The Complete Short Stories

Motel Architecture

Pangborn’s suspicion that someone was hiding in the solarium coincided with the arrival of the young repairwoman. The presence of this smartly uniformed but bored girl rattling her metal valise around his wheelchair so frayed his nerves that at first he made no attempt to find the intruder. Her aggressive manner, the interminable whistling she kept up as she wiped the television screens, and her growing interest in Pangborn were unlike anything he had previously had to deal with.

The uniformed women sent by the company to maintain the services within the solarium had been noted for their silence and efficiency. Looking back at the twelve years he had spent in the solarium, Pangborn could hardly recall a single face. In fact, the absence of any kind of personal identity allowed the young women to carry out their intimate chores. Yet even within the hour of her first visit this new recruit had managed to damage the tuning control of the master screen and unsettle Pangborn with her moody gaze. But for this vague and unsettling criticism of him Pangborn would have identified the intruder far earlier and avoided the strange consequences that were to follow.

At the time he had been sitting in his chair in the centre of the solarium, bathing in the warm artificial light that flowed through the ceiling vents and watching the shower sequence from Psycho on the master screen. The brilliance of this tour de force never ceased to astonish Pangborn. He had played the sequence to himself hundreds of times, frozen every frame and explored it in close-up, separately recorded sections of the action and displayed them on the dozen smaller screens around the master display. The extraordinary relationship between the geometry of the shower stall and the anatomy of the murdered woman’s body seemed to hold the clue to the real meaning of everything in Pangborn’s world, to the unstated connections between his own musculature and the immaculate glass and chromium universe of the solarium. In his headier moments Pangborn was convinced that the secret formulas of his tenancy of time and space were contained somewhere within this endlessly repeated clip of film.

So immersed had he been in the mysterious climax of the sequence -the slewing face of the actress pressed against the tiled floor with its rectilinear grid — that at first he ignored the faint noise of breathing nearby, the half-familiar smell of a human being.

Pangborn turned in his wheelchair, expecting to find someone standing behind him, perhaps one of the delivery men who provisioned the solarium’s kitchen and fuel tanks. After twelve years of living entirely on his own, Pangborn had discovered that his senses were sharp enough to detect the presence of a single fly.

Freezing the film on the television screens, he swung his chair and turned his back to them. The circular chamber was empty, like the uncurtained bathroom and kitchen.

But the air had moved, somewhere behind him a heart had beaten, lungs had breathed.

At this moment a key turned in the entrance hall, the glass door was banged back by a clumsily carried vacuumcleaner, and Vera Tilley made her first appearance.

For all his intimacy with the electronic image of the naked film actress, Pangborn had not looked a real woman in the face for more than ten years. Still unsettled by the suspected intruder, he watched the uniformed girl drop her vacuum-cleaner on to the carpet and root about in her tool-kit. She was barely twenty, with untidy blonde hair pushed up into her cap, eccentric make-up applied to her already large mouth and eyes. On her lapel was an identification badge — under the company’s heraldic device was the name ‘Vera Tilley’ and a photograph of her staring at the camera with a cheeky pout.

She now gazed at Pangborn and the solarium in the same provocative way.

‘When you’re ready you can carry on,’ Pangborn told her. ‘I’m busy at the moment.’

‘So I can see.’ The girl eyed the complex of screens, the huge blow-ups of the dead eyes of the actress surrounded like an electronic altar-piece by the quantified sections of her body on the smaller displays. With a wry glance at Pangborn’s padded contour chair, she remarked: ‘Is she comfortable up there? Can’t you do something for her?’ She flicked a dirty finger-nail at the control console on the arm of the chair. ‘You’ve got enough buttons to stop the world.’

Ignoring her, Pangborn rotated the chair and returned to the screens. For the next hour, as he continued his analysis of the shower sequence, he was still thinking of the intruder. Clearly there was no one hiding in the solarium now, but the presence of this mysterious visitor might in some way be connected with the odd young woman. He could almost believe that she was some new kind of urban terrorist. He listened to her moving around the kitchen, servicing the equipment and replacing the supplies in the food dispensers. Every now and then her whistling was modulated by an ironic note.

When she had cleaned the bathroom she came back and stood between Pangborn and the screens. He could smell his cologne on her wrists.

