Crash

by James Graham Ballard

  He walked back to his car, camera held like a weapon by its pistol grip. As he reached the balcony his face was lit by the headlamps of the police car. I realized that I had seen his pock-marked face many times before, projected from a dozen forgotten television programmes and news-magazine profiles—this was Vaughan, Dr Robert Vaughan, a one-time computer specialist. As one of the first of the new-style TV scientists, Vaughan had combined a high degree of personal glamour—heavy black hair over a scarred face, an American combat jacket—with an aggressive lecture-theatre manner and complete conviction in his subject matter, the application of computerized techniques to the control of all international traffic systems. In the first programmes of his series three years earlier Vaughan had projected a potent image, almost that of the scientist as hoodlum, driving about from laboratory to television centre on a high-powered motorcycle. Literate, ambitious and adept at self-publicity, he was saved from being no more than a pushy careerist with a Ph.D. by a strain of naive idealism, his strange vision of the automobile and its real role in our lives.

  He stood by the balcony, looking down at the collision below. The headlamps illuminated the hard ridges of scar tissue above his eyebrows and mouth, the broken and re-set nose bridge. I remembered why Vaughan’s career had come to an abrupt end—halfway through his television series he had been seriously injured in a motorcycle crash. All too clearly his face and personality still carried the memory of that impact, some terrifying collision on a motorway in the North when his legs had been broken by the rear wheels of a truck. His features looked as if they had been displaced laterally, reassembled after the crash from a collection of faded publicity photographs. The scars on his mouth and forehead, the self-cut hair and two missing upper canine gave him a neglected and hostile appearance. The bony knuckles of his wrists projected like manacles from the frayed cuffs of his leather jacket.

  He stepped into his car. This was a ten-year-old model of a Lincoln Continental, the same make of vehicle as the open limousine in which President Kennedy had died. I remembered that one of Vaughan’s obsessions had been Kennedy’s assassination.

  He reversed past me, the left fender of the Lincoln brushing against my knee. I crossed the roof as he swept away down the ramp. This first meeting with Vaughan remained vividly in my mind. I knew that his motives for following me had nothing to do with revenge or blackmail.

  Chapter 7

  After our meeting on the roof of the airport car-park I was continually aware of Vaughan’s presence. He no longer followed me, but seemed to hover like an invigilator in the margins of my life, for ever monitoring my head. Along the high-speed lanes of Western Avenue I watched the rear-view mirror, and scanned the parapets of overpasses and multi-storey car-parks.

  In a sense I had already enlisted Vaughan in my confused hunt. I sat in the crowded traffic lanes of the flyover, the aluminium walls of the airline coaches shutting off the sky. As I watched the packed concrete decks of the motorway from our veranda while Catherine prepared our first evening drinks, I was convinced that the key to this immense metallized landscape lay somewhere within these constant and unchanging traffic patterns.

  Luckily, my messianic obsessions soon made themselves evident to Paul Waring, my partner. He arranged with Catherine to restrict my visits to the studio offices to an hour a day. Easily tired and excited, I had an absurd row with Waring’s secretary. But all this seemed trivial and unreal. Far more important was the delivery of my new car from the local distributors.

  Catherine regarded with profound suspicion my choice of the same make and model as the car in which I had crashed. I had even selected the same make of wing mirror and mudguard spat. She and her secretary watched me critically from the forecourt of the airfreight offices. Karen stood behind Catherine, a cocked elbow almost touching her shoulder blade, like a young and ambitious madame keeping a protective eye on her latest discovery.

  ‘Why did you ask us here?’ Catherine said. ‘I don’t think either of us ever wants to look at a car again.’

  ‘Certainly not this one, Mrs Ballard.’

  ‘Is Vaughan following you?’ I asked Catherine. ‘You spoke to him at the hospital.’

  ‘He said he was a police photographer. What does he want?’

  Karen’s eyes gazed at my scarred scalp. ‘It’s hard to believe he was ever on television.’

  I outstared Karen with an effort. She watched me like a predatory animal behind the silver bars of her mouth.

