Ballard, J G - High Rise

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HIGH RISE

by J. G. Ballard

flyleaf:

A new forty-story luxury apartment building is both location and protagonist of this

gripping and unforgettable novel. With amenities that include its own movie theater, swimming

pools, supermarket, and elementary school, the building offers a self-contained world of

comfortable living for its 2,000 tenants.

It is only with full occupancy that the residents' repressed antagonisms begin to break

through the surface, at first in such half-playful occurrences as the dropping of debris from the

top floors onto the balconies below. Then, in rapid retallatory succession, violence breaks out in

the halls and stairways, children are abused, a dog is drowned in a swimming pool, and a rich

jeweler is flung to his death from his penthouse. Tenants separate into three rival groupls

relative to the level of their apartments, and inexorably all are carried back into a kind of

stone-age primitivism. We follow about a dozen lives through this terrifying process -- in

particular, the architect who designed the building and lives on its top floor, a middle-echelon

doctor who first realizes what is going on and gives himself up to its new logic, and a TV

producer from the bottom floor who determines to fight his way to the top. By a strange paradox

they continue with their lives in the world outside as if nothing is amiss, clinging all the while

to the hope of making sense of the technological landscape they have helped to create, even as it

crumbles around them.

Reminiscent of William Golding's _Lord of the Flies_, _High-Rise_ is a masterfully enacted

vision of human violence and regression, a novel that will reverberate in the minds of its readers

long after its shocking conclusion.

J. G. BALLARD has published many novels and short stories to critical acclaim here and

abroad. His most recent titles include _The Drowned World_, _The Atrocity Exhibit_, _Love and

Napalm_, and _Crash_.

Jacket illustration by Carlos Ochagavia

Holt, Rinehart and Winston

383 Madison Avenue

New York, New York 10017

First published in the United States in 1977. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

ISBN 0-03-020651-0

Printed in the United States of America

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Contents

1 Critical Mass 7

2 Party Time 25

3 Death of a Resident 40

4 Up! 50

5 The Vertical City 59

6 Danger in the Streets of the Sky 70

7 Preparations for Departure 81

8 The Predatory Birds 94

9 Into the Drop Zone 102

10 The Drained Lake 112

11 Punitive Expeditions 124

12 Towards the Summit 133

13 Body Markings 145

14 Final Triumph 156

15 The Evening's Entertainment 164

16 A Happy Arrangement 171

17 The Lakeside Pavilion 183

18 The Blood Garden 191

19 Night Games 199

1/Critical Mass

Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing reflected on the unusual

events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months.

Now that everything had returned to normal, he was surprised that there had been no obvious

beginning, no point beyond which their lives had moved into a clearly more sinister dimension.

With its forty floors and thousand apartments, its supermarket and swimming-pools, bank and junior

school -- all in effect abandoned in the sky -- the high-rise offered more than enough

opportunities for violence and confrontation. Certainly his own studio apartment on the 25th floor

was the last place Laing would have chosen as an early skirmish-ground. This over-priced cell,

slotted almost at random into the cliff face of the apartment building, he had bought after his

divorce specifically for its peace, quiet and anonymity. Curiously enough, despite all Laing's

efforts to detach himself from his two thousand neighbours and the regime of trivial disputes and

irritations that provided their only corporate life, it was here if anywhere that the first

significant event had taken place -- on this balcony where he now squatted beside a fire of

telephone directories, eating the roast hind-quarter of the alsatian before setting off to his

lecture at the medical school.

While preparing breakfast soon after eleven o'clock one Saturday morning three months

earlier, Dr Laing was startled by an explosion on the balcony outside his living-room. A bottle of

sparkling wine had fallen from a floor fifty feet above, ricocheted off an awning as it hurtled

downwards, and burst across the tiled balcony floor.

The living-room carpet was speckled with foam and broken glass. Laing stood in his bare

feet among the sharp fragments, watching the agitated wine seethe across the cracked tiles. High

above him, on the 31st floor, a party was in progress. He could hear the sounds of deliberately

over-animated chatter, the aggressive blare of a record-player. Presumably the bottle had been

knocked over the rail by a boisterous guest. Needless to say, no one at the party was in the least

concerned about the ultimate destination of this missile -- but as Laing had already discovered,

people in high-rises tended not to care about tenants more than two floors below them.

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Trying to identify the apartment, Laing stepped across the spreading pool of cold froth.

Sitting there, he might easily have found himself with the longest hangover in the world. He

leaned out over the rail and peered up at the face of the building, carefully counting the

balconies. As usual, though, the dimensions of the forty-storey block made his head reel. Lowering

his eyes to the tiled floor, he steadied himself against the door pillar. The immense volume of

open space that separated the building from the neighbouring high-rise a quarter of a mile away

unsettled his sense of balance. At times he felt that he was living in the gondola of a ferris

wheel permanently suspended three hundred feet above the ground.

