Автокатастрофа

One by one, I moved Vaughan’s hand across the glowing dials of the instrument panel, pressing his fingers against the sharp toggles, the projecting lances of the direction indicator and gear shift.At last I let his hand rest on my penis,

The spurs of deformed metal, the triangles of fractured glass, were signals that had lain unread for years in this shabby grass, ciphers translated by Vaughan and myself as we sat with our arms around each other in the centre of the electric storm moving across our retinas.

In the breaker’s yard a testudo of abandoned cars lay together in the ever-changing light, their outlines shifting as if some time-wind were blowing across them.

With Vaughan, by contrast, I felt at ease, confident of his affection for me, as if he were deliberately guiding me along this expressway which he had created for me alone.

Sitting in the passenger seat of the Lincoln, Vaughan eased his shoulders into the upholstery, as if laying out his wounds. He watched me fumble with the ignition, a faint smile mocking me for all the eagerness I had shown in pursuing him, and yet accepting now his own failure and my authority over him.

A few paces ahead of me, Vaughan moved like an over-careful dream-walker.

I waited as he climbed these first gradients of excitation and alarm, eyes roving around the glass-enclosed mezzanine as he picked from the air the first motes of fused light and movement.

‘Vaughan …’ I tried to press the cocktail into his hands. He nodded without arguing. ‘Try to sip it. Do you want some breakfast?’

All the experiences of our weeks together had left me in a state of increasing violence, which I knew only Vaughan could resolve. In my fantasies, as I made love to Catherine, I saw myself in an act of sodomy with Vaughan, as if only this act could solve the codes of a deviant technology.

the points of fresh blood on his knuckles catching the light.