J.G. Ballard - Super-Cannes

'You're thinking of David Greenwood?'

'He's a good example.' Penrose sat up and rubbed at a coffee stain on his white shirt, irritated by the dark smudge. 'The security people here won't admit it, but on May 28 they took at least an hour to react coherently, even when they actually heard gunshots. They couldn't believe that a madman with a rifle was walking into offices and shooting people dead. Their moral perception of evil was so eroded that it failed to warn them of danger. Places like Eden-Olympia are fertile ground for any messiah with a grudge. The Adolf Hitlers and Pol Pots of the future won't walk out of the desert. They'll emerge from shopping malls and corporate business parks.'

'Aren't they the same thing? Eden-Olympia as an air-conditioned Sinai…?'

'Absolutely.' Penrose pointed approvingly at me, the alert student in the front row of the lecture hall. 'We're on the same side, Paul. I want people to come together, not divide themselves into separate enclaves. The ultimate gated community is a human being with a closed mind. We're breeding a new race of deracinated people, internal exiles without human ties but with enormous power. It's this new class that runs our planet. To be successful enough to work at Eden-Olympia calls for rare qualities of self-restraint and intelligence. These are people who won't admit to any weakness and won't allow themselves to fail. When they arrive their health is at a peak, they rarely touch drugs and the glass of wine they have with dinner is a social fossil, like the christening mug and the family silver.'

'But things go wrong?'

'Nothing too obvious at first. But by the end of the first year their energy levels begin to fall. Even a twelve-hour day, six days a week, isn't long enough to get everything done. At the clinic we've watched it happen dozens of times. People complain about the recirculated air and pathogens breeding in the filter fans. Of course, none of the air at Eden-Olympia is recirculated.'

'And the filters? They screen something out.'

'Bird droppings and toilet wastes from aircraft using Nice Airport. Then people worry about security inside their office buildings. That's always a key indicator of internal stress, the obsession with the invisible intruder in the fortress – the other self, the silent brother who clones himself off from the unconscious. The neural networks are starting to uncouple themselves. Committee meetings are rescheduled for Sundays, holidays abandoned after twenty-four hours. Finally they make their way to the clinic. Insomnia, fungal infections, respiratory complaints, inexplicable migraines and attacks of hives…'

'Old-fashioned burnout?'

'That's what we thought with the first cases. Presidents of multinational companies and their CEOs. These people weren't anywhere near burnout.' Penrose sounded almost disappointed as his eyes strayed across the white walls, searching for a blemish. 'But the creative edge was blunted, and they knew it. We urged them to take up skiing or yachting, book a suite at the Martinez and spend the weekend with a crate of champagne and a pretty woman.'

'The perfect prescription,' I commented. 'Did it work?'

'No. There was no response at all. But the health checks threw up a curious fact. There was a very low level of venereal complaints, surprising when you think of these attractive men and women at the height of their powers, and all the business trips around the world.'

'They weren't having much sex?'

'Worse. They weren't having sex at all. We set up a bogus lonely-hearts club, hinting that there were any number of bored secretaries eager for a fling. No takers. The adult film channel, hours of explicit hardcore, did no better. People watched, but in a nostalgic way, as if they were seeing a documentary about morris dancing or roof-thatching, an old craft skill popular with a previous generation. We were desperate. We held corporate parties with a chorus line of kiss-me-quick beauties, but all they did was look at their watches and keep an eye on their briefcases in reception.'

'They'd forgotten they were living in paradise?'

'This was an Eden without a snake. Short of making sexual intercourse a corporate requirement, there was nothing we could do. Meanwhile, immune levels across a hundred boardrooms continued to fall. Faced with all this insomnia and depression, I went back to old-fashioned depth psychology.'

'The leather couch and the lowered blinds?'

'More the armchair and the sun-filled room – psychiatry has moved on.' Penrose stared at me, aware that I was waiting for him to trip himself. For all his jovial asides, his manner was relentlessly aggressive. As he flexed his legs and openly displayed his heavy thigh muscles it occurred to me that psychiatry might be the last refuge of the bully.

'Of course, Wilder,' I apologized. 'I'm behind the times. Jane showed me round Freud's house in Hampstead… dark and very strange. All those figurines and ancient idols.'

'The antechamber to a pharaoh's tomb. The great man was preparing for death, and surrounded himself with a retinue of lesser gods paying tribute to him.' Forgiving me with a raised hand, Penrose went on: 'Classical psychoanalysis starts with the dream, and that was my first breakthrough. I realized that these highly disciplined professionals had very strange dreams. Fantasies filled with suppressed yearnings for violence, and ugly narratives of anger and revenge, like the starvation dreams of death-camp prisoners. Despair was screaming through the bars of the corporate cage, the hunger of men and women exiled from their deeper selves.'

'They wanted more violence in their lives?'

'More violence and cruelty, more drama and rage.' Penrose clenched his huge fists and drummed them on the table, sending the coffee cups into a frenzy. 'But how to satisfy them? Today we shun the psychopathic, the dark side of the sun and those shadows that burn the ground. Sadism, cruelty and the dream of pain belong to our primate ancestors. When they surface in a damaged adolescent with a taste for strangling cats we lock him away for good. The run-down chief executives with their hives and depression were sane and civilized men. Maroon them on a desert island after a plane crash and they'd be the first to perish. Any perverse elements in their lives would have to be applied externally, like a vitamin shot or an antibiotic.'

'Or a small dose of madness?'

'Let's say, a carefully metered measure of psychopathy. Nothing too criminal or deranged. More like an adventure-training course, or a game of touch rugby.'

'Shins will be barked, eyes blacked…'

'But no bones broken.' Penrose nodded approvingly. 'I wish you'd been with me, Paul. You obviously have a feel for this sort of thing. Still, I needed to test the theory, and start rolling this very odd-shaped ball. I could hardly sit at my desk in the clinic and tell some depressed CEO that he'd cure his insomnia by vandalizing a few Mercs in the Palais des Festivals car park. Then a senior manager with Hoechst showed me the way. He'd been out of sorts for months and suffered from attacks of dermatitis, even thought of transferring back to the head office in Düsseldorf.'

'And what saved him? I think I can guess.'

'Good. He saw a woman tourist in Cannes being mugged by an Arab youth, and went to her rescue. While she called the police he gave the fellow a good beating, kicked him so hard that he broke two bones in his right foot. He came in a week later to have the cast removed, and I asked him about the dermatitis. It had gone. He felt buoyant and confident again. Not a trace of depression.'

'He knew why?'

'Absolutely. Whenever he felt the blues coming on he would take one of the security men into La Bocca and provoke an incident with a passing immigrant. It worked a treat. He coopted a couple of close colleagues and they too cheered up. I asked if I could keep a professional eye on the exercise. Soon we had an active therapy group with a dozen senior executives. At weekends they'd start brawls in Maghrebian bars, trash any Arab cars that looked unroadworthy, rough up a Russian pimp or two. The health benefits were remarkable. Bandaged fists and plastered shins on Monday mornings, but clear, confident heads.'