Crash

by James Graham Ballard

  I pointed to the smears of blood. ‘You must have hit a dog—the police may impound the car while they have the blood analysed.’

  Vaughan knelt beside me and inspected the bloodstains, nodding sagely. ‘You’re right, Ballard—there’s an all-night car-wash in the airport service area.’

  He held the door open for me, his steady eyes without any show of hostility, as if calmed and relaxed by the accident we had passed. I sat behind the wheel, waiting for him to walk around the car and sit beside me, but he pulled open the rear door and climbed in with Catherine.

  As we set off, his camera landed on the front seat. Its invisible silver memories of pain and excitement distilled themselves on their dark reel as, behind me, Catherine’s most sensitive mucous surfaces quietly discharged their own quickening chemicals.

  We drove westwards towards the airport. I watched Catherine in the rear-view mirror. She sat in the centre of the rear seat, elbows forward on her knees, looking over my shoulder at the speeding lights of the expressway. At the first traffic lights, when I glanced at her, she smiled at me reassuringly. Vaughan sat like a bored gangster behind her, his left knee leaning against her thigh. One hand rubbed his groin absent-mindedly. He stared at the nape of her neck, running his eyes along the profiles of her cheek and shoulder. That Catherine should choose Vaughan, whose manic style summed up everything she found most unnerving, struck me as perfectly logical. The multiple car-crash we had seen had sprung the same traps in her mind as in mine.

  At the north-west airport entrance I turned the car into the service area. On this peninsula between the perimeter fence and the access roads to Western Avenue was an encampment of car-hire firms, all-night cafeterias, airfreight offices and filling stations. The evening air was crossed by the navigation lights of airliners and maintenance vehicles, by the thousands of headlamps flowing along Western Avenue and the flyover. The jarring light across Catherine’s face made her seem part of this midsummer nightmare, true creature of the electric air.

  A line of cars waited their turn to pass through the automatic car-wash. In the darkness the three nylon rollers drummed against the sides and roof of a taxi parked in the washing station, water and soap solution jetting from the metal gantries. Fifty yards away, the two night attendants sat in their glass cubicle beside the deserted fuel pumps, reading their comic books and playing a transistor radio. I watched the rollers sweeping across the taxi. Hidden inside the cabin as the soapy water sluiced across the windows, the off-duty driver and his wife were invisible and mysterious mannequins.

  The car ahead advanced a few yards. Its brake-lights illuminated the interior of the Lincoln, covering us with a pink sheen. Through the driving mirror I saw that Catherine was leaning against the rear seat. Her shoulder was pressed tightly into Vaughan’s. Her eyes were fixed on Vaughan’s chest, at the scars around his injured nipples shining like points of light.

  I edged the Lincoln forward a few feet. Behind me lay a block of darkness and silence, a condensed universe. Vaughan’s hand moved across a surface. I went through the pretence of withdrawing the car’s radio aerial. The accident below the flyover, in a position almost symmetrically opposite to my own, and the thudding of the rollers had pre-empted my responses. The possibilities of a new violence, even more exciting for only touching my mind rather than my nerve endings, was reflected in the deformed sheen of the chromium window pillar beside my wrist, the dented panels of the Lincoln’s hood. I thought of Catherine’s past infidelities, liaisons always visualized in my mind but never observed.

  An attendant left the pay-box and walked to the cigarette machine beside the lubrication bay. His reflection in the wet concrete merged with the lights of the cars passing along the expressway. The water jetted from the metal gantry across the car in front of us. The soap stream hit the bonnet and windshield, hiding two air hostesses and a steward in its liquid glaze.

  When I turned around I saw that Vaughan was holding in his cupped hand my wife’s right breast.

  I eased the car forward into the empty bay, concentrating on the controls. The last liquid dripped from the stationary rollers in front of me. I wound down my window and searched in my pockets for the coins. The plump meridian of Catherine’s breast jutted forwards in Vaughan’s hand, the nipple inflated between his fingers as if about to feed a platoon of eager male mouths, the lips of countless lesbian secretaries. He stroked the nipple gently, brushing the supernumerary nipples, no larger than delicious warts, with the ball of his thumb. Catherine looked down at this breast with rapt eyes, as if seeing it for the first time, fascinated by its unique geometry.

