Crash - Ballard James Graham. Страница 37

By this time I was certain that if the screen actress never died in a car-crash, Vaughan had created all the possibilities of her death. From these hundreds of miles and sexual acts, Vaughan was selecting certain needed elements: a section of the Western Avenue flyover, examined through my own accident and the death of Helen Remington's husband, marked in a sexual notation by an act of oral copulation with a seventeen-year-old schoolgirl; the off-side fender of a black American limousine, marked by the pressure of Catherine's arm against the left door-sill and celebrated by the sustained erection of a middle-aged prostitute's nipple; the actress herself stepping from her car and stumbling briefly against the half-open window, her grimace recorded by Vaughan through the zoom lens of his cine-camera; elements of accelerating cars, changing traffic lights, swaying breasts, varying road surfaces, clitorises held gently like botanical specimens between thumb and forefinger, the stylization of a thousand actions and postures as he drove – together these were stored in Vaughan's mind, ready to be recalled and fitted into whatever weapon of assassination he devised. Vaughan questioned me repeatedly about the actress's sexual life, about which I knew nothing, urging me to enlist Catherine in a literature search of defunct movie magazines. Many of his sexual acts were clearly models for what he imagined her own to be within the automobile.

However, Vaughan had already worked out the imaginary sexual acts within the automobile of a host of famous personalities – politicians, Nobel prizewinners, international athletes, astronauts and criminals – just as he had already conceived their deaths. As we strolled together through the airport parking lots, searching for a car to borrow, Vaughan would cross-examine me about the ways in which Marilyn Monroe or Lee Harvey Oswald would probably have had intercourse in their cars, Armstrong, Warhol, Raquel Welch… their choice of vehicle and model year, their postures and favourite erogenous zones, the freeways and autostradas of Europe and North America along which they moved in Vaughan's mind, their bodies funded by their limitless sexualities, love, tenderness and eroticism.

'… Monroe masturbating, or Oswald, say – left- or right-handed, which would you guess? And what instrument panels? Was orgasm reached more quickly with a recessed or overhanging binnacle? Vinyl colour-contouring, windshield glass, these are factors. Garbo and Diet-rich, there's a place for the gerontological approach. The special involvement of at least two of the Kennedys with the automobile… ' Always he deliberately side-stepped into self-parody.

However, during my last days with Vaughan his obsessions with the crashed car became increasingly disordered. His fixation on the screen actress and the sex-death he had devised for her seemed to make him all the more frustrated when this hoped-for death failed to occur. Instead of driving along the motorway we sat in a deserted parking lot behind my apartment house in

Drayton Park, watching the leaves of the plane trees carried through the falling light across the wet macadam. For hours Vaughan listened to the police and ambulance broadcasts, his long body fretting as he flicked at the overloaded ashtray, stuffed with reefer stubs and an old sanitary tampon. Caring for him, I wanted to stroke his scarred thighs and abdomen, offering him the automobile injuries carried by my own body in place of those imaginary wounds he wished upon the actress.

The crash that I most feared – after Vaughan's own death, already a coming reality in my mind – took place on the Harlington clearway three days later. As the first garbled references to the multiple injuries of the screen actress, Elizabeth Taylor, were made on the police broadcasts, and cancelled shortly afterwards, I knew whose death-ordeal we were about to witness.

Vaughan sat patiently beside me as I pushed the Lincoln westwards to the accident site. He stared with resigned eyes at the white trades of the plastics factories and tyre warehouses along the clearway. He listened to the details of the three-vehicle collision on the police frequency, steadily turning up the volume as if wanting to hear the final confirmation broadcast at full crescendo.

We reached the accident site at Harlington half an hour later, and parked on the grass verge below the overpass. Three cars had collided in the centre of a highspeed intersection. The first two vehicles – a customized fibreglass sports car and a silver Mercedes coupe – had struck each other in a right-angle collision, ripping away their nearside wheels and crushing their engine compartments. The fibreglass sports car, an anthology of every bulbous and fin-shaped motif of the 1950s, had then been hit in the rear by a chauffeur-driven government saloon. Shaken but uninjured, the young woman driver in her green uniform was helped from her vehicle, which had buried its bonnet in the rear end of the sports car. Sections of tattered fibreglass lay around the crushed fuselage, like discarded styling exercises in a designer's studio.

The driver of the sports car lay dead in his cockpit, as two firemen and a police constable worked to free him from the buckled overhang of the instrument panel. The woman's leopard-skin coat which he was wearing had been torn back to expose his crushed chest, but his white platinum hair was still neatly held together by a nylon hair-net. On the seat beside him, like a dead cat, lay a black wig. Seagrave's slim and exhausted face was covered with shattered safety glass, as if his body were already crystallizing, at last escaping out of this uneasy set of dimensions into a more beautiful universe.

