As World War II comes to a close, a young man who has been interred in a Japanese prison camp is given a macabre mission, which he embraces in a disturbing fashion.
This is one of Ballard’s realistic stories about World War II, a precursor to “Empire of the Sun,” set in the civilian prison camps around Shanghai. “The dead time” could refer to this strange limbo period, with Japan having capitulated but not yet fully surrendered, the Allies nearby but not yet occupying the prison camps, and an uncertainty about the rules of the present and the shape of the future. It could also refer quiet literally to the narrator’s mission of ferrying a truck full of corpses, possibly victims of Japanese war crimes, to a distant graveyard, with the corpses loaded and unloaded several times and the narrator coming to a strange identity with his gruesome cargo. A strange and unsettling story indeed.