Цитаты из книги Crash

As she stepped naked across the floor of the bathroom, pushing past me with a look of nervous distraction; as she masturbated in the bed beside me in the mornings, <…>; <…> as she walked with me to my car, fingers playing amiably across my left shoulder – all these acts and emotions were ciphers searching for their meaning among the hard, chromium furniture of our minds.

I visualized <…>, injured in a succession of accidents, fitted with orifices of ever greater abstraction and ingenuity, so that my incest with her might become more and more cerebral, allowing me at last to come to terms with her embraces

the extraordinary sexual acts celebrating the possibilities of unimagined technologies.

During the next few days my orgasms took place within the scars <…>, in the wounds on her neck and shoulder,

The exposed portions of her body were joined together by the loosened braces and straps.

For some reason I had expected it to be a detachable latex structure, fitted on each morning along with her spinal brace and leg supports, and I felt vaguely disappointed that it should be made of her own flesh.

the shape and tenderness of her nipple seemed to rape my fingers.

She gazed back at me through the windshield, playing with the chromium clutch treadle as if hoping that something obscene might happen.

‘Walk with Gabrielle, Ballard,’ Vaughan urged me. ‘Hold her arm. She’d like you to.’

Pivoting about on her heels, Gabrielle seemed to take immense pleasure from these immaculate vehicles, placing her scarred hands on their paintwork, rolling her injured hips against them like an unpleasant cat. She provoked a young salesman on the Mercedes stand to ask her to inspect a white sports car, relishing his embarrassment when he helped her shackled legs into the front seat. Vaughan whistled in admiration at this.

During this last period with Vaughan I saw that the women he brought to the car each evening had begun to resemble more and more closely the colouring and figure of the film actress. The dark-haired schoolgirl resembled the young Elizabeth Taylor, while the other women represented her at successively older stages.

By this time I was unable to rally myself and make an effort to stop Vaughan. As obsessed with his hard body as he himself was with the bodies of automobiles, I found myself locked into a system of beckoning violence and excitement, made up of the motorway and traffic jams, the cars we stole and Vaughan’s discharging sexuality.

Tired of the Lincoln, Vaughan borrowed other cars from the airport parking lots,

His self-conscious gestures, the grotesque way in which he hung his arm out of the car, as if about to unscrew it and toss the bloody limb under the wheels of the car following us, <…>, seemed to be private rehearsals for a terrifying drama unfolding in his mind, the sex act he saw as the climax of his own death-collision.

By the early hours of the morning we had seen three car-crashes.

As the evening light lay over the last traffic jams of the day Vaughan came completely awake.

I realized that I now wanted to spend as much time as possible with him.

The scars on his abdomen shone in the morning sunlight,

The distant headlamps, refracted through the soap solution jetting across the windows, covered their bodies with a luminescent glow, like two semi-metallic human beings of the distant future making love in a chromium bower.

Through the driving mirror I saw that Catherine was leaning against the rear seat. Her shoulder was pressed tightly into Vaughan’s.