The Sign of the Stripper
As the music stopped they took their seats in the front row of the strip club. Only three feet from him, on a miniature stage decorated like a boudoir, the naked couple were reaching the climax of their sex act. The bored audience hushed behind them, and he was aware of Heller watching him with an almost obsessive intensity. For days he had been numbed by the galvanic energy of this psychotic man, this terrorist with his doomsday dreams of World War III. During the past few days they had followed a deranged itinerary – airport cargo bays, the approach roads to missile silos, secret apartments packed with computer terminals and guarded by a gang of arrogant killers, hoodlum physicists trained at some deviant university. And above all, the strip clubs – he and Heller had visited dozens of these lurid cabins, watching Renata and the women members of the gang run the gamut of every conceivable sexual variation, perversions so abstract that they had become the elements in a complex calculus. Later, in their apartments, these aggressive women would sidle around him like caricatures from an erotic dream. Already he knew that Heller was trying to recruit him into his conspiracy. But were they unconsciously giving him the keys to the sixth house? He stared up at the young woman who was now leaving the stage to scattered applause, showing off the semen on her thigh. He remembered Heller’s frightening violence as he grappled with the young whores in the back of the sports car, assaults as stylized as ballet movements. In the codes of Renata’s body, in the junctions of nipple and finger, in the sulcus of her buttocks, waited the possibilities of a benevolent psychopathology.
The Sign of the Psychiatrist
Professor Rotblat paused as Vanessa Carrington returned from the window and stood behind the young man’s chair, her hands protectively on his shoulders. His face seemed to embody the geometry of totally alien obsessions. ‘The role of psychiatry today is no longer to cure the patient, but to reconcile him to his strengths and weaknesses, to balance the dark side of the sun against the light – a task, incidentally, made no easier for us by an unaccommodating nature. Theoretical physics reminds us of the inherent right-hand bias of all matter. The spin of the electron, the rotation of both the solar system and the smallest sub-atomic particles, the great tides that turn the cosmos itself, all embody this fundamental constant, reflected not only in the deep-rooted popular unease with left-handedness, but in the dextro-rotatory helix of DNA. Given the high energies involved, whether in galaxies or biological systems, any attempt at a contrary direction would have catastrophic results, of a type familiar to us in the case of black holes. A single such individual might become the psychological equivalent of a doomsday weapon . . .’ He waited for the young man to reply. Had he returned to the hospital to remind them that he had transcended the role of patient and was moving into a sinistral realm where the ULTRAC predictions should be read from right to left?
The Sign of the Psychopath
He stood by the stolen Mercedes as the women loaded the ambassador’s body into the trunk. Heller was watching from the elevator doors, the heavy machine-pistol held in both hands. The terrorist’s swarthy face had closed in on itself, exposing the loosening sutures around his temples. During the hours of violence in the apartment he had gripped his pistol as if masturbating himself to a continuous orgasm. The torment inflicted upon this elderly diplomat had clearly served a purpose known only to Renata and her companions. They had watched the murder with an almost dreamlike calm, as if Heller’s deranged cruelty revealed the secret formulas of a new logic, a conceptualized violence that would transform the air disaster and the car crash into events of loving gentleness. Already they planned an ever-more psychotic series of spectacular adventures – the assassination of the visiting party leader, the hijacking of the plutonium convoy, the reprogramming of ULTRAC to destroy the entire commercial and banking system of the West. These women dreamed of World War III like young mothers crooning over their first pregnancies.
The Sign of the Hypodermic
He watched Dr Vanessa’s reflection in the window of the control room as she adjusted the electrodes on his scalp. Her uncertain hands, with their tremor of guilt and affection, summed up all the uncertainties of this dangerous experiment conducted in the converted television studios. Despite Professor Rotblat’s disapproval, she had become a willing conspirator, perhaps out of some confused hope that he would make his escape, embark from the causeways of his own spinal column and fly away across some interior sky. The television director’s face swam through the heavy glass of the control room. During the previous days, as they set up the experiment in the studio laboratory, Tarrant had begun to hide behind these transparent mirrors, as if uncertain of his own reality. Yet he seemed to sympathize with the need to come to terms with this nightmare world of terrorists and cruise missiles, objects seen in a deformed mirror that might one day be reunited in a more meaningful sequence. Multiplied by the ULTRAC computer, the wave-functions of his hallucinating brain would be transmitted on the nationwide channels and provide a new set of operating formulae for their passage through consciousness. He touched Dr Vanessa’s knee reassuringly as she held the hypodermic to the light.
The Sign of the Vibrator
He listened to the monotonous, insect-like buzz of the elegant machine in Renata’s hand. She lay on her back, muttering some complex masturbatory fantasy to herself, for once unaware of his presence. Was she really convinced by these shudders and gasps of her own sexual fulfilment? Since his return to her apartment he had often reflected that sex offered to any would-be tyrant the easiest and most effective means of political take-over. However, he had made his own choice elsewhere. Within a few days the terrorist groups would attempt to start World War III, and the psychological year would move to its climax. Already the subliminal films were ready to be transmitted through the emergency news bulletins. Relaxed now, he looked down at Renata’s straining thighs and pelvis. By the time the television transmission of this exhausting sex act had reached the nearest stars any curious observers there would assume that she was giving birth to this unpleasant machine, offspring of her marriage with the ULTRAC print-outs.
