High-Rise

by J. G. Ballard

  He waved to Royal with a quick movement of his hand, as if flicking a dart at him, dismissing him for ever. The torches swung away from Royal, and everyone returned to the more serious business of tormenting the two guests.

  Royal watched from the darkness as they argued over the prisoners. The confrontation with Pangbourne was over -- or, more exactly, had never taken place. A simple ruse had unnnerved him, leaving him with the uncertainty of whether or not he really feared Wilder. He had been humiliated, but in a sense this was only just. The gynaecologist was the man for their hour. No zoo would survive for long with Pangbourne as its keeper, but he would provide a node of violence and cruelty that would keep alive in others the will to survive.

  Let the psychotics take over. They alone understood what was happening. Holding to the alsatian, Royal let the dog drag him away towards the safety of the darkness near the sculpture-garden. The white forms of the birds were massed together on every ledge and parapet. Royal listened to the whimpering dogs. He had no means now of feeding them. The glass doors of the penthouse reflected the swerving birds, like the casements of a secret pavilion. He would close down his apartment, block the staircase and retreat to the penthouse, perhaps taking Mrs Wilder with him as his servant. Here he would preside over the high-rise, taking up his last tenancy in the sky.

  He unlocked the gate of the sculpture-garden and moved through the darkness among the statues, releasing the dogs. One by one they scrambled away, until only Royal and the birds were left.

  16/A Happy Arrangement

  An uncertain scene, Robert Laing decided. He could no longer trust his senses. A curious light, grey and humid but at the same time marbled by a faint interior luminosity, hung over the apartment. As he stood among the garbage-sacks in the kitchen, trying to coax a few drops of water from the tap, he peered over his shoulder at the dull fog that stretched like a curtain across the sitting-room, almost an extension of his own mind. Not for the first time he was unsure what time of day it was. How long had he been up ? Laing vaguely remembered sleeping on the tartan rug that lay on the kitchen floor, his head pillowed on a garbage-sack between the table legs. He had been wandering about the bedroom where his sister Alice lay asleep, but whether he had woken five minutes ago or the previous day Laing had no means of telling.

  He shook his watch, picking at the fractured dial with a grimy finger-nail. The watch had stopped during a scuffle in the 25th floor lobby several days earlier. Although he had forgotten the exact moment, the hands of this broken watch contained the one point of finite time left to him, like a fossil cast on to a beach, crystallizing -for ever a brief sequence of events within a vanished ocean. However, it barely mattered now what time it was -- anything rather than night, when it was too terrifying to do more than shelter in the apartment, crouching behind his dilapidated barricade.

  Laing turned the cold water tap on and off, listening to the faintly changing tone. At rare intervals, perhaps for a single minute during the day, a green, algae-stained liquid flowed from the tap. These small columns of water, moving up and down the huge system of pipes that ran throughout the building, announced their arrivals and departures with faint changes of note.

  Listening to this remote and complex music had sharpened Laing's ears, a sensitivity that extended to almost any kind of sound within the building. By contrast his sight, dulled by being used chiefly at night, presented him with an increasingly opaque world.

  Little movement took place within the high-rise. As Laing often reminded himself, almost everything that could happen had already taken place. He left the kitchen and squeezed himself into the narrow niche between the front door and the barricade. He placed his right ear to the sounding panel of the wooden door. From the minute reverberations he could tell instantly if a marauder was moving through the abandoned apartments nearby. During the brief period each afternoon when he and Steele emerged from their apartments -- a token remembrance of that time when people had actually left the building -- they would take turns standing with their hands pressed against the metal walls of an elevator shaft, feeling the vibrations transmitted to their bodies, picking up a sudden movement fifteen floors above or below. Crouched on the staircase with their fingers on the metal rails, they listened to the secret murmurs of the building, the distant spasms of violence that communicated themselves like bursts of radiation from another universe.

  The high-rise quivered with these tremors, sinister trickles of sound as a wounded tenant crawled up a stairway, a trap closed around a wild dog, an unwary prey went down before a club.

