J. Ballard - Crash

It was during this evening that I noticed the first of Vaughan's self-inflicted wounds. At a Western Avenue filling station he deliberately trapped his hand in the door of the car, mimicking the injuries to the arm of a young hotel receptionist involved in a side-swipe collision in the car-park of her hotel. Vaughan picked repeatedly at the scabs running across his knuckles. The scars on his knees, healed now for more than a year, were beginning to re-open. The points of blood seeped through the worn fabric of his jeans. Red flecks appeared on the lower curvature of the dashboard locker, on the lower rim of the radio console, and marked the black vinyl of the doors. Vaughan encouraged me to drive faster than the airport access roads allowed. When I braked sharply at the intersections he deliberately let himself slide against the instrument panel. Blood mingled with the dried semen on the seats, marking my own hands with dark points as I turned the wheel. His face was whiter than I had ever seen it, and he moved in bursts of exhausted nervousness around the cabin of the car, like an uncomfortable animal. This hyper-irritation reminded me of my own long recovery from a bad acid trip some years earlier, when I had felt for months afterwards as if a vent of hell had opened momentarily in my mind, as if the membranes of my brain had been exposed in some appalling crash.

My last meeting with Vaughan – the climax of a long punitive expedition into my own nervous system – took place a week later in the mezzanine lounge of the Oceanic Terminal. In retrospect, it seems ironic that this house of glass, of flight and possibility, should have been the departure point for our own lives and deaths. As he walked towards me through the chromium chairs and tables, his reflection multiplied in the glass wall-panels, Vaughan had never appeared more derelict and uncertain. His pock-marked face and haggard shamble through the passengers waiting for their flight-calls together gave him the look of an unsuccessful fanatic, doggedly holding together his spent obsessions.

He stood beside me at the bar when I rose to greet him, barely bothering to recognize me, as if I were some unfamiliar blur. His hands fretted at the bar, searching for a control surface, the points of fresh blood on his knuckles catching the light. During the previous six days I had waited restlessly in my office and apartment, watching the motorways through the windows, running down the elevator staircase whenever I thought that I had seen his car speeding past. I scrutinized the gossip columns of newspapers and film-trade magazines, trying to guess which screen star or political celebrity Vaughan might be following, assembling the elements of imaginary accidents in his mind. All the experiences of our weeks together had left me in a state of increasing violence, which I knew only Vaughan could resolve. In my fantasies, as I made love to Catherine, I saw myself in an act of sodomy with Vaughan, as if only this act could solve the codes of a deviant technology.

Vaughan waited as I ordered a drink for him, staring across the runways at an airliner lifting into the air over the western perimeter of the airfield. He had telephoned me that morning, his voice barely recognizable, and suggested that we meet at the airport. Seeing him again, tracing the outlines of his buttocks and thighs in his worn trousers, the scars around his mouth and below his jaw angle, filled me with a hard, erotic excitement.

'Vaughan… ' I tried to press the cocktail into his hands. He nodded without arguing. 'Try to sip it. Do you want some breakfast?'

Vaughan made no effort to touch the cocktail. He stared at me with his uncertain eyes, like a marksman calculating the distance of a target. He picked up a water jug, holding the sliding fluid between his hands. When he filled a dirty glass on the counter and drank thirstily, I realized that he was moving into the opening stages of an acid high. He was squeezing and flexing the palms of his hands, wiping his scarred mouth with his fingertips. I waited as he climbed these first gradients of excitation and alarm, eyes roving around the glass-enclosed mezzanine as he picked from the air the first motes of fused light and movement.

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 whiter 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 road-wheels 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.