J.G. Ballard - Super-Cannes

'Tough on the Arabs, though.'

'True. But on the whole the immigrant community benefits. Eden-Olympia is a scrupulous equal-opportunities employer, with no racial bias. We hire a disproportionate number of north Africans as gardeners and road sweepers. The immigrant population gains from the clearer heads of the people who do the hiring.'

'A tricky balance to weigh. I assume the therapeutic system began to expand.'

'I was surprised by how quickly. Vigilante actions, incidents of deliberate road rage, thefts from immigrant markets, tangles with the Russian mafiosi. Other therapy groups spread out into the fringes of drug-dealing and prostitution, burglaries and warehouse robberies. A picked group of security men were paid foot soldiers, earning generous bonuses we deducted from the arts and recreations budget. The benefits were astounding. Immune levels rose through the ceiling, within three months there wasn't a trace of insomnia or depression, not a hint of respiratory infections. Corporate profits and equity values began to climb again. The treatment worked.'

'No side effects?'

'A few.' Penrose watched me as he spoke, curious to see how I reacted, and clearly pleased that I had not leapt from my chair in outrage. He spoke matter-of-factly, like an architect setting out the pros and cons of an experimental sewerage system. 'There's a risk element, but it's acceptable. Eden-Olympia has a lot of clout with the local authorities. In many ways we're carrying out tasks the police would do anyway, and we free them for other duties. The sex side can be troubling. A few prostitutes have needed remedial surgery. Your friend Alain Delage is a little too free with his fists. There's a remarkable need for punitive violence hidden away in the senior executive mind.'

'And sex tends to release it?'

'It's meant to, for sound biological reasons. Sex is such a quick route to the psychopathic, the shortest of short cuts to the perverse. We aren't running an adventure playground, but a forcing house designed to expand the psychopathic possibilities of the executive imagination. It needs to be carefully monitored. Sadomasochism, excretory sex-play, body-piercing and wife-pandering can easily veer off into something nasty. It's surprising how many prostitutes object to rape, even of the most stylized kind.'

'Unimaginative of them.'

'Who knows?' Penrose shrugged generously at the world and its curious ways. 'A few times I've had to step in and redirect the therapy. On the whole, though, it's worked well. Almost every senior executive at Eden-Olympia is now involved in the programme, even if only at the margins.'

'And David Greenwood was aware of all this?'

'To a large extent. He and I discussed it with Professor Kalman. The department heads at the clinic are in the know. They can see the benefits, and on the whole David approved. The drug rehab centre in Mandelieu was plagued by smalltime gangsters trying to muscle in on the methadone supply. It was a big help to him when the therapy groups came down from Eden-Olympia and drove them out. The more aggressive road attacks bothered him, but he knew that the violence against the local prostitutes was a special kind of rehabilitation, a form of shock treatment that would send them back to their factory jobs.'

Penrose turned from me, a hand raised to catch a ray of sunlight over his head. He glanced at the opaque mirror behind him, as if waiting for an audience's response. His exposition had been almost playful, testing me with his callous asides. But he was clearly proud of his dubious achievement and its insane logic, a therapeutic breakthrough that would never be awarded the gold medals of the leading medical societies. This lonely commitment to his radical vision gave him an almost bearlike dignity.

'The murders on May 28,' I said. 'Were they part of David's therapy programme?'

'Paul… that's the great mystery of Eden-Olympia. In his deranged way, David was a minor prophet, guiding us into the future. Meaningless violence may be the true poetry of the new millennium. Perhaps only gratuitous madness can define who we are.'

'At the cost of breaking the law? Your senior executives at Eden-Olympia are committing enough crimes to get themselves locked away for the rest of their lives.'

'That's true, on a literal level. Remember that these criminal activities have helped them to rediscover themselves. An atrophied moral sensibility is alive again. Some of my patients even feel guilty, a revelation to them…'

I listened to a car alarm sounding in the avenue, and imagined the French police bursting in to arrest us. 'Guilt? Isn't that a design error? It only needs one CEO to go to the authorities and your therapy programme will be over. Curing a few cases of insomnia will count for nothing.'

'Not just a few. But I agree with you.' Penrose stared over my head, weighing the objection in his mind. 'So far people have been intelligent enough to see the point. They grasp the value of…'

'Beating up an out-of-work Arab? Some labourer with a wife and four children living in a tin shack at a bidonville?'

'Paul…' Pained by my crude questions, Penrose reached out a hand to settle me, like a minister with a restive congregation. 'Sit back and think things through. The twentieth century was an heroic enterprise, but it left us in the dark, feeling our way towards a locked door. Here at Eden-Olympia there's a chink of light, a thin and fierce glow…'

'Our own psychopathy?'

'Whether we like it or not. The twentieth century ended with its dreams in ruins. The notion of the community as a voluntary association of enlightened citizens has died for ever. We realize how suffocatingly humane we've become, dedicated to moderation and the middle way. The suburbanization of the soul has overrun our planet like the plague.'

'Sanity and reason are unworthy of us?'

'No. But a vast illusion, built from mirrors that lie. Today we scarcely know our neighbours, shun most forms of civic involvement and happily leave the running of society to a caste of political technicians. People find all the togetherness they need in the airport boarding lounge and the department-store lift. They pay lip service to community values but prefer to be alone.'

'Isn't that odd, for a social animal?'

'Only in some ways. Homo sapiens is a reformed hunter-killer of depraved appetites, which once helped him to survive. He was partly rehabilitated in an open prison called the first agricultural societies, and now finds himself on parole in the polite suburbs of the city state. The deviant impulses coded into his central nervous system have been switched off. He can no longer harm himself or anyone else. But nature sensibly endowed him with a taste for cruelty and an intense curiosity about pain and death. Without them, he's trapped in the afternoon shopping malls of a limitless mediocrity. We need to revive him, give him back the killing eye and the dreams of death. Together they helped him to dominate this planet.'

'So psychopathy is freedom, psychopathy is fun?'

'A natty slogan, Paul, but it does contain a certain fiery truth.'

Penrose beamed at me, openly pleased with my progress. 'We're creatures of the treadmill: monotony and convention rule everything. In a totally sane society, madness is the only freedom. Our latent psychopathy is the last nature reserve, a place of refuge for the endangered mind. Of course, I'm talking about a carefully metered violence, microdoses of madness like the minute traces of strychnine in a nerve tonic. In effect, a voluntary and elective psychopathy, as you can see in any boxing ring or ice-hockey rink. You've served in the armed forces, Paul. You know that recruits are deliberately brutalized – the drill sergeant's boot and the punishment run give back to young men a taste for pain that generations of socialized behaviour have bred out of them.'