  Our car was alone in the washing bay. Around us the forecourt was deserted. Catherine lay back with her legs apart, her mouth raised to Vaughan, who touched it with his lips, laying each scar in turn against her mouth. I felt that this act was a ritual devoid of ordinary sexuality, a stylized encounter between two bodies which recapitulated their sense of motion and collision. Vaughan’s postures, the way in which he held his arms as he moved my wife across the seat, lifting her left knee so that his body was in the fork between her thighs, reminded me of the driver of a complex vehicle, a gymnastic ballet celebrating a new technology. His hands explored the back of her thighs in a slow rhythm, holding her buttocks and lifting her exposed pubis towards his scarred mouth without touching it. He was arranging her body in a series of positions, carefully searching the codes of her limbs and musculature. Catherine seemed still only half aware of Vaughan, holding his penis in her left hand and sliding her fingers towards his anus as if performing an act divorced from all feeling. She touched his chest and shoulders with her right hand, exploring the patterns of scars on his skin, handholds which his crashes had designed specifically for this sexual act.

  A voice shouted. Ggarette in hand, one of the attendants was standing in the wet darkness, beckoning to me like the flight commander of an aircraft carrier. I inserted my coins in the pay slot and closed the window. Water jetted on to the car, clouding the windows and shutting us into its interior, lit only by the lights from the instrument panel. Within this blue grotto Vaughan lay diagonally across the rear seat. Catherine knelt across him, skirt rolled around her waist, holding his penis in both hands, her mouth no more than an inch away from his. The distant headlamps, refracted through the soap solution jetting across the windows, covered their bodies with a luminescent glow, like two semi-metallic human beings of the distant future making love in a chromium bower. The gantry engine began to drum. The rollers pounded across the bonnet of the Lincoln and roared forwards to the windshield, driving the soap solution into a whirlwind of froth. Thousands of bubbles burst across the windows. As the rollers drummed against the roof and doors, Vaughan began to drive his pelvis upwards, almost lifting his buttocks off the seat. With clumsy hands Catherine settled her vulva over his penis. In the mounting roar of the rollers around us she and Vaughan rocked together, Vaughan holding her breasts with his palms as if trying to force them into a single globe. At his orgasm Catherine’s gasps were drowned by the roar of the car-wash.

  The gantry retreated to its start position. The machine switched itself out of circuit. The rollers hung limply in front of the clear glass of the windshield. The last of the detergent-stained water ran through the darkness to the drainage vents. Sucking at the air through his scarred lips, Vaughan lay back exhausted, staring at Catherine with confused eyes. He watched her raise her cramped left thigh, a movement I remembered her making a hundred times with me. Her breasts were bruised by Vaughan’s fingers, the marks forming a pattern like crash injuries. I wanted to reach out and care for them, helping them into their next sexual act, steering her nipples into Vaughan’s mouth, guiding his penis into her small rectum, along the guidelines provided by the diagonal seat vents that pointed towards her perineum. I wanted to adjust the contours of her breasts and hips to the roofline of the car, celebrating in this sexual act the marriage of their bodies with this benign technology.

  I opened the windo
w and inserted more coins into the cash meter. As the water jetted on to the streaming panes Vaughan and my wife began to make love again. Catherine held his shoulders, staring at his face with possessive eyes, a dishevelled lover. She brushed her blonde hair from her cheeks, eager to get to Vaughan’s body again. Vaughan laid her against the rear seat, opened her thighs and began to stroke her pubis, his middle finger searching for her anus. He leaned towards her on one hip, placing Catherine and himself in the postures of the injured diplomat and the young woman whom we had seen sitting together in the cabin of the crashed limousine. He lifted her on to him, pressing his penis frontally into her vagina, one hand under her right armpit, the other below her buttock, in the same handholds that the ambulance men had used to lift the young woman from the car.

