The Open Window Society

Excerpts from The Drought / No Lifeguard on Duty

“The birds had gone. Everywhere light and shade crept on slowly. No longer cooled by the evaporating water, the dunes around the oasis reflected the heat like banks of ash. Ransom rested quietly in the ruined loggia beside the swimming pool. His complete surrender to Quilter had left him with a feeling almost of euphoria. The timeless world in which Quilter lived now formed his own universe, and only the shadow of the broken roof above, adjusting its length and perimeter, reminded him of the progress of the sun.”

“The banks [of the river] were now opposing cliffs, topped by the inverted tents suspended from the chimneys of the riverside houses. Originally designed as rain-traps — though no rain had ever fallen into them — the canvas envelopes had been transformed into a line of aerial garbage scoops, the bowls of dust and leaves raised like offerings to the sun.”

“The beach was a zone without time, suspended in an endless interval as flaccid and enduring as the wet dunes themselves… But… time was not absent but immobilized, what was new in their lives and relationships they could form only from the residues of the past, from the failures and omissions that persisted into the present like the wreckage and scrap metal from which they built their cabins.”

“…he now felt that the white deck of the river was carrying them all in the opposite direction, forward into zones of time future where the unresolved residues of the past would appear smoothed and rounded, muffled by the detritus of time, like images in a clouded mirror. Perhaps these residues were the sole elements contained in the future, and would have the bizarre and fragmented quality of the debris through which he was now walking. None the less they would all be merged and resolved in the soft dust of the drained bed.”

“They rounded the house and reached the swimming pool. Here at least there were some signs of habitation. A line of screens made of tanned hide had been erected around the pool, and the caves of a large tent rose from the deep end. The faint smoke of a wood fire lifted from the centre of the pool. The sandy verges were littered with old cooking implements, bird traps and pieces of refrigerator cabinets, salvaged from the near-by ruins. A shore distance away the wheelless bodies of two cars sat side by side among the dunes.”

No Lifeguard on Duty photographs by J Bennett Fitts via Pitch Design