Nonetheless, Laing was still exhilarated by the high-rise, one of five identical units in

the development project and the first to be completed and occupied. Together they were set in a

mile-square area of abandoned dockland and warehousing along the north bank of the river. The five

high-rises stood on the eastern perimeter of the project, looking out across an ornamental lake --

at present an empty concrete basin surrounded by parking-lots and construction equipment. On the

opposite shore stood the recently completed concert-hall, with Laing's medical school and the new

television studios on either side. The massive scale of the glass and concrete architecture, and

its striking situation on a bend of the river, sharply separated the development project from the

run-down areas around it, decaying nineteenth-century terraced houses and empty factories already

zoned for reclamation.

For all the proximity of the City two miles away to the west along the river, the office

buildings of central London belonged to a different world, in time as well as space. Their glass

curtain-walling and telecommunication aerials were obscured by the traffic smog, blurring Laing's

memories of the past. Six months earlier, when he had sold the lease of his Chelsea house and

moved to the security of the high-rise, he had travelled forward fifty years in time, away from

crowded streets, traffic hold-ups, rush-hour journeys on the Underground to student supervisions

in a shared office in the old teaching hospital.

Here, on the other hand, the dimensions of his life were space, light and the pleasures of

a subtle kind of anonymity. The drive to the physiology department of the medical school took him

five minutes, and apart from this single excursion Laing's life in the high-rise was as self-

contained as the building itself. In effect, the apartment block was a small vertical city, its

two thousand inhabitants boxed up into the sky. The tenants corporately owned the building, which

they administered themselves through a resident manager and his staff.

For all its size, the high-rise contained an impressive range of services. The entire 10th

floor was given over to a wide concourse, as large as an aircraft carrier's flight-deck, which

contained a supermarket, bank and hairdressing salon, a swimming-pool and gymnasium, a well-

stocked liquor store and a junior school for the few young children in the block. High above

Laing, on the 35th floor, was a second, smaller swimming-pool, a sauna and a restaurant. Delighted

by this glut of conveniences, Laing made less and less effort to leave the building. He unpacked

his record collection and played himself into his new life, sitting on his balcony and gazing

across the parking-lots and concrete plazas below him. Although the apartment was no higher than

the 25th floor, he felt for the first time that he was looking down at the sky, rather than up at

it. Each day the towers of central London seemed slightly more distant, the landscape of an

abandoned planet receding slowly from his mind. By contrast with the calm and unencumbered

geometry of the concert-hall and television studios below him, the ragged skyline of the city

resembled the disturbed encephalograph of an unresolved mental crisis.

The apartment had been expensive, its studio living-room and single bedroom, kitchen and

bathroom dovetailed into each other to minimize space and eliminate internal corridors. To his

sister Alice Frobisher, who lived with her publisher husband in a larger apartment three floors

below, Laing had remarked, "The architect must have spent his formative years in a space capsule --

I'm surprised the walls don't curve . . ."

At first Laing found something alienating about the concrete landscape of the project --

an architecture designed for war, on the unconscious level if no other. After all the tensions of

his divorce, the last thing he wanted to look out on each morning was a row of concrete bunkers.

However, Alice soon convinced him of the intangible appeal of life in a luxury high-rise.

Seven years older than Laing, she made a shrewd assessment of her brother's needs in the months

after his divorce. She stressed the efficiency of the building's services, the total privacy. "You

could be alone here, in an empty building -- think of _that_, Robert." She added, illogically,

"Besides, it's full of the kind of people you ought to meet."

Here she was making a point that had not escaped Laing during his inspection visits. The

two thousand tenants formed a virtually homogeneous collection of well-to-do professional people --

lawyers, doctors, tax consultants, senior academics and advertising executives, along with a

smaller group of airline pilots, film-industry technicians and trios of air-hostesses sharing

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apartments. By the usual financial and educational yardsticks they were probably closer to each

other than the members of any conceivable social mix, with the same tastes and attitudes, fads and

styles -- clearly reflected in the choice of automobiles in the parking-lots that surrounded the

high-rise, in the elegant but somehow standardized way in which they furnished their apartments,

in the selection of sophisticated foods in the supermarket delicatessen, in the tones of their

self-confident voices. In short, they constituted the perfect background into which Laing could

merge invisibly. His sister's excited vision of Laing alone in an empty building was closer to the

truth than she realized. The high-rise was a huge machine designed to serve, not the collective

body of tenants, but the individual resident in isolation. Its staff of air-conditioning conduits,

elevators, garbage-disposal chutes and electrical switching systems provided a never-failing

supply of care and attention that a century earlier would have needed an army of tireless

servants.

