Vermilion Sands

by James Graham Ballard

  But this, as I realized later, was the crazy season at Vermilion Sands, when Tony Sapphire heard a sand-ray singing, and I saw the god Pan drive by in a Cadillac.

  Who was Aurora Day, I often ask myself now. Sweeping across the placid out-of-season sky like a summer comet, she seems to have appeared in a different role to each of us at the colony along the Stars. To me, at first, she was a beautiful neurotic disguised as a femme fatale, but Raymond Mayo saw her as one of Salvador Dali’s exploding madonnas, an enigma serenely riding out the apocalypse. To Tony Sapphire and the rest of her followers along the beach she was a reincarnation of Astarte herself, a diamond-eyed time-child thirty centuries old.

  I can remember clearly how I found the first of her poems. After dinner one evening I was resting on the terrace – something I did most of the time at Vermilion Sands – when I noticed a streamer lying on the sand below the railing. A few yards away were several others, and for half an hour I watched them being blown lightly across the dunes. A car’s headlamps shone in the drive at Studio 5, and I assumed that a new tenant had moved into the villa, which had stood empty for several months.

  Finally, out of curiosity, I straddled the rail, jumped down on to the sand and picked up one of the ribbons of pink tissue. It was a fragment about three feet long, the texture of rose petal, so light that it began to flake and dissolve in my fingers.

  Holding it up I read: … COMPARE THEE TO A SUMMER’S DAY, THOU ART MORE LOVELY…

  I let it flutter away into the darkness below the balcony, then bent down and carefully picked up another, disentangling it from one of the buttresses.

  Printed along it in the same ornate neo-classical type was : …SET KEEL TO BREAKERS, FORTH ON THAT GODLY SEA…

  I looked over my shoulder. The light over the desert had gone now, and three hundred yards away my neighbour’s villa was lit like a spectral crown. The exposed quartz veins in the sand reefs along the Stars rippled like necklaces in the sweeping headlights of the cars driving into Red Beach.

  I glanced at the tape again.

  Shakespeare and Ezra Pound? My neighbour had the most curious tastes. My interest fading, I returned to the terrace.

  Over the next few days the streamers continued to blow across the dunes, for some reason always starting in the evening, when the lights of the traffic illuminated the lengths of coloured gauze. But to begin with I hardly noticed them – I was then editing Wave IX, an avant-garde poetry review, and the studio was full of auto-tapes and old galley proofs. Nor was I particularly surprised to find I had a poetess for my neighbour. Almost all the studios along the Stars are occupied by painters and poets – the majority abstract and non-productive. Most of us were suffering from various degrees of beach fatigue, that chronic malaise which exiles the victim to a limbo of endless sunbathing, dark glasses and afternoon terraces.

  Later, however, the streamers drifting across the sand became rather more of a nuisance. When the protest notes achieved nothing I went over to my neighbour’s villa with a view to seeing her in person. On this last occasion, after a dying ray had plummeted out of the sky and nearly stung me in its final spasm, I realized that there was little chance of reaching her.

  A hunchbacked chauffeur with a club foot and a twisted face like a senile faun’s was cleaning the cerise Cadillac in the drive. I went over to him and pointed to the strands of tissue trailing through the first-floor windows and falling on to the desert below.

  ‘These tapes are blowing all over my villa,’ I told him. ‘Your mistress must have one of her VT sets on open sequence.’

  He eyed me across the broad hood of the El Dorado, sat down in the driving seat and took a small flute from the dashboard.

  As I walked round to him he began to play some high, irritating chords. I waited until he had finished and asked in a louder voice: ‘Do you mind telling her to close the windows?’

  He ignored me, his lips pressed moodily to the flute. I bent down and was about to shout into his ear when a gust of wind swirled across one of the dunes just beyond the drive, in an instant whirled over the gravel, flinging up a miniature tornado of dust and ash. This miniature tornado completely enclosed us, blinding my eyes and filling my mouth with grit. Arms shielding my face, I moved away towards the drive, the long streamers whipping around me.