  ‘Did anyone see him at the accident?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. Are you planning to have another crash for him?’ Catherine sauntered around the car. She settled herself in the front passenger seat, savouring the sharp tang of salesroom vinyl.

  ‘I’m not thinking about the crash at all.’

  ‘You’re getting involved with this man, Vaughan—you’re talking about him all the time.’ Catherine stared through the immaculate windshield, her thighs held open in a formalized posture.

  I was thinking, in fact, about the contrast between this generous pose and the glass curtain-walling of the airport buildings, the showroom glitter of the new car. Sitting here in the exact replica of the vehicle in which I had nearly killed myself, I visualized the crushed fenders and radiator grille, the precise deformation of the hood trim, the angular displacement of the windshield pillars. The triangle of Catherine’s pubis reminded me that the first sexual act within the car had yet to take place.

  At the Northolt police pound I showed my pass to the guard, custodian of this museum of wrecks. I hesitated there, like a husband collecting his wife from the depot of a strange and perverse dream. Some twenty or so crashed vehicles were parked in the sunlight against the rear wall of an abandoned cinema. At the far end of the asphalt yard was a truck whose entire driving cabin had been crushed, as if the dimensions of space had abruptly contracted around the body of the driver.

  Unnerved by these deformations, I moved from one car to the next. The first vehicle, a blue taxi, had been struck at the point of its near-side headlamp—on one side the bodywork was intact, on the other the front wheel had been forced back into the passenger compartment. Next to it was a white saloon which had been run over by an enormous vehicle. The marks of giant tyres ran across its crushed roof, forcing it down to the transmission hump between the seats.

  I recognized my own car. The remains of towing tackle were attached to the front bumper, and the body panels were splashed with oil and dirt. I peered through the windows into the cabin, running my hand over the mud-stained glass. Without thinking, I knelt in front of the car and stared at the crushed fenders and radiator grille.

  For several minutes I gazed at this wrecked car, reassembling its identity. Terrifying events rolled through my mind on its flattened wheels. What most surprised me was the extent of the damage. During the accident the hood had climbed over the engine compartment, hiding from me the real extent of the collision. Both front wheels and the engine had been driven back into the driver’s section, bowing the floor. Blood still marked the bonnet, streamers of black lace running towards the windshield wiper gutters. Minute flecks were spattered across the seat and steering wheel. I thought of the dead man lying on the hood of the car. The blood rilling across the bruised cellulose was a more potent fluid than the semen cooling in his testicles.

  Two policemen crossed the yard with a black Alsatian dog. They watched me hovering around my car as if they vaguely resented my touching it. When they had gone I unlatched the driver’s door, and with an effort pulled it open.

  I eased myself on to the dusty vinyl seat, tipped back by the bowing of the floor. The steering column had reared forward six inches towards my chest. I lifted my nervous legs into the car and placed my feet on the rubber cleats of the pedals, which had been forced out of the engine compartment so that my knees were pressed against my chest. In front of me the instrument panel had been buckled inwards, cracking the clock and speedometer dials. Sitting here in this deformed cabin, rilled with dust and
damp carpeting, I tried to visualize myself at the moment of collision, the failure of the technical relationship between my own body, the assumptions of the skin, and the engineering structure which supported it. I remembered visiting the Imperial War Museum with a close friend, and the pathos that surrounded the cockpit segment of a World War II Japanese Zero fighter aircraft. The clutter of electrical wiring and torn canvas webbing on the floor expressed all the isolation of war. The blurring perspex of the cockpit canopy contained a small segment of the Pacific sky, the roar of air-, craft warming up on a carrier deck thirty years before.

  I watched the two policemen exercising their dog across the yard. I opened the dashboard locker and forced the shelf downwards. Inside, covered with dirt and flaked plastic, were several items Catherine had been unable to reclaim: a set of route maps, a mild pornographic novel which Renata had lent me as a brave joke, a polaroid photograph I had taken of her sitting in the car near the water reservoirs with her left breast exposed.

