Crash

by James Graham Ballard

  His presence had affected my driving, and I guessed that I was really waiting to be involved in a second accident, this time under Vaughan’s eyes. Even the giant aircraft taking off from the airport were systems of excitement and eroticism, punishment and desire waiting to be inflicted on my body. The massive traffic jams on the motorways seemed to suffocate the air, and I nearly believed that Vaughan himself had conjured these vehicles on to the exhausted concrete as part of some elaborate psychological test.

  When Renata had gone Vaughan stepped from his car. I watched him walk across the parking lot to the entrance of the offices, wondering why he had chosen me—already I could see myself driving a target vehicle on a collision course with either Vaughan or some victim of his choice.

  Vaughan walked through the outer offices, glancing to left and right at the enlarged sales photographs of automobile radiator grilles and windshield assemblies. He was wearing the same stale jeans he had unrolled around his hard buttocks during his sex-act as I drove the car. His lower lip had developed a small ulcer which he had opened by chewing on it. I stared with a peculiar fascination at this miniature orifice, aware of his extending sexual authority over me, an authority partly won by the accident memorialized in the scarred contours of his face and chest.

  ‘Vaughan, I’m exhausted. It’s been an effort to move in and out of this office, let alone chase up a producer I barely know. Anyway, the chance of her actually completing one of your questionnaires is nil.’

  ‘Let me give it to her.’

  ‘I know, you’ll probably charm her…’

  Vaughan was standing with his back to me, broken eye-tooth gnawing away at the ulcer. My hands, apparently detached from the rest of my body and brain, hesitated in the air, wondering how to embrace his waist. Vaughan turned towards me, a reassuring smile on his scarred mouth, posed at its best diagonal profile as if I were auditioning him for his new television series. He spoke in an oblique and distracted voice, as if he had been clouded by the hash he was smoking. ‘Ballard, she’s central to the fantasies of all the subjects I’ve tested. There’s a limited amount of time, though you’re too obsessed with yourself to realize it. I need her responses.’

  ‘Vaughan, the likelihood of her being killed in a car-crash is remote. You’ll have to follow her around until doomsday.’

  Standing behind Vaughan, I stared down at the cleft between his buttocks, wishing that these display photographs of car fenders and windshield sections could form themselves into a complete automobile, in which I could take his body in my hands, like that of some vagrant dog, and anneal its wounds within this arcade of possibilities. I visualized these sections of radiator grilles and instrument panels coalescing around Vaughan and myself, embracing us as I pulled the belt from its buckle and eased down his jeans, celebrating in the penetration of his rectum the most beautiful contours of a rear-fender assembly, a marriage of my penis with all the possibilities of a benevolent technology.

  ‘Vaughan… ‘

  He was looking down at a display photograph of the actress leaning against a motor-car. He had taken a pencil from my inkwell, and was shading in portions of the actress’s body, ringing her armpits and cleavage. He stared almost sightlessly at the photographs, cigarette forgotten on the edge of an ashtray. A dank odour rose from his body, an amalgam of rectal mucus and engine coolant. His pencil cut heavier grooves in the picture. The shaded areas had begun to perforate under his more and more savage slashes, blows with the broken pencil point that punctured the cardboard backing. He marked in points of the motor-car interior, stabbing at the protruding areas of steering assembly and instrument panel.

  ‘Vaughan!’ I put my arm around his shoulder. His body was shaking towards an orgasm, the edge of his left hand against his groin in a karate-like hold, as if he were trying to injure himself, working away through the cloth at his erect penis as his right hand moved across the disfigured photographs.

  With an effort, Vaughan straightened himself, leaning against my arm. He stared at the mutilated pictures of the screen actress, surrounded by the impact points and wound areas he had marked for her death.

  Uneasily, I lowered my arm from Vaughan’s shoulder. His hard stomach was marked by a fretwork of scars. On his right hip the scars formed a mould waiting for my fingers, the templates of a caress imprinted years earlier in some forgotten automobile pile-up.

