Its brake-lights illuminated the interior of the Lincoln, covering us with a pink sheen.

The jarring light across Catherine’s face made her seem part of this midsummer nightmare, true creature of the electric air.

his camera landed on the front seat. Its invisible silver memories of pain and excitement distilled themselves on their dark reel

He held the door open for me, his steady eyes without any show of hostility, as if calmed and relaxed by the accident we had passed.

I pointed to the smears of blood. ‘You must have hit a dog – the police may impound the car while they have the blood analysed.’

The spectators <…> climbed the embankment to the break in the wire fence.

Vaughan, by contrast, seemed to have lost interest in the accident.

Standing at the centre of this paralysed hurricane, I felt completely at ease,

Their relaxed postures implied a shared understanding of the most subtle points, as if they all realized the full significance

Warning tripods set up on the pavement flashed a rhythmic ‘Slow … Slow … Accident … Accident …’

The enormous energy of the twentieth century, enough to drive the planet into a new orbit around a happier star, was being expended to maintain this immense motionless pause.

As he took off his denim jacket the falling light picked out the scars on his abdomen and chest, a constellation of white chips that circled his body from the left armpit down to his crotch. The handholds of complex sex acts had been created by the cars in which he had deliberately crashed for my future pleasure,

We walked through the evening light towards the car-park. Along the northbound motorway embankment the sluggish traffic moved like blood in a dying artery.

‘Ballard, she’s central to the fantasies of all the subjects I’ve tested. There’s a limited amount of time, though you’re too obsessed with yourself to realize it.

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.
<…>
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

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.

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.

the cars in which she moved would become devices for exploiting every pornographic and erotic possibility, every conceivable sex-death and mutilation.

These unions of torn genitalia and sections of car body and instrument panel formed a series of disturbing modules, units in a new currency of pain and desire.

Tell me if I’ve left anything out.’