Super-Cannes

by J. G. Ballard

  ‘But things go wrong?’

  ‘Nothing too obvious at first. But by the end of the first year their energy levels begin to fall. Even a twelve-hour day, six days a week, isn’t long enough to get everything done. At the clinic we’ve watched it happen dozens of times. People complain about the recirculated air and pathogens breeding in the filter fans. Of course, none of the air at Eden-Olympia is recirculated.’

  ‘And the filters? They screen something out.’

  ‘Bird droppings and toilet wastes from aircraft using Nice Airport. Then people worry about security inside their office buildings. That’s always a key indicator of internal stress, the obsession with the invisible intruder in the fortress – the other self, the silent brother who clones himself off from the unconscious. The neural networks are starting to uncouple themselves. Committee meetings are rescheduled for Sundays, holidays abandoned after twenty-four hours. Finally they make their way to the clinic. Insomnia, fungal infections, respiratory complaints, inexplicable migraines and attacks of hives …’

  ‘Old-fashioned burnout?’

  ‘That’s what we thought with the first cases. Presidents of multinational companies and their CEOs. These people weren’t anywhere near burnout.’ Penrose sounded almost disappointed as his eyes strayed across the white walls, searching for a blemish. ‘But the creative edge was blunted, and they knew it. We urged them to take up skiing or yachting, book a suite at the Martinez and spend the weekend with a crate of champagne and a pretty woman.’

  ‘The perfect prescription,’ I commented. ‘Did it work?’

  ‘No. There was no response at all. But the health checks threw up a curious fact. There was a very low level of venereal complaints, surprising when you think of these attractive men and women at the height of their powers, and all the business trips around the world.’

  ‘They weren’t having much sex?’

  ‘Worse. They weren’t having sex at all. We set up a bogus lonely-hearts club, hinting that there were any number of bored secretaries eager for a fling. No takers. The adult film channel, hours of explicit hardcore, did no better. People watched, but in a nostalgic way, as if they were seeing a documentary about morris dancing or roof-thatching, an old craft skill popular with a previous generation. We were desperate. We held corporate parties with a chorus line of kiss-me-quick beauties, but all they did was look at their watches and keep an eye on their briefcases in reception.’

  ‘They’d forgotten they were living in paradise?’

  ‘This was an Eden without a snake. Short of making sexual intercourse a corporate requirement, there was nothing we could do. Meanwhile, immune levels across a hundred boardrooms continued to fall. Faced with all this insomnia and depression, I went back to old-fashioned depth psychology.’

  ‘The leather couch and the lowered blinds?’

  ‘More the armchair and the sun-filled room – psychiatry has moved on.’ Penrose stared at me, aware that I was waiting for him to trip himself. For all his jovial asides, his manner was relentlessly aggressive. As he flexed his legs and openly displayed his heavy thigh muscles it occurred to me that psychiatry might be the last refuge of the bully.

  ‘Of course, Wilder,’ I apologized. ‘I’m behind the times. Jane showed me round Freud’s house in Hampstead … dark and very strange. All those figurines and ancient idols.’

  ‘The antechamber to a pharaoh’s tomb. The great man was preparing for death, and surrounded himself with a retinue of lesser gods paying tribute to him.’ Forgiving me with a raised hand, Penrose went on: ‘Classical psychoanalysis starts with the dream, and that was my first breakthrough. I realized that these highly disciplined professionals had very strange dreams. Fantasies filled with suppressed yearnings for violence, and ugly narratives of anger and revenge, like the starvation dreams of death-camp prisoners. Despair was screaming through the bars of the corporate cage, the hunger of men and women exiled from their deeper selves.’

  ‘They wanted more violence in their lives?’

  ‘More violence and cruelty, more drama and rage.’ Penrose clenched his huge fists and drummed them on the table, sending the coffee cups into a frenzy. ‘But how to satisfy them? Today we shun the psychopathic, the dark side of the sun and those shadows that burn the ground. Sadism, cruelty and the dream of pain belong to our primate ancestors. When they surface in a damaged adolescent with a taste for strangling cats we lock him away for good. The run-down chief executives with their hives and depression were sane and civilized men. Maroon them on a desert island after a plane crash and they’d be the first to perish. Any perverse elements in their lives would have to be applied externally, like a vitamin shot or an antibiotic.’