  Today, however, befitting this timeless zone with its uncertain light, there was no sound at all. Laing returned to the kitchen and listened to the water-pipes, part of a huge acoustic system operated by thousands of stops, this dying musical instrument they had once all played together. But everything was quiet. The residents of the high-rise remained where they were, hiding behind the barricades in their apartments, conserving what was left of their sanity and preparing themselves for the night. By now what violence there was had become totally stylized, spasms of cold and random aggression. In a sense life in the high-rise had begun to resemble the world outside -- there were the same ruthlessness and aggression concealed within a set of polite conventions.

  Still uncertain how long he had been awake, or what he had been doing half an hour earlier, Laing sat down among the empty bottles and refuse on the kitchen floor. He gazed up at the derelict washing-machine and refrigerator, now only used as garbage-bins. He found it hard to remember what their original function had been. To some extent they had taken on a new significance, a role that he had yet to understand. Even the run-down nature of the high-rise was a model of the world into which the future was carrying them, a landscape beyond technology where everything was either derelict or, more ambiguously, recombined in unexpected but more meaningful ways. Laing pondered this -- sometimes he found it difficult not to believe that they were living in a future that had already taken place, and was now exhausted.

  Squatting beside his dried-up water-hole like a desert nomad with all the time in the world, Laing waited patiently for the taps to flow. He picked at the dirt on the backs of his hands. Despite his tramp-like appearance he dismissed the notion of using the water to wash. The high-rise stank. None of the lavatories or garbage-disposal chutes _were_ working, and a faint spray of urine hung over the face of the building, drifting across the tiers of balconies.

  Overlaying this characteristic odour, however, was a far more ambiguous smell, putrid and sweet, that tended to hover around empty apartments, and which Laing chose not to investigate too closely.

  For all its inconveniences, Laing was satisfied with life in the high-rise. Now that so many of the residents were out of the way he felt able to relax, more in charge of himself and ready to move forward and explore his life. How and where exactly, he had not yet decided.

  His real concern was with his sister. Alice had fallen ill with a non-specific malaise, and spent her time lying on the mattress in Laing's bedroom or wandering half-naked around the apartment, her body shuddering like an oversensitive seismograph at imperceptible tremors that shook the building. When Laing drummed on the waste-pipe below the sink, sending a hollow drone through the empty pipe, Alice called out from the bedroom in her thin voice.

  Laing went in to see her, picking his way among the piles of kindling he had made from chopped-up furniture. He enjoyed cutting up the chairs and tables.

  Alice pointed to him with a stick-like hand. "The noise -- you're signalling again to someone. Who is it now?"

  "No one, Alice. Who do you think we know?"

  "Those people on the lower floors. The ones you like."

  Laing stood beside her, uncertain whether to sit on the mattress. His sister's face was as greasy as a wax lemon. Trying to focus on him, her tired eyes drifted about in her head like lost fish. It crossed his mind briefly that she might be dying -- during the past two days they had eaten no more than a few fillets
of canned smoked salmon, which he had found under the floorboards in an empty apartment. Ironically, the standard of cuisine in the apartment building had begun to rise during these days of its greatest decline, as more and more delicacies came to light.

  However, food was a secondary matter, and Alice was very much alive in other ways. Laing enjoyed her wheedling criticisms of him, as he tried to satisfy her pointless whims. All this was a game, but he relished the role of over-dutiful servant dedicated to a waspish mistress, a devoted menial whose chief satisfaction was a total lack of appreciation and the endless recitation of his faults. In many ways, in fact, his relationship with Alice recapitulated that which his wife had unthinkingly tried to create, hitting by accident on the one possible source of harmony between them, and which Laing had rejected at the time. Within the high-rise, he reflected, his marriage would have succeeded triumphantly.

  "I'm trying to find some water, Alice. You'd like a little tea?"

  "The kettle smells."

  "I'll wash it for you. You mustn't become dehydrated."

  She nodded grudgingly. "What's been happening?"