  As suddenly as it had started, the squall vanished. The dust stilled and faded, leaving the air as motionless as it had been a few moments previously. I saw that I had backed about thirty yards down the drive, and to my astonishment realized that the Cadillac and chauffeur had disappeared, although the garage door was still open.

  My head rang strangely, and I felt irritable and short of breath. I was about to approach the house again, annoyed at having been refused entry and left to suffer the full filthy impact of the dust squall, when I heard the thin piping refrain sound again into the air.

  Low, but clear and strangely menacing, it sang in my ears, the planes of sound shifting about me in the air. Looking around for its source, I noticed the dust flicking across the surface of the dunes on either side of the drive.

  Without waiting, I turned on my heel and hurried back to my villa.

  Angry with myself for having been made such a fool of, and resolved to press some formal complaint, I first went around the terrace, picking up all the strands of tissue and stuffing them into the disposal chute. I climbed below the villa and cut away the tangled masses of streamers.

  Cursorily, I read a few of the tapes at random. All printed the same erratic fragments, intact phrases from Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Keats and Eliot. My neighbour’s VT set appeared to have a drastic memory fault, and instead of producing a variant on the classical model the selector head was simply regurgitating a dismembered version of the model itself. For a moment I thought seriously of telephoning the IBM agency in Red Beach and asking them to send a repair man round.

  That evening, however, I finally spoke to my neighbour in person.

  I had gone to sleep at about eleven, and an hour or so later something woke me. A bright moon was at apogee, moving behind strands of pale green cloud that cast a thin light over the desert and the Stars. I stepped out on to the veranda and immediately noticed a curiously luminescent glow moving between the dunes. Like the strange music I had heard from the chauffeur’s flute, the glow appeared to be sourceless, but I assumed it was cast by the moon shining through a narrow interval between the clouds.

  Then I saw her, appearing for a moment among the dunes, strolling across the midnight sand. She wore a long white gown that billowed out behind her, against which her blue hair drifted loosely in the wind like the tail-fan of a paradise bird. Streamers floated about her feet, and overhead two or three purple rays circled endlessly. She walked on, apparently unaware of them, a single light behind her shining through an upstairs window of her villa.

  Belting my dressing-gown, I leaned against a pillar and watched her quietly, for the moment forgiving her the streamers and her ill-trained chauffeur. Occasionally she disappeared behind one of the green-shadowed dunes, her head raised slightly, moving from the boulevard towards the sand reefs on the edge of the fossil lake.

  She was about a hundred yards from the nearest sand reef, a long inverted gallery of winding groins and over-hanging grottoes, when something about her straight path and regular unvarying pace made me wonder whether she might in fact be sleepwalking.

  I hesitated briefly, watching the rays circling around her head, then jumped over the rail and ran across the sand towards her.

  The quartz flints stung at my bare feet, but I managed to reach her just as she neared the edge of the reef. I broke into a walk beside her and touched her elbow.

  Three feet above my head the rays spat and whirled in the darkness. The strange luminosity that I had assumed came from the moon seemed rather to emanate from her white gown.

  My neighbour was not somnambulating, as I thought, but lost in some deep reverie or dream. Her black eyes stared opaquely in front of her, her
slim white-skinned face like a marble mask, motionless and without expression. She looked round at me sightlessly, one hand gesturing me away. Suddenly she stopped and glanced down at her feet, abruptly becoming aware of herself and her midnight walk. Her eyes cleared and she saw the mouth of the sand reef. She stepped back involuntarily, the light radiating from her gown increasing with her alarm.

  Overhead the rays soared upwards into the air, their arcs wider now that she was awake.

  ‘Sorry to startle you,’ I apologized. ‘But you were getting too close to the reef.’

  She pulled away from me, her long black eyebrows arching.

  ‘What?’ she said uncertainly. ‘Who are you?’ To herself, as if completing her dream, she murmured sotto voce: ‘Oh God, Paris, choose me, not Minerva –’ She broke off and stared at me wildly, her carmine lips fretting. She strode off across the sand, the rays swinging like pendulums through the dim air above her, taking with her the pool of amber light.

