Crash

by J. G. Ballard

  We walked to his car, double-parked alongside an airline coach. A few paces ahead of me, Vaughan moved like an over-careful dream-walker. He stared at different pieces of the sky, experiencing – as I myself remembered only too well – the first of those premonitory light changes that turn a brilliant summer noon into a leaden winter evening within the space of a second. Sitting in the passenger seat of the Lincoln, Vaughan eased his shoulders into the upholstery, as if laying out his wounds. He watched me fumble with the ignition, a faint smile mocking me for all the eagerness I had shown in pursuing him, and yet accepting now his own failure and my authority over him.

  As I started the engine Vaughan laid his bandaged palm across my thigh. Surprised by this physical contact between us, I thought at first that Vaughan was trying to reassure me. He lifted his hand to my mouth, and I saw the dented silver cube in his fingers. I unwrapped the foil and placed the sugar cube on my tongue.

  We left the airport through the exit tunnel, crossed Western Avenue and ascended the upward ramp of the interchange. For twenty minutes I drove along the Northolt expressway, holding the car in the centre lane and letting the faster traffic overtake us on either side. Vaughan lay back, right cheek resting against the cool seat, his arms limply at his sides. Now and then his hands contracted, arms and legs flexing involuntarily. Already I could feel the first effects of the acid. My palms felt cool and tender; wings were about to grow from them and lift me into the speeding air. An icy nimbus was gathering around the roof of my skull, like the clouds that form in the hangars of spacecraft. I had taken an acid trip two years earlier, a paranoid nightmare during which I had let a Trojan horse into my mind. As Catherine tried helplessly to calm me she had appeared in my eyes as a hostile and predatory bird. I had felt my brains sliding on to the pillow through the hole she had pecked in my skull. I remembered crying like a child and hanging from her arm, begging her not to leave me as my body shrank to a naked membrane.

  With Vaughan, by contrast, I felt at ease, confident of his affection for me, as if he were deliberately guiding me along this expressway which he had created for me alone. The other cars passing us were present through an enormous act of courtesy on his part. At the same time, I was sure that everything around me, the growing extension of the LSD through my body, was part of some ironic intention of Vaughan’s, as if the excitement suffusing my mind hovered between hostility and affection, emotions which had become interchangeable.

  We joined the fast westward sweep of the outer circular motorway. I moved the car into the slow lane as we turned around the central drum of the interchange, accelerating when we gained the open deck of the motorway, traffic speeding past us. Everywhere the perspectives had changed. The concrete walls of the slip road reared over us like luminous cliffs. The marker lines diving and turning formed a maze of white snakes, writhing as they carried the wheels of the cars crossing their backs, as delighted as dolphins. The overhead route signs loomed above us like generous dive-bombers. I pressed my palms against the rim of the steering wheel, pushing the car unaided through the golden air. Two airport coaches and a truck overtook us, their revolving wheels almost motionless, as if these vehicles were pieces of stage scenery suspended from the sky. Looking around, I had the impression that all the cars on the highway were stationary, the spinning earth racing beneath them to create an illusion of movement. The bones of my forearms formed a solid coupling with the shift of the steering column, and I felt the smallest tremors of the roadwheels magnified a hundred times, so that we traversed each grain of gravel or cement like the surface of a small asteroid. The murmur of the transmission system reverberated through my legs and spine, echoing off the plates of my skull as if I myself were lying in the transmission tunnel of the car, my hands taking the torque of the crankshaft, my legs spinning to propel the vehicle forwards.

  The daylight above the motorway grew brighter, an intense desert air. The white concrete became a curving bone. Waves of anxiety enveloped the car like pools of heat off summer macadam. Looking down at Vaughan, I tried to master this nervous spasm. The cars overtaking us were now being superheated by the sunlight, and I was sure that their metal bodies were only a fraction of a degree below their melting points, held together by the force of my own vision, and that the slightest shift of my attention to the steering wheel would burst the metal films that held them together and break these blocks of boiling steel across our path. By contrast, the oncoming cars were carrying huge cargoes of cool light, floats loaded with electric flowers being transported to a festival. As their speeds increased I found myself drawn into the fast lane, so that the oncoming vehicles were moving almost straight towards us, enormous carousels of accelerating light. Their radiator grilles formed mysterious emblems, racing alphabets that unravelled at high speed across the road surface.

