Free The atrocity exhibition by J. G. Ballard Page A

terracing of Karen’s body in the landscape of the beach in some way diminished the identity of the young woman asleep in her apartment. He walked among the displaced contours of her pectoral girdle. What time could be read off the slopes and inclines of this inorganic musculature, the drifting planes of its face?
    The Assumption of the Sand-dune . This Venus of the dunes, virgin of the time-slopes, rose above Tallis into the meridian sky. The porous sand, reminiscent of the eroded walls of the apartment, and of the dead film star with her breasts of carved pumice and thighs of ash, diffused along its crests into the wind.
    The Apartment: Real Space and Time . The white rectilinear walls, Tallis realized, were aspects of that virgin of the sand-dunes whose assumption he had witnessed. The apartment was a box clock, a cubicular extrapolation of the facial planes of the yantra, the cheekbones of Marilyn Monroe. The annealed walls froze all the rigid grief of the actress. He had come to this apartment in order to solve her suicide.
    Murder . Tallis stood behind the door of the lounge, shielded from the sunlight on the balcony, and considered the white cube of the room. At intervals Karen Novotny moved across it, carrying out a sequence of apparently random acts. Already she was confusing the perspectives of the room, transforming it into a dislocated clock. She noticed Tallis behind the door and walked towards him. Tallis waited for her to leave. Her figure interrupted the junction between the walls in the corner on his right. After a few seconds her presence became an unbearable intrusion into the time geometry of the room.
    Epiphany of this death . Undisturbed, the walls of the apartment contained the serene face of the film star, the assuaged time of the dunes.
    Departure . When Coma called at the apartment Tallis rose from his chair by Karen Novotny’s body. ‘Are you ready?’ she asked. Tallis began to lower the blinds over the windows. ‘I’ll close these - no one may come here for a year.’ Coma paced around the lounge. ‘I saw the helicopter this morning - it didn’t land.’ Tallis disconnected the telephone behind the white leather desk. ‘Perhaps Dr Nathan has given up.’ Coma sat down beside Karen Novotny’s body. She glanced at Tallis, who pointed to the corner. ‘She was standing in the angle between the walls.’
    
    The Robing of the Bride.
    The title of one of Max Ernst’s most mysterious paintings. An unseen woman is being prepared by two attendants for her marriage, and is dressed in an immense gown of red plumage that transforms her into a beautiful and threatening bird. Behind her, as if in a mirror, is a fossilized version of herself, fashioned from archaic red coral. All my respect and admiration of women is prompted by this painting, which I last saw at Peggy Guggenheim’s museum in Venice, stared at by bored students. Leaving them, I strayed into a private corridor of the palazzo, and a maid emerging through a door with a vacuum cleaner gave me a glimpse into a bedroom overlooking the Grand Canal. Sitting rather sadly on the bed was Miss Guggenheim herself, sometime Alice at the surrealist tea-party, a former wife of Max Ernst, and by then an old woman. As she stared at the window I half-expected to see the bird costume on the floor beside her. She was certainly entitled to wear it.
    The ‘Soft’ Death of Marilyn Monroe.
    Marilyn Monroe’s death was another psychic cataclysm. Here was the first and greatest of the new-style film goddesses, whose images, unlike those of their predecessors, were fashioned from something close to the truth, not from utter fiction. We know everything about Marilyn’s sleazy past - the modest background, the foster homes and mother with mental problems, the long struggle as a starlet on the fringes of prostitution, then spectacular success as the world embraced her flawed charm, loved by sporting idols, intellectuals and, to cap it all, the US