Crash

CATHERINE

No. What about your camera girl? Did she come?

JAMES

We were interrupted. I had to go back to the set...

Catherine turns towards James and pulls open her blouse, exposing her left breast. She pulls James's face down and presses her nipple against his cheek.

CATHERINE

Poor darling.

(pause)

What can I do about Karen? How can I arrange to have her seduce me? She desperately needs a conquest.

JAMES

I've been thinking about that, about you and Karen.

INT. DEPARTMENT STORE – LINGERIE – DAY

James lingers amongst racks of nightdresses outside a change cubicle. Monitored by a bored, seen-it-all middle-aged saleslady, James glances now and then through the curtains to watch Karen help Catherine try on underwear.

Karen, Catherine's secretary, a moody, unsmiling girl, is methodically involved in the soft technology of Catherine's breasts and the brassieres designed to show them off.

Karen touches Catherine with peculiar caresses, tapping her lightly with the tips of her fingers, first upon the shoulders along the pink grooves left by her underwear, then across her back, where the metal clasps of her brassiere have left a medallion of impressed skin, and finally to the elastic-patterned grooves beneath Catherine's breasts themselves.

Catherine stands through this in a trance-like state, gabbling to herself in a low voice, as the tip of Karen's right forefinger surreptitiously touches her nipple.

INT. UNDERGROUND PARKING LOT – DAY

James sits in the car beside his wife. She watches as his fingers move across the control panel, switching on the ignition, the direction indicator, selecting the drive lever, fastening his seat belt.

As the car moves off, James puts his free hand between Catherine's thighs.

INT. FILM STUDIO – JAMES'S OFFICE – NIGHT

James studies storyboards for an automotive battery commercial which are spread out over a broad architects' table. He makes notes on each panel of the boards with a sharp pencil.

As we move around him, we reveal his secretary Renata sitting and watching him intently from the vantage point of her corner chair, her hand poised to write down anything he might say in a small, leather-bound notebook.

From her point of view, we watch James from behind as he works. Every movement he makes – bending over to correct a panel, manipulating the pencil, touching the sharp point of the pencil to his lip, straightening up again – provokes a different tiny response from Renata, so attuned to him is she.

But he says nothing to her, and she remains poised and vigilant.

EXT. FILM STUDIO PARKING LOT – NIGHT

James settles into his car – a boring American four-door sedan – running through his control-panel routine like a pilot before driving off. This time his routine ends with the switching on of the windshield wipers because it has begun to rain heavily.

EXT. RAINSWEPT ROAD – NIGHT

Driving home from the studio, James hits a deep puddle at 60 miles an hour and suddenly finds himself heading into the oncoming lane. The car hits the central reservation with a thump and the offside tire explodes and spins off its rim.

INT. JAMES'S CAR – NIGHT

In the car, James fights desperately for control.

EXT. RAIN-SWEPT ROAD – NIGHT

The car hurtles across the reservation and, bouncing and slamming down on its suspension, heads up the high-speed exit ramp. Three sedans are barreling down the ramp right towards James.

INT. JAMES'S CAR – NIGHT

James pumps the brakes and saws away inexpertly at the wheel. He manages to avoid the first two cars, but the third he strikes head-on.

At the moment of impact, the man in the passenger seat of the other car is propelled like a Ha stress from the barrel of a circus cannon through his own windshield and then partially through the windshield of James's car.

The propelled man's blood spatters James's face and chest, his body coming to rest half inside James's car, its head dangling down into the dark recess of the passenger footwell.

James's chest hits the steering wheel, his knees crush into the instrument panel, his forehead hits the upper windshield frame. As these things happen, James is vaguely conscious of the same things happening to the woman driving the other car, as though she is a bizarre mirror image.

Slammed back into their seats after the initial impact, James and the woman look at each other through the shattered windshields, neither able to move. The woman, handsome and intelligent-looking, supported by her seat belt, stares at James in a curiously formal way, as if unsure what has brought them together.

Out of the corner of his eye, James can see the hand of the dead passenger, now his passenger, caught on the dashboard and lying palm upwards only a few inches away from him. James squints as he tries to focus on a huge blood-blister, pumped up by the man's dying circulation, which has a distinct triton shape.

James shifts his focus to the hood ornament of his car, twisted up into the cold mercury-vapor glare of the roadway lights but still intact. It is the same triton imprinted on the palm of the dead passenger, the car manufacturer's logo.

EXT. RAINSWEPT ROAD – NIGHT

Traffic is beginning to back up behind the accident and a growing circle of spectators, some of them pedestrians, some drivers who have left their own cars, begins to form.

The more adventurous members of the crowd paw hesitantly at the seized doors of the two cars, afraid to really yank them open in case the violence of that act might trigger some further unnamed catastrophe

INT. JAMES' S CAR – NIGHT

Numbly watching James as she fumbles to undo her seatbelt, the woman in the other crashed car inadvertently jerks open her blouse and exposes her breast to James, its inner curve marked by a dark, strap-like bruise made by her seatbelt.

In the strange, desperate privacy of this moment, the breast's erect nipple seems somehow, impossibly, a deliberate provocation.

INT. HOSPITAL – DAY

We are close on a face having makeup applied to it. It is a very pale, blotchy face, and the makeup is smoothing it, making it appear healthy and even slightly tanned. There are also some crude black stitches in this face, and we realize that it is James's face, and that it is Catherine who is applying the makeup with a very serious demeanor.

James's legs are up in a sling, drainage tubes coming from both knees. Wounds on his chest: broken skin around the lower edge of the sternum, where the horn boss had been driven upwards by the collapsing engine compartment; a semicircular bruise, a marbled rainbow running from one nipple to the other; stitches in the laceration across the scalp, a second hairline an inch below the original. Unshaven face and fretting hands.

Catherine is dressed more for a smart lunch with an airline executive than to visit her husband in hospital.

CATHERINE

There, that's better.

JAMES

Thank you.