  Exhausted by the effort of concentrating on the traffic and holding the cars around us in their lanes, I took my hands off the wheel and let the car press on. In a long and elegant swerve the Lincoln crossed the fast lane. The tyres roared against the concrete verge, lashing the windshield with a storm of dust. I lay back helplessly, my body exhausted. In front of me I saw Vaughan’s hand on the wheel. He sat across me, one knee up on the instrument panel, steering the car within inches of the central reservation. An oncoming truck sped towards us in the adjacent fast lane. Vaughan removed his hand from the wheel and gestured towards it, suggesting that I drive the Lincoln across the central reservation and straight into the truck.

  Distracted by Vaughan’s physical presence as he leaned against me, I held the wheel again, steering the car down the fast lane. Vaughan’s body was a collection of loosely coupled planes. The elements of his musculature and personality were suspended a few millimetres apart, floating beside me in this pressure-free zone like the contents of an astronaut’s capsule. I watched the cars approaching us, unable to grasp more than a fraction of the thousands of messages which their wheels and headlamps, windshields and radiator grilles were flashing at me.

  I remembered my first journey home from Ashford Hospital after my accident. The brightness of the traffic, the nervous perspectives of the motorway embankments and the vehicle lanes along Western Avenue, had anticipated this acid vision, as if my wounds had flowered into these paradisial creatures, celebrating the unity of my crash and this metallized Elysium. As Vaughan urged me again to crash the car into the vehicles approaching us, I was tempted to obey him, making no effort to answer the teasing pressure of his hand. An airline coach sped towards us, its silver hull irradiating all six lanes of the motorway, bearing down on us like an alighting archangel.

  I held Vaughan’s wrist in my hand. The dark hairs of his pallid forearm, the scar tissue on the knuckles of his ring and index fingers, were now irrigated with a harsh beauty. Taking my eyes off the road, I clasped Vaughan’s hand in my own, trying to close my eyes to the fountain of light that poured through the windshield of the car from the vehicles approaching us.

  An armada of angelic creatures, each surrounded by an immense corona of light, was landing on the motorway on either side of us, sweeping down in opposite directions. They soared past, a few feet above the ground, landing everywhere on these endless runways that covered the landscape. I realized that all these roads and expressways had been built by us unknowingly for their reception.

  Leaning across me, Vaughan steered the car through the flight paths. As we changed direction, horns and tyres screamed around us. Vaughan controlled the wheel, like a parent guiding an exhausted child. I held the rim passively in my hands, following the pathway of the car down a slip road.

  We stopped below an overpass, the front fender of the Lincoln rolling on to the concrete palisade that divided the motorway embankment from the edge of an abandoned wrecker’s yard. I listened to the last music of the engine before I switched off the ignition, and lay back in my seat. In the screen of the rear-view mirror I watched the cars climbing the access ramp on to the motorway behind us, eager arrivals at this aeri
al carnival. They sailed along the road surface above our heads to join the aircraft Vaughan had watched for so many months. As I gazed at the distant causeways of the northern circular motorway I could see that everywhere these metallized creatures were soaring through the sunlight, ascending from the traffic jams that had locked them together.

  Around me the interior of the car glowed like a magician’s bower, the light within the compartment becoming darker and brighter as I moved my eyes. The instrument dials irradiated my skin with their luminous needles and numerals. The carapace of the instrument binnacle, the inclined planes of the dashboard panel, the metal sills of the radio and ashtrays gleamed around me like altarpieces, their geometries reaching towards my body like the stylized embraces of some hyper-cerebral machine.

  In the breaker’s yard a testudo of abandoned cars lay together in the ever-changing light, their outlines shifting as if some time-wind were blowing across them. Strips of rusting chrome leaked into the overheated air, patches of intact cellulose bled away into the crown of light that covered the yard. The spurs of deformed metal, the triangles of fractured glass, were signals that had lain unread for years in this shabby grass, ciphers translated by Vaughan and myself as we sat with our arms around each other in the centre of the electric storm moving across our retinas.