  ‘Or a small dose of madness?’

  ‘Let’s say, a carefully metered measure of psychopathy. Nothing too criminal or deranged. More like an adventure-training course, or a game of touch rugby.’

  ‘Shins will be barked, eyes blacked …’

  ‘But no bones broken.’ Penrose nodded approvingly. ‘I wish you’d been with me, Paul. You obviously have a feel for this sort of thing. Still, I needed to test the theory, and start rolling this very odd-shaped ball. I could hardly sit at my desk in the clinic and tell some depressed CEO that he’d cure his insomnia by vandalizing a few Mercs in the Palais des Festivals car park. Then a senior manager with Hoechst showed me the way. He’d been out of sorts for months and suffered from attacks of dermatitis, even thought of transferring back to the head office in Düsseldorf.’

  ‘And what saved him? I think I can guess.’

  ‘Good. He saw a woman tourist in Cannes being mugged by an Arab youth, and went to her rescue. While she called the police he gave the fellow a good beating, kicked him so hard that he broke two bones in his right foot. He came in a week later to have the cast removed, and I asked him about the dermatitis. It had gone. He felt buoyant and confident again. Not a trace of depression.’

  ‘He knew why?’

  ‘Absolutely. Whenever he felt the blues coming on he would take one of the security men into La Bocca and provoke an incident with a passing immigrant. It worked a treat. He coopted a couple of close colleagues and they too cheered up. I asked if I could keep a professional eye on the exercise. Soon we had an active therapy group with a dozen senior executives. At weekends they’d start brawls in Maghrebian bars, trash any Arab cars that looked unroadworthy, rough up a Russian pimp or two. The health benefits were remarkable. Bandaged fists and plastered shins on Monday mornings, but clear, confident heads.’

  ‘Tough on the Arabs, though.’

  ‘True. But on the whole the immigrant community benefits. Eden-Olympia is a scrupulous equal-opportunities employer, with no racial bias. We hire a disproportionate number of north Africans as gardeners and road sweepers. The immigrant population gains from the clearer heads of the people who do the hiring.’

  ‘A tricky balance to weigh. I assume the therapeutic system began to expand.’

  ‘I was surprised by how quickly. Vigilante actions, incidents of deliberate road rage, thefts from immigrant markets, tangles with the Russian mafiosi. Other therapy groups spread out into the fringes of drug-dealing and prostitution, burglaries and warehouse robberies. A picked group of security men were paid foot soldiers, earning generous bonuses we deducted from the arts and recreations budget. The benefits were astounding. Immune levels rose through the ceiling, within three months there wasn’t a trace of insomnia or depression, not a hint of respiratory infections. Corporate profits and equity values began to climb again. The treatment worked.’

  ‘No side effects?’

  ‘A few.’ Penrose watched me as he spoke, curious to see how I reacted, and clearly pleased that I had not leapt from my chair in outrage. He spoke matter-of-factly, like an architect setting out the pros and cons of an experimental sewerage system. ‘There’s a risk element, but it’s acceptable. Eden-Olympia has a lot of clout with the local authorities. In many ways we’re carrying out tasks the police woul
d do anyway, and we free them for other duties. The sex side can be troubling. A few prostitutes have needed remedial surgery. Your friend Alain Delage is a little too free with his fists. There’s a remarkable need for punitive violence hidden away in the senior executive mind.’

  ‘And sex tends to release it?’

  ‘It’s meant to, for sound biological reasons. Sex is such a quick route to the psychopathic, the shortest of short cuts to the perverse. We aren’t running an adventure playground, but a forcing house designed to expand the psychopathic possibilities of the executive imagination. It needs to be carefully monitored. Sadomasochism, excretory sex-play, body-piercing and wife-pandering can easily veer off into something nasty. It’s surprising how many prostitutes object to rape, even of the most stylized kind.’

  ‘Unimaginative of them.’

  ‘Who knows?’ Penrose shrugged generously at the world and its curious ways. ‘A few times I’ve had to step in and redirect the therapy. On the whole, though, it’s worked well. Almost every senior executive at Eden-Olympia is now involved in the programme, even if only at the margins.’