  Controlling the phlegm in my throat, I pointed to the scars, five notches that described a loose circle above his iliac crest. Vaughan watched me without comment as my fingers reached to within a few inches of his skin. A gallery of scars marked his thorax and abdomen. His right nipple had been severed and re-sectioned incorrectly, and was permanently erect.

  We walked through the evening light towards the carpark. Along the northbound motorway embankment the sluggish traffic moved like blood in a dying artery. Two cars were parked in front of Vaughan’s Lincoln in the empty parking lot: a police patrol car and Catherine’s white sports saloon. One policeman was inspecting the Lincoln, peering through the dusty windows. The other stood beside Catherine’s car, questioning her.

  The policemen recognized Vaughan and signalled to him. Thinking that they had come to question me about my growing homo-erotic involvement with Vaughan, I turned away guiltily.

  Catherine walked over to me as the policemen spoke to Vaughan.

  ‘They want to question Vaughan about an accident near the airport. Some pedestrian—they think he was run over intentionally.’

  ‘Vaughan isn’t interested in pedestrians.’

  As if taking their cue from this, the policemen walked back to their car. Vaughan watched them go, head raised like a periscope as if scanning something over the surface of their minds.

  ‘You’d better drive him,’ Catherine said as we walked towards Vaughan. ‘I’ll follow in my car. Where is yours?’

  ‘At home. I couldn’t face all this traffic.’

  ‘I’d better come with you.’ Catherine peered into my face, as if squinting through the window of a diving helmet. ‘Are you sure you can drive?’

  Waiting for me, Vaughan reached into the rear seat of his car for a white sweat-shirt. As he took off his denim jacket the falling light picked out the scars on his abdomen and chest, a constellation of white chips that circled his body from the left armpit down to his crotch. The handholds of complex sex acts had been created by the cars in which he had deliberately crashed for my future pleasure, of strange postures in the back and front seats of cars, peculiar acts of sodomy and fellatio I would perform as I moved across his body from one hand-hold to the next.

  Chapter 17

  We had entered an immense traffic jam. From the junction of the motorway and Western Avenue to the ascent ramp of the flyover the traffic lanes were packed with vehicles, windshields leaching out the molten colours of the sun setting above the western suburbs of London. Brake-lights flared in the evening air, glowing in the huge pool of cellulosed bodies. Vaughan sat with one arm out of the passenger window. He slapped the door impatiently, pounding the panel with his fist. To our right the high wall of a double-decker airline coach formed a cliff of faces. The passengers at the windows resembled rows of the dead looking down at us from the galleries of a columbarium. The enormous energy of the twentieth century, enough to drive the planet into a new orbit around a happier star, was being expended to maintain this immense motionless pause.

  A police car sped down the descent lane of the flyover, headlamps flashing, the rotating blue light on its roof flicking at the dark air like a whip. Above us, on the crest of the ascent lane, two policemen steered the traffic stream from the nearside kerb. Warning tripods set up on the pavement flashed a rhythmic ‘Slow… Slow… Accident… Accident… ‘ Ten minutes later, when we reached the eastern end of the flyover, we could see the accident site below. Lines of cars moved past a circle of police spotlights.

  Three cars had collided at the junction of the eastern descent ramp of the flyover and Western Avenue. Arou
nd them a police car, two ambulances and a breakdown truck formed a loose corral. Firemen and police engineers worked on the vehicles, oxy-acetylene torches flaring against door and roof panels. A crowd was gathering on the sidewalks, and on the pedestrian bridge that spanned Western Avenue the spectators leaned elbow to elbow on the metal rail. The smallest of the cars involved in the accident, a yellow Italian sports car, had been almost obliterated by a black limousine with an extended wheelbase which had skidded across the central reservation. The limousine had returned across the concrete island to its own lane and struck the steel pylon of a route indicator, crushing its radiator and nearside wheel housing, before being hit in turn by a taxi joining the flyover from the Western Avenue access road. The head-on collision into the rear end of the limousine, followed by roll-over, had crushed the taxi laterally, translating its passenger cabin and body panels through an angle of some fifteen degrees. The sports car lay on its back on the central reservation. A squad of police and firemen were jacking it on to its side, revealing two bodies still trapped inside the crushed compartment.