  I stroked Vaughan’s shoulder, remembering the terror in which I had clung to my wife. Yet Vaughan, for all his harshness, was a wholly benevolent partner, the eye of this illumination of the landscape around us. Taking his hand, I pressed his palm against the medallion of the horn boss, an aluminized emblem which had always irritated me. I felt the indentation in his white skin, remembering the triton-shaped bruise in the palm of the dead Remington as he lay across my bonnet, remembering the pink grooves in my wife’s skin left by her underwear, the imprints of imaginary wounds, as she changed in her department store cubicle, remembering the exciting crevices and sulci of Gabrielle’s crippled body. One by one, I moved Vaughan’s hand across the glowing dials of the instrument panel, pressing his fingers against the sharp toggles, the projecting lances of the direction indicator and gear shift.

  At last I let his hand rest on my penis, reassured by its firm pressure on my testicles. I turned towards Vaughan, floating with him on the warm amnion of illuminated air, encouraged by the stylized morphology of the automobile’s interior, by the hundreds of radiant gondolas soaring along the motorway above our heads. As I embraced him, Vaughan’s body seemed to slide up and down in my arms, the muscles of his back and buttocks becoming hard and opaque as I felt the changing planes. I held his face in my hands, feeling the porcelain smoothness of his cheeks, and touched with my fingers the scars on his lips and cheeks. Vaughan’s skin seemed to be covered with scales of metallic gold as the points of sweat on his arms and neck fired my eyes. I hesitated at finding myself wrestling with this ugly golden creature, made beautiful by its scars and wounds. I moved my mouth across the scars on his lips, feeling with my tongue for those familiar elements of long-vanished dashboards and windshields. Vaughan loosened his leather jacket, exposing the re-opened wounds that marked his chest and abdomen, a deranged drag queen revealing the leaking scars of an unsuccessful trans-sexual surgery. I lowered my head to his chest, pressing my cheek against the bloody profiles of a collapsing steering wheel, the collision points of an instrument panel. I ran my lips along his left collar-bone, and sucked at his scarred nipple, feeling the re-sectioned areola between my lips. I moved my mouth down his abdomen to his damp groin, marked with blood and semen, a faint odour of a woman’s excrement clinging to the shaft of his penis. A zodiac of unforgotten collisions illuminated Vaughan’s groin, and one by one I explored these scars with my lips, tasting the blood and urine. With my fingers I touched the scar on his penis, then felt the glans within my mouth. I loosened Vaughan’s blood-stained trousers. His naked buttocks were like a pubertal youth’s, as unscarred as a child’s. The nerves in my legs and arms began to jump with irritation, my limbs flexing themselves in a series of nervous spasms. I crouched behind Vaughan, forcing his thighs against my own. The jutting carapace of the instrument binnacle presided over the dark cleft between his buttocks. With my right hand I parted his buttocks, feeling for the hot vent of his anus. For several minutes, as the cabin walls glowed and shifted, as if trying to take up the deformed geometry of the crashed cars outside, I laid my penis at the mouth of his rectum. His anus opened around the head of my penis, settling itself around the shaft, his hard detrusor muscles gripping my glans. As I moved in and out of his rectum the lightborne vehicles soaring along the motorway drew the semen from my testicles. After my orgasm I lifted myself slowly from Vaughan, holding his buttocks apart with my hands so as not to injure his rectum. Still parting his buttocks, I watched my semen leak from his anus across the fluted ribbing of the vinyl upholstery.

  Sitting together, we were washed by the light flowing in every direction across the landscape. I held my arm around Vaughan as he slept, watching as the fountain pouring from the radiator grilles of the crashed cars twenty yards away gradually faded. A profound sense of calm presided over my body, composed partly of my love for Vaughan, and partly of my feelings of tenderness towards the metal bower in which we sat. When Vaughan woke, exhausted and still half asleep, he leaned his naked body against me. His face was pallid, eyes exploring the contours of my arms and chest. Together we showed our wounds to each other, exposing the scars on our chests and hands to the beckoning injury sites on the interior of the car, to the pointed sills of the chromium ashtrays, to the lights of a distant intersection. In our wounds we celebrated the re-birth of the traffic-slain dead, the deaths and injuries of those we had seen dying by the roadside and the imaginary wounds and postures of the millions yet to die.

