J. Ballard - The Drought

"My dear Charles, I do apologize for sending Quilter to you, but the servants have left me. Can you believe it, the ingratitude! But the Gadarene rush is on, nothing will stop them…" He sighed theatrically, then winked at Ransom and confided coarsely: "Bloody fools, aren't -they? What are they going to do when they get to the sea-swim?"

He sat back with an affected rictus of pain and gazed limply at the decoated ceiling, like a petulant Nero overwhelmed by the absurdity and ingratitude of the world. Ransom watched the performance with a tolerant smile. The pose, he knew, was misleading. Under the soft, cupidlike exterior, Lomax's face was hard and rapacious, there was something almost reptilian about the gray hooded eyes.

"What's the matter?" Ransom asked him. "You look all right."

"Well, I'm not, Charles." Lomax raised his cane and gestured toward his right ear. "A drop of water from that confounded pool jumped into it, for a day I've been carrying the Atlantic Ocean around in my- head. I feel as if I'm turning into an oyster."

He waited patiently as Ransom sat back and laughed at the intended irony of this, eyes half-closed with pleasure. Ransom was one of the few people to appreciate his Fabergé style without any kind of moral reservation-everyone else was faintly shocked, for which Lomax despised them ("Mankind's besetting sin, Charles," he once complained, "is to sit in judgment on its fellows"), or viewed him uneasily from a safe distance. In part this reaction was based on an instinctive revulsion from Lomax's ambiguous physical makeup, and the sense that his whole personality was based on, and even exploited, precisely these areas.

Yet Ransom felt that this was to misjudge him. Just as his own rather stratified personality reflected his preoccupation with the vacuums and drained years of his memory, so Lomax's had been formed by his intense focus upon the immediate present, his crystallization on the razor's edge of the momentary impulse. In a sense, he was a kind of supersaturation of himself, the elegant cartouches of his nostrils and the pomaded waves of his blond hair like the decoration on a baroque pavilion, which seems to contain a greater ambient time than defined by its own space. Suitably pricked, he would probably begin to deliquesce, fizzing out in a brilliant sparkle of contained light.

Ransom opened his valise. "All right, let's have a look. Perhaps I'll find a pearl."

When Lomax settled himself, he examined the ear and syringed it, then pronounced it sound.

"I'm so relieved, Charles, it's your neutral touch. Hippocrates would have been proud of you." He eyed Ransom for a moment, and then continued, his voice more pointed: "While you're here there's another little matter I wanted to raise with you. I've been so busy recently with one thing and another, I haven't had a chance until now." Steadying himself with the cane, he lowered his short legs to the floor, accepting Ransom's hand with a flourish of thanks.

Despite Lomax's pose as an elderly invalid, Ransom could feel the hard muscles tightening under the smooth silk suiting, the supple ease with which he moved off on his dapper feet across the floor. What exactly had kept him busy Ransom could only guess. The white shoes and spotless suit indicated a fairly insulated existence during the previous weeks. Perhaps Lomax saw an opportunity to settle some old scores-although responsible for a concert hall and part of the university in Mount Royal, examples of his Japanese, pagoda-ridden phase some years earlier, Lomax had long been _persona non grata_ with the local authorities. No doubt he had been brooding over his revenge for the way they had allowed a firm of commercial builders to complete the second of these projects after local conservative opinion, outraged by the glass minarets and tiled domes rising over their heads, had marched on the city hall. But the officials concerned would by now be safely at the coast, well out of Lomax's reach.

"What's on your mind?" Ransom asked, as Lomax sprayed the air with a few puffs of scent from a gilt plunger on his dressing table.

"Well, Charles…" Lomax gazed out at the obscured skyline of the city, from which the smoke rose more and more thickly. To his right the bleached white bed of the river, the channel down its center little wider than a canal, wound its way between the riverside villas. "What's going on out there? You know more about these things than I do."

Ransom gestured at the windows. "It's plain enough. You really must have been busy if you haven't noticed. The entire balance of nature has-"

Lomax snapped his fingers irritably. "Charles, don't talk to me about the balance of nature! If it wasn't for people like myself we'd all be living in mud huts." He peered darkly at the city. "A good thing, too, judging by that monstrous heap. I meant what's happening over there, in Mount Royal? I take it most people have left by now?"

"Nine out of ten. Probably more. There can't be much future for them there."

"That's where you're wrong. There's a great deal of future there, believe me." He walked toward Ransom, surveying him with his head on one side, like a couturier inspecting a suspect mannequin, about to remove a single pin and expose the whole shabby pretense. "And what about you, Charles? Why are you still hanging around? I can't understand why you haven't set off for the coast with everyone else."

"Can't you, Richard? I think you probably can. Perhaps we both have some unfinished business to clear up."

Lomax nodded sagely. "Well put, with your usual tact and discretion. Of course I understand. I hate to pry, but I care for you in a strange sort of way. You began with so many advantages in life-advantages of character, I mean- and you've deliberately ignored them. There's true nobility, the Roman virtue. Unlike myself; _I_ haven't a moral notion in my head." Thoughtfully, he added: "Until now, that is. I feel I may at last be coming into my own. Still, what are you actually going to do? You can't just sit on the mud in your little houseboat."

"As a matter of fact I haven't been there for three or four days," Ransom said. "The roads are rather crowded, I felt I could better come to terms with certain problems here. I'll have to leave eventually."

"You really think you will?" Lomax drawled. "Perhaps. Certainly everything is going to be very changed here, Charles."

Ransom lifted his valise off the floor. "I've grasped that much." He pointed to the dusty villas along the river. "They look like mud huts already. We're moving straight back into the past."

Lomax shook his head. "You've got your sense of direction wrong, my boy. It's the future each of us has to come to terms with now." He straightened up. "Why don't you come and live here?"

"Thank you, Richard, no."

"Why not?" Lomax pressed. "Let's be honest, you don't intend to leave-I can see that in your face a mile off. The servants will be back soon, for one damn good reason, if no other-" his eyes flashed knowingly at Ransom "-they're going to find the sea isn't quite so full of water as they think. Back to old Father Neptune, yes. They'll look after you, and Quilter's a willing lad, full of strange notions, though a bit tiresome at times. You'll be able to moon around, come to terms with Judith-"

Ransom walked to the door. "Richard, I already have done. A long time ago. It's you who's missing the point now."

"Wait!" Lomax scurried after him. "Those of us who stay behind have got to rally together, Charles. I'm damned if I'm going to the sea. All that water-a material I despise, utterly unmalleable, fit only for fountains. Also, you'll be able to help me with a little project of mine."

"What's that?"

"Well…" Lomax turned his face slyly to the city. "A slight divertissement I've been toying over for some time. Rather spectacular, as a matter of fact. I'd like to tell you, Charles, but it's probably best to wait until we're more committed to each other."