  Beside the taxi, the three passengers lay in a group, blankets swathing their chests and legs. First-aid men worked on the driver, an elderly man who sat upright against the rear fender of his car, face and clothes speckled with drops of blood, like an unusual disease of the skin. The limousine’s passengers still sat in the deep cabin of their car, their identities sealed behind the starred internal window.

  We passed the accident site, edging forward in the line of cars. Catherine had half hidden herself behind the front seat. Her steady eyes followed the skid lines and loops of bloodstained oil that crossed the familiar macadam like the choreographic codes of a complex gun battle, the diagram of an assassination attempt. Vaughan, by contrast, leaned out of the window, both arms ready as if about to seize one of the bodies. In some recess or locker in the rear seat he had found a camera, which now swung from his neck. His eyes were racing over the three crashed vehicles, as if he were photographing every detail with his own musculature, in the white retinas of the scars around his mouth, memorializing every bent fender and broken bone in a repertory of rapid grimaces and droll expressions. For almost the first time since I met him he was completely calm.

  Siren whining, a third ambulance drove down the oncoming lane. A police motorcyclist cut in front of us and slowed to a halt, signalling me to wait and allow the ambulance to pass. I stopped the car and switched off the engine, looking over Catherine’s shoulder at the grim tableau. Ten yards from us was the crushed limousine, the body of the young chauffeur still lying on the ground beside it. A policeman stared at the blood netting like a widow’s veil around his face and hair. Three engineers worked with crowbars and cutting equipment at the rear doors of the limousine. They severed the jammed door mechanism and pulled back the door to expose the passengers trapped inside the compartment.

  The two passengers, a pink-faced man in his fifties wearing a black overcoat, and a younger woman with a pale, anaemic skin, still sat upright in the rear seat. Their heads were held forward, staring together at the policemen and hundreds of spectators like two minor royalties at a lev£e. A policeman pulled away the travelling rug that covered their legs and waists. This single motion, exposing the bare legs of the young woman and the splayed feet of the older man, apparently broken at the ankles, immediately transformed the entire scene. The woman’s skirt had ridden up around her waist, and her thighs lay apart as if she were deliberately exposing her pubis. Her left hand held the window strap, the white glove marked with blood from her small fingers. She gave the policeman a weak smile, like a partially disrobed queen beckoning a courtier to touch her private parts. Her companion’s coat was flared to reveal the full length of his black trousers and patent shoes. His right thigh was extended like a dancehall instructor’s in a tango glide. As he turned to the young woman, one hand searching for her, he slipped sideways off the seat, his ankles kicking at the clutter of leather valises and broken glass.

  The traffic stream moved on. I started the engine and eased the car forwards. Vaughan raised the camera to his eye, lowering it from sight when an ambulance attendant tried to knock it from his hands. The pedestrian bridge passed overhead. Half out of the car, Vaughan peered at the scores of legs pressed against the metal railings, then opened the door and dived out.

  As I pulled the Lincoln on to the verge he was running back to the pedestrian bridge, darting in and out of the cars.

  We followed Vaughan back to the accident site. Hundreds of faces pressed at the windows of the cars moving down the flyover. Spectators stood three deep on the sidewalks and central reservation, crowded together against the wire mesh fence that separated the roadway embankment from the nearby shopping precinct and housing estate. The police had given up any attempt to disperse this enormous crowd. One group of engineers worked on the crushed sports car, prying at the metal roof which had been flattened on to the heads of the occupants. The passengers from the taxi were carried on stretchers to an ambulance. The dead chauffeur of the limousine lay with a blanket over his face, while a doctor and two ambulance men climbed into the rear compartment.