Only five or six feet away from him, the woman driver of the silver Mercedes coup6 lay sideways across her seat below the broken windshield. The crowd of spectators pressed around and over the two cars, almost toppling the ambulance men trying to lift the woman from her crushed driving compartment. From a policeman pushing past with a blanket I heard her name, that of a former television presenter, several years past her bloom but still an occasional performer on panel games and late-night talk shows. As she was propped into a half-sitting position I recognized her face, pallid and drained now like an -old woman's. A lace-work of dried blood hung from her chin, forming a dark bib. As she was placed on a stretcher, the spectators stared respectfully at the injuries to her thighs and lower abdomen, making way for her when she was carried to the ambulance.

Two women in headscarves and tweed coats were pushed aside. Arms outstretched, Vaughan plunged between them. His eyes seemed to be out of focus. He seized one of the handles already held by an attendant, and swept along with it to the ambulance. The woman was lifted into the back of the vehicle, breathing jerkily through the crust of blood over her nose. I nearly shouted to the police, convinced from the agitated way in which Vaughan bent over the recumbent woman that he was about to draw his penis and use it to free her blood-filled mouth passage. Assuming from his overwrought state that Vaughan was some kind of relative, the attendants stood back for him, but a policeman who recognized Vaughan punched him in the chest with the palm of his hand and shouted to him to move along.

Vaughan hovered around the closing doors, ignoring the constable, then made off through the crowd in a sudden swerve, his bearings lost for the moment. He forced his way to the crushed fibreglass sports car and looked down uncertainly at Seagrave's body, dressed in its coronation armour of fractured glass, a suit of lights like a dead matador's. His hands gripped the windshield pillar.

Confused and shaken by the stunt-man's death and the tags of the film actress's clothing – themselves the props of a calculated collision – still lying around the car, I followed Vaughan through the spectators. He wandered blankly around the silver Mercedes, eyes fixed on the bloodstains smeared across the seat and instrument panel, examining every piece of the strange litter that had materialized from nowhere after the crash. His hands made small movements through the air, marking out the trajectories of the internal impacts within the car as Sea-grave struck it, the mechanical moments of the second collision between this minor television personality and her instrument panel.

Later, I realized what had most upset Vaughan. This was not Seagrave's death, but that in his collision, still wearing Elizabeth Taylor's wig and costume, Seagrave had pre-empted that real death which Vaughan had reserved for himself. In his mind, from that accident onwards, the film actress had already died. All that remained now for Vaughan was to constitute the formalities of time and place, the entrances of her flesh to a wedding with himself already celebrated across the bloody altar of Seagrave's car.

We walked back to the Lincoln. Vaughan opened the passenger door, staring at me as if he had never seen me clearly before.

'Ashford hospital.' He motioned me on. They'll take Seagrave there when they've cut him loose.'

'Vaughan… ' I tried to think of some means of calming him. I wanted to touch his thigh, press the knuckles of my left hand against his mouth. 'You've got to tell Vera.'

'Who?' Vaughan's eyes cleared momentarily. 'Vera -she knows already.'

He drew from his pocket a grimy square of silk scarf. He spread it carefully on the seat between us. Lying in the centre was a triangle of bloodstained grey leather, the drying blood still a bright carmine. Experimentally, Vaughan touched the blood with his fingertips, brought it up to his mouth and tasted the tacky fragments. He had cut the piece from the front seat of the Mercedes, where the blood from the woman's abdominal wounds had flowed between her legs.

Mesmerized, Vaughan stared at the fragment, prodding the stitched vinyl inlay that traversed the triangle from its apex. It lay between us like a saintly relic, the fragment of a hand or shinbone. For Vaughan this piece of leather, as delicious and as poignant as the stains on the gusset of a shroud, contained all the special magic and healing powers of a modern martyr of the super-highways. These precious square inches had pressed against the vulva of the dying woman, stained with the blood that had flowed from her wounded genital orifice.

I waited for Vaughan at the entrance to the hospital. He ran towards the casualty department, ignoring the shout of a passing attendant. I sat in the car outside the gates, wondering if Vaughan had been waiting here with his camera when my own injured body was brought in. At this moment the injured woman was probably dying, her blood pressure falling, organs heavy with uncirculated fluid, a thousand stagnant arterial deltas forming an ocean bar that blocked the rivers of her bloodstream. I visualized her lying on a metal bed in the emergency ward, her bloodied face and shattered nasal bridge like the mask worn at an obscene halloween, the initiation rite into one's own death. I visualized the graphs that recorded the falling temperatures of her rectum and vagina, the steepening gradients of nerve function, the last curtains of her dying brain.