Besides all this, once Laing had been appointed senior lecturer in physiology at the new

medical school, the purchase of an apartment nearby made sense. It helped him as well to postpone

once again any decision to give up teaching and take up general practice. But as he told himself,

he was still waiting for his real patients to appear -- perhaps he would find them here in the

high-rise? Rationalizing his doubts over the cost of the apartment, Laing signed a ninety-nine-

year lease and moved into his one-thousandth share of the cliff face.

The sounds of the party continued high over his head, magnified by the currents of air

that surged erratically around the building. The last of the wine rilled along the balcony gutter,

sparkling its way into the already immaculate drains. Laing placed his bare foot on the cold tiles

and with his toes detached the label from its glass fragment. He recognized the wine immediately,

a brand of expensive imitation champagne that was sold pre-chilled in the loth-floor liquor store

and was its most popular line.

They had been drinking the same wine at Alice's party the previous evening, in its way as

confused an affair as the one taking place that moment over his head. Only too keen to relax after

demonstrating all afternoon in the physiology laboratories, and with an eye on an attractive

fellow guest, Laing had inexplicably found himself in a minor confrontation with his immediate

neighbours on the 25th floor, an ambitious young orthodontic surgeon named Steele and his pushy

fashion-consultant wife. Half-way through a drunken conversation Laing had suddenly realized that

he had managed to offend them deeply over their shared garbage-disposal chute. The two had

cornered Laing behind his sister's bar, where Steele fired a series of pointed questions at him,

as though seriously disturbed by a patient's irresponsible attitude towards his own mouth. His

slim face topped by a centre parting -- always an indication to Laing of some odd character strain

-- pressed ever closer, and he half-expected Steele to ram a metal clamp or retractor between his

teeth. His intense, glamorous wife followed up the attack, in some way challenged by Laing's

offhand manner, his detachment from the serious business of living in the high-rise. Laing's

fondness for pre-lunch cocktails, his nude sunbathing on the balcony, and his generally raffish

air obviously unnerved her. She clearly felt that at the age of thirty Laing should have been

working twelve hours a day in a fashionable consultancy, and be in every way as respectably self-

aggrandizing as her husband. No doubt she regarded Laing as some kind of internal escapee from the

medical profession, with a secret tunnel into a less responsible world.

This low-level bickering surprised Laing, but after his arrival at the apartment building

he soon recognized the extraordinary number of thinly veiled antagonisms around him. The high-rise

had a second life of its own. The talk at Alice's party moved on two levels -- never far below the

froth of professional gossip was a hard mantle of personal rivalry. At times he felt that they

were all waiting for someone to make a serious mistake.

After breakfast, Laing cleared the glass from the balcony. Two of the decorative tiles had

been cracked. Mildly irritated, Laing picked up the bottle neck, still with its wired cork and

foil in place, and tossed it over the balcony rail. A few seconds later he heard it shatter among

the cars parked below.

Pulling himself together, Laing peered cautiously over the ledge -- he might easily have

knocked in someone's windscreen. Laughing aloud at this aberrant gesture, he looked up at the 31st

floor. What were they celebrating at eleven-thirty in the morning ? Laing listened to the noise

mount as more guests arrived. Was this a party that had accidentally started too early, or one

that had been going on all night and was now getting its second wind? The internal time of the

high-rise, like an artificial psychological climate, operated to its own rhythms, generated by a

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combination of alcohol and insomnia.

On the balcony diagonally above him one of Laing's neighbours, Charlotte Melville, was

setting out a tray of drinks on a table. Queasily aware of his strained liver, Laing remembered

that at Alice's party the previous evening he had accepted an invitation to cocktails. Thankfully,

Charlotte had rescued him from the orthodontic surgeon with the disposal-chute obsessions. Laing

had been too drunk to get anywhere with this good-looking widow of thirty-five, apart from

learning that she was a copywriter with a small but lively advertising agency. The proximity of

her apartment, like her easy style, appealed to Laing, exciting in him a confusing blend of

lechery and romantic possibility -- as he grew older, he found himself becoming more romantic and

more callous at the same time.

Sex was one thing, Laing kept on reminding himself, that the high-rise potentially

provided in abundance. Bored wives, dressed up as if for a lavish midnight gala on the observation

roof, hung around the swimming-pools and restaurant in the slack hours of the early afternoon, or

strolled arm-in-arm along the loth-floor concourse. Laing watched them saunter past him with a

fascinated but cautious eye. For all his feigned cynicism, he knew that he was in a vulnerable

zone in this period soon after his divorce -- one happy affair, with Charlotte Melville or anyone

else, and he would slip straight into another marriage. He had come to the high-rise to get away

from all relationships. Even his sister's presence, and the reminders of their high-strung mother,

a doctor's widow slowly sliding into alcoholism, at one time seemed too close for comfort.