  I looked round at the crowd. A considerable number of children were present, many lifted on their parents’ shoulders to give them a better view. The revolving police beacons moved across the watching faces as we climbed the embankment to the wire mesh fence. None of the spectators showed any signs of alarm. They looked down at the scene with the calm and studied interest of intelligent buyers at a leading bloodstock sale. Their relaxed postures implied a shared understanding of the most subtle points, as if they all realized the full significance of the displacement of the limousine’s radiator grille, the distortion of the taxi’s body frame, the patterns of frosting on its shattered windshield.

  Pushing amiably between Catherine and myself on the embankment was a thirteen-year-old boy in a cowboy suit. He chewed steadily on a piece of gum, watching the last of the taxi passengers being lifted on to a stretcher. A policeman with a broom scattered lime on the blood-smeared concrete beside the sports car. With careful strokes, as if frightened of working out the complex human arithmetic of these injuries, he swept the darkening clots against the verge of the central reservation.

  More spectators strolled across the common from the shopping precinct. They climbed through a break in the wire fence. Together we watched as the two occupants of the limousine were eased through the canted door of their car. Clearly the most vivid erotic fantasies would be moving through our minds, of imaginary acts of intercourse performed with enormous decorum and solicitude upon the blood-stained loins of this young woman while she lay within her car, as the members of her audience stepped forward and entered the broken compartment of the limousine, each placing his penis within her vagina, seeding the infinite futures that would flower from the marriage of violence and desire.

  Around me, down the entire length of Western Avenue, along both ramps of the flyover, stretched an immense congestion of traffic held up by the accident. Standing at the centre of this paralysed hurricane, I felt completely at ease, as if my obsessions with the endlessly multiplying vehicles had at last been relieved.

  Vaughan, by contrast, seemed to have lost interest in the accident. Holding his camera above his head, he pushed roughly through the spectators making their way down the bridge. Catherine watched him jump the last six steps and dart among the tired police. Her clear interest in Vaughan, her eyes avoiding my own but fixed continually on his scarred face as she held tightly to my arm, neither surprised nor upset me. Already I sensed that the three of us had yet to make the most of this crash, play its quickening possibilities into our own lives. I was thinking of the scars on my own body and on Vaughan’s, handholds for our first embraces, and of the wounds on the bodies of the survivors of the crash behind us, contact points for all the sexual possibilities of their futures.

  The last of the ambulances drove away, its siren wailing. The spectators returned to their cars,
or climbed the embankment to the break in the wire fence. An adolescent girl in a denim suit walked past us, her young man with an arm around her waist. He held her right breast with the back of his hand, stroking her nipple with his knuckles. They stepped into a beach buggy slashed with pennants and yellow paint and drove off, horn hooting eccentrically. A burly man in a truck-driver’s jacket helped his wife up the embankment, a hand on her buttocks. This pervasive sexuality filled the air, as if we were members of a congregation leaving after a sermon urging us to celebrate our sexualities with friends and strangers, and were driving into the night to imitate the bloody eucharist we had observed with the most unlikely partners.

  Catherine leaned against the rear body panel of the Lincoln, crotch pressed against the chromium fin moulding. She kept her head away from me.

  ‘Are you going to drive? You’re all right, aren’t you?’

  I stood with my feet apart, hands on my breast bone, inhaling the floodlit air. I could feel my wounds again, cutting through my chest and knees. I searched for my scars, those tender lesions that now gave off an exquisite and warming pain. My body glowed from these points, like a resurrected man basking in the healed injuries that had brought about his first death.

  I knelt by the nearside front wheel of the Lincoln. Streaks of a black gelatinous material smeared the fender and wheel housing, marking the muddied disc of the whitewall tyre. I touched the gummy residues with my fingers. A heavy dent marked the wheel housing, the same deformation produced on my own car some two years earlier when I had been hit by a German shepherd dog running blindly across a street. I had stopped a hundred yards ahead and walked back to find two schoolgirls vomiting into their hands over the dying dog.