High-Rise

With the high-rise largely silent, Royal goes to the roof to seek solace in the gulls. The starving dogs that Royal cages in the sculpture garden—as both a food reserve and a hunting pack for his final confrontation with the residents—whimper at his presence.

Suddenly, a raiding party led by Pangbourne erupts onto the roof. Pangbourne speaks to his followers in an indecipherable language based on his recordings of birth cries. Royal recognizes the language as the zoo sounds he’s heard for weeks—Pangbourne has been proselytizing his language as a means of social control.

Pangbourne’s gang has abducted two residents from the lower floors: the wounded Mr. Hillman and a meteorologist. Waiting to make his surprise entrance, Royal feels as if he’s witnessing theater, “a stylized opera or ballet, in which a restaurant is reduced to a single table and the doomed hero is taunted by a chorus of waiters, before being despatched to his death” (166). As the gang begins a chant for flying school—throwing their prisoners over the parapet—Royal calls out, his Alsatian at his side. As he approaches the group, the jeweler’s wife shouts a warning that Wilder is behind him. Believing this ruse, Royal flails backward in fear, tripping over his dog. Everyone laughs, and Pangbourne dismisses Royal with a flick of his wrist.

Royal consoles himself: Although Pangbourne is the sadistic leader for the hour—“a node of violence and cruelty that would keep alive in others the will to survive” (168)—his reign will soon end. Before sequestering himself in his penthouse, Royal releases the dogs, who scatter down the stairwells, leaving only him and the birds.

Barricaded in his apartment with his sister, Laing is in a fog, unable to remember how long he’s been awake. A miasma of garbage pervades the building; from some apartments emanates the smell of decomposing corpses. The only person who still leaves the building is Paul Crosland, who travels to the television studio across the river every day to announce the news. Some residents still watch him out of a silent hope that he’ll mention the high-rise.

The violence, while more sporadic, has become more stylized and extreme. Steele—with whom Laing maintains an uneasy alliance—has become murderous since the disappearance of his wife. He mounts ballistae built from piano wire and golf clubs throughout the hallways, loaded to shoot unwary intruders. In empty apartments Steele constructs macabre tableaux with the costumed corpses of dead residents. While afraid of Steele, Laing nonetheless praises him for pushing the high-rise toward its final stage: “a realm where their most deviant impulses were free at last to exercise themselves in any way they wished” (174).

Laing leaves his apartment to find water and check his dog snares. In another unit Laing finds Eleanor Powell letting an emaciated cat tear at a wound on her wrist while she watches her muted TV. Eleanor offers her other wrist to Laing, noting how thin he is. Laing brings Eleanor and her TV to his apartment.

The reappearance of TV heralds a return to normalcy. Days later, when Steele invites Laing to move up the building with him, Laing declines: He wants to make his home separate from the rising herd, content to be self-reliant and protect Eleanor and his sister.

As the sun rises, Wilder shivers in the cold morning air. He sits by a barricade on the 35th-floor stairwell, preparing for his final ascent by freshening the war paint on his chest. The designs, drawn in lipstick the previous night, give Wilder a strong sense of identity. Wilder welcomes the poodle by his side—the dog will be both a fellow warrior in Wilder’s final push and his celebratory summit dinner.

Wilder uses the whimpering poodle as bait. A 70-year-old woman and her 30-year-old daughter appear through the barricade to kill the dog for food. Wilder jumps at them, throwing the older woman against the wall and disarming the younger one of her handbag pistol.

Defeated, the women become friendly. Wilder takes the daughter to the campfire and mattresses beside the swimming pool, where he eats the leftovers of a roast cat. Nearby, the daughter’s elderly father sleeps. The pool is littered with debris, including two corpses. Wilder tries to speak but finds that his damaged mouth prevents him from doing more than grunt. Wilder fondles the young woman, who strokes the markings on his chest.

Wilder rests for the afternoon before leaving: He senses that the young woman is lulling him to sleep so that she can cut his throat. Carrying the pistol and his broken video camera, Wilder continues upward. Preoccupied, he doesn’t notice that the walls are no longer scrawled with blood and graffiti: “[T]he icy air mov[ed] across his naked body from the open sky…the walls around him had been freshly painted, their white surfaces gleaming in the afternoon sunlight like the entrance to an abattoir” (185). On the 37th floor, Wilder barricades himself in an empty apartment, where he falls asleep to the cries of the gulls above.

