Ballardian: Another Atrocity

>>> Introduction

Some Bloody Accident. With an effort, Dr Nathan looked away from Catherine Austin as she picked at her finger quicks. For months Travis had seen his solitary figure, shoulders hunched inside the flying jacket, in more and more newsreels, as an extra in war films, and then as a patient in an elegant ophthalmic film on nystagmus - the series of giant geometric models, like sections of abstract landscapes, had made him uneasily aware that their long-delayed confrontation would soon take place. A hundred yards away, across two parallel settling beds, she saw her husband walking rapidly along one of the white-painted catwalks. The presence of Madame Chiang in Dealey Plaza was an unresolved element. Through the glass doors Travers could see into the festival arena, where a circle of cine screens carried their films above the heads of the audience. Studies have been carried out on the recuperative behaviour of crash victims.

Combat films and the clinically insane. When the car surged forward he realized that the two passengers had gone. Karen stumbled over a wooden trestle, falling across the concrete. After a brief initial period of withdrawal, relatives would revisit the site, usually attempting a discreet re-enactment of the crash mode. Talbot followed the young woman between the burning helicopters. Holding her cheap Nikon, he led the young woman down the bank. Why had Travers invited her to this apartment above the zoo?

An Unpleasant Orifice. As they walked along the catapult rails Talbot was aware of the young woman pacing out the triangle of approach roads. For Tallis, this period in the apartment was a time of increasing fragmentation. The hyoid bone in her throat flutters as if discharging some subvocal rosary. Oxyacetylene flared over the roofs of the police cars and ambulances in a corral at the mouth of the underpass. All week he had been watching the telescopes with the same fixity of expression, an optical rigor like that of a disappointed voyeur. As he searched among the tyres and coils of barbed wire he saw the helicopter rising into the sky, the bomber pilot at the controls.