Crash

Chapter 14

As the heavy car moved through the London-bound traffic I began to read the questio

In each questio

By contrast, the choice of wounds and death-modes available showed all the benefits of an exhaustive and lingering research. Almost every conceivable violent confrontation between the automobile and its occupants was listed: mechanisms of passenger ejection, the geometry of kneecap and hip-joint injuries, deformation of passenger compartments in head-on and rear-end collisions, injuries sustained in accidents at roundabouts, at trunk-road intersections, at the junctions between access roads and motorway intersections, the telescoping mechanisms of car-bodies in front-end collisions, abrasive injuries formed in roll-overs, the amputation of limbs by roof assemblies and door sills during roll-over, facial injuries caused by dashboard and window trim, scalp and cranial injuries caused by rear-view mirrors and sun-visors, whiplash injuries in rear-end collisions, first and second-degree burns in accidents involving the rupture and detonation of fuel tanks, chest injuries caused by steering column impalements, abdominal injuries caused by faulty seat-belt adjustment, second-order collisions between front-seat and rear-seat passengers, cranial and spinal injuries caused by ejection through windshields, the graded injuries to the skull caused by variable windshield glasses, injuries to minors, both children and infants in arms, injuries caused by prosthetic limbs, injuries caused within cars fitted with invalid controls, the complex self-amplifying injuries of single and double amputees, injuries caused by specialist automobile accessories such as record players, cocktail cabinets and radiotelephones, the injuries caused by manufacturers' medallions, safety belt pinions and quarter-window latches.

Lastly came that group of injuries which had clearly most preoccupied Vaughan – genital wounds caused during automobile accidents. The photographs which illustrated the options available had clearly been assembled with enormous care, torn from the pages of forensic medical journals and textbooks of plastic surgery, photocopied from internally circulated monographs, extracted from operating theatre reports stolen during his visits to Ashford hospital.

As Vaughan turned the car into a filling station courtyard the scarlet light from the neon sign over the portico flared across these grainy photographs of appalling injuries: the breasts of teenage girls deformed by instrument bi

The same conjunctions, all the more terrifying when they seemed to evoke the -underlying elements of character, I saw in the photographs of facial injuries. These wounds were illuminated like medieval manuscripts with the inset details of instrument trim and horn bosses, rear-view mirrors and dashboard dials. The face of a man whose nose had been crushed lay side by side with a chromium model-year emblem. A young coloured woman with sightless eyes lay on a hospital couch, a rear-view mirror inset beside her, its glassy stare replacing her own vision.

Comparing the completed questio

Horns sounded ahead of us. We had reached the first heavy traffic in the approaches to the western suburbs of London. Vaughan drummed impatiently on the steering wheel. The scars on his mouth and forehead formed a clear hatchwork in the afternoon light, the marking areas of a future generation of wounds.

I turned the pages of Vaughan's questio

At the conclusion of the questio

Thinking of this new algebra of leg-stance and wound area which Vaughan was calculating, I searched her thighs and kneecaps, the chromium door frames and cocktail cabinet lids. I assumed that either Vaughan or his volunteer subjects would have mounted her body in any number of bizarre postures, like a demented stunt driver, and that the cars in which she moved would become devices for exploiting every pornographic and erotic possibility, every conceivable sex-death and mutilation.

Vaughan's hand took the file from me and returned it to his briefcase.

The traffic had come to a halt, the access lanes to Western Avenue jammed by the first rush-hour traffic exiting from the city. Vaughan leaned against the window-sill, fingers raised to his nostrils as if clinging to the last odour of semen on their tips. The warning headlamps of the oncoming traffic, and the overhead lights of the expressway, the emblematic signals and destinations, lit up the isolated face of this hunted man at the wheel of his dusty car. I looked out at the drivers of the cars alongside us, visualizing their lives in the terms Vaughan had defined for them. For Vaughan they were already dead.

Six lanes wide, the traffic edged forward to the Western Avenue interchange, in this huge evening rehearsal of its own death. Red tail-lights flared like fireflies around us. Vaughan was holding passively to the rim of his steering wheel, staring with an expression of defeat at the fading passport photograph of an anonymous middle-aged woman clipped to the ventilation duct of the instrument bi

As Vaughan stared at them I looked down at his semen-stained trousers, excited by this automobile marked with mucus from every orifice of the human body. Thinking of the photographs in the questio