However, Charlotte had briskly put all these fears to rest. She was still preoccupied by

her husband's death from leukaemia, her six-year-old son's welfare and, she admitted to Laing, her

insomnia -- a common complaint in the high-rise, almost an epidemic. All the residents he had met,

on hearing that Laing was a physician, at some point brought up their difficulties in sleeping. At

parties people discussed their insomnia in the same way that they referred to the other built-in

design flaws of the apartment block. In the early hours of the morning the two thousand tenants

subsided below a silent tide of seconal.

Laing had first met Charlotte in the 35th-floor swimming-pool, where he usually swam,

partly to be on his own, and partly to avoid the children who used the 10th-floor pool. When he

invited her to a meal in the restaurant she promptly accepted, but as they sat down at the table

she said pointedly, "Look, I only want to talk about myself."

Laing had liked that.

At noon, when he arrived at Charlotte's apartment, a second guest was already present, a

television producer named Richard Wilder. A thick-set, pugnacious man who had once been a

professional rugby-league player, Wilder lived with his wife and two sons on the 2nd floor of the

building. The noisy parties he held with his friends on the lower levels -- airline pilots and

hostesses sharing apartments -- had already put him at the centre of various disputes. To some

extent the irregular hours of the tenants on the lower levels had cut them off from their

neighbours above. In an unguarded moment Laing's sister had whispered to him that there was a

brothel operating somewhere in the high-rise. The mysterious movements of the air-hostesses as

they pursued their busy social lives, particularly on the floors above her own, clearly unsettled

Alice, as if they in some way interfered with the natural social order of the building, its system

of precedences entirely based on floor-height. Laing had noticed that he and his fellow tenants

were far more tolerant of any noise or nuisance from the floors above than they were from those

below them. However, he liked Wilder, with his loud voice and rugby-scrum manners. He let a needed

dimension of the unfamiliar into the apartment block. His relationship with Charlotte Melville was

hard to gauge -- his powerful sexual aggression was overlaid by a tremendous restlessness. No

wonder his wife, a pale young woman with a postgraduate degree who reviewed children's books for

the literary weeklies, seemed permanently exhausted.

As Laing stood on the balcony, accepting a drink from Charlotte, the noise of the party

came down from the bright air, as if the sky itself had been wired for sound. Charlotte pointed to

a fragment of glass on Laing's balcony that had escaped his brush.

"Are you under attack? I heard something fall." She called to Wilder, who was lounging

back in the centre of her sofa, examining his heavy legs. "It's those people on the 31st floor."

"Which people?" Laing asked. He assumed that she was referring to a specific group, a

clique of over-aggressive film actors or tax consultants, or perhaps a freak aggregation of

dipsomaniacs. But Charlotte shrugged vaguely, as if it was unnecessary to be more specific.

Clearly some kind of demarcation had taken place in her mind, like his own facile identification

of people by the floors on which they lived.

"By the way, what are we all celebrating?" he asked as they returned to the living-room.

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"Don't you know?" Wilder gestured at the walls and ceiling. "Full house. We've achieved

critical mass."

"Richard means that the last apartment has been occupied," Charlotte explained.

"Incidentally, the contractors promised us a free party when the thousandth apartment was sold."

"I'll be interested to see if they hold it," Wilder remarked. Clearly he enjoyed running

down the high-rise. "The elusive Anthony Royal was supposed to provide the booze. You've met him,

I think," he said to Laing. "The architect who designed our hanging paradise."

"We play squash together," Laing rejoined. Aware of the hint of challenge in Wilder's

voice, he added, "Once a week -- I hardly know the man, but I like him."

Wilder sat forward, cradling his heavy head in his fists. Laing noticed that he was

continually touching himself, for ever inspecting the hair on his massive calves, smelling the

backs of his scarred hands, as if he had just discovered his own body. "You're favoured to have

met him," Wilder said. "I'd like to know why. An isolated character -- I ought to resent him, but

somehow I feel sorry for the man, hovering over us like some kind of fallen angel."

"He has a penthouse apartment," Laing commented. He had no wish to become involved in any

tug of war over his brief friendship with Royal. He had met this well-to-do architect, a former

member of the consortium which had designed the development project, during the final stages of

Royal's recovery from a minor car accident. Laing had helped him to set up the complex

callisthenics machine in the penthouse where Royal spent his time, the focus of a great deal of

curiosity and attention. As everyone continually repeated, Royal lived "on top" of the building,

as if in some kind of glamorous shack.