‘Time to switch off the life-support system,’ she said goodhumouredly. ‘Can you survive for five minutes on your own?’

Pangborn waited impatiently while she swung each of the television sets from the wall and tuned its controls. As he watched this young woman at work, kneeling in front of him on the carpet, he felt strangely vulnerable. Her breathing, her plump calves, the coarse vitality of her body, made him wish that it were possible to dispense with any need to maintain the solarium. He had been celibate for the past fifteen years, and his confused feelings unsettled him. He preferred the secure realities of the television screens to the endlessly bizarre fictions of ordinary life. At the same time Vera Tilley intrigued him. He thought again of the intruder.

‘See you next week,’ she told him as he signed the work schedule. While she packed her valise she watched him with some concern. ‘Don’t you ever get tired of looking at those old films? You ought to go out once in a while. My brother owns a taxi if you ever want one.’

Pangborn waved her away, his eyes on the magnified image of the bathroom floor and the strange contours of the film actress’s cheekbones. But when the door opened he called out: ‘Tell me, I meant to ask — when you arrived, was there anyone waiting outside?’

‘Only if he was invisible.’ Puzzled by Pangborn’s deliberately casual tone, she weighed the valise in her strong hand, as if about to take out her screwdriver and turn down his over-active image control. ‘You’re alone here, Mr Pangborn. Perhaps you saw a ghost…’

After she had gone Pangborn lay back in his chair and scanned through the afternoon’s public television programmes. With her slapdash manner, the girl had mistuned the master screen, dappling everything with an intermittent interference pattern, but for once Pangborn was able to ignore this. He turned off the sound and watched the dozens of programmes move past silently.

Once again, unmistakably, he was aware of the presence of someone nearby. The faint voice of another human being hung on the air, the spoor of an unfamiliar body. There was an odd but not unpleasant odour in the solarium. Pangborn left the screens and drove the wheelchair around the chamber, inspecting the kitchen, hail and bathroom. He could see that the solarium was empty, but at the same time he was convinced that someone was watching him.

The girl, Vera Tilley, had unsettled him in a way he had not expected. All his experience, his years spent in front of the television screens, had not prepared him for even the briefest encounter with an actual woman. What would once have been called the ‘real’ world, the quiet streets outside, the private estate of hundreds of similar solaria, made no effort to intrude itself into Pangborn’s private world and he had never felt any need to defend himself against it.

Looking down at himself, he realized that he had been naked during her visit. Bathed in the ceaseless light of the solarium, he had years ago given up wearing even his loin-slip. So distant and anonymous were the repair-women usually sent by the company that he felt no embarrassment as they moved around him.

However, Vera Tilley had made him aware of himself for the first time. No doubt she had noticed just how she had aroused him. Trying not to think of her, Pangborn stiffened the back of the chair and concentrated on the television screens in front of him. Calmed by the warm light flowing across his bronzed body, he switched off the public channels and returned to his analysis of Psycho. The geometry of the naked actress slumped across the floor of the shower stall provided an endless source of interest, like the most abstract possible of all music, and within a few minutes he was able to lower the back of the chair, Vera Tilley and the mysterious intruder forgotten.

During his twelve years in the solarium Pangborn had never left the light-filled chamber, and recently had hardly even left the chair. For the few minutes each day which he was forced to spend standing in the bathroom he felt strangely heavy and cumbersome, his body an uncouth mass of superfluous musculature suspended as if by a bad sculptor on the slender armature of his bones. Lying back on the chair, he found it hard to believe that the sleek, bronzed figure projected by the monitor camera on to the screens in front of him was that same shaky invalid who faced him in the bathroom mirror. As far as possible Pangborn remained in the chair, wheeling himself into the kitchen, preparing his meals sitting down, in a sense remaking a small second world within the private universe of the solarium.

This spherical chamber where he seemed to have spent his entire life, asleep and awake, by now supplied all his needs, both physical and psychological. The chamber was at once a gymnasium and bedroom, library and workplace (nominally Pangborn was a television critic, virtually the only job, apart from that of the maintenance engineers, in a society where everything else was done by machine). Mounted on the rear wall of the solarium was a cluster of exercise devices which he operated for half an hour each day while sitting in the chair.