The Sign of the Cruise Missile
He knelt in front of the television set, waiting for the overdue emergency bulletins. By now the skies over central London should have been filled with helicopters, the streets deafened by the treads of armoured troop carriers, the whole panoply of nuclear alert. Waiting patiently, confident that the logic of the new zodiac would be fulfilled, he stared at the silent screen as Renata lay asleep on the bed. Deep in his mind he dreamed of cruise missiles, launched from the surfacing submarines and heading out across the lonely tundra, following the contours of remote arctic fjords. Soon he would be leaving, glad to abandon this planet to its nightmare games. He had played only a small part in this reductive drama. The true zodiac of these people, the constellations of their mental skies, constituted nothing more than a huge self-destructive machine. Leaving the set, he looked down at the young woman. As he placed his hands around her neck, ready to satisfy the faultless logic of the psychological round, he was thinking only of the cruise missiles.
The Sign of the Astronaut
Through the glass window of the isolation ward he watched Dr Vanessa speaking quietly to Professor Rotblat. Her nervous anxiety when the police returned him to the hospital had given way to no more than a neutral and professional concern. He pressed his elbows against the restraining sheet, thinking of Renata’s bloodied body, with its strangely resistant anatomy that he had tried to arrange into a happier and more meaningful geometry. He knew now that he had been tricked by them all, that there had been no nuclear crisis, and that the subliminal messages had been intended only for himself. Had it all been no more than a fantasy, and was the search for the zodiac imposed upon him unintentionally by his too-sudden release from the hospital? However, Renata’s body remained more than a small clinical embarrassment. One day the murder of this intellectual woman gangster might really seed their society’s destruct
ion. He had been trapped by the zodiac they had urged him to construct, but he had escaped through the side door of this young woman’s death. The great round had come full circle, raised him on its shoulder and returned him to the institution. However, they had made no allowance for a wholly unexpected contingency – his recovery of his sanity, a treasure abducted from the twelve mansions. Now he would leave them, and take the left-handed staircase to the roof above his mind, and fly away across the free skies of his inner space.
1978
MOTEL ARCHITECTURE
Pangborn’s suspicion that someone was hiding in the solarium coincided with the arrival of the young repairwoman. The presence of this smartly uniformed but bored girl rattling her metal valise around his wheelchair so frayed his nerves that at first he made no attempt to find the intruder. Her aggressive manner, the interminable whistling she kept up as she wiped the television screens, and her growing interest in Pangborn were unlike anything he had previously had to deal with.
The uniformed women sent by the company to maintain the services within the solarium had been noted for their silence and efficiency. Looking back at the twelve years he had spent in the solarium, Pangborn could hardly recall a single face. In fact, the absence of any kind of personal identity allowed the young women to carry out their intimate chores. Yet even within the hour of her first visit this new recruit had managed to damage the tuning control of the master screen and unsettle Pangborn with her moody gaze. But for this vague and unsettling criticism of him Pangborn would have identified the intruder far earlier and avoided the strange consequences that were to follow.
At the time he had been sitting in his chair in the centre of the solarium, bathing in the warm artificial light that flowed through the ceiling vents and watching the shower sequence from Psycho on the master screen. The brilliance of this tour de force never ceased to astonish Pangborn. He had played the sequence to himself hundreds of times, frozen every frame and explored it in close-up, separately recorded sections of the action and displayed them on the dozen smaller screens around the master display. The extraordinary relationship between the geometry of the shower stall and the anatomy of the murdered woman’s body seemed to hold the clue to the real meaning of everything in Pangborn’s world, to the unstated connections between his own musculature and the immaculate glass and chromium universe of the solarium. In his headier moments Pangborn was convinced that the secret formulas of his tenancy of time and space were contained somewhere within this endlessly repeated clip of film.
So immersed had he been in the mysterious climax of the sequence – the slewing face of the actress pressed against the tiled floor with its rectilinear grid – that at first he ignored the faint noise of breathing nearby, the half-familiar smell of a human being.
Pangborn turned in his wheelchair, expecting to find someone standing behind him, perhaps one of the delivery men who provisioned the solarium’s kitchen and fuel tanks. After twelve years of living entirely on his own, Pangborn had discovered that his senses were sharp enough to detect the presence of a single fly.
Freezing the film on the television screens, he swung his chair and turned his back to them. The circular chamber was empty, like the uncurtained bathroom and kitchen.
But the air had moved, somewhere behind him a heart had beaten, lungs had breathed.
At this moment a key turned in the entrance hall, the glass door was banged back by a clumsily carried vacuum-cleaner, and Vera Tilley made her first appearance.
For all his intimacy with the electronic image of the naked film actress, Pangborn had not looked a real woman in the face for more than ten years. Still unsettled by the suspected intruder, he watched the uniformed girl drop her vacuum-cleaner on to the carpet and root about in her tool-kit. She was barely twenty, with untidy blonde hair pushed up into her cap, eccentric make-up applied to her already large mouth and eyes. On her lapel was an identification badge – under the company’s heraldic device was the name ‘Vera Tilley’ and a photograph of her staring at the camera with a cheeky pout.
