Machines in the Head

by Anna Kavan

  ‘The driver took the car’s registration number