The bathroom was also equipped with a special cabinet containing a variety of sexual appliances, but for years Pangborn had been repelled by the thought of using them — they engaged him in too unsettling a way with the facts of his own body. He felt the same resistance towards the psychological maintenance devices which everyone was encouraged to air for at least an hour each day on the television screens — simulated confrontations and reconciliations with his parents, intelligence and personality tests, and a whole range of psychological games, pocket dramas in which he could play the starring role.

But Pangborn had soon become bored with the limited repertory of these charades. Fantasy and the imagination had always played little part in his life, and he felt only at home within the framework of an absolute realism. The solarium was a fully equipped television studio, in which Pangborn was simultaneously the star, script-writer and director of an unending domestic serial of infinitely more interest than the programmes provided by the public channels. The news bulletins now were about his own body processes, the night’s heart rate, the rising and falling curves of his temperature. These images, and the analysis of certain key events from his, library of feature films, seemed to have some kind of profound though yet mysterious connection. The strange geometry presiding over the actress in her shower stall provided a key to that absolute abstraction of himself he had sought since his arrival at the solarium, the construction of a world formed entirely from the materials of his own consciousness.

During the next days Pangborn’s peace of mind was interrupted by his growing awareness of the intruder who had entered the solarium. At first he put down his suspicions to Vera Tilley’s arrival. The strongly scented cosmetics used by the young woman had released some repressed memory of his mother and sister, and of his brief and abortive marriage. But once again, as he lay back in his chair, analysing the ever larger blow-ups of the actress’s face pressed against the bathroom tiles, he felt the presence of an uninvited visitor somewhere behind him. With the sound turned down he could hear the occasional breathing, even a sigh as this mysterious intruder seemed to weary of his secret vigil. Now and then Pangborn would hear a metallic creak behind him, the tension of a leather harness, and detect the faint smell of another body.

For once ignoring his television screens, Pangborn began a painstaking inspection of the solarium, starting with the hall and its storage cupboards. He pulled out the racks of cassettes, the cases filled with suits he had not worn for ten years. Satisfied that the hall provided no hiding place, he drove the wheelchair into the bathroom and kitchen, searched the medicine cabinet and shower, the narrow spaces behind the refrigerator and cooker. It occurred to him that the intruder might be some small animal which had slipped into the solarium during a visit by one of the cleaners. But as he sat motionlessly in the light-filled silence he could hear the steady breathing of a human being.

By the time of Vera Tilley’s second visit Pangborn was waiting at the door of the solarium. He hoped to catch a glimpse of someone loitering outside, perhaps an accomplice of the intruder. Already he suspected that they might be members of a gang hoping to rig the television audience surveys.

‘You’re on my foot, Mr Pangborn! What’s the matter? Don’t you want me to come in today?’ Pushing the door against the wheelchair, Vera looked down at Pangborn. ‘You’re in a state.’

Pangborn reversed into the centre of the solarium. The young woman’s make-up seemed less bizarre, as if she intended to reveal more of herself to him. Realizing suddenly that he was naked, he felt his skin prickle uncomfortably.

‘Did you see anyone outside? Waiting in a car, or watching the door?’

‘You asked me that last week.’ Ignoring his agitated condition, Vera opened her tool-kit and began to fit together the sections of the vacuumcleaner. ‘Are you expecting someone to stay?’

‘No!’ The thought appalled Pangborn. Even the presence of the young woman exhausted him. He remembered the sounds of breathing behind the chair. Calming himself, he said: ‘Leave the cleaning until later and have a look at the aerials. I think one of the sets is picking up a strange sound-track — perhaps from the studio next door.’

Pangborn waited while she worked away at the sets. Afterwards he followed her around the solarium in his wheelchair, watching as she cleaned the bathroom and kitchen. He peered between her legs into the shower stall and garbage disposal chute, confirming for himself that there was no one hiding there.

‘You’re all alone, Mr Pangborn. Just you and the TV screens.’ As she locked her valise Vera watched him in a concerned way. ‘Have you ever been to the zoo, Mr Pangborn?’