  I pulled back the ashtray. The metal tray jumped on to my lap, releasing a dozen lipstick-smeared butts. Each of these cigarettes, smoked by Renata as we drove from the office to her flat, reminded me of one of the sexual acts that had taken place between us. Looking down at this small museum of excitement and possibility, I realized that the crushed cabin of my car, like some bizarre vehicle modified for an extreme cripple, was the perfect module for all the quickening futures of my life.

  Someone passed in front of the car. A policeman’s voice called from the gatehouse. Through the windshield I saw a woman in a white raincoat walking along the line of wrecked cars. The appearance in this drab yard of an attractive woman, moving from one car to the next like an intelligent gallery visitor, roused me from this reverie upon twelve cigarette ends. The woman approached the car next to mine, a crushed convertible involved in a massive rear-end collision. Her intelligent face, that of an overworked doctor, broad forehead disguised by a lowered hairline, gazed down at the vanished passenger compartment.

  Without thinking, I started to climb from my car, then sat quietly behind the steering wheel. Helen Remington turned from the crashed convertible. She glanced at the bonnet of my car, clearly not recognizing the vehicle which had killed her husband. As she raised her head she saw me through the empty windshield, sitting behind the deformed steering wheel among the dried bloodstains of her husband. Her strong eyes barely changed their focus, but one hand rose involuntarily to her cheek. She took in the damage to my car, her attention moving from the impacted radiator grille to the high-rising steering wheel in my hands. Then she began a brief scrutiny of myself, inspecting me with a tolerant eye like a doctor faced with a difficult patient suffering from a set of largely self-indulgent symptoms.

  She moved away towards the damaged truck. What struck me again was her unusual leg-stance, the inner surface of her thighs, set in a broad pelvis, turned outwards as if exposed to the line of crashed vehicles. Had she been waiting for me to visit the police pound? I knew that some kind of confrontation between us was inevitable, but in my mind this was already overlaid by other feelings—pity, eroticism, even a strange jealousy of the dead man, whom she but not I had known.

  She came back as I waited on the oil-stained asphalt in front of my car.

  She pointed to the damaged vehicles. ‘After this sort of thing, how do people manage to look at a car, let alone drive one?’ When I made no reply she said flatly, ‘I’m trying to find Charles’s car.’

  ‘It’s not here. Perhaps the police are still holding it. Their forensic people…’

  ‘They said it was here. They told me this morning.’ She peered critically at my car, as if puzzled by its distorted geometry, and then finding this confirmed in my own bent of character. ‘This is your car?’

  She reached out a gloved hand and touched the radiator grille, feeling a torn chrome pillar from the accordion, as if searching for some trace of her husband’s presence among the blood-spattered paintwork. I had never spoken to this tired woman, and felt that I should launch into a formal apology for her husband’s death and the appalling act of violence which had involved us. At the same time, her gloved hand on the scarred chrome aroused a feeling of sharp sexual excitement.

  ‘You’ll tear your gloves.’ I moved her hand away from the grille. ‘I don’t think we should have come here—I’m surprised the police don’t make it more difficult.’

  Her strong wrist pressed back against my fingers, out of a kind of wayward irritation, as if she were rehearsing her physical revenge against me. Her eyes lingered on the black confetti scattered across the bonnet and seats.

  ‘Were you badly hurt?’ she asked. ‘I think we saw each other at the hospital.’

  I found it impossible to say anything to her, aware of the almost obsessive way in which she brushed her hair across her cheek. Her strong body, with its nervous sexuality, formed a powerful junction with the dented and mud-stained car.

  ‘I don’t want the car,’ she said. ‘In fact, I was appalled to find that I have to pay a small fee to have it scrapped.’

  She hung around the car, watching me with a mixture of hostility and interest, as if admitting that her motives for coming to the pound were as ambiguous as my own. I sensed that in her refined and matter-of-fact way she was already trying out the possibilities I had opened for her, examining this instrument of a perverse technology which had killed her husband and closed the principal avenue of her life.

  I offered her a lift to her surgery.