  I waited until she reached her villa and turned away. Glancing at the ground, I noticed something glitter in the small depression formed by one of her footprints. I bent down, picked up a small jewel, a perfectly cut diamond of a single carat, then saw another in the next footprint. Hurrying forwards, I picked up half-a-dozen of the jewels, and was about to call out after her disappearing figure when I felt something wet in my hand.

  Where I had held the jewels in the hollow of my palm now swam a pool of ice-cold dew.

  I found out who she was the next day.

  After breakfast I was in the bar when I saw the El Dorado turn into the drive. The club-footed chauffeur jumped from the car and hobbled over in his curious swinging gait to the front door. In his black-gloved hand he carried a pink envelope. I let him wait a few minutes, then opened the letter on the step as he went back to the car and sat waiting for me, his engine running.

  I’m sorry to have been so rude last night. You stepped right into my dream and startled me. Could I make amends by offering you a cocktail? My chauffeur will collect you at noon.

  AURORA DAY

  I looked at my watch. It was 11:55. The five minutes, presumably, gave me time to compose myself.

  The chauffeur was studying his driving wheel, apparently indifferent to my reaction. Leaving the door open, I stepped inside and put on my beach-jacket. On the way out I slipped a proof copy of Wave IX into one of the pockets.

  The chauffeur barely waited for me to climb in before moving the big car rapidly down the drive.

  ‘How long are you staying in Vermilion Sands?’ I asked, addressing the band of curly russet hair between the peaked cap and black collar.

  He said nothing. As we drove along the Stars he suddenly cut out into the oncoming lane and gunned the Cadillac forward in a tremendous burst of speed to overtake a car ahead.

  Settling myself, I put the question again and waited for him to reply, then smartly tapped his black serge shoulder.

  ‘Are you deaf, or just rude?’

  For a second he took his eyes off the road and glanced back at me. I had a momentary impression of bright red pupils, ribald eyes that regarded me with a mixture of contempt and unconcealed savagery. Out of the side of his mouth came a sudden cackling stream of violent imprecations, a short filthy blast that sent me back into my seat.

  He jumped out when we reached Studio 5 and opened the door for me, beckoning me up the black marble steps like an attendant spider ushering a very small fly into a particularly large web.

  Once inside the doorway he seemed to disappear. I walked through the softly lit hall towards an interior pool where a fountain played and white carp circled tirelessly. Beyond it, in the lounge, I could see my neighbour reclining on a chaise longue, her white gown spread around her like a fan, the jewels embroidered into it glittering in the fountain light.

  As I sat down she regarded me curiously, putting away a slender volume bound in yellow calf which appeared to be a private edition of poems. Scattered across the floor beside her was a miscellaneous array of other volumes, many of which I could identify as recently printed collections and anthologies.

  I noticed a few coloured streamers trailing through the curtains by the window, and glanced around to see where she kept her VT set, helping myself to a cocktail off the low table between us.

  ‘Do you read a lot of poetry?’ I asked, indicating the volumes around her.

  She nodded. ‘As much as I can bear to.’

  I laughed. ‘I know what you mean. I have to read rather more than I want.’ I took a copy of Wave IX from my pocket and passed it to her. ‘Have you come across this one?’

  She glanced at the title page, her manner moody and autocratic. I wondered why she had bothered to ask me over. ‘Yes, I have. Appalling, isn’t it? “Paul Ransom” ’, she noted. ‘Is that you? You’re the editor? How interesting.’

  She said it with a peculiar inflection, apparently considering some possible course of action. For a moment she watched me reflectively. Her personality seemed totally dissociated, her awareness of me varying abruptly from one level to another, like light-changes in a bad motion picture. However, although her mask-like face remained motionless, I none the less detected a quickening of interest.

  ‘Well, tell me about your work. You must know so much about what is wrong with modern poetry. Why is it all so bad?’