  As the rollers drummed over our heads Catherine looked into my eyes in a moment of complete lucidity. Her expression showed both irony and affection, an acceptance of a sexual logic we both recognized and had prepared ourselves for. I sat quietly in the front seat as the white soap sluiced across the roof and doors like liquid lace. Behind me, Vaughan’s semen glistened on my wife’s breasts and abdomen. The rollers drummed and battered at the car; the streams of water and soap solution jetted over its now immaculate body. Each time the machine completed its cycle I wound down my window and pushed more coins into the pay slot. The two attendants watched us from their glass kiosk, the faint music of the transistor radio sounding into the night air as the gantry returned to its start position.

  Catherine cried out, a gasp of pain cut off by Vaughan’s strong hand across her mouth. He sat back with her legs across his hips, slapping her with one hand as the other forced his flaccid penis into her vagina. His face was clamped in an expression of anger and distress. Sweat poured from his neck and chest, soaking the waist-band of his trousers. The blows from his hand raised blunted weals on Catherine’s arms and hips. Exhausted by Vaughan, Catherine hung to the rear seat behind his head. As his penis jerked emptily into her bruised vulva, Vaughan sank back against the seat. Already he had lost interest in the whimpering young woman pulling herself into her clothes. His scarred hands explored the worn fabric of the seat, marking in semen a cryptic diagram: some astrological sign or road intersection.

  As we drove away from the car-wash, the rollers dripped silently in the darkness. Around the car an immense pool of white bubbles subsided into the wet concrete.

  Chapter 18

  No traffic moved along the expressway. For the first time since my release from hospital the streets were empty, as if the exhausted sexual acts between Vaughan and Catherine had banished these vehicles for ever. As I drove towards our apartment house in Drayton Park the street-lamps illuminated Vaughan’s sleeping face in the rear of the car, scarred mouth lying open like a child’s against the sweat-soaked seat. His face seemed drained of all aggressiveness, as if the semen he had voided into Catherine’s vulva had carried with it his sense of crisis.

  Catherine sat forward, freeing herself from Vaughan. She touched my shoulder in a gesture of domestic affection. In the driving mirror I saw the weals on her cheek and neck, the bruised mouth that deformed her nervous smile. These disfigurements marked the elements of her real beauty.

  When we reached the apartment house Vaughan was still asleep. Catherine and I stood in the darkness beside the immaculate car, its polished hood like a black shield. I took Catherine’s arm to steady her, holding her bag in my hand. As we walked towards the entrance across the worn gravel Vaughan pulled himself from the rear seat. Without looking back at us he climbed unsteadily behind the steering wheel. I expected him to drive off in a roar of noise, but he started the engine and slipped away silently.

  In the elevator I held Catherine closely, loving her for the blows Vaughan had struck her body. Later that night, I explored her body and bruises, feeling them gently with my lips and cheeks, seeing in the rash of raw skin across her abdomen the forcing geometry of Vaughan’s powerful physique. My penis traced the raw symbols that his hands and mouth had left across her skin. I knelt over her as she lay diagonally across the bed, her small feet resting on my pillow, one hand over her right breast. She watched me with a calm and affectionate gaze as I touched her body with the head of my penis, marking out the contact points of the imaginary automobile accidents which Vaughan had placed on her body.

  The next morning, I drove to the studios at Shepper-ton, revelling in the movement of the traffic around me, free at last to enjoy the lanes of speeding vehicles. Along the elegant motion sculpture of the concrete highway the coloured carapaces of the thousands of cars moved like the welcoming centaurs of some Arcadian land.

  Vaughan was already waiting for me in the studio carpark, the Lincoln parked in my own space. The scars on his abdomen shone in the morning sunlight, a few inches from my fingers as they rested on the door sill. A white areole of dried vaginal mucus circled the vent of his jeans, marking where my wife’s vulva had pressed against his groin.

  Vaughan opened the driver’s door of the Lincoln for me. As I took my seat behind the steering wheel I realized that I now wanted to spend as much time as possible with him. He sat facing me, one arm along the seat behind my head, his heavy penis pointing towards me in the crotch of his jeans. I now felt the elements of a true affection for Vaughan, elements of jealousy, love and pride. I wanted to touch his body, holding his thigh as we drove in the same way that I had held Catherine’s when we first met, letting my hand rest on his hip as we walked to and from the car.