  22

  FLIES crawled across the oil-smeared windshield, vibrating against the glass. The chains of their bodies formed a blue veil between myself and the traffic moving along the motorway. I turned on the windshield wipers, but the blades swept through the flies without disturbing them. Vaughan lay back on the seat beside me, trousers open around his knees. The flies crawled in thick clumps across his blood-smeared chest, festering on his pallid stomach. They formed an apron of pubic hair that reached from his limp testicles to the scars along his diaphragm. The flies covered Vaughan’s face, hovering around his mouth and nostrils as if waiting for the rancid liquors distilled from the body of a corpse. Vaughan’s eyes were open and alive, watching me as his head lay against the seat with a calm gaze. I tried to brush the flies from his face, thinking that they must irritate him, and saw that my hands and arms, the interior of the car, were covered with the insects.

  The steering wheel and instrument panel were alive with this retinal horde. Ignoring Vaughan’s raised hand, I opened the driver’s door. Vaughan tried to stop me. His exhausted face was raised in a warning gesture, a rictus of alarm and concern, as if frightened of what I might find in the open air. I stepped on to the roadway, mechanically brushing these motes of optical irritation from my hands and arms. I had entered an abandoned world. The stones in the road surface cut unevenly into the soles of my shoes, discarded there after the passage of a hurricane. The concrete walls of the overpass were drained and grey, like the entrance to a hypogeum. The cars moving in a desultory way along the road above me had shed their cargoes of light, and clattered down the highway like the dented instruments of a fugitive orchestra.

  But as I turned, the sunlight against the concrete walls of the overpass formed a cube of intense light, almost as if the stony surface had become incandescent. I was sure that the white ramp was a section of Vaughan’s body, and that I was one of the flies crawling across him. Afraid to move for fear of burning myself against this luminous surface, I put my hands on the roof of my skull, holding the soft brain tissue in place.

  Abruptly, the light faded. Vaughan’s car sank into the darkness below the bridge. Everything had become drab again. The air and light were exhausted. I stepped into the road, mo
ving away from the car, aware of Vaughan’s uncertain arm reaching for me. I walked along the palisade to the weed-grown entrance of the breaker’s yard. Above me, the cars on the motorway moved like motorized wrecks, paintwork worn and blunted. Their drivers sat stiffly behind their wheels, overtaking the airline coaches filled with mannequins dressed in meaningless clothing.

  An abandoned car, its engine and wheels removed, sat on its axles in a layby below the overpass. I opened the door on its rusting hinges. A confetti of fragmented glass covered the front passenger seat. For the next hour I sat there, waiting for the acid to wear its way through my nervous system. Crouching over the mud-streaked instrument panel of this hollow wreck, I tightened my knees against my chest wall, flexing the muscles of my calves and arms, trying to squeeze the last micro-drops of this insane irritant from my body.

  The termites had gone. The light changes became less frequent, and the air over the motorway steadied itself. The last silver and golden sprays sank back into the deserted wrecks in the breaker’s yard. The distant motorway embankments resumed their blurred outlines. Irritable and exhausted, I pushed back the door and stepped from the car. The nodes of glass scattered on the ground glinted like pieces of discredited coinage.

  An engine started with a roar. As I stepped into the road from the layby I was briefly aware of a heavy black vehicle accelerating towards me from the shadow of the overpass where Vaughan and I had lain together. Its white-walled tyres tore through the broken beer bottles and cigarette packs in the gutter, mounted the narrow kerb and hurtled on towards me. Knowing now that Vaughan would not stop for me, I pressed myself against the concrete wall of the layby. The Lincoln swerved after me, its right-hand front fender striking the rear wheel housing of the abandoned car in which I had sat. It swung away, ripping the open passenger door from its hinges. A column of exploding dust and torn newspaper rose into the air as it slid sideways across the access road. Vaughan’s bloodied hands whirled at the steering wheel. The Lincoln re-mounted the kerb on the far side of the access road. It crushed a ten-yard section of the wooden palisade. The rear wheels regained their traction on the road surface and the car swung away on to the motor road above.