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.
Along the pavement a traffic policeman walked towards the car, clearly recognizing the Lincoln. When he saw me behind the wheel he moved on, but for a moment I had relished being identified with Vaughan and the uncertain images of crime and violence that were forming in the eyes of the police. I thought of the crashed cars at the collision site, of Seagrave dying during a last acid trip. In the moment of her collision with this deranged stunt-driver the television actress celebrated her last performance, marrying her body with the stylized contours of the instrument panel and windshield, her elegant posture with the violent conjunctions of colliding door panels and bulkheads. I visualized the accident filmed in slow motion, like the simulated collisions we had seen at the Road Research Laboratory. I saw the actress colliding with her instrument panel, the steering column buckling under the weight of her heavy-breasted thorax; her slim hands, familiar from a hundred panel games, feinting with the razor- sharp louvres of the ashtray and instrument clusters; her self-immersed face, idealized in a hundred close-ups, three-quarter profile lit by the most flattering light densities, striking the upper rim of the steering wheel; her nasal bridge crushed, upper incisors driven back through her gums into her soft palate. Her mutilation and death became a coronation of her image at the hands of a colliding technology, a celebration of her individual limbs and facial planes, gestures and skin tones. Each of the spectators at the accident site would carry away an image of the violent transformation of this woman, of the complex of wounds that fused together her own sexuality and the hard technology of the automobile. Each of them would join his own imagination, the tender membranes of his mucous surfaces, his groves of erectile tissue, to the wounds of this minor actress through the medium of his own motorcar, touching them as he drove in a medley of stylized postures. Each would place his lips on those bleeding apertures, lay his own nasal septum against the lesions of her left hand, press his eyelids against the exposed tendon of her forefinger, the dorsal surface of his erect penis against the ruptured lateral walls of her vagina. The automobile crash had made possible the final and longed-for union of the actress and the members of her audience.
This last period with Vaughan is inseparable in my mind from the excitement I felt as I thought about these imaginary deaths, the exhilaration of being close to Vaughan and wholly accepting his logic. Curiously, Vaughan remained subdued and depressed, indifferent to his success in converting me into an eager disciple. As we ate lunch in a motorway cafeteria he fed his scarred mouth with amphetamine tablets, but these stimulants only touched him later in the day, when he recovered slightly. Was Vaughan losing his resolve? Already I felt the dominant partner in our relationship. Without needing any instruction from Vaughan, I listened to the police and ambulance frequencies, propelling the heavy car up and down the access roads in pursuit of the latest vehicle pile- up and collision.
Our behaviour together became increasingly stylized, as if we were some skilled partnership of surgeons, jugglers or comedians. Far from reacting with horror or revulsion now at the sight of these injured victims, sitting stunned on the grass beside their cars after an early afternoon fog patch, or pinned against their instrument panels, Vaughan and I felt a sense of professional detachment, in which the first workings of some kind of true involvement were revealed. My horror and disgust at the sight of these appalling injuries had given way to a lucid acceptance that the translation of these injuries in terms of our fantasies and sexual behaviour was the only means of re- invigorating these wounded and dying victims. Early that evening, after seeing a woman driver with severe facial injuries, Vaughan lay for ten minutes with his penis in the mouth of a middle-aged, silver-haired prostitute, almost choking her as she knelt across him. He held her head fiercely in his hands to prevent her from moving, until the spit dribbled from her mouth like a tap. Driving slowly around the darkening streets of the housing estates to the south of the airport, I watched over my shoulder as Vaughan moved this woman around the rear seat, steering her with his strong thighs. All his violence and anger had returned. After his orgasm the woman slumped against the seat. She let the semen drip on to the damp vinyl below Vaughan’s testicles, gasping for breath as she wiped away the flecks of vomit from his penis. Staring at her face as she replaced her spilled bag, I saw the wounded face of the injured woman driver irrigated with Vaughan’s semen. On the seat, and on Vaughan’s thighs, on the hands of this middle-aged prostitute, the semen glimmered in opalescent drops, their colour changing from red to amber and green in the rhythm of the traffic lights, reflecting the thousands of lights in the night air as we sped along the expressway, the harsh phosphorescent tubes of the lamp standards, and the huge corona of light that hung over the airport. As I looked at the evening sky it seemed as if Vaughan’s semen bathed the entire landscape, powering these thousands of engines, electric circuits and private destinies, irrigating the smallest gestures of our lives.
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
