J. G. Ballard - Dream Cargoes

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J.G. BALLARD

DREAM CARGOES

A poor seaman forgets his past, and finds a bizarre new life on a polluted

Caribbean Isle.

Across the lagoon an eager new life was forming, drawing its spectrum of colors

from a palette more vivid than the sun's. Soon after dawn, when Johnson woke in

Captain Galloway's cabin behind the bridge of the Prospero, he watched the lurid

hues, cyanic blues and crimsons, playing against the ceiling above his bunk.

Reflected in the metallic surface of the lagoon, the tropical foliage seemed to

concentrate the Caribbean sunlight, painting on the warm air a screen of

electric tones that Johnson had only seen on the nightclub facades of Miami and

Veracruz.

He stepped onto the tilting bridge of the stranded freighter, aware that the

island's vegetation had again surged forward during the night, as if it had

miraculously found a means of converting darkness into these brilliant leaves

and blossoms. Shielding his eyes from the glare, he searched the six hundred

yards of empty beach that encircled the Prospero, disappointed that there was no

sign of Dr. Chambers' rubber inflatable. For the past three mornings, when he

woke after an uneasy night, he had seen the craft beached by the inlet of the

lagoon. Shaking off the overlit dreams that rose from the contaminated waters,

he would gulp down a cup of cold coffee, jump from the stern rail, and set off

between the pools of leaking chemicals in search of the American biologist. It

pleased Johnson that she was so openly impressed by this once barren island, a

leftover of nature seven miles from the northeast coast of Puerto Rico. In his

modest way he knew that he was responsible for the transformation of the

nondescript atoll, scarcely more than a forgotten garbage dump left behind by

the American Army after World War 11. No one, in Johnson's short life, had ever

been impressed by him, and the biologist's silent wonder gave him the first

sense of achievement he had ever known.

Johnson had learned her name from the labels on the scientific stores in the

inflatable. However, he had not yet approached or even spoken to her,

embarrassed by his rough manners and shabby seaman's clothes, and the engrained

chemical stench that banned him from sailors' bars all over the Caribbean. Now,

when she failed to appear on the fourth morning, he regretted all the more that

he had never worked up the courage to introduce himself.

Through the acid-streaked windows of the bridge house he stared at the terraces

of flowers that hung from the forest wall. A month earlier, when he first

arrived at the island, struggling with the locked helm of the listing freighter,

there had been no more than a few stunted palms growing among the collapsed army

huts and water tanks buried in the dunes. But already, for reasons that Johnson

preferred not to consider, a wholly new vegetation had sprung to life. The

palms rose like flagpoles into the vivid Caribbean air, pennants painted with a

fresh green sap. Around them the sandy floor was -thick With flowering vines

and ground ivy, blue leaves like dappled metal foil, as if some midnight

gardener had watered them with a secret plant elixir as Johnson lay asleep in

his bunk.

He put on Galloway's peaked cap and examined himself in the greasy mirror.

Stepping onto the open deck behind the wheelhouse, he inhaled the acrid chemical

air of the lagoon. At least it masked the odors of the captain's cabin, a

rancid bouquet of ancient sweat, cheap rum, and diesel oil. He had thought

seriously of abandoning Galloway's cabin and returning to his hammock in the

forecastle, but despite the stench he felt that he owed it to himself to remain

in the cabin. The moment that Galloway, with a last disgusted curse, had

stepped into the freighter's single lifeboat, he, Johnson, had become the

captain of this doomed vessel. He had watched Galloway, the four Mexican

crewmen, and the weary Portuguese engineer row off into the dusk, promising

himself that he would sleep in the captain's cabin and take his meals at the

captain's table. After five years at sea, working as cabin boy and deck hand on

the lowest grade of chemical waste carrier, he had a command of his own, this

antique freighter, even if the Prospero's course was the vertical one to the

seabed of the Caribbean.

Behind the funnel the Liberian flag of convenience hung in tatters, its fabric

rotted by the acid air. Johnson stepped onto the stern ladder, steadying

himself against the sweating hull plates, and jumped into the shallow water.

Careful to find his feet, he waded through the bilious green foam that leaked

from the steel drums he had jettisoned from the freighter's deck.

When he reached the clear sand above the tide line he wiped the emerald dye from

his jeans and sneakers. Leaning to starboard in the lagoon, the Prospero

resembled an exploded paint box. The drums of chemical waste on the foredeck

still dripped their effluent through the scuppers. The more sinister belowdecks

cargonameless organic by-products that Captain Galloway had been bribed to carry

and never entered into his manifest-had dissolved the rusty plates and spilled

an eerie spectrum of phosphorescent blues and indigos into the lagoon below.

Frightened of these chemicals, which every port in the Caribbean had rejected,

Johnson had begun to jettison the cargo after running the freighter aground.

But the elderly diesels had seized and the winch had jarred to a halt, leaving

only a few of the drums on the nearby sand with their death's-head warnings and

eroded seams.

Johnson set off along the shore, searching the sea beyond the inlet of the

lagoon for any sign of Dr. Chambers. Everywhere a deranged horticulture was

running riot. Vivid new shoots pushed past the metal debris of old ammunition

boxes, filing cabinets, and truck tires. Strange grasping vines clambered over

the scarlet caps of giant fungi, their white stems as thick as sailors' bones.

Avoiding them, Johnson walked toward an old staff car that sat in an open glade

between the palms. Wheelless, its military markings obliterated by the rain of

decades, it had settled into the sand, vines encircling its roof and windshield.

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