Hello America. J. G. Ballard

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       6 The Great American Desert

      At seven o’clock that evening, when the air at last began to cool, a small reconnaissance party set out through the shaded streets to the north-western perimeter of the deserted city. Steiner rode by himself in the lead, followed by Orlowski and Anne Summers, with Wayne taking up the rear on a little palomino. Ricci had stayed behind, fuming in his cabin after an altercation with the Captain, who had caught him smuggling aboard a heavy automatic pistol he had looted from a gunsmith’s.

      Manhattan was silent, the huge buildings withdrawing into their emptiness as the sun moved across the western land. They passed the George Washington Bridge, and then paused to look out over the mile-wide channel of the Hudson River.

      In front of them was an unbroken expanse of sand strewn with sage-brush, a dusty plantation of cacti and prickly pear. A century earlier the Hudson had dried up, and was now a broad wadi filled with the desert flora that had come in from New Jersey. The harsh and glaring light of the early afternoon had given way to the red earth colours of evening. They stood silently by their horses at the edge of the half-buried expressway. Beyond the Jersey shore Wayne could see the rectangular profiles of isolated buildings, their sunset façades like mesas in Monument Valley. Already they had arrived at an authentic replica of Utah or Arizona.

      Nearby was a small six-storey office block whose glass doors had long ago been smashed by vandals. After tethering their horses, they climbed the stairway around the elevator shaft to the roof. Together they looked out over the empty land, like prospective purchasers offered a wilderness for sale.

      ‘It’s a desert…‘In a gesture of respect, Orlowski took off his Stetson and held it against his plump chest. ‘Nothing but desert, probably all the way to the Pacific’

      Anne Summers shielded her eyes from the sun’s disc, now bisected by the horizon. The vermilion glow gave her face a flush of animation, as if she were a convalescent already showing a marked improvement on the first day of arrival at a desert resort. Without thinking, she touched Wayne’s shoulder, concerned for the young stowaway’s sake.

      ‘It’s strange, and yet familiar at the same time. I feel I’ve been here. Gregor, we knew the climate had changed.’

      ‘But not like this. This is like the Sahara in the twentieth century. It’s going to affect the mission—we aren’t equipped for this sort of terrain. What do you say, Captain?’

      Steiner had removed his sunglasses and was staring out across the dried river. His deeply tanned face had become more hawk-like, his eyes had moved back into their sockets under the weathered overhang of his forehead.

      ‘I don’t agree, Commissar,’ he replied calmly. ‘It’s all that much more of a challenge. Do you understand, Wayne?’

      Wayne understood all too well. The next morning, as Orlowski and Anne Summers supervised the transfer ashore of the expedition’s stores, Wayne joined the party of armed sailors who explored the area around New York. Led by Steiner, they rode ten miles out into the desert, a sunbaked wilderness that stretched as far as the Catskills and almost certainly well beyond them. Here and there, in Jonkers and the Bronx, they came across a freshwater spring in a highway culvert, or a few shabby date palms reared from the cracked floor of a motel swimming-pool. But these small oases were clearly too few to sustain a long expedition inland.

      This sight of the failed continent only served to spur Steiner on – his long-dormant resources for surviving in this arid world were now emerging. Yet all of them were strongly affected by the sight of this once powerful nation lying derelict in the dusty sunlight. They rode through the silent suburbs of uptown New York, across the precarious hulk of the Brooklyn Bridge to Long Island, and over the bleached ghost of the Hudson to the Jersey shore. The endless succession of roofless houses, deserted shopping malls and sand-covered parking lots was unsettling enough. Resting from the noon glare, Wayne and the sailors wandered through the abandoned supermarkets, whose shelves were still loaded with the canned goods no one had been able to cook. They climbed to the top floors of lavishly furnished apartment houses that had become freezing tenements in the North American winter. Everywhere the desert had moved in, cacti thrived in the shaded forecourts of fortified filling stations, creosote bushes had taken over the suburban gardens. At Kennedy Airport hundreds of abandoned airliners sat on flattened tyres, mesquite and prickly pear grew through the wings of parked Concordes and 747s.

      All around them, as well, was ample evidence of the desperate attempts by the last Americans to beat the energy crisis. Within this once heroic landscape of giant highways, factories and tower blocks there existed a second shabby world of metal shanties fitted with wood-burning stoves, pathetic home-made solar-power units rigged to the roofs of modest houses like ambitious conceptual sculptures, ramshackle water-wheels whose blades were locked for ever now in sand-clogged streams. Thousands of makeshift windmills had been erected in back yards and drive-ways, their metal blades cut from the shells of refrigerators and washing machines. And even more ominously, the quiet streets of Queens and Brooklyn were filled with fortress-like gas stations, government water depots built like block-houses, gun-slits still visible among the crumbling sandbags.

      And everywhere, to Wayne’s relief, there were the cars. They sat nose to rear bumper in the dust, rusting shells transformed into metal bowers for the wild flowers that sprang through the broken windshields, their engine compartments a home for kangaroo rats and gophers.

      It was the cars that most surprised Wayne. His childhood in Dublin had been fed by dreams of an America filled with automobiles, immense chromium СКАЧАТЬ