However, as everyone there had found out, living in the Bin was hell on earth. The architects had employed the socalled psycho-modular system — a basic L-design — and this meant that everything under-or overlapped everything else. The whole development was a sprawl of interlocking frosted glass, white rectangles and curves, at first glance exciting and abstract (Life magazine had done several glossy photographic treatments of the new ‘living trends’ suggested by the Village) but to the people within formless and visually exhausting. Most of the Clinic’s senior staff had soon taken off, and the Village was now rented to anyone who could be persuaded to live there.
Faulkner gazed out across the veranda, separating from the clutter of white geometric shapes the eight other houses he could see without moving his head. On his left, immediately adjacent, were the Penzils, with the McPhersons on the right; the other six houses were directly ahead, on the far side of a muddle of interlocking garden areas, abstract rat-runs divided by waist-high white panelling, glass angle-pieces and slatted screens.
In the Penzils’ garden was a collection of huge alphabet blocks, each three high, which their two children played with. Often they left messages out on the grass for Faulkner to read, sometimes obscene, at others merely gnomic and obscure. This morning’s came into the latter category. The blocks spelled out: STOP AND GO Speculating on the total significance of this statement, Faulkner let his mind relax, his eyes staring blankly at the houses. Gradually their already obscured outlines began to merge and fade, and the long balconies and ramps partly hidden by the intervening trees became disembodied forms, like gigantic geometric units.
Breathing slowly, Faulkner steadily closed his mind, then without any effort erased his awareness of the identity of the house opposite.
He was now looking at a cubist landscape, a collection of random white forms below a blue backdrop, across which several powdery green blurs moved slowly backwards and forwards. Idly, he wondered what these geometric forms really represented — he knew that only a few seconds earlier they had constituted an immediately familiar part of his everyday existence — but however he rearranged them spatially in his mind, or sought their associations, they still remained a random assembly of geometric forms.
He had discovered this talent only about three weeks ago. Balefully eyeing the silent television set in the lounge one Sunday morning, he had suddenly realized that he had so completely accepted and assimilated the physical form of the plastic cabinet that he could no longer remember its function. It had required a considerable mental effort to recover himself and re-identify it. Out of interest he had tried out the new talent on other objects, found that it was particularly successful with over-associated ones such as washing machines, cars and other consumer goods. Stripped of their accretions of sales slogans and status imperatives, their real claim to reality was so tenuous that it needed little mental effort to obliterate them altogether.
The effect was similar to that of mescaline and other hallucinogens, under whose influence the dents in a cushion became as vivid as the craters of the moon, the folds in a curtain the ripples in the waves of eternity.
During the following weeks Faulkner had experimented carefully, training his ability to operate the cut-out switches. The process was slow, but gradually he found himself able to eliminate larger and larger groups of objects, the massproduced furniture in the lounge, the over-enamelled gadgets in the kitchen, his car in the garage — de-identified, it sat in the half-light like an enormous vegetable marrow, flaccid and gleaming; trying to identify it had driven him almost out of his mind. ‘What on earth could it possibly be?’ he had asked himself helplessly, splitting his sides with laughter — and as the facility developed he had dimly perceived that here was an escape route from the intolerable world in which he found himself at the Village.
He had described the facility to Ross Hendricks, who lived a few houses away, also a lecturer at the Business School and Faulkner’s only close friend.
‘I may actually be stepping out of time,’ Faulkner speculated. ‘Without a time sense consciousness is difficult to visualize. That is, eliminating the vector of time from the de-identified object frees it from all its everyday cognitive associations. Alternatively, I may have stumbled on a means of repressing the photo-associative centres that normally identify visual objects, in the same way that you can so listen to someone speaking your own language that none of the sounds has any meaning. Everyone’s tried this at some time.’
Hendricks had nodded. ‘But don’t make a career out of it, though.’ He eyed Faulkner carefully. ‘You can’t simply turn a blind eye to the world. The subject-object relationship is not as polar as Descartes’ "Cogito ergo sum" suggests. By any degree to which you devalue the external world so you devalue yourself. It seems to me that your real problem is to reverse the process.’
But Hendricks, however sympathetic, was beyond helping Faulkner. Besides, it was pleasant to see the world afresh again, to wallow in an endless panorama of brilliantly coloured images. What did it matter if there was form but no content?
A sharp click woke him abruptly. He sat up with a jolt, fumbling with the alarm clock, which had been set to wake him at 11 o’clock. Looking at it, he saw that it was only 10.55. The alarm had not rung, nor had he received a shock from the battery. Yet the click had been distinct. However, there were so many servos and robots around the house that it could have been anything.
A dark shape moved across the frosted glass panel which formed the side wall of the lounge. Through it, into the narrow drive separating his house from the Penzils’, he saw a car draw to a halt and park, a young woman in a blue smock climb out and walk across the gravel. This was Penzil’s sister-in-law, a girl of about twenty who had been staying with them for a couple of months. As she disappeared into the house Faulkner quickly unstrapped his wrist and stood up. Opening the veranda doors, he sauntered down into the garden, glancing back over his shoulder.
The girl, Louise (he had never spoken to her), went to sculpture classes in the morning, and on her return regularly took a leisurely shower before going out onto the roof to sunbathe.
Faulkner hung around the bottom of the garden, flipping stones into the pond and pretending to straighten some of the pergola slats, then noticed that the McPhersons’ 15-year-old son Harvey was approaching along the other garden.
‘Why aren’t you at school?’ he asked Harvey, a gangling youth with an intelligent ferretlike face under a mop of brown hair.
‘I should be,’ Harvey told him easily. ‘But I convinced Mother I was overtense, and Morrison’ — his father — ‘said I was ratiocinating too much.’ He shrugged. ‘Patients here are overpermissive.’
‘For once you’re right,’ Faulkner agreed, watching the shower stall over his shoulder. A pink form moved about, adjusting taps, and there was the sound of water jetting.
‘Tell me, Mr Faulkner,’ Harvey asked. ‘Do you realize that since the death of Einstein in 1955 there hasn’t been a single living genius? From Michelangelo, through Shakespeare, Newton, Beethoven, Goethe, Darwin, Freud and Einstein there’s always been a living genius. Now for the first time in 500 years we’re on our own.’
Faulkner nodded, his eyes engaged. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I feel damned lonely about it too.’
When the shower was over he grunted to Harvey, wandered back to the veranda, and took up his position again in the chair, the battery lead strapped to his wrist.
Steadily, object by object, he began to switch off the world around him. The houses opposite went first. The white masses of the roofs and balconies he resolved quickly into flat rectangles, the lines of windows into small squares of colour like the grids in a Mondrian abstract. The sky was a blank field of blue. In the distance an aircraft moved across it, engines hammering. Carefully Faulkner repressed the identity of the image, then watched the slim silver dart move slowly away like a vanishing fragment from a cartoon dream.