J. G. Ballard

Through the deep grass the faces of the three children glowed like pensive moons. Followed by the sun, I left the grounds of the mansion and entered the deserted park, an ostler leading a large and passive work-horse out to the day's labour. In the dusky streets around me ruled an innocent and open copulation. The entire town mated together, in the leafy bowers that had sprung up among the washing-machines and television sets in the shopping mall, on the settees and divans by the furniture store, in the tropical paradises of the suburban gardens. Seeing these happy pairings, I thought of the cheerful promiscuity to come. I felt a growing sexual need, not only for the young women brushing against me in the crowded street... Below me, through the opalescent surface, I saw the white ghost of the Cessna. Every chair was filled, the line of assistants working like conjurors at the bizarre hairstyles, a splendid confusion of feathers and flared perukes, wings of back-brushed hair, like the plumage of an aviary. Urging them to join me, I raced in circles through the surging water, chased my tail for the children, blew spouts of foam through the sunfilled spray, porpoised to and fro across the river in shallow leaps that stitched the air and water into a table-lace of foam. Screamers trumpeted from the roof of the supermarket, white storks rattled their bills as their surveyed the town from the proscenium of the filling-station. I saw Mrs St Cloud wander happily through the flower-filled streets, her belly smeared with smegma, breasts bruised by the hands of boys. Along the perimeter road the police car approached, headlamps inflaming the afternoon sunlight. Disowned by my father... I began an erratic and increasingly steep slalom. Rejected would-be mercenary pilot, failed Jesuit novice, unpublished writer of pornography… yet for all these failures I had a tenacious faith in myself, a messiah as yet without The entire town mated together, in the leafy bowers that had sprung up among the washing-machines and television sets in the shopping mall, on the settees and divans by the furniture store, in the tropical paradises of the suburban gardens. I felt his strong bones anneal themselves to my own, his blood vent its bright tide into my veins, the semen of his testicles foam as it dashed in a torrent against mine. I wanted to shrink myself to a mote of dust, plunge into this pool I held in my own cyclopean hands, soar down these runs of light to places where light itself was born from this colloquy of dust. Children swung from the branches of the banyan tree, teenagers climbed into the arbours of orchids and gourds into which the abandoned cars had been transformed.