James Ballard - Crash

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 window 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.