Liveblogging Ballard's Crash Chapter Four

| | TrackBacks (0)
crashcoverTo access the whole series of posts just click on the tag crash at the bottom.

Spurred into action by his first erection since the crash, James starts to get focused and active about recovery and by the end of the chapter he has left the hospital.

His mental awakening continues.

The crash was the only real experience I had been through for years. For the first time I was in physical confrontation with my own body, an inexhaustible encyclopedia of pains and discharges, with the hostile gaze of other people, and with the fact of the dead man. After being bombarded endlessly by road-safety propaganda it was almost a relief to find myself in an actual accident.
As he makes himself useful around the hospital he sees who we assume is Vaughan. A youngish looking man in a white doctor's coat going around the building confidently, consulting with staff and patients alike. There are some tell-tale details: he is bare chested under the coat, his face is criss-crossed with scar tissue and he carries a briefcase of photographs. Ballard imagines he is pedaling pornographic x-rays, or maybe he is one of the new doctors who is fashionably aggressive to his patients.

James briefly meets the widowed Helen Remington, whose husband was killed in the crash, and, of course, fantasizes about her. Finally, the saga of the erectile awakening closes when Catherine, his wife, masturbates him in the ward.

Did Catherine respond to the image of these which had been caught, like a photographic plate or a still from a newsreel, in the dark bruises of my body and the physical outline of the steering wheel? In my left knee the scars above my fractured patella exactly replicated the protruding switches of the windshield wipers and parking lights. As I moved towards my orgasm she began to soap her hand every ten seconds, her cigarette forgotten, concentrating her attention on this orifice of my body like the nurses who attended me in the first hours after my accident.

0 TrackBacks

Listed below are links to blogs that reference this entry: Liveblogging Ballard's Crash Chapter Four.

TrackBack URL for this entry: http://www.kungfuology.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/1328

About this Entry

This page contains a single entry by Andy Best published on August 20, 2012 12:59 PM.

Next Year's Love live @ 390 was the previous entry in this blog.

Blogosphere: Chris B and Jon Campbell is the next entry in this blog.

Find recent content on the main index or look in the archives to find all content.