"Royal was the first person to move in here," Wilder informed him. "There's something

about him I haven't put my finger on. Perhaps even a sense of guilt -- he hangs around up there as

if he's waiting to be found out. I expected him to leave months ago. He has a rich young wife, so

why stay on in this glorified tenement?" Before Laing could protest, Wilder pressed on. "I know

Charlotte has reservations about life here -- the trouble with these places is that they're not

designed for children. The only open space turns out to be someone else's car-park. By the way,

doctor, I'm planning to do a television documentary about high-rises, a really hard look at the

physical and psychological pressures of living in a huge condominium such as this one."

"You'll have a lot of material."

"Too much, as always. I wonder if Royal would take part -- you might ask him, doctor. As

one of the architects of the block and its first tenant, his views would be interesting. Your own,

too . . ."

As Wilder talked away rapidly, his words over-running the cigarette smoke coming from his

mouth, Laing turned his attention to Charlotte. She was watching Wilder intently, nodding at each

of his points. Laing liked her determination to stick up for herself and her small son, her

evident sanity and good sense. His own marriage, to a fellow physician and specialist in tropical

medicine, had been a brief but total disaster, a reflection of heaven-only-knew what needs. With

unerring judgment Laing had involved himself with this highly strung and ambitious young doctor,

for whom Laing's refusal to give up teaching -- in itself suspicious -- and involve himself

directly in the political aspects of preventive medicine had provided a limitless opportunity for

bickering and confrontation. After only six months together she had suddenly joined an

international famine-relief organization and left on a three-year tour. But Laing had made no

attempt to follow her. For reasons he could not yet explain, he had been reluctant to give up

teaching, and the admittedly doubtful security of being with students who were still almost his

own age.

Charlotte, he guessed, would understand this. In his mind Laing projected the possible

course of an affair with her. The proximity and distance which the high-rise provided at the same

time, .that neutral emotional background against which the most intriguing relationships might

develop, had begun to interest him for its own sake. For some reason he found himself drawing back

even within this still imaginary encounter, sensing that they were all far more involved with each

other than they realized. An almost tangible network of rivalries and intrigues bound them

together.

As he guessed, even this apparently casual meeting in Charlotte's apartment had been set

up to test his attitude to the upper-level residents who were trying to exclude children from the

35th-floor swimming-pool.

"The terms of our leases guarantee us equal access to all facilities," Charlotte

explained. "We've decided to set up a parents' action group."

"Doesn't that leave me out ?"

"We need a doctor on the committee. The paediatric argument would come much more

forcefully from you, Robert."

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"Well, perhaps . . ." Laing hesitated to commit himself. Before he knew it, he would be a

character in a highly charged television documentary, or taking part in a sit-in outside the

office of the building manager. Reluctant at this stage to be snared into an inter-floor wrangle,

Laing stood up and excused himself. As he left, Charlotte had equipped herself with a checklist of

grievances. Sitting beside Wilder, she began to tick off the complaints to be placed before the

building manager, like a conscientious teacher preparing the syllabus for the next term.

When Laing returned to his apartment, the party on the 31st floor had ended. He stood on

his balcony in the silence, enjoying the magnificent play of light across the neighbouring block

four hundred yards away. The building had just been completed, and by coincidence the first

tenants were arriving on the very morning that the last had moved into his own block. A furniture

moving van was backing into the entrance to the freight elevator, and the carpets and stereo-

speakers, dressing-tables and bedside lamps would soon be carried up the elevator shaft to form

the elements of a private world.

Thinking of the rush of pleasure and excitement which the new tenants would feel as they

gazed out for the first time from their aerial ledge on the cliff face, Laing contrasted it with

the conversation he had just heard between Wilder and Charlotte Melville. However reluctantly, he

now had to accept something he had been trying to repress -- that the previous six months had been

a period of continuous bickering among his neighbours, of trivial disputes over the faulty

elevators and air-conditioning, inexplicable electrical failures, noise, competition for parking

space and, in short, that host of minor defects which the architects were supposed specifically to

have designed out of these over-priced apartments. The underlying tensions among the residents

were remarkably strong, damped down partly by the civilized tone of the building, and partly by

the obvious need to make this huge apartment block a success.

Laing remembered a minor but unpleasant incident that had taken place the previous

afternoon on the loth-floor shopping concourse. As he waited to cash a cheque at the bank an

altercation was going on outside the doors of the swimming-pool. A group of children, still wet

from the water, were backing away from the imposing figure of a cost-accountant from the 17th

floor. Facing him in this unequal contest was Helen Wilder. Her husband's pugnacity had long since

drained any self-confidence from her. Nervously trying to control the children, she listened

stoically to the accountant's reprimand, now and then making some weak retort.

