James Ballard: The Subliminal Man

“The signs, Doctor! Have you see the signs?”

Frowning with annoyance, Dr. Franklin quickened his pace and hurried down the hospital steps toward the line of parked cars. Over his shoulder he caught a glimpse of a thin, scruffy young man in ragged sandals and lime-stained jeans waving to him from the far side of the drive, then break into a run when he saw Franklin try to evade him.

“Dr. Franklin! The signs!”

Head down, Franklin swerved around an elderly couple approaching the outpatients department. His car was over a hundred yards away. Too tired to start running himself, he waited for the young man to catch him up.

“All right, Hathaway, what is it this time?” he snapped irritably. “I’m getting sick of you hanging around here all day.”

Hathaway lurched to a halt in front of him, uncut black hair like an awning over his eyes. He brushed it back with a clawlike hand and turned on a wild smile, obviously glad to see Franklin and oblivious of the latter’s hostility.

“I’ve been trying to reach you at night, Doctor, but your wife always puts the phone down on me,” he explained without a hint of rancor, as if well used to this kind of snub. “And I didn’t want to look for you inside the Clinic.” They were standing by a privet hedge that shielded them from the lower windows of the main administrative block, but Franklin ’s regular rendezvous with Hathaway and his strange messianic cries had already been the subject of amused comment.

Franklin began to say: “I appreciate that-“ but Hathaway brushed this aside. “Forget it, Doctor, there are more important things happening now. They’ve started to build the first big signs! Over a hundred feet high, on the traffic islands just outside town. They’ll soon have all the approach roads covered. When they do we might as well stop thinking.

“Your trouble is that you’re thinking too much,” Franklin told him. “You’ve been rambling about these signs for weeks now. Tell me, have you actually seen one signaling?”

Hathaway tore a handful of leaves from the hedge, exasperated by this irrelevancy. “Of course I haven’t, that’s the whole point, Doctor. - He dropped his voice as a group of nurses walked past, watching him uneasily out of the corners of their eyes. “The construction gangs were out again last night, laying huge power cables. You’ll see them on the way home. Everything’s nearly ready now.”

“They’re traffic signs,” Franklin explained patiently. “The flyover has just been completed. Hathaway, for God’s sake, relax. Try to think of Dora and the child.”

“I am thinking of them!” Hathaway’s voice rose to a controlled scream. “Those cables were 40,000-volt lines, Doctor, with terrific switch gear. The trucks were loaded with enormous metal scaffolds. Tomorrow they’ll start lifting them up all over the city, they’ll block off half the sky! What do you think Dora will be like after six months of that? We’ve got to stop them, Doctor, they’re trying to transistorize our brains!”

Embarrassed by Hathaway’s high-pitched shouting, Franklin had momentarily lost his sense of direction and helplessly searched the sea of cars for his own. “Hathaway, I can’t waste any more time talking to you. Believe me, you need skilled help; these obsessions are beginning to master you.”

Hathaway started to protest, and Franklin raised his right hand firmly. “Listen. For the last time, if you can show me one of these new signs, and prove that it’s transmitting subliminal commands, I’ll go to the police with you. But you haven’t got a shred of evidence, and you know it. Subliminal advertising was banned thirty years ago, and the laws have never been repealed. Anyway, the technique was unsatisfactory; any success it had was marginal. Your idea of a huge conspiracy with all these thousands of giant signs everywhere is preposterous. “

“All right, Doctor.” Hathaway leaned against the bonnet of one of the cars. His moods seemed to switch abruptly from one level to the next. He watched Franklin amiably. “What’s the matter-lost your car?”

“All your damned shouting has confused me. ” Franklin pulled out his ignition key and read the number off the tag: -NYN 299-566-36721--can you see it?”

Hathaway leaned around lazily, one sandal up on the bonnet, surveying the square of a thousand or so cars facing them. “Difficult, isn’t it, when they’re all identical, even the same color? Thirty years ago there were about ten different makes, each in a dozen colors.”

Franklin spotted his car, began to walk toward it. “Sixty years ago there were a hundred makes. What of it? The economies of standardization are obviously bought at a price.9’

Hathaway drummed his palm lightly on the roofs. “But these cars aren’t all that cheap, Doctor. In fact, comparing them on an average income basis with those of thirty years ago they’re about forty percent more expensive. With only one make being produced you’d expect a substantial reduction in price, not an increase.”

“Maybe,” Franklin said, opening his door. “But mechanically the cars of today are far more sophisticated. They’re lighter, more durable, safer to drive.”

Hathaway shook his head skeptically. “They bore me. The same model, same styling, same color, year after year. It’s a sort of communism. “ He rubbed a greasy finger over the windshield. “This is a new one again, isn’t it, Doctor? Where’s the old one-you only had it for three months?”

“I traded it in,” Franklin told him, starting the engine. “If you ever had any money you’d realize that it’s the most economical way of owning a car. You don’t keep driving the same one until it falls apart. It’s the same with everything else-television sets, washing machines, refrigerators. But you aren’t faced with the problem-you haven’t got any. “

Hathaway ignored the gibe, and leaned his elbow on Franklin ’s window. “Not a bad idea, either, Doctor. It gives me time to think. I’m not working a twelve-hour day to pay for a lot of things I’m too busy to use before they’re obsolete. “

He waved as Franklin reversed the car out of its line, then shouted into the wake of exhaust: “Drive with your eyes closed, Doctor!”

On the way home Franklin kept carefully to the slowest of the fourspeed lanes. As usual after his discussions with Hathaway he felt vaguely depressed. He realized that unconsciously he envied Hathaway his footloose existence. Despite the grimy cold-water apartment in the shadow and roar of the flyover, despite his nagging wife and their sick child, and the endless altercations with the landlord and the supermarket credit manager, Hathaway still retained his freedom intact. Spared any responsibilities, he could resist the smallest encroachment upon him by the rest of society, if only by generating obsessive fantasies such as his latest one about subliminal advertising.

The ability to react to stimuli, even irrationally, was a valid criterion of freedom. By contrast, what freedom Franklin possessed was peripheral, sharply demarked by the manifold responsibilities in the center of his life-the three mortgages on his home, the mandatory rounds of cocktail and TV parties, the private consultancy occupying most of Saturday which paid the installments on the multitude of household gadgets, clothes and past holidays. About the only time he had to himself was driving to and from work.

But at least the roads were magnificent. Whatever other criticisms might be leveled at the present society, it certainly knew how to build roads. Eight-, ten- and twelve-lane expressways interlaced across the continent, plunging from overhead causeways into the giant car parks in the center of the cities, or dividing into the great suburban arteries with their multiacre parking aprons around the marketing centers. Together the roadways and car parks covered more than a third of the country’s entire area, and in the neighborhood of the cities the proportion was higher. The old cities were surrounded by the vast, dazzling abstract sculptures of the cloverleafs and flyovers, but even so the congestion was unremitting.