Автокатастрофа

This hyper-irritation reminded me of my own long recovery from a bad acid trip some years earlier, when I had felt for months afterwards as if a vent of hell had opened momentarily in my mind, as if the membranes of my brain had been exposed in some appalling crash.

It was during this evening that I noticed the first of Vaughan’s self-inflicted wounds. At a Western Avenue filling station he deliberately trapped his hand in the door of the car,
<…>
Vaughan picked repeatedly at the scabs running across his knuckles.
<…>
The points of blood seeped through the worn fabric of his jeans.

As I looked at the evening sky it seemed as if Vaughan’s semen bathed the entire landscape,

This last period with Vaughan is inseparable in my mind from the excitement I felt as I thought about these imaginary deaths, the exhilaration of being close to Vaughan and wholly accepting his logic.

Curiously, Vaughan remained subdued and depressed, indifferent to his success in converting me into an eager disciple.

Each of the spectators at the accident site would carry away an image of the violent transformation of this woman,

It lay between us like a saintly relic, the fragment of a hand or shinbone. For Vaughan this piece of leather, as delicious and as poignant as <…>, contained all the special magic and healing powers of a modern martyr of the super-highways.

Seagrave’s slim and exhausted face was covered with shattered safety glass, as if his body were already crystallizing, at last escaping out of this uneasy set of dimensions into a more beautiful universe.

together these were stored in Vaughan’s mind, ready to be recalled and fitted into whatever weapon of assassination he devised.

I began to think about Catherine’s death in a more calculated way, trying to devise in my mind an even richer exit than the death which Vaughan had designed for Elizabeth Taylor. These fantasies were part of the affectionate responses exchanged between us as we drove along the motorway together.