Crash Page #2

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.

James examines himself in her hand-mirror, staring at his pale,

mannequin-like face, trying to read its lines.

Catherine looks around her as she puts her makeup away. There are

twenty-three other beds in the briskly efficient new ward, all of

them empty.

CATHERINE:

Not a lot of action here.

JAMES:

They consider this to be the airport

hospital. This ward is reserved for air-

crash victims. The beds are kept waiting.

CATHERINE:

If I groundloop during my flying lesson on

Saturday you might wake up and find me

next to you.

JAMES:

I'll listen for you buzzing over.

Catherine crosses her legs and tries to light a cigarette with a

heavy, mechanically complex lighter with which she is obviously

unfamiliar.

JAMES:

(referring to the lighter)

Is that a gift from Wendel? It has an

aeronautical feel to it.

CATHERINE:

Yes. From Wendel. To celebrate, the

license approval for our air-charter firm.

I forgot to tell you.

Catherine finally succeeds in lighting the cigarette. She takes a

deep drag. James props himself up on his elbow, breathing with

transparent pain.

JAMES:

That's going well, then.

CATHERINE:

Well, yes.

(pause)

You're getting out of bed tomorrow. They

want you to walk.

James gestures for the cigarette. Catherine puts the warm tip,

stained with pink lipstick, into his mouth.

CATHERINE:

The other man, the dead man, his wife is a

doctor - Dr. Helen Remington. She's here,

somewhere. As a patient, of course. Maybe

you'll find her in the hallways tomorrow

on your walk.

JAMES:

And her husband? What was he?

CATHERINE:

He was a chemical engineer with a food

company.

A dark-haired student female Nurse comes into the ward. She wags a

finger at James.

STUDENT NURSE:

No smoking, please.

As Catherine retrieves the cigarette from James and stubs it out

in a glass, the nurse examines Catherine's glamorous figure, her

expensive suit, her jewelry.

STUDENT NURSE:

(to Catherine)

Are you this gentleman's wife? Mrs.

Ballard?

CATHERINE:

Yes.

STUDENT NURSE:

You can stay for this, then.

The nurse pulls the bedclothes back and digs the urine bottle from

between his legs. She checks the level and, satisfied, drops it

back, flips over the sheets again.

Both Catherine and James watch her closely, her sly thighs under

her gingham, the movement of her breasts as she bends to check the

chart at the foot of the bed, the pulse in her throat. The nurse

catches them watching her, smiles enigmatically back at them, and

leaves.

Catherine pulls out a manila folder from her bag and slips a set

of storyboards for a commercial out of it.

CATHERINE:

Aida telephoned to say how sorry she was,

but could you look at the storyboards

again, she's made a number of changes.

James waves the folder away. Catherine examines his body, aloofly

curious.

JAMES:

Where's the car?

CATHERINE:

Outside in the visitors, car park.

JAMES:

What!? They brought the car here?

CATHERINE:

My car, not yours. Yours is a complete

wreck. The police dragged it to the pound

behind the station.

JAMES:

Have you seen it?

CATHERINE:

The sergeant asked me to identify it. He

didn't believe you'd gotten out alive.

JAMES:

It's about time.

CATHERINE:

It is?

JAMES:

After being bombarded endlessly by road-

safety propaganda, it's almost a relief to

have found myself in-an actual accident.

Rate this script:3.5 / 6 votes