  As I turned the ignition switch, Vaughan said, ‘Sea-grave has gone.’

  ‘Where? They’ve finished the crash sequence here.’

  ‘God only knows. He’s driving around in a wig and leopard-skin coat. He may start following Catherine.’

  I abandoned my office. On that first day we drove for hours along the motorways in search of Seagrave, listening to the police and ambulance broadcasts on Vaughan’s VHP radio. Vaughan listened to the accident reports, readying his cameras in the rear seat.

  As the evening light lay over the last traffic jams of the day Vaughan came completely awake. I drove him to his apartment, a large single-roomed studio on the top floor of a block overlooking the river north of Shepperton. The room was filled with discarded electronic equipment—electric typewriters, a computer terminal, several oscilloscopes, tape recorders and cine-cameras. Bales of electric cable were heaped on the unmade bed. The shelves and walls were packed with scientific textbooks, incomplete runs of technical journals, science-fiction paperbacks and reprints of his own papers. Vaughan had furnished the apartment without any interest—the selection of chromium and vinyl chairs looked as if they had been seized at random from a suburban department-store window.

  Above all, the apartment was dominated by Vaughan’s evident narcissism—the walls of the studio, bathroom and kitchen were covered with photographs of himself, stills from his television programmes, half-plate prints from newspaper photographers, polaroid snapshots of himself on location, enjoying the attentions of the makeup lady, gesturing at the producer for the photographer’s benefit. All these photographs dated back to the time before Vaughan’s accident, as if the subsequent years marked a temporal no-zone, a period whose urgencies went beyond vanity. Yet, as he moved around the apartment, taking a shower and changing his clothes, Vaughan was self-consciously absorbed in these fading images, straightening their curling corners as if frightened that when they finally vanished his own identity would also cease to matter.

  I saw this attempt at tagging himself, to fix his identity by marking it upon some external event, as we drove along the expressways that evening. Listening to his radio, Vaughan lay in the front passenger seat beside me, lighting the first of his cigarettes. The fresh scent of his well-showered body was overlaid, first, by the smell of hash and then by the tang of Vaughan’s semen moistening the crotch of his trousers as we passed the first of the automobile crashes. As I drove the car through the network of back streets to the next accide
nt site, my head invaded by the burning resin, I thought of Vaughan’s body in the bathroom at his apartment, the powerful hose of his penis jutting from his hard groin. The scars on his knees and thighs were like miniature rungs, handholds on this ladder of desperate excitements.

  By the early hours of the morning we had seen three car-crashes. Inside my fuddled head I assumed that we were still trying to track down Seagrave, but I knew that Vaughan had lost interest in the stunt-driver. After the third of these crashes, when the police and ambulance attendants had left, and the last all-night truck driver had returned to his vehicle, Vaughan finished his cigarette and walked unsteadily across the oil-slick concrete to the motorway embankment. A heavy saloon car driven by a middle-aged woman dentist had skidded through the railings and overturned in the abandoned allotment garden below. I followed Vaughan and watched from the ruptured balustrade as he climbed down to the now upended car. Vaughan walked through the knee-deep grass around the car, and picked up a piece of white chalk discarded by the police. With his hands he felt the sharp edges of the fractured glass and metalwork, pressing against the crushed roof and hood panels. Resting for a moment, he urinated in the darkness against the still warm radiator grille, sending a cloud of vapour into the night air. He stared down at his half-erect penis, looking back at me in a muddled way as if asking me to help him identify this strange organ. He placed it against the right-hand front wing of the car, and with the chalk drew its outline on the black cellulose. He inspected this thoughtfully and, satisfied, moved around the car, marking the profile of his penis on the doors and fractured windows, on the trunk lid and rear fender. Carrying his penis in his hand to shield it from the sharp metal, Vaughan climbed into the front seat and began to draw the outline of his penis against the instrument panel and centre arm-rest, marking out the erotic focus of a crash or sex act, celebrating the marriage of his own genitalia and the skull-shattered dashboard binnacle against which this middle-aged woman dentist had died.