  ‘And David Greenwood was aware of all this?’

  ‘To a large extent. He and I discussed it with Professor Kalman. The department heads at the clinic are in the know. They can see the benefits, and on the whole David approved. The drug rehab centre in Mandelieu was plagued by smalltime gangsters trying to muscle in on the methadone supply. It was a big help to him when the therapy groups came down from Eden-Olympia and drove them out. The more aggressive road attacks bothered him, but he knew that the violence against the local prostitutes was a special kind of rehabilitation, a form of shock treatment that would send them back to their factory jobs.’

  Penrose turned from me, a hand raised to catch a ray of sunlight over his head. He glanced at the opaque mirror behind him, as if waiting for an audience’s response. His exposition had been almost playful, testing me with his callous asides. But he was clearly proud of his dubious achievement and its insane logic, a therapeutic breakthrough that would never be awarded the gold medals of the leading medical societies. This lonely commitment to his radical vision gave him an almost bearlike dignity.

  ‘The murders on May 28,’ I said. ‘Were they part of David’s therapy programme?’

  ‘Paul … that’s the great mystery of Eden-Olympia. In his deranged way, David was a minor prophet, guiding us into the future. Meaningless violence may be the true poetry of the new millennium. Perhaps only gratuitous madness can define who we are.’

  ‘At the cost of breaking the law? Your senior executives at Eden-Olympia are committing enough crimes to get themselves locked away for the rest of their lives.’

  ‘That’s true, on a literal level. Remember that these criminal activities have helped them to rediscover themselves. An atrophied moral sensibility is alive again. Some of my patients even feel guilty, a revelation to them …’

  I listened to a car alarm sounding in the avenue, and imagined the French police bursting in to arrest us. ‘Guilt? Isn’t that a design error? It only needs one CEO to go to the authorities and your therapy programme will be over. Curing a few cases of insomnia will count for nothing.’

  ‘Not just a few. But I agree with you.’ Penrose stared over my head, weighing the objection in his mind. ‘So far people have been intelligent enough to see the point. They grasp the value of…’

  ‘Beating up an out-of-work Arab? Some labourer with a wife and four children living in a tin shack at a bidonville?’

  ‘Paul…’ Pained by my crude questions, Penrose reached out a hand to settle me, like a minister with a restive congregation. ‘Sit back and think things through. The twentieth century was an heroic enterprise, but it left us in the dark, feeling our way towards a locked door. Here at Eden-Olympia there’s a chink of light, a thin and fierce glow …’

  ‘Our own psychopathy?’

  ‘Whether we like it or not. The twentieth century ended with its dreams in ruins. The notion of the community as a voluntary association of enlightened citizens has died for ever. We realize how suffocatingly humane we’ve become, dedicated to moderation and the middle way. The suburbanization of the soul has overrun our planet like the plague.’

  ‘Sanity and reason are unworthy of us?’

  ‘No. But a vast illusion, built from mirrors that lie. Today we scarcely know our neighbours, shun most forms of civic involvement and happily leave the running of society to a caste of political technicians. People find all the togetherness they need in the airport boarding lounge and the department-store lift. They pay lip service to community values but prefer to be alone.’

  ‘Isn’t that odd, for a social animal?’

  ‘Only in some ways. Homo sapiens is a reformed hunter-killer of depraved appetites, which once helped him to survive. He was partly rehabilitated in an open prison called the first agricultural societies, and now finds himself on parole in the polite suburbs of the city state. The deviant impulses coded into his central nervous system have been switched off. He can no longer harm himself or anyone else. But nature sensibly endowed him with a taste for cruelty and an intense curiosity about pain and death. Without them, he’s trapped in the afternoon shopping malls of a limitless mediocrity. We need to revive him, give him back the killing eye and the dreams of death. Together they helped him to dominate this planet.’

  ‘So psychopathy is freedom, psychopathy is fun?’