‘What…? There are wild-life programmes I sometimes review.’ Pangborn waited impatiently for her to leave, relieved that he could get on with his work. Watching the dozen television screens, which the girl had tuned to a needle-like sharpness, he was suddenly convinced that the notion of an intruder had all been a delusion fostered by the unsettled presence of this young woman.

However, only a few minutes after she had gone Pangborn once again heard the sounds of the intruder behind him, and the noise of the man’s breathing, even louder now as if he had decided no longer to conceal his presence from Pangborn.

Controlling himself, Pangborn took stock of the solarium. An unvarying light fell through the glass vents into this world without shadows, bathing the chamber in an almost submarine glow. He had been reviewing a programme of redubbed films — a huge repertory of transcribed classics now existed, their story lines and dialogue totally unconnected with their originals. Pangborn had been watching a tinted and redubbed version of Casablanca, now a new instructional film in a hotel management course on the pitfalls and satisfactions of overseas nightclub operation. Ignoring the trite dialogue, Pangborn was enjoying the timelessly elegant direction when a colour fault on the master screen began to turn the characters’ faces green.

As he switched off the wall of screens, about to call the maintenance company, Pangborn heard the distinctive sounds of breathing. He froze in his chair, listening to the characteristic rise and fall of human respiration. As if aware that Pangborn was listening to him, the intruder began to breathe more heavily, the harsh, deep breaths of a man in fear.

Coolly, Pangborn kept his back to the intruder, who was hiding either in the hall or bathroom. He could not only hear but smell the man’s fear, the vaguely familiar scent he had noticed the previous week. For some reason he was almost sure that the man had no intention of attacking him, and was only trying to escape from the solarium. Perhaps he was an exhausted fugitive from some act of misjustice, a wrongly incarcerated mental patient.

For the rest of the afternoon Pangborn pretended to watch the defective television screens, while systematically devising a method of dealing with the intruder. First of all he needed to establish the man’s identity. He switched on the monitor camera that surveyed the solarium and set it on continuous traverse across the bathroom, kitchen and hail.

Pangborn then turned to setting a number of small traps. He unlocked the medicine cabinet in the bathroom, marking the positions of the antiseptic cream and Band-aids. After a deliberately early supper he left untouched a small filet steak and a bowl of salad. He placed a fresh bar of soap in the shower tray and scattered a fine mist of talc on the bathroom carpet.

Satisfied, he returned to the television screens and lay half-awake until the small hours, listening to the faint breathing somewhere behind him as he carried out his endless analysis of the murder sequence from Psycho. The immaculate and soundless junction of the film actress’s skin and the white bathroom tiles, magnified in a vast closeup, contained the secret formulas that somewhere united his own body to the white fabric and soft chrome of his contour couch.

When he woke the next morning he once again heard the intruder’s breathing, so rested that his mysterious visitor seemed almost to be part of everyday life in the solarium. Sure enough, as Pangborn had expected, all the modest traps had been sprung. The man had washed his hands with the fresh bar of soap, a small portion of the steak and salad had been eaten, a strange footprint marked the talc in the bathroom.

Unsettled by this tangible proof that he was not alone in the solarium, Pangborn stared at the footprint. The man’s foot was almost the size of his own, with the same overlarge and questing big toe. Something about this similarity brought a flush of irritation to Pangborn. He felt a sudden sense of challenge, provoked by this feeling of identity with the man.

This close involvement with the intruder was redoubled when Pangborn discovered that the man had taken a book from his shelf — the almost unobtainable text of the original dialogue of The Third Man, now a cautionary tale put out by the world tourist authority on the perils of the language barrier. Pangborn thumbed through the pages of the scenario, half-hoping to find a further clue to the man’s identity. He carefully replaced the book on the shelf. These first hints of the intruder’s nature — the shared literary tastes, the shape of his feet, the sounds of his breathing and his body smell — both intrigued and provoked him.

As he played at high speed through the hours of film the solarium camera had recorded, he now and then caught what seemed to be brief glimpses of the intruder — the flash of an elbow behind the bathroom door, a shoulder framed against the medicine cabinet, the back of a head in the hall. Pangborn gazed at these magnifications, expanding them beside the stills from Psycho, the systems of two parallel but coinciding geometries.

