Автокатастрофа

I watched him waiting for her at various intersections, clearly testing in his mind the possibilities of different accident modes: head-on collisions, side-impacts, rear-end collisions, roll-over.

His left hand drummed across the rim of the steering wheel, as if reading the road’s braille

As she spoke in her calm tones I carried the telephone to the window. Watching the cars edge along the motorway, I felt my penis stiffening. Somewhere below me, among those thousands of vehicles, Vaughan was waiting at an intersection.

I watched the cars leaving the flyover. Each of them carried on its roof a piece of the sun.

‘The traffic – where is everyone?’ I realized that the three lanes were almost deserted. ‘They’ve all gone away.’
‘I’d like to go back – James!’
‘Not yet – it’s only beginning …’

The colours of her face and arms revealed themselves in their clearest and richest forms, as if each blood cell and pigment granule, the cartileges of her face, were real for the first time,

Had Vaughan deliberately followed Catherine, striking her parked car in a first gesture of courtship?

Even as I had placed my penis in his rectum Vaughan had known he would try to kill me, in a final display of his casual love for me.

I thought of Vaughan, covered with flies like a resurrected corpse, watching me with a mixture of irony and affection.

Often I asked her what period of the year it was. The light changes within my retina moved the seasons without warning.

The pedestrians in the streets below wore their suits of lights, <…>. Catherine would move behind me like some electric nymph, a devotional creature guarding my gestures of excitement with her calm presence.

Catherine would move behind me like some electric nymph, a devotional creature guarding my gestures of excitement with her calm presence.

I felt detached from my own body, as if my musculature were suspended a few millimetres from the armature of bones,

As the Lincoln crushed the palisade Vaughan had looked back, his hard eyes calculating if he could make a second pass at me.

A confetti of fragmented glass covered the front passenger seat.

For the next hour I sat there, waiting for the acid to wear its way through my nervous system.

Abruptly, the light faded. Vaughan’s car sank into the darkness below the bridge. Everything had become drab again. The air and light were exhausted.

I had entered an abandoned world.

The stones in the road surface cut unevenly into the soles of my shoes, discarded there after the passage of a hurricane.

Sitting together, we were washed by the light flowing in every direction across the landscape.