  ‘A natty slogan, Paul, but it does contain a certain fiery truth.’ Penrose beamed at me, openly pleased with my progress. ‘We’re creatures of the treadmill: monotony and convention rule everything. In a totally sane society, madness is the only freedom. Our latent psychopathy is the last nature reserve, a place of refuge for the endangered mind. Of course, I’m talking about a carefully metered violence, microdoses of madness like the minute traces of strychnine in a nerve tonic. In effect, a voluntary and elective psychopathy, as you can see in any boxing ring or ice-hockey rink. You’ve served in the armed forces, Paul. You know that recruits are deliberately brutalized – the drill sergeant’s boot and the punishment run give back to young men a taste for pain that generations of socialized behaviour have bred out of them.’

  ‘The toy poodle becomes a wolf again?’

  ‘But only when it wants to. Remember your childhood – like all of us you stole from the local supermarket. It was deeply exciting, and enlarged your moral sense of yourself. But you were sensible, and kept it down to one or two afternoons a week. The same rules apply to society at large. I’m not advocating an insane free-for-all. A voluntary and sensible psychopathy is the only way we can impose a shared moral order.’

  ‘And if we do nothing?’

  ‘Danger will rush up to us and put a knife to our throat. Look at the century that lies ahead – an upholstered desert, but a wasteland all the same. An absence of faith, except for a vague belief in an unknown deity, like the sponsor of a public-service broadcast. Wherever there’s a vacuum, the wrong kind of politics creep in. Fascism was a virtual psychopathology that served deep unconscious needs. Years of bourgeois conditioning had produced a Europe suffocating in work, commerce and conformity. Its people needed to break out, to invent the hatreds that could liberate them, and they found an Austrian misfit only too happy to do the job. Here at Eden-Olympia we’re setting out the blueprint for an infinitely more enlightened community. A controlled psychopathy is a way of resocializing people and tribalizing them into mutually supportive groups.’

  ‘Like divisions of the Waffen-SS? At the Cardin Foundation there was real violence. People might have been killed.’

  ‘It was more choreographed than you think. Violence is spectacular and exciting, but sex has always been the main hunting ground of psychopathy. A perverse sexual act can liberate the visionary self in even the dullest soul. The consumer society hungers for the deviant and unexpected. What else can drive the bizarre shifts in the entertainment landscape that will keep us “buying”? Psychopathy is the
only engine powerful enough to light our imaginations, to drive the arts, sciences and industries of the world. Your passing infatuation with that child in the Rue Valentin might spark off some vital new development in aviation …’

  Penrose stood up, kicked the fur stole out of his way and began to stroll around the room, almost dismissing me with a flourish. Scenting the sunlight, he opened a window and filled his lungs. He had been saving little Natasha to the last, warning me from any rush to judgement. After inspecting himself in the mirror, he turned to stare down at me. The warring elements in his face, the ready smile and steely eyes, gave me the sense that several personalities were jostling for space in his large skull.

  ‘Paul, you can tell me – are you going to the police?’

  ‘Probably. I need to think about it.’

  ‘I’ve been completely frank. I’ve held back nothing.’

  ‘The Cannes police wouldn’t understand a word. If they did, they’d probably agree with you.’

  Penrose chuckled over this. ‘Still … the Cardin Foundation robbery. Are you going to report it?’

  ‘Not for a day or two. I’ll tell you when I do.’

  ‘Good. I need to know. There are large issues here.’

  ‘Involving a great many powerful people. Don’t worry, it would be easy to arrange a ratissage for an Englishman who’s overstayed his welcome. An old Jaguar with fading brakes, the high corniche road, an empty bottle of cognac in the wreckage … at least I’d have cured some chief executive’s migraine.’

  ‘Paul …’ Penrose seemed disappointed in me. ‘This isn’t a regime of gangsters.’

  ‘Gangsters and psychopaths? Surely that’s the prospectus you’ve been setting out? What I still can’t grasp is where David Greenwood fits into all this.’

  I waited for Penrose to reply, but he stood with his back to the sun, arms limply at his sides, his large chest deflating. As I watched his uneasy grimaces, the heavy knuckles that cuffed his nose, I realized that he was hoping for my approval. He needed me to understand him, and the brave gamble he had taken for the sake of Eden-Olympia. In some way he had failed David Greenwood, and he was now doing his best to avoid failing me.