This never explicit but civilized duel between them continued during the next days. At times Pangborn felt that he was running a mnage-a-deux. He effectively cooked meals for them both — the intruder fortunately approved of Pangborn’s tastes in wine, and often reinforced the night with small measures of Pangborn’s brandy. Above all, their intellectual tastes coincided their interests in film, in abstract painting, and in the architecture of large structures. Indeed, Pangborn almost visualized them openly sharing the solarium, embarking together on their rejection of the world and the exploration of their absolute selves, their unique time and space.

All the more bitter, therefore, were Pangborn’s reactions when he discovered the intruder’s attempt to kill him.

Too stunned to reach for the telephone and call the police, Pangborn stared at the bottle of sleeping tablets. He listened to the faint breathing somewhere behind him, lower now as if the intruder were holding his breath, waiting for Pangborn’s response.

Ten minutes earlier, while drinking his morning coffee, Pangborn had at first ignored its faintly acrid flavour, presumably some new spice or preservative. But after a few more sips he had almost gagged. Carefully emptying the cup into the wash-basin, he discovered the half-dissolved remains of a dozen plastic capsules.

Pangborn reached into the medicine cabinet and opened the now empty bottle of sleeping tablets. He listened to the faint breathing in the solarium. At some point, while his back was turned, the intruder had slipped the entire contents into his coffee.

He forced himself to vomit into the basin, but still felt queasy when Vera arrived an hour later.

‘You look fed up,’ she told him cheerfully. She nodded at the books scattered around the place. ‘I can see you’ve been reading again.’

‘I’m lending some books to a friend,’ Pangborn reversed his chair away from her as she ambled around the chamber with her valise. Under the seat of his chair he held the handle of a vegetable knife. Looking up at the girl’s overbright make-up and guileless eyes it was hard to believe that she might be in collusion with the intruder. At the same time he was surprised that she could not hear the obvious sounds of the man’s breathing. Once again Pangborn was amazed by his nimbleness, his ability to move from one end of the solarium to the other without leaving more than a few fragments of his presence on the monitor film. He assumed that the man had found a secure hiding place, perhaps in a service shaft unknown to Pangborn.

‘Mr Pangborn! Are you awake?’

With an effort, Pangborn rallied himself. He looked up to find Vera kneeling in front of him. She had pushed back her cap and was shaking his knees. He searched for the knife handle.

‘Mr Pangborn — all those pills in the bathroom. What are they doing?’ Pangborn gestured vaguely. Concerned only to find a weapon, he had forgotten to wash away the capsules.

‘I dropped the bottle in the basin — be careful you don’t cut your hands.’

‘Mr Pangborn -’ Confused, Vera stood up and straightened her cap. She glanced disapprovingly at the huge blow-ups from Psycho on the television screens, and at the blurred fragments of shoulder and elbow recorded by the solarium camera. ‘It’s like a jig-saw. Who is it? You?’

‘Someone else — a friend who’s been visiting me.’

‘I thought so — the place is in a mess. The kitchen… Have you ever thought of getting married, Mr Pangborn?’

He stared at her, aware that she was deliberately being coquettish, trying to unsettle him for his own sake. Once again his skin began to scream.

‘You ought to get out of here more,’ she was telling him sensibly. ‘Visit your friend. Do you want me to come tomorrow? It’s on my route. I can say your aerials need tuning.’

Pangborn reversed around her, keeping an eye on the bathroom and kitchen. Vera hesitated before leaving, searching for an excuse to prolong her stay. Pangborn was certain that this amiable scatter-brain was not an accomplice of the intruder, but if he once divulged the man’s presence, let alone the murder attempt, she would probably panic and then provoke an openly homicidal assault.

Controlling his temper, he waited until she left. But any irritation he felt was soon forgotten when a second attempt was made on his life.

As with the first murder attempt, Pangborn noticed that the method chosen was both devious and clumsy. Whether because he was still half-doped by the sleeping pills, or out of sheer physical bravado, he felt no sense of panic, but only a calm determination to beat the intruder at his own game. A complex duel was taking place between them, its fragmentary course displayed in a lengthening series of giant blow-ups on the screens — his own suspicious hands a few feet from the camera, the intruder’s angular shoulder silhouetted against the kitchen door, even a portion of an ear reflected in the mirror of the medicine cabinet. As Pangborn sat in his chair, comparing sections of this visual jigsaw with the elements from the shower sequence in Psycho, he knew that sooner or later he would assemble a complete picture of the intruder.

Meanwhile, the man’s presence became ever more evident. The smell of his body filled the solarium and stained the towels in the bathroom. He openly helped himself to the food in the refrigerator, scattering shreds of salad on the floor. Tirelessly, Pangborn maintained his round-the-clock surveillance, trying to shake off the effects of the sleeping pills. So determined was he to defeat the intruder that he took for granted that the water in the bathroom tank had been fouled with cleaning soda. Later, in the kitchen, as he bathed his stinging face with mineral water, he could hear the self-satisfied breathing of the intruder, celebrating another small deceit.

Later that night, as he lay half-asleep in front of the television screens, he woke with a start to feel the hot breath of the stranger against his face. Startled, he looked round in the flickering light to find the vegetable knife on the carpet and a small wound on his right knee.

For the first time a foul smell pervaded the solarium, an unpleasant blend of disinfectant, excrement and physical rage, like the atmosphere of some ill-maintained psychiatric institution.

Retching on to the carpet beside his chair, Pangborn turned his back to the television screens. Holding the vegetable knife in front of him, he headed for the hall. He unlocked the front door, waiting for the cool night air to invade the solarium. Leaving the door ajar, he wheeled himself to the telephone beside the screens.

As he held the severed flex in his hands he heard the hall door close quietly. So the intruder had decided to leave, resigning from their duel even though Pangborn was now unable to contact the outside world.

Pangborn looked at the screens, regretting that he would never complete the jig-saw. The foul smell still hung on the air, and Pangborn decided to take a shower before going out to use a neighbour’s telephone.

But as he entered the bathroom he could see clearly the bloody rents in the shower curtain. Pulling it back, he recognized the body of the young repair-woman, lying face down on the tiled floor, and the familiar postures he had analysed in a thousand blow-ups.

Appalled by the calm expression in Vera’s eyes, as if she had known full well the role in which she had been cast, Pangborn reversed his chair into the solarium. He gripped the knife, feeling her wounds in the pain in his leg, and aware once again of the deep breathing around him.

Everything now, in this final phase, was in close-up. After recording the position of the girl’s body with his portable camera — the film would be vital evidence for the investigating police — Pangborn sat in front of the wall of screens. He was certain that the last confrontation was about to take place between himself and the intruder. Holding the knife in his hand, he waited for the imminent attack. The sounds in the solarium seemed amplified, and he could hear the intruder’s pumping lungs and feel his frightened pulse drumming through the floor into the arms of his chair.

Pangborn waited for him to come, his eyes on the screen, the monitor camera focused directly upon himself. He watched the huge close-ups of his own body, of the film actress on the floor of her bathroom, and of Vera’s sprawled form entangled with the white shower curtains. As he adjusted the controls, moving these areas of tile and flesh into ever-closer focus, Pangborn felt himself rising beyond anger into an almost sexual lust for the intruder’s death, the first erotic impulse he had known since he had begun watching these television screens so many years earlier. The smell of the man’s body, the beat of his pulse and hot breath seemed to be moving towards an orgasmic climax. Their collision when it came in the next few minutes would be an act of intercourse, which would at last provide the key he needed.

Pangborn held the knife, watching the whitening screens, anonymous rectangles of blank skin that formed a fragmented sky. Somewhere among them the elements of the human form still remained, a residual nexus of contour and texture in which Pangborn could at last perceive the unmistakable outline of the stranger’s face.

Eyes fixed upon the screens, he waited for the man to touch him, certain that he had mesmerized the intruder with these obsessive images. He felt no hostility towards the man, and was aware now that over the years in the solarium he had become so detached from external reality that even he himself had become a stranger. The odours and sounds that disgusted him were those of his own body. All along, the intruder in the solarium had been himself. In his search for absolute peace he had found one last limiting obstacle — the intrusive fact of his own consciousness. Without this, he would merge forever into the universe of the infinite close-up. He was sorry for the young woman, but it was she who had first provoked him into his disgust with himself.

Eager now to merge with the white sky of the screen, to find that death in which he would be rid forever of himself, of his intruding mind and body, he raised the knife to his happy heart.