James Ballard - Crash

At the far end of the track, a smaller group of technicians prepared the motorcycle, securing the boom camera attached to the cradle which would travel down the rails. The visitors—Ministry officials, road safety engineers, traffic specialists and their wives—had gathered around the point of impact, like a crowd at a race track.

As Vaughan arrived, striding on his long, uneven legs from the car-park, everyone looked round, watching this black-jacketed figure advance towards the motorcycle. I myself half expected him to mount the machine and drive it down the rails at us. The scars on his mouth and forehead caught the air like sabre wounds. He hesitated, watching the technicians lift the plastic motorcyclist—’Elvis’—on to his machine, and then strode on towards us, beckoning to Helen Remington and myself. He scanned the visitors with a somehow offensive gaze. Once again he struck me as being a strange mixture of personal hauntedness, complete confinement in his own panicky universe, and yet at the same time open to all kinds of experiences from the outer world.

Vaughan pushed his way through the visitors. In his right hand he carried a bundle of publicity folders and R.R.L. handouts. He bent over Helen Remington’s shoulder as she looked up at him from her chair in the front row.

‘Have you seen Seagrave?’

‘Was he supposed to come?’

‘Vera telephoned me about him this morning.’ He turned his attention to me, tapping the bundle of handouts in his grip. ‘Get all the paper you can, Ballard. Some of the stuff they give away—"Mechanisms of Occupant Ejection", "Tolerances of the Human Face in Crash Impacts"… ‘ As the last of the engineers stood back from the test car Vaughan nodded appreciatively, and commented sotto voce, ‘The technology of accident simulation at the R.R.L. is remarkably advanced. Using this set-up they could duplicate the Mansfield and Camus crashes—even Kennedy’s—indefinitely.’

‘They’re trying to reduce the number of accidents here, not increase it.’

‘I suppose that’s a point of view.’

The commentator had called the crowd to order. The test crash was about to take place. Vaughan had forgotten me, starting forward like a patient suburban voyeur half asleep over his binoculars. His right hand, shielded by the publicity folders, was manipulating his penis through the fabric of his trousers. He squeezed the distal end, almost forcing the glans through the threadbare cloth, index finger rolling back the foreskin. All the while his eyes moved up and down the collision course, taking in every detail.

The electric winches which propelled the catapult began to drum at the rails, the cables tautening. Vaughan’s hand worked away at his groin. The engineer in charge stepped back from the motorcycle and signalled to his assistant by the catapult. Vaughan switched his attention to the car in front of us, its four plastic occupants sitting up stiffly as if en route to a chapel meeting. Vaughan glanced at me over his shoulder, his face hard and flushed, as if making sure that I was involved.

With a loud jerk, the motorcycle sped down the track, its cables clanking between the metal rails. The mannequin rider sat well back, the onrushing air lifting his chin. His hands were shackled to the handlebars like a kamikaze pilot’s. His long thorax was plastered with metering devices. In front of him, their expressions equally vacant, the family of four mannequins sat in their vehicle. Their faces were marked with cryptic symbols.

A harsh whipping noise came towards us, the sound of the metering coils skating along the grass beside the rail. There was a violent metallic explosion as the motorcycle struck the front of the saloon car. The two vehicles veered sideways towards the line of startled spectators. I regained my balance, involuntarily holding Vaughan’s shoulder, as the motorcycle and its driver sailed over the bonnet of the car and struck the windshield, then careened across the roof in a black mass of fragments. The car plunged ten feet back on its hawsers. It came to rest astride the rails. The bonnet, windshield and roof had been crushed by the impact. Inside the cabin, the lopsided family lurched across each other, the decapitated torso of the front-seat woman passenger embedded in the fractured windshield.

The engineers waved to the crowd reassuringly and moved towards the motorcycle, which lay on its side fifty yards behind the car. They began to pick up the sections of the cyclist’s body, tucking the legs and head under their arms. Shavings of fibreglass from its face and shoulders speckled the glass around the test car like silver snow, a death confetti.

The loudspeaker addressed the crowd again. I tried to follow the commentator’s words, but my brain failed to translate the sounds. The ugly and violent impact of this simulated crash, the rupture of metal and safety glass, and the deliberate destruction of expensively engineered artefacts, had left me lightheaded.

Helen Remington held my arm. She smiled at me, nodding encouragingly as if urging a child across some mental hurdle. ‘We can have a look at it again on the Ampex. They’re showing it in slow-motion.’

The crowd was moving towards the trestle tables, voices lifting again in relieved chatter. I turned back, waiting for Vaughan to join us. He was standing among the empty seats, eyes still fixed on the wrecked car. Below his waistband a pool of semen darkened the crotch of his trousers.

Ignoring Helen Remington, who moved away from us with a faint smile, I stared at Vaughan, uncertain what to say to him. Faced with this junction of the crashed car, the dismembered mannequins and Vaughan’s exposed sexuality, I found myself moving through a terrain whose contours led inside my skull towards an ambiguous realm. I stood behind Vaughan, staring at his muscular back, hard shoulders swinging under his black jacket.

Beside the Ampex machine the visitors were watching the motorcycle as it crashed once again into the saloon car. Sections of the collision were replayed in slow motion. In a dream-like calm, the front wheel of the motorcycle struck the fender of the car. As the rim collapsed, the tyre sprung inwards upon itself to form a figure of eight. The tail of the machine rose into the air. The mannequin, Elvis, lifted himself from his seat, his ungainly body at last blessed by the grace of the slow-motion camera. Like the most brilliant of all stunt men, he stood on his pedals, legs and arms fully stretched. His head was raised with its chin forwards in a pose of almost aristocratic disdain. The rear wheel of the motorcycle lifted into the air behind him, and seemed about to strike him in the small of the back, but with great finesse the rider detached his feet from the pedals and inclined his floating body in a horizontal posture. His hands were still attached to the handlebars, now moving away from him as the cycle somersaulted. The metering coils severed one wrist, and he launched himself into a horizontal dive, head raised so that his face became a prow, bearing its painted wound areas towards the oncoming windshield. His chest struck the bonnet of the car, grazing its polished cellulose like a surfboard.

Already, as the vehicle moved back under the impact of the first collision, the four occupants of the car were themselves moving towards the second collision. Their smooth faces pressed on into the advancing windshield as if eager to see the chest glider soaring up the bonnet of the car. Both the driver and his woman passenger rolled forwards to meet the windshield, touching it with the crowns of their lowered heads at the same moment as the motorcyclist’s profile struck the glass. A fountain of spraying crystal erupted around them, through which, as if in celebration, their figures were taking up ever more eccentric positions. The motorcyclist continued on his horizontal path through the emblazoned windshield, his face torn away by the centrally mounted driving mirror. His left arm detached itself at the elbow as it struck the windshield pillar, and was swept up through the fountain of glass to join the debris chasing the inverted body of the motorcycle three feet above his spine. His right arm moved through the fractured windshield, losing first its hand on the guillotine of the near-side windshield wiper, and then its forearm against the face of the front-seat woman passenger, taking with it her right cheekbone. The motorcyclist’s body slewed gracefully to one side in an elegant slalom, his hips striking the right-hand windshield pillar, buckling it at the central welding point. His legs rotated around the car, shin-bones striking the central door pillar.