James Ballard - Crash

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.

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 accident 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.