She now gazed at Pangborn and the solarium in the same provocative way.
‘When you’re ready you can carry on,’ Pangborn told her. ‘I’m busy at the moment.’
‘So I can see.’ The girl eyed the complex of screens, the huge blow-ups of the dead eyes of the actress surrounded like an electronic altar-piece by the quantified sections of her body on the smaller displays. With a wry glance at Pangborn’s padded contour chair, she remarked: ‘Is she comfortable up there? Can’t you do something for her?’ She flicked a dirty finger-nail at the control console on the arm of the chair. ‘You’ve got enough buttons to stop the world.’
Ignoring her, Pangborn rotated the chair and returned to the screens. For the next hour, as he continued his analysis of the shower sequence, he was still thinking of the intruder. Clearly there was no one hiding in the solarium now, but the presence of this mysterious visitor might in some way be connected with the odd young woman. He could almost believe that she was some new kind of urban terrorist. He listened to her moving around the kitchen, servicing the equipment and replacing the supplies in the food dispensers. Every now and then her whistling was modulated by an ironic note.
When she had cleaned the bathroom she came back and stood between Pangborn and the screens. He could smell his cologne on her wrists.
‘Time to switch off the life-support system,’ she said goodhumouredly. ‘Can you survive for five minutes on your own?’
Pangborn waited impatiently while she swung each of the television sets from the wall and tuned its controls. As he watched this young woman at work, kneeling in front of him on the carpet, he felt strangely vulnerable. Her breathing, her plump calves, the coarse vitality of her body, made him wish that it were possible to dispense with any need to maintain the solarium. He had been celibate for the past fifteen years, and his confused feelings unsettled him. He preferred the secure realities of the television screens to the endlessly bizarre fictions of ordinary life. At the same time Vera Tilley intrigued him. He thought again of the intruder.
‘See you next week,’ she told him as he signed the work schedule. While she packed her valise she watched him with some concern. ‘Don’t you ever get tired of looking at those old films? You ought to go out once in a while. My brother owns a taxi if you ever want one.’
Pangborn waved her away, his eyes on the magnified image of the bathroom floor and the strange contours of the film actress’s cheekbones. But when the door opened he called out: ‘Tell me, I meant to ask – when you arrived, was there anyone waiting outside?’
‘Only if he was invisible.’ Puzzled by Pangborn’s deliberately casual tone, she weighed the valise in her strong hand, as if about to take out her screwdriver and turn down his over-active image control. ‘You’re alone here, Mr Pangborn. Perhaps you saw a ghost . . .’
After she had gone Pangborn lay back in his chair and scanned through the afternoon’s public television programmes. With her slapdash manner, the girl had mistuned the master screen, dappling everything with an intermittent interference pattern, but for once Pangborn was able to ignore this. He turned off the sound and watched the dozens of programmes move past silently.
Once again, unmistakably, he was aware of the presence of someone nearby. The faint voice of another human being hung on the air, the spoor of an unfamiliar body. There was an odd but not unpleasant odour in the solarium. Pangborn left the screens and drove the wheelchair around the chamber, inspecting the kitchen, hall and bathroom. He could see that the solarium was empty, but at the same time he was convinced that someone was watching him.
The girl, Vera Tilley, had unsettled him in a way he had not expected. All his experience, his years spent in front of the television screens, had not prepared him for even the briefest encounter with an actual woman. What would once have been called the ‘real’ world, the quiet streets outside, the private estate of hundreds of similar solaria, made no effort to intrude itself
into Pangborn’s private world and he had never felt any need to defend himself against it.
Looking down at himself, he realized that he had been naked during her visit. Bathed in the ceaseless light of the solarium, he had years ago given up wearing even his loin-slip. So distant and anonymous were the repair-women usually sent by the company that he felt no embarrassment as they moved around him.
However, Vera Tilley had made him aware of himself for the first time. No doubt she had noticed just how she had aroused him. Trying not to think of her, Pangborn stiffened the back of the chair and concentrated on the television screens in front of him. Calmed by the warm light flowing across his bronzed body, he switched off the public channels and returned to his analysis of Psycho. The geometry of the naked actress slumped across the floor of the shower stall provided an endless source of interest, like the most abstract possible of all music, and within a few minutes he was able to lower the back of the chair, Vera Tilley and the mysterious intruder forgotten.
During his twelve years in the solarium Pangborn had never left the light-filled chamber, and recently had hardly even left the chair. For the few minutes each day which he was forced to spend standing in the bathroom he felt strangely heavy and cumbersome, his body an uncouth mass of superfluous musculature suspended as if by a bad sculptor on the slender armature of his bones. Lying back on the chair, he found it hard to believe that the sleek, bronzed figure projected by the monitor camera on to the screens in front of him was that same shaky invalid who faced him in the bathroom mirror. As far as possible Pangborn remained in the chair, wheeling himself into the kitchen, preparing his meals sitting down, in a sense remaking a small second world within the private universe of the solarium.
The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard Page 144