Crash Page #3

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.

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