  "Nothing . . . It's already happened." A ripe but not unpleasant smell rose from Alice's body. "Everything is starting to get back to normal."

  "What about Alan -- you said you'd look for him."

  "I'm afraid he's gone." Laing disliked these references to Alice's husband. They introduced a discordant note. "I found your apartment but it's empty now."

  Alice turned her head away, indicating that she had seen enough of her brother. Laing bent down and gathered together the kindling she had scattered on the floor beside the mattress. These dining-room chair-legs, well impregnated with glue and varnish, would burn briskly. Laing had looted the chairs from Adrian Talbot's apartment after the psychiatrist's disappearance. He was grateful for this reproduction Hepplewhite -- the conventional tastes of the middle-floor residents had served them well. By contrast, those on the lower levels found themselves with a clutter of once-fashionable chromium tubing and undressed leather, useless for anything but sitting on.

  All cooking was now done over fires which the residents lit for themselves on their balconies, or in the artificial fireplaces. Laing carried the sticks on to the balcony. As he squatted there he realized that he had nothing to cook. The secret cache of cans he had long ago been obliged to surrender to the orthodontic surgeon next door. In fact, Laing's position was secure thanks only to the morphine ampoules he had concealed.

  Although Steele frightened him with his unpredictable cruelties, Laing had attached himself to him out of necessity. So many people had gone, or dropped out of the struggle altogether. Had they deserted the high-rise for the world outside? Laing was sure that they had not. In a sense he depended on the uncertainties of his relationship with the dentist, following his murderous swings like a condemned prisoner in love with a moody jailer. During the previous weeks Steele's behaviour had become frightening. The deliberately mindless assaults on anyone found alone or unprotected, the infantile smearing of blood on the walls of empty apartments --

  all these Laing watched uneasily. Since his wife's disappearance Steele had been as tautly strung as the huge crossbows which he constructed from piano wire and mounted in the lobbies and corridors, their vicious arrows fashioned from the shafts of golf-clubs. At the same time, however, Steele remained strangely calm, as if pursuing some unknown quest.

  Steele slept in the afternoon, giving Laing a chance to prospect for water. As he picked up the kettle he heard Alice call out to him, but when he returned to her she had already forgotten what she wanted.

  She held out her hands to him. Usually Laing would have rubbed them for her, trying to kindle a little warmth in them, but out of some kind of peculiar loyalty to the dentist he made no effort to help Alice. This petty show of callousness, his declining personal hygiene, and even his deliberate neglect of his health, were elements in a system he made no attempt to change. For weeks all he had been able to think about were the next raid, the next apartment to be ransacked, the next tenant to be beaten up. He enjoyed watching Steele at work, obsessed with these expressions of mindless violence. Each one brought them a step closer to the ultimate goal of the high-rise, a realm where their most deviant impulses were free at last to exercise themselves in any way they wished. At this point physical violence would cease at last.

  Laing waited for Alice to subside into half-consciousness. Looking after his sister was taking up more of his energy than he could afford. If she was dying there was little he could do, apart from giving her a terminal gram of morphine and hiding her body before Steele could mutilate it. Dressing up corpses and setting them in grotesque tableaux was a favourite pastime of the dentist's. His imagination, repressed by all the years of reconstructing his patients' mouths, came alive particularly when he was playing with the dead. The previous day Laing had blundered into an apartment and found him painting a bizarre cosmetic mask on the face of a dead account-executive, dressing the body like an overblown drag-queen in a voluminous silk nightdress. Given time, and a continuing supply of subjects, the dentist would repopu-late the entire high-rise.

  Carrying the kettle, Laing let himself out of the apartment. The same dim light, pearled by a faint interior glow, filled the corridor and elevator lobby, a miasma secreted by the high-rise itself, distillation of all its dead concrete. The walls were spattered with blood, overlaying the aerosolled graffiti like the tachist explosions in the paintings that filled the top-floor apartments. Broken furniture and unravelled recording tape lay among the garbage-sacks piled against the walls.