  I shrugged. ‘I suppose its principally a matter of inspiration. I used to write a fair amount myself years ago, but the impulse faded as soon as I could afford a VT set. In the old days a poet had to sacrifice himself in order to master his medium. Now that technical mastery is simply a question of pushing a button, selecting metre, rhyme, assonance on a dial, there’s no need for sacrifice, no ideal to invent to make the sacrifice worthwhile –’

  I broke off. She was watching me in a remarkably alert way, almost as if she were going to swallow me.

  Changing the tempo, I said: ‘I’ve read quite a lot of your poetry, too. Forgive me mentioning it, but I think there’s something wrong with your Verse-Transcriber.’

  Her face snapped and she looked away from me irritably. ‘I haven’t got one of those dreadful machines. Heavens above, you don’t think I would use one?’

  ‘Then where do the tapes come from?’ I asked. The streamers that drift across every evening. They’re covered with fragments of verse.’

  Off-handedly, she said: ‘Are they? Oh, I didn’t know.’ She looked down at the volumes scattered about on the floor. ‘Although I should be the last person to write verse, I have been forced to recently. Through sheer necessity, you see, to preserve a dying art.’

  She had baffled me completely. As far as I could remember, most of the poems on the tapes had already been written.

  She glanced up and gave me a vivid smile.

  ‘I’ll send you some.’

  The first ones arrived the next morning. They were delivered by the chauffeur in the pink Cadillac, neatly printed on quarto vellum and sealed by a floral ribbon. Most of the poems submitted to me come through the post on computer punch-tape, rolled up like automat tickets, and it was certainly a pleasure to receive such elegant manuscripts.

  The poems, however, were impossibly bad. There were six in all, two Petrarchan sonnets, an ode and three free-form longer pieces. All were written in the same hectoring tone, at once minatory and obscure, like the oracular deliriums of an insane witch. Their overall import was strangely disturbing, not so much for the content of the poems as for the deranged mind behind them. Aurora Day was obviously living in a private world which she took very seriously indeed. I decided that she was a wealthy neurotic able to over-indulge her private fantasies.

  I flipped through the sheets, smelling the musk-like scent that misted up from them. Where had she unearthed this curious style, these archaic mannerisms, the ‘arise, earthly seers, and to thy ancient courses pen now thy truest vows’? Mixed up in some of the metaphors were odd echoes of Milton and Virgil. In fact, the whole tone reminded me of the archpriestess in the
Aeneid who lets off blistering tirades whenever Aeneas sits down for a moment to relax.

  I was still wondering what exactly to do with the poems – promptly on nine the next morning the chauffeur had delivered a second batch – when Tony Sapphire called to help me with the make-up of the next issue. Most of the time he spent at his beach-chalet at Lagoon West, programming an automatic novel, but he put in a day or two each week on Wave IX.

  I was checking the internal rhyme chains in an IBM sonnet sequence of Xero Paris’s as he arrived. While I held the code chart over the sonnets, checking the rhyme lattices, he picked up the sheets of pink quarto on which Aurora’s poems were printed.

  ‘Delicious scent,’ he commented, fanning the sheets through the air. ‘One way to get round an editor.’ He started to read the first of the poems, then frowned and put it down.

  ‘Extraordinary. What are they?’

  ‘I’m not altogether sure,’ I admitted. ‘Echoes in a stone garden.’

  Tony read the signature at the bottom of the sheets. ‘“Aurora Day.” A new subscriber, I suppose. She probably thinks Wave IX is the VT Times. But what is all this – “nor psalms, nor canticles, nor hollow register to praise the queen of night –”?’ He shook his head. ‘What are they supposed to be?’

  I smiled at him. Like most other writers and poets, he had spent so long sitting in front of his VT set that he had forgotten the period when poetry was actually handspun.

  ‘They’re poems, of a sort, obviously.’

  ‘Do you mean she wrote these herself?’

  I nodded. ‘It has been done that way. In fact the method enjoyed quite a vogue for twenty or thirty centuries. Shakespeare tried it, Milton, Keats and Shelley – it worked reasonably well then.’

  ‘But not now,’ Tony said. ‘Not since the VT set. How can you compete with an IBM heavy-duty logomatic analogue? Look at this one, for heaven’s sake. It sounds like T. S. Eliot. She can’t be serious.’