Crash

Half an hour later I had turned back to the airport and stopped the car in the shadows of the multi-storey carpark facing the Oceanic Terminal. The girl at last managed to pull herself from Vaughan, who lay exhausted against the rear seat. Clumsily, she reassembled herself, remonstrating with Vaughan and the drowsy blonde in the front seat. Vaughan's semen ran down her left thigh on to the black vinyl of the seat. The ivory globes searched for the steepest gradient to the central sulcus of the seat.

I stepped from the car and paid the two women. When they had gone, carrying their hard loins back to the neon-lit concourses, I waited beside the car. Vaughan was staring at the terraced cliff of the car-park, his eyes following the canted floors, as if trying to recognize everything that had passed between himself and the dark-haired girl.

Later, Vaughan explored the possibilities of the car-crash in the same calm and affectionate way that he had explored the limits of that young prostitute's body. Often I watched him lingering over the photographs of crash fatalities, gazing at their burnt faces with a terrifying concern, as he calculated the most elegant parameters of their injuries, the junctions of their wounded bodies with the fractured windshield and instrument assemblies. He would mimic these injuries in his own driving postures, turning the same dispassionate eyes on the young women he picked up near the airport. Using their bodies, he recapitulated the deformed anatomies of vehicle crash victims, gently bending the arms of these girls against their shoulders, pressing their knees against his own chest, always curious to see their reactions.

Chapter 16

The world was beginning to flower into wounds. From the window of my office at the film studios I watched Vaughan seated in his car in the centre of the parking lot. Most of the staff were leaving for home, taking their cars one by one from the files around Vaughan's dusty limousine. He had driven into the studios an hour earlier. After Renata pointed him out to me I managed successfully to ignore him, but the steady subtraction of the other vehicles from the parking lot soon focused all my attention on this isolated car at the centre. In the three days since our visit to the Road Research Laboratory he had come to the studios each afternoon – ostensibly to see Seagrave, but his real motive was to force me to arrange his formal introduction to the film actress. At an uncertain moment the previous afternoon, after meeting him at a filling station on Western Avenue, I had agreed to help him, well aware that I was no longer able to throw Vaughan off. Without any effort now, he was able to follow me all day, for ever waiting for me at the airport entrances, in the forecourts of filling stations, almost as if I were unconsciously steering myself into his path.

His presence had affected my driving, and I guessed that I was really waiting to be involved in a second accident, this time under Vaughan's eyes. Even the giant aircraft taking off from the airport were systems of excitement and eroticism, punishment and desire waiting to be inflicted on my body. The massive traffic jams on the motorways seemed to suffocate the air, and I nearly believed that Vaughan himself had conjured these vehicles on to the exhausted concrete as part of some elaborate psychological test.

When Renata had gone Vaughan stepped from his car. I watched him walk across the parking lot to the entrance of the offices, wondering why he had chosen me – already I could see myself driving a target vehicle on a collision course with either Vaughan or some victim of his choice.

Vaughan walked through the outer offices, glancing to left and right at the enlarged sales photographs of automobile radiator grilles and windshield assemblies. He was wearing the same stale jeans he had unrolled around his hard buttocks during his sex-act as I drove the car. His lower lip had developed a small ulcer which he had opened by chewing on it. I stared with a peculiar fascination at this miniature orifice, aware of his extending sexual authority over me, an authority partly won by the accident memorialized in the scarred contours of his face and chest.

'Vaughan, I'm exhausted. It's been an effort to move in and out of this office, let alone chase up a producer I barely know. Anyway, the chance of her actually completing one of your questionnaires is nil.'

'Let me give it to her.'

'I know, you'll probably charm her…'