Leaving the bank counter, Laing walked towards them, past the crowded check-out points of

the supermarket and the lines of women under the driers in the hair-dressing salon. As he stood

beside Mrs Wilder, waiting until she recognized him, he gathered that the accountant was

complaining that her children, not for the first time, had been urinating in the pool.

Laing briefly interceded, but the accountant slammed away through the swing doors,

confident that he had sufficiently intimidated Mrs Wilder to drive her brood of children away for

ever.

"Thanks for taking my side -- Richard was supposed to be here." She picked a damp thread

of hair out of her eyes. "It's becoming impossible -- we arrange set hours for the children but

the adults come anyway." She took Laing's arm and squinted nervously across the crowded concourse.

"Do you mind walking me back to the elevator ? It must sound rather paranoid, but I'm becoming

obsessed with the idea that one day we'll be physically attacked . . ." She shuddered under her

damp towel as she propelled the children forward. "It's almost as if these aren't the people who

really live here."

During the afternoon Laing found himself thinking of this last remark of Helen Wilder's.

Absurd though it sounded, the statement had a certain truth. Now and then his neighbours, the

orthodontic surgeon and his wife, stepped on to their balcony and frowned at Laing, as if

disapproving of the relaxed way in which he lay back in his reclining chair. Laing tried to

visualize their life together, their hobbies, conversation, sexual acts. It was difficult to

imagine any kind of domestic reality, as if the Steeles were a pair of secret agents

unconvincingly trying to establish a marital role. By contrast, Wilder was real enough, but hardly

belonged to the high-rise.

Laing lay back on his balcony, watching the dusk fall across the facades of the adjacent

blocks. Their size appeared to vary according to the play of light over their surfaces. Sometimes,

when he returned home in the evening from the medical school, he was convinced that the high-rise

had managed to extend itself during the day. Lifted on its concrete legs, the forty-storey block

appeared to be even higher, as if a group of off-duty construction workers from the television

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studios had casually added another floor. The five apartment buildings on the eastern perimeter of

the mile-square project together formed a massive palisade that by dusk had already plunged the

suburban streets behind them into darkness.

The high-rises seemed almost to challenge the sun itself -- Anthony Royal and the

architects who had designed the complex could not have foreseen the drama of confrontation each

morning between these concrete slabs and the rising sun. It was only fitting that the sun first

appeared between the legs of the apartment blocks, raising itself over the horizon as if nervous

of waking this line of giants. During the morning, from his office on the top floor of the medical

school, Laing would watch their shadows swing across the parking-lots and empty plazas of the

project, sluice-gates opening to admit the day. For all his reservations, Laing was the first to

concede that these huge buildings had won their attempt to colonize the sky.

Soon after nine o'clock that evening, an electrical failure temporarily blacked out the

9th, 10th and 11th floors. Looking back on this episode, Laing was surprised by the degree of

confusion during the fifteen minutes of the blackout. Some two hundred people were present on the

10th floor concourse, and many were injured in the stampede for the elevators and staircases. A

number of absurd but unpleasant altercations broke out in the darkness between those who wanted to

descend to their apartments on the lower levels and the residents from the upper floors who

insisted on escaping upwards into the cooler heights of the building. During the blackout two of

the twenty elevators were put out of action. The air-conditioning had been switched off, and a

woman passenger trapped in an elevator between the 10th and nth floors became hysterical, possibly

the victim of a minor sexual assault -- the restoration of light in due course revealed its crop

of illicit liaisons flourishing in the benevolent conditions of total darkness like a voracious

plant species.

Laing was on his way to the gymnasium when the power failed. Uneager to join the mêlée on

the concourse, he waited in a deserted classroom of the junior school. Sitting alone at one of the

children's miniature desks, surrounded by the dim outlines of their good-humoured drawings pinned

to the walls, he listened to their parents scuffling and shouting in the elevator lobby. When the

lights returned he walked out among the startled residents, and did his best to calm everyone

down. He supervised the transfer of the hysterical woman passenger from the elevator to a lobby

sofa. The heavy-boned wife of a jeweller on the 40th floor, she clung powerfully to Laing's arm,

only releasing him when her husband appeared.

As the crowd of residents dispersed, their fingers punching the elevator destination

buttons, Laing noticed that two children had sheltered during the blackout in another of the

classrooms. They were standing now in the entrance to the swimming-pool, backing away defensively

from the tall figure of the 17th-floor cost-accountant. This self-appointed guardian of the water

held a long-handled pool skimmer like a bizarre weapon.