As Wilder sleeps, Royal stands alert beside his white Alsatian, watching the shrieking gulls spiral above his penthouse windows. For three days Royal has stayed in his apartment, seeing no one but the gulls—“the true residents of the high-rise” (189).

Royal steps onto the roof, which he notices is marked in blood with strange symbols. To his dismay he hears women’s voices on the other end of the roof—he isn’t yet alone in the building. While he waits for the women to leave, Royal walks around. Following the birds, Royal finds his tiled sculpture garden drenched in blood and bits of flesh.

Wilder awakes on the 37th floor surrounded clouds and cold: “The top floors of the building had been partially invaded by the sky” (191). Wielding the pistol, he takes the stairs to the 40th floor. The elevator lobby has been restored to its original form, all traces of the previous three months erased. Wilder ducks and darts around the corridors with the gun like a child playing secret agent.

Wilder kicks down the door to the penthouse and finds that it has also been restored. The vast rooms awaken deep memories of a childhood home. Drawn by a childlike curiosity, Wilder climbs the stairs to the private chambers. Suddenly, he encounters Royal, who appears frightened and scoured by the wind at the top of the staircase. When Wilder gestures with the pistol for Royal to join his game, Royal flings his chromium cane, hitting Wilder in the arm. As Royal advances down the stairs, Wilder shoots him in the chest.

Leaving his camera, Wilder steps over the dying Royal and through the French doors onto the roof. There, children play naked in the freshly painted sculpture garden. Excited to finally find playmates, Wilder totters forward to join them. When he gets closer, he sees that they’re playing with bones.

Nearby, a group of women in neo-Amish dress prepare a fire under a makeshift spit. Shyly, Wilder approaches them, proud of his body paint. The women finally notice Wilder. He recognizes one of them as his wife, Helen, who gazes unimpressed at his genitals. There too are the jeweler’s wife, Charlotte Melville, Jane Sheridan, and Anne Royal—who has become the governess to the children.

The fire ready, the women encircle Wilder, drawing knives from their aprons: “They seemed to belong to another century and another landscape, except for their sunglasses, whose dark shades stood out against the blood-notched concrete of the roof-terrace” (194). Wilder welcomes their approach like a child welcoming his mother.

While scavenging firewood on the 25th floor, Laing encounters the wounded and delirious Royal dragging himself down the stairs. Laing helps Royal down to the 10th-floor concourse, which reeks of rotting meat. Royal steers them toward the former swimming pool:

In the yellow light reflected off the greasy tiles, the long tank of the bone-pit stretched in front of them. The water had long since drained away, but the sloping floor was covered with the skulls, bones and dismembered limbs of dozens of corpses. Tangled together where they had been flung, they lay about like the tenants of a crowded beach visited by a sudden holocaust (198).

Judging by the way flesh has been stripped off bone, Laing suspects that the lower-floor residents have resorted to cannibalism. As Laing turns away in horror, Royal drags himself into the mass grave.

Back on his floor, Laing traps Royal’s Alsatian. He dresses and prepares the dog according to a recipe modified from a fine cookbook. He hopes that Eleanor and his sister will appreciate the effort he puts into the elaborate meal—their first substantive food in weeks.

As Laing roasts the dog on a makeshift spit on his balcony, the women reprimand him for filling the apartment with the smoke from the plastic telephone books he uses as fuel. Laing welcomes such domestic disputes. He enjoys finding ways to win the women’s favor and control them; he also enjoys submitting to their abuse. This dynamic protects him: One time a gang of women led by Helen Wilder broke into the apartment, only to leave after finding Alice and Eleanor beating Laing. He plans to get them addicted to morphine, using his stash to make them dependent on him.

Laing carves and serves the Alsatian. As they eat, watching the sunset, Laing reflects that he finally feels free to inhabit familial roles denied to him in childhood. He thinks excitedly of repairing his apartment, restoring elevator service, and returning to work, as he sees some women on his floor doing.

As dusk falls, Laing looks out across the development. Another of the buildings, just opened, experiences its first blackout: “Already torch-beams were moving about in the darkness, as the residents made their first confused attempts to discover where they were. Laing watched them contentedly, ready to welcome them to their new world” (201).