J.G.Ballard – The Drained Lake

Soon after dawn the next morning, Robert Laing sat on his balcony on the 25th floor, eating a frugal breakfast and listening to the first sounds of activity in the apartments around him. Already a few residents were leaving the building on their way to work, picking their way through the debris underfoot towards their garbage-speckled cars. Several hundred people still left each day for their offices and studios, airports and auction-rooms. Despite the scarcity of water and heating, the men and women were well dressed and groomed, their appearance giving no hint of the events of the previous weeks. However, without realizing it, many of them would spend much of their time at their offices asleep at their desks.
Laing ate his slice of bread with methodical slowness. Sitting there on the cracked balcony tiles, he felt like a poor pilgrim who had set out on a hazardous vertical journey and was
performing a simple but meaningful ritual at a wayside shrine.
The previous night had brought total chaos — drunken parties, brawls, the looting of empty apartments and assaults on any isolated resident. Several more floors were now in darkness, including the 22nd, where his sister Alice lived. Hardly anyone had slept. Amazingly, few people showed any signs of fatigue, as if the economy of their lives was switching from day to night.
Laing half-suspected that the insomnia so many of his neighbours had suffered had been some kind of unconscious preparation for the emergency ahead. He himself felt alert and confident — despite the bruises on his shoulders and arms, he was physically in fine trim. At eight o'clock he intended to clean himself up and leave for the medical school.
Laing had spent the early part of the night straightening Charlotte Melville's apartment, which had been ransacked by intruders while she and her small son were sheltering with friends. Later, he had helped to guard an elevator which his neighbours had seized for a few hours. Not that they had gone anywhere — having commandeered the elevator what mattered was to hold it for an effective psychological interval.
The evening had begun, as usual, with a party held by Paul Crosland, television newsreader and now clan chief. Crosland had been delayed at the studios, but his guests watched him deliver the nine-o'clock news, speaking in his familiar, well-modulated voice about a rush-hour pile-up in which six people had died. As his neighbours stood around the television set, Laing waited for Crosland to refer to the equally calamitous events taking place in the high-rise, the death of the jeweller (now totally forgotten), and the division of the tenants into rival camps. Perhaps, at the end of the newscast, he would add a special message for his clan members at that moment fixing
their drinks among the plastic rubbish-sacks in his living-room.
By the time Crosland arrived, swerving into the apartment in his fleece-lined jacket and boots like a returning bomber pilot, everyone was drunk. Flushed and excited, Eleanor Powell
swayed up to Laing, pointing hilariously at him and accusing him of trying to break into her apartment. Everyone cheered this news, as if rape was a valuable and well-tried means of bringing clan members together.
"A low crime-rate, doctor," she told him amiably, "is a sure sign of social deprivation."
Drinking steadily and without any self-control, Laing felt the alcohol bolt through his head. He knew that he was deliberately provoking himself, repressing any reservations about the