  ‘Thanks.’ She walked ahead of me. ‘To the airport, if you could.’

  ‘The airport?’ I had an odd feeling of loss. ‘Why—are you leaving?’

  ‘Not yet—though not soon enough for some people, I’ve already found.’ She took off her sunglasses and gave me a bleak smile. ‘A death in the doctor’s family makes the patients doubly uneasy.’

  ‘I take it you’re not wearing white to reassure them?’

  ‘I’ll wear a bloody kimono if I want to.’

  We took our seats in my car. She told me that she worked in the immigration department at London Airport. Holding herself well away from me, she leaned back against the door pillar, surveying the interior of the car with a critical eye, this apparent resurrection of smooth vinyl and polished glass. She followed my hands as they moved across the controls. The pressure of her thighs against the hot plastic formed a module of intense excitement. Already I guessed that she was well aware of this. By a terrifying paradox, a sexual act between us would be a way of taking her revenge on me.

  Heavy traffic jammed the northbound motorway from Ashford to London Airport. The sunlight burned on the overheated cellulose. Tired drivers leaned through open windows around us, listening to the endless newscasts on their radios. Sealed inside their airline coaches, would-be passengers watched the jetliners lifting from the distant runways of the airport. To the north of the terminal buildings I could see the high deck of the flyover straddling the airport entrance tunnel, clogged with traffic that seemed about to re-enact a slow-motion dramatization of our crash.

  Helen Remington pulled a cigarette packet from the pocket of her raincoat. She searched the instrument panel for the lighter, right hand moving above my knees like a nervous bird.

  ‘Do you want a cigarette?’ Her strong fingers tore away the cellophane. ‘I started to smoke at Ashford—it’s rather stupid of me.’

  ‘Look at all this traffic—I need every sedative I can lay my hands on.’

  ‘It’s much worse now—you noticed that, did you? The day I left Ashford I had the extraordinary feeling that all these cars were gathering for some special reason I didn’t understand. There seemed to be ten times as much traffic.’

  ‘Are we imagining it?’

  She pointed to the interior of the car with her cigarette. ‘You’ve bought yourself exactly the same car again. It’s the same shape and colour.’

  She turned her face towards me, making no effort now to hide the scar-line on her face. I was w
ell aware of the strong undertow of hostility moving towards me. The traffic stream reached the Stanwell intersection. I followed the queue of cars, already thinking of how she would behave during sexual intercourse. I tried to visualize her broad mouth around her husband’s penis, sharp fingers between his buttocks searching out his prostate. She touched the yellow hull of a fuel tanker beside us, its massive rear wheels only six inches from her elbow. As she read the fire instructions on the tank I stared at her firm calves and thighs. Had she any notion of the man, or woman, with whom her next sex act would take place? I felt my penis stirring as the lights changed. I moved from the fast into the slow lane, taking up my position in front of the fuel tanker.

  The arch of the flyover rose against the skyline, its northern ramp shielded by the white rectangle of a plastics factory. The untouched, rectilinear volumes of this building fused in my mind with the contours of her calves and thighs pressed against the vinyl seating. Clearly unaware that we were moving towards our original meeting ground, Helen Remington crossed and uncrossed her legs, shifting these white volumes as the front elevations of the plastics factory moved past.

  The pavement fell away below us. We sped towards the junction with the Drayton Park motorway spur. She steadied herself against the chromium pillar of the quarter-window, almost dropping her cigarette on to her lap. Trying to control the car, I pressed the head of my penis against the lower rim of the steering wheel. The car swept toward? its first impact point with the central reservation. Marker lines unravelled diagonally below us, and a car’s horn blared faintly from behind my shoulder. The drifts of broken windshield glass flashed like morse lamps in the sunlight.

  Semen jolted through my penis. As I lost control of the car the front wheel struck the kerb of the central reservation, throwing a tornado of dust and cigarette packs on to the windshield. The car swerved from the fast lane and veered towards an airline coach coming out of the roundabout. As the semen oozed from my penis I pulled the car behind the coach. The last tremor of this small orgasm faded.