  Laing's feet crackled among the polaroid negatives scattered about the corridor floor, each recording a long-forgotten act of violence. As he paused, wary of attracting the attention of a watching predator, the staircase doors opened and a man in a flying-jacket and fleece-lined boots entered the lobby.

  Watching Paul Crosland stride purposefully across the debris-strewn carpet, Laing realized that the television announcer had just returned, as he did every day, from reading the lunch-time news bulletin at the television station. Crosland was the only person to leave the high-rise, maintaining a last tenuous link with the outside world. Even Steele side-stepped him discreetly. A few people still watched him read the news on their battery-powered sets, crouching among the garbage-sacks behind their barricades, perhaps still hoping that even now Crosland might suddenly depart from his set text and blurt out to the world at large what was happening within the high-rise.

  Inside the staircase Laing had set up a dog trap, using a tropical mosquito-net he had lifted from an anthropologist's apartment three floors above. A plague of dogs had descended the building from their breeding grounds on the upper floors. Laing had no hopes of catching the larger dogs in the spring-loaded contraption, but a dachshund or pekinese might become entangled in the nylon mesh.

  The staircase was unguarded. Taking a chance, Laing made his way down the steps to the floor below. The lobby was blocked by a barricade of furniture, and he turned into the corridor that served the ten apartments in the northern wing of the building.

  Three doors along, he entered an abandoned apartment. The rooms were empty, the furniture and fittings long since stripped away. In the kitchen Laing tried the taps. With his sheath-knife he cut the hoses of the washing-machine and dishwasher, collecting a cupful of metallic water. In the bathroom the naked body of an elderly tax-specialist lay on the tiled floor. Without thinking, Laing stepped over him. He wandered around the apartment, picking up an empty whisky decanter on the floor. A faint odour of malt whisky clung to it, an almost intoxicating nostalgia.

  Laing moved to the next apartment, also abandoned and gutted. In a bedroom he noticed that the carpet covered a small circular depression. Suspecting a secret food cache, he rolled back the carpet, and found that a manhole had been drilled through the wooden floorboards and concrete deck to the apartment below.

  After sealing the door, Laing lay down on the floor an
d peered into the room beneath. A circular glass table, by a miracle still intact, reflected his blood-spattered shirt and bearded face, staring up from what seemed to be the bottom of a deep well. Beside the table were two overturned armchairs. The balcony doors were closed, and curtains hung on either side of the windows. Looking down at this placid scene, Laing felt that he had accidentally been given a glimpse into a parallel world, where the laws of the high-rise were suspended, a magical domain where these huge buildings were furnished and decorated but never occupied.

  On an impulse, Laing eased his thin legs through the manhole. He sat on the ledge and swung himself down into the room below. Standing on the glass table, he surveyed the apartment.

  Hard experience told him that he was not alone -- somewhere a miniature bell was ringing. A faint scratching came from the bedroom, as if a small animal was trying to escape from a paper sack.

  Laing pushed back the bedroom door. A red-haired woman in her mid-thirties lay fully dressed on the bed, playing with a persian cat. The creature wore a velvet collar and bell, and its lead was attached to the woman's bloodied wrist. The cat vigorously licked at the bloodstains on its coat, and then seized the woman's wrist and gnawed at the thin flesh, trying to reopen a wound.

  The woman, whom Laing vaguely recognized as Eleanor Powell, made no effort to stop the cat from dining off her flesh. Her serious face, with its blue cyanosed hue, was inclined over the cat like that of a tolerant parent watching a child at play.

  Her left hand lay across the silk bedspread, touching a pencil and reporter's note-pad.

  Facing her, at the foot of the bed, were four television sets. They were tuned to different stations, but three of the screens were blank. On the fourth, a battery-powered set, the out-of-focus picture of a horse-race was being projected soundlessly.

  Uninterested in her reviewing, Eleanor teased her bloodied wrist into the cat's mouth. The creature was ravenous, tearing excitedly at the flesh around the knuckle. Laing tried to pull the cat away, but Eleanor jerked at the lead, urging it back on to her wound.