Newman had passed the time usefully. Luckily, his cell faced south and sunlight traversed it for most of the day. He divided its arc into ten equal segments, the effective daylight hours, marking the intervals with a wedge of mortar prised from the window ledge. Each segment he further subdivided into twelve smaller units.

  Immediately he had a working timepiece, accurate to within virtually a minute (the final subdivision into fifths he made mentally). The sweep of white notches, curving down one wall, across the floor and metal bedstead, and up the other wall, would have been recognizable to anyone who stood with his back to the window, but no one ever did. Anyway, the guards were too stupid to understand, and the sundial had given Newman a tremendous advantage over them. Most of the time, when he wasn’t recalibrating the dial, he would press against the grille, keeping an eye on the orderly room.

  “Brocken!” he would shout out at seven-fifteen as the shadow line hit the first interval. “Morning inspection! On you feet, man!”

  The sergeant would come stumbling out of his bunk in a sweat, rising the other warders as the reveille bell split the air.

  Later, Newman sang out the other events on the daily roster: roll call, cell fatigues, breakfast, exercise, and so on around to the evening roll just before dusk. Brocken regularly won the block merit for the best-run cell deck and he relied on Newman to program the day for him, anticipate the next item on the roster, and warn him if anything went on for too long—in some of the other blocks fatigues were usually over in three minutes while breakfast or exercise could go on for hours, none of the warders knowing when to stop, the prisoners insisting that they had only just begun.

  Brocken never inquired how Newman organized everything so exactly; once or twice a week, when it rained or was overcast, Newman would be strangely silent, and the resulting confusion reminded the sergeant forcefully of the merits of cooperation. Newman was kept in cell privileges and all the cigarettes he needed. It was a shame that a date for the trial had finally been named.

  Newman, too, was sorry. Most of his research so far had been inconclusive. Primarily his problem was that, given a northwardfacing cell for the bulk of his sentence, the task of estimating the time might become impossible. The inclination of the shadows in the exercise yards or across the towers and walls provided too blunt a reading. Calibration would have to be visual; an optical instrument would soon be discovered.

  What he needed was an internal timepiece, an unconsciously operating psychic mechanism regulated, say, by his pulse or respiratory rhythms. He had tried to train his time sense, running an elaborate series of tests to estimate its minimum in-built error, and this had been disappointingly large. The chances of conditioning an accurate reflex seemed slim.

  However, unless he could tell the exact time at any given moment, he knew he would go mad.

  His obsession, which now faced him with a charge of murder, had revealed itself innocently enough.

  As a child, like all children, he had noticed the occasional ancient clock tower, bearing the same white circle with its twelve intervals. In the seedier areas of the city the round characteristic dials often hung over cheap jewelry stores, rusting and derelict.

  “Just signs,” his mother explained. “They don’t mean anything, like stars or rings.”

  Pointless embellishment, he had thought.

  Once, in an old furniture shop, they had seen a clock with hands, upside down in a box full of fire irons and miscellaneous rubbish.

  “Eleven and twelve,” he had pointed out. “What does it mean?”

  His mother had hurried him away, reminding herself never to visit that street again. “Nothing,” she told him sharply. “It’s all finished.” To herself she added experimentally: Five and twelve. Five to twelve. Yes.

  Time unfolded at its usual sluggish, half-confused pace. They lived in a ramshackle house in one of the amorphous suburbs, a zone of endless afternoons. Sometimes he went to school, until he was ten spent most
of his time with his mother queueing outside the closed food stores. In the evenings he would play with the neighborhood gang around the abandoned railway station, punting a homemade flatcar along the overgrown tracks, or break into one of the unoccupied houses and set up a temporary command post.

  He was in no hurry to grow up; the adult world was unsynchronized and ambitionless. After his mother died he spent long days in the attic, going through her trunks and old clothes, playing with the bric-a-brac of hats and beads, trying to recover something of her personality.

  In the bottom compartment of her jewelry case he came across a flat gold-cased object, equipped with a wrist strap. The dial had no hands but the twelve-numbered face intrigued him and he fastened it to his wrist.

  His father choked over his soup when he saw it that evening.

  “Conrad, my God! Where in heaven did you get that?”

  “In Mamma’s bead box. Can’t I keep it?”

  “No. Conrad, give it to me! Sorry, son.” Thoughtfully: “Let’s see, you’re fourteen. Look, Conrad, I’ll explain it all in a couple of years.”

  With the impetus provided by this new taboo there was no need to wait for his father’s revelations. Full knowledge came soon. The older boys knew the whole story, but strangely enough it was disappointingly dull.

  “Is that all?” he kept saying. “I don’t get it. Why worry so much about clocks? We have calendars, don’t we?”

  Suspecting more, he scoured the streets, carefully inspecting every derelict clock for a clue to the real secret. Most of the faces had been mutilated, hands and numerals tom off, the circle of minute intervals stripped away, leaving a shadow of fading rust.

  Distributed apparently at random all over the city, above stores, banks, and public buildings, their real purpose was hard to discover. Sure enough, they measured the progress of time through twelve arbitrary intervals, but this seemed barely adequate grounds for outlawing them. After all, a whole variety of timers were in general use: in kitchens, factories, hospitals, wherever a fixed period of time was needed. His father had one by his bed at night. Sealed into the standard small black box, and driven by miniature batteries, it emitted a high penetrating whistle shortly before breakfast the next morning, woke him if he overslept. A clock was no more than a calibrated timer, in many ways less useful, as it provided you with a steady stream of irrelevant information. What if it was half past three, as the old reckoning put it, if you weren’t planning to start or finish anything then?