Angrily, Laing ran forward. But the children were not being driven from the pool. They

stepped aside when Laing approached. The accountant stood by the water's edge, awkwardly reaching

the skimmer across the calm surface. At the deep end three swimmers, who had been treading water

during the entire blackout, were clambering over the side. One of them, he noticed without

thinking, was Richard Wilder. Laing took the handle of the skimmer. As the children watched, he

helped the accountant extend it across the water.

Floating in the centre of the pool was the drowned body of an Afghan hound.

2/Party Time

During these days after the drowning of the dog, the air of over-excitement within the

high-rise gradually settled itself, but to Dr Laing this comparative calm was all the more

ominous. The swimming-pool on the 10th floor remained deserted, partly, Laing assumed, because

everyone felt that the water was contaminated by the dead Afghan. An almost palpable miasma hung

over the slack water, as if the spirit of the drowned beast was gathering to itself all the forces

of revenge and retribution present within the building.

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On his way to the medical school a few mornings after the incident, Laing looked in at the

10th-floor concourse. After booking a squash court for his weekly game that evening with Anthony

Royal, he walked towards the entrance of the swimming-pool. He remembered the panic and stampede

during the blackout. By contrast, the shopping mall was now almost empty, a single customer

ordering his wines at the liquor store. Laing pushed back the swing doors and strolled around the

pool. The changing cubicles were closed, the curtains drawn across the shower stalls. The official

attendant, a retired physical-training instructor, was absent from his booth behind the diving-

boards. Evidently the profanation of his water had been too much for him.

Laing stood by the tiled verge at the deep end, under the unvarying fluorescent light. Now

and then, the slight lateral movement of the building in the surrounding airstream sent a warning

ripple across the flat surface of the water, as if in its pelagic deeps an immense creature was

stirring in its sleep. He remembered helping the accountant to lift the Afghan from the water, and

being surprised by its lightness. With its glamorous plumage drenched by the chlorinated water,

the dog had lain like a large stoat on the coloured tiles. While they waited for the owner, a

television actress on the 37th floor, to come down and collect the dog Laing examined it

carefully. There were no external wounds or marks of restraint. Conceivably it had strayed from

its apartment into a passing elevator and emerged on to the shopping concourse during the

confusion of the power failure, fallen into the swimming-pool and died there of exhaustion. But

the explanation hardly fitted the facts. The blackout had lasted little more than fifteen minutes,

and a dog of this size was powerful enough to swim for hours. Besides, it could simply have stood

on its hind legs in the shallow end. But if it had been thrown into the pool, and held below the

water in the darkness by a strong swimmer . . .

Surprised by his own suspicions, Laing made a second circuit of the pool. Something

convinced him that the dog's drowning had been a provocative act, intended to invite further

retaliation in its turn. The presence of the fifty or so dogs in the high-rise had long been a

source of irritation. Almost all of them were owned by residents on the top ten floors -- just as,

conversely, most of the fifty children lived in the lower ten. Together the dogs formed a set of

over-pampered pedigree pets whose owners were not noticeably concerned for their fellow tenants'

comfort and privacy. The dogs barked around the car-parks when they were walked in the evening,

fouling the pathways between the cars. On more than one occasion elevator doors were sprayed with

urine. Laing had heard Helen Wilder complain that, rather than use their five high-speed elevators

which carried them from a separate entrance lobby directly to the top floors, the dog-owners

habitually transferred to the lower-level elevators, encouraging their pets to use them as

lavatories.

This rivalry between the dog-owners and the parents of small children had in a sense

already polarized the building. Between the upper and lower floors the central mass of apartments -

- roughly from the loth floor to the 30th -- formed a buffer state. During the brief interregnum

after the dog's drowning a kind of knowing calm presided over the middle section of the high-rise,

as if the residents had already realized what was taking place within the building.

Laing discovered this when he returned that evening from the medical school. By six

o'clock the section of the parking-lot reserved for the 20th to the 25th floors would usually be

full, forcing him to leave his car in the visitors' section three hundred yards from the building.

Reasonably enough, the architects had zoned the parking-lots so that the higher a resident's

apartment (and consequently the longer the journey by elevator), the nearer he parked to the

building. The residents from the lower floors had to walk considerable distances to and from their

cars each day -- a sight not without its satisfaction, Laing had noticed. Somehow the high-rise

played into the hands of the most petty impulses.

That evening, however, as he reached the already crowded car-park, Laing was surprised by

his fellow tenants' tolerant behaviour. He arrived at the same time as his neighbour Dr Steele. By

rights they should have raced each other for the last vacant place, and taken separate elevators

to their floor. But tonight each beckoned the other forward in a show of exaggerated gallantry and

waited while the other parked. They even walked together to the main entrance.

In the lobby a group of tenants stood outside the manager's office, remonstrating noisily

with his secretary. The electrical supply system on the gth floor was still out of order, and at

night the floor was in darkness. Fortunately it was light until late in the summer evening, but

the inconvenience to the fifty residents on the floor was considerable. None of the appliances in

their apartments would function, and the limits of co-operation with their neighbours on the

floors above and below had soon been reached.

Steele watched them unsympathetically. Although he was in his late twenties, his manner

was already securely middle-aged. Laing found himself fascinated by his immaculate centre parting,

almost an orifice.

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"They're always complaining about something," Steele confided to Laing as they stepped

into an elevator. "If it isn't this, it's that. They seem unwilling to accept that the services in

a new building take time to settle down."

"Still, it must be a nuisance to have no power."

Steele shook his head. "They persistently overload the master-fuses with their elaborate

stereo-systems and unnecessary appliances. Electronic baby-minders because the mothers are too

lazy to get out of their easy chairs, special mashers for their children's food . . ."

Laing waited for the journey to end, already regretting his new-found solidarity with his

neighbour. For some reason, Steele made him nervous. Not for the first time, he wished he had

purchased an apartment above the 30th floor. The high-speed elevators were bliss.

"The children here look well enough to me," he remarked when they stepped out at the 25th

floor.

The surgeon held his elbow in a surprisingly powerful grip. He smiled reassuringly,

flashing a mouth like a miniature cathedral of polished ivory.

"Believe me, Laing. I see their teeth."

The punitive tone in Steele's voice, as if he were describing a traditionally feckless

band of migrant workers rather than his well-to-do neighbours, came as a surprise to Laing. He

knew casually a few of the 9th floor residents -- a sociologist who was a friend of Charlotte

Melville's, and an air-traffic controller who played string trios with friends on the 25th floor,

an amusing and refined man to whom Laing often talked as he carried his cello into the elevator.

But distance lent disenchantment.

The extent of this separation of loyalties was brought home to Laing when he set off to

play squash with Anthony Royal. He took an elevator up to the 40th floor and, as usual, arrived

ten minutes early so that he could go out on to the roof. The spectacular view always made Laing

aware of his ambivalent feelings for this concrete landscape. Part of its appeal lay all too

clearly in the fact that this was an environment built, not for man, but for man's absence.

Laing leaned against the parapet, shivering pleasantly in his sports-clothes. He shielded

his eyes from the strong air currents that rose off the face of the high-rise. The cluster of

auditorium roofs, curving roadway embankments and rectilinear curtain-walling formed an intriguing

medley of geometries -- less a habitable architecture, he reflected, than the unconscious diagram

of a mysterious psychic event.

Fifty feet away to Laing's left a cocktail party was in progress. Two buffet tables

covered with white cloths had been laid with trays of canapés and glasses, and a waiter was

serving drinks behind a portable bar. Some thirty guests in evening dress stood about talking in

small groups. For a few minutes Laing ignored them, absent-mindedly tapping his rackets case on

the parapet, but something about the hard, over-animated chatter made him turn. Several of the

guests were looking in his direction, and Laing was certain that they were talking about him. The

party had moved nearer, and the closest guests were no more than ten feet away. All were residents

from the top three floors. Even more unusual was the self-conscious formality of their dress. At

none of the parties in the high-rise had Laing seen anyone dressed in anything other than casual

wear, yet here the men wore dinner-jackets and black ties, the women floor-length evening dresses.

They carried themselves in a purposeful way, as if this were less a party than a planning

conference.

Almost within arm's reach, the immaculate figure of a well-to-do art dealer was squaring

up to Laing, the lapels of his dinner-jacket flexing like an over-worked bellows. On either side

of him were the middle-aged wives of a stock-exchange jobber and a society photographer, staring

distastefully at Laing's white sports-clothes and sneakers.

Laing picked up his rackets case and towel bag, but his way to the staircase was blocked

by the people around him. The entire cocktail party had moved along the roof, and the waiter now

stood alone between the bar and the buffet tables.

Laing leaned against the parapet, for the first time conscious of the immense distance to

the ground below. He was encircled by a heavily breathing group of his fellow residents, so close

that he could smell the medley of expensive scents and after-shaves. He was curious as to what

exactly they were going to do, but at the same time was aware that at any moment a meaningless act

of violence might occur.

"Dr Laing . . . Ladies, would you release the doctor?" At what seemed the last moment, a

familiar figure with adroit hands and a soft walk called out reassuringly. Laing recognized the

jeweller whose hysterical wife he had briefly examined during the power failure. As he greeted

Laing the guests casually dispersed, like a group of extras switched to another scene. Without

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Ballard, J G - High Rise

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