IN FRANCE, LATE in the reign of Louis XV, a man named Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot devised the world’s first automobile, a steam-powered wagon. Cugnot called it a fardier à vapeur. Equipped with wagon wheels, a kettle-shaped steam generator and a tiller – the driver steered as if piloting a boat – it could accelerate to speeds as high as 2.5 mph. Perhaps inevitably, having invented the fardier à vapeur, Cugnot also invented the car crash, when he drove the fardier à vapeur into a wall. Although no one was hurt, Cugnot lost his research funding.
So Ellis reported to Boggs during a plane flight. ‘Thank God,’ Boggs said, ‘fardier à vapeur isn’t a term that’s stuck.’
Ellis had started the research out of simple curiosity, but Boggs had encouraged him – a good anecdote might be useful in court some day. Ellis went on: more than one hundred years elapsed before the first fatal automotive accident occurred. In 1896 a woman named Bridget Driscoll was strolling with her daughter on the grounds of London’s Crystal Palace when she was struck and killed by an Anglo-French Motor Car Company vehicle. Witnesses reported the Anglo-French vehicle was travelling at a ‘tremendous speed’, later estimated to be 4 mph.
‘No way,’ Boggs said. ‘Is that even possible? Four miles an hour is barely a fast walk.’
‘It’s a bit like letting yourself be trampled to death by a marching band.’
‘I don’t know if I can even use that in court. It might kill my credibility.’
Prosecutors alleged, Ellis went on, that the automobile had attained such an impressive velocity only because the driver had secretly modified the engine to provide more power. Nonetheless, a jury determined that the death of Mrs Driscoll was not the fault of the driver. Instead, the jury called the death accidental – the first application of that term to an automotive collision. Ellis quoted from the coroner who examined Mrs Driscoll: ‘This must never happen again.’
Boggs chortled. ‘And here we are.’
They had spent the morning inspecting the collision damage to a Mitsubishi SUV that had crashed into the back end of a trailered yacht at a closing speed of 75 mph. Stored in a field behind a gas station, the Mitsubishi was filled with rainwater, its contents were rotted, and a family of rats were living in the dashboard. Boggs cursed spectacularly while they worked, and Ellis held his breath until he nearly passed out.
Boggs bought two mini-bottles of Scotch from the flight attendant and drank the first neat from a transparent plastic cup, a dainty object in his large hand. They flew above a smooth white cloud surface like a perfected landscape.
‘Christopher was your half-brother on which side?’ Boggs asked. The question startled Ellis; it was the first time Boggs had ever asked about his brother. But, of course, Heather must have told him about Christopher.
‘My father’s,’ Ellis said.
‘What was his mother like?’
‘Skinny, tight pants, too much make-up. Smoker. I never saw much of her. Whenever I heard about her, it seemed she was moving into a new place with a new guy in a new town. I couldn’t figure out the understanding she had with my dad. But every so often he told Christopher to get ready to leave. Then she turned up and took Christopher away for a night, or a week, or whole summers. The longest was nearly two years. When Christopher came back from that one, he was fifteen. He had become much more withdrawn. He couldn’t bear to look at us, to speak with us. It was as if our family made him physically ill. He literally refused to speak to me.’
The plane banked. The clouds had broken, and in the window lay the miniature streets and buildings of an industrial city absent industry – houses lay gutted with constituent elements strewn into overgrown lawns, factories crouched amid empty parking lots. ‘I was excited when Dad said Christopher was coming back. But then it might as well have been a stranger who moved into the house -’ Ellis lifted his hands. ‘It was confusing.’
‘Sounds like adolescence.’
‘Actually, I think, fundamentally, he was just a jerk.’
Boggs looked over. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘the dynamics of a family are pretty much the most inexplicable, anti-analytic thing on earth.’
As they descended, the city’s empty apartment towers presented faces of glassless window openings, black voids repeated in ranks. Few cars moved on the street grid; traffic surged in large numbers only on the interstate, en route to other places.