The true light of the high-rise was the metallic flash of the polaroid camera, that intermittent radiation which recorded a moment of hoped-for violence for some later voyeuristic pleasure. What depraved species of electric flora would spring to life from the garbage-strewn carpets of the corridors in response to this new source of light? The floors were littered with the blackened negative strips, flakes falling from this internal sun.
Muddled by alcohol and excitement, Laing clambered to his feet with his neighbours as they set off like a crowd of drunken students, brawling with each other to keep up their courage. By the time they had descended three floors in the darkness Laing had lost his bearings. They had entered an enclave of abandoned apartments on the 22nd floor. They wandered around the deserted rooms, kicking in the faces of the television sets, breaking up the kitchen crockery.
Trying to clear his head before going to rescue his sister, Laing vomited over a balcony rail. The threads of luminous phlegm fell away across the face of the building. Leaning there in the darkness, he listened to his neighbours moving along the corridor. When they had gone he would be able to look for Alice.
Behind him the electric lights came on. Startled, Laing flinched against the parapet, expecting an intruder to attack him. After a brief interval, the lights began to flicker continuously like a fibrillating heart. Laing looked down at his grimy clothes and vomit-stained hands. The vandalized living-room glimmered around him, the floor strewn with debris as if he had woken on a battlefield.
In the bedroom a broken mirror lay on the bed, the pieces flickering like the fragments of another world trying unsuccessfully to reconstitute itself.
"Come in, Laing…" The familiar precise voice of the orthodontic surgeon called out to him. "There's something interesting here."
Steele was circling the room with a sword-stick in one hand. Now and then he feinted at the floor in a teasing way, as if rehearsing a scene from a melodrama. He beckoned Laing forward into the stuttering light.
Laing cautiously approached the door, glad to see Steele at last but well aware of how exposed he was to any passing whim of his. He assumed that Steele had trapped the apartment's owner, or a vagrant resident who had taken shelter here, but there was no one in the room. Then, following the blade of the sword-stick, he saw that Steele had cornered a small cat between the legs of the dressing-table. Steele lunged forward, twirling a brocade curtain he had wrenched from the window, and whirled the terrified creature into the bathroom.
"Wait, doctor!" The surgeon's voice was infused with a strangely cold gaiety, like an erotic machine's. "Don't leave yet…"
The lights continued to flicker with the harsh over-reality of an atrocity newsreel. Confused by his own response, Laing watched Steele manipulate the cat under the curtain. By some ugly logic the dentist's pleasure in tormenting the creature was doubled by the presence of a squeamish but fascinated witness. Laing stood in the bathroom doorway, hoping despite himself that the lights would not fail again. He waited as Steele calmly smothered the cat, destroying it under the curtain as if carrying out a complex resuscitation under a hospital blanket.
Pulling himself away at last, Laing left without speaking. He moved carefully along the darkened corridor, as the lights flickered from the doorways of ransacked apartments, from overturned lamps lying on the floor and television screens brought back to a last intermittent life. A faint music played somewhere around him. An abandoned record turntable was spinning again. In an empty bedroom a cine-projector screened the last feet of a pornographic film on to the wall facing the bed.
When he reached Alice's apartment Laing hesitated, uncertain how to explain his presence. But as his sister opened the door and beckoned him in he saw immediately that she had known he was coming. Two suitcases, already packed, stood in the living-room. Alice walked to the door of her bedroom for the last time. In the yellow, intermittent light Frobisher was slumped asleep on the bed, a half-empty case of whisky beside him.
Alice took Laing's arm. "You're late," she said reprovingly. "I've been waiting for hours." As they left she made no attempt to look back at her husband. Laing remembered Alice and himself at home years earlier, and how once they had slipped out of the drawing-room in the same way as their mother lay unconscious on the floor after injuring herself during a drinking bout.
The sounds of a minor clash echoed up the stairwell as they made their way to the safety of the darkness on the 25th floor. Fifteen floors, including Laing's own, were now permanently without light.
Like a storm reluctant to end, recapitulating itself at intervals, the violence rumbled on throughout the night as Laing and his sister lay awake together on the mattress in his bedroom.
12. Towards the Summit
Soon after two o'clock in the afternoon four days later, Richard Wilder returned from his television station and drove into the parking-lot beside the high-rise. Reducing speed so that he could relish to the full this moment of arrival, he sat back comfortably behind the wheel and looked up with a confident eye at the face of the apartment building. Around him the long ranks of parked cars were covered with a thickening layer of dirt and cement dust, blown across the open plazas of the development project from the road junction under construction behind the medical centre. Few cars now left the parking-lot, and there were almost no free spaces, but Wilder drove up and down the access lanes, stopping at the end of each file and reversing back to his starting point.
Wilder fingered the freshly healed scar on his unshaven chin, relic of a vigorous corridor battle the previous night. Deliberately he reopened the wound, and glanced with satisfaction at the point of blood on his finger. He had driven from the television station at speed, as if trying to emerge from an angry dream, shouting and sounding the horn at other drivers in his way, cutting up one-way streets. Now he felt calm and relaxed. The first sight of the line of five apartment buildings soothed him as usual, providing a context of reality absent from the studios.
Confident that he would find a free space, Wilder continued his patrol. Originally he had parked, along with his neighbours on the lower floors, in the ranks along the perimeter of the parking-lot, but during the previous weeks he had been moving his car nearer to the building. What had begun as a harmless piece of vanity-an ironic joke at his own expense-had soon taken on a more serious role, a visible index of his success or failure. After several weeks dedicated to his ascent of the building he felt entitled to park in those files reserved for his new neighbours. Ultimately he would reach the front rank. At the moment of his triumph, when he climbed to the 40th floor, his car would join the line of expensive wrecks nearest to the apartment block.
For several hours the previous night Wilder had reached the 20th floor and even, during the few minutes of an unexpected skirmish, the 25th. By dawn he had been forced to retire from this advance position to his present base camp, an apartment on the 17th floor owned by a stage manager at the television station, a former drinking companion named Hillman who had grudgingly accepted this cuckoo in his nest. The occupation of a floor, in Wilder's strict sense of the term, meant more than the casual seizure of an abandoned apartment. Dozens of these were scattered throughout the high-rise. Wilder had imposed on himself a harder definition of ascent-he had to be accepted by his new neighbours as one of them, the holder of a tenancy won by something other than physical force. In short, he insisted that they need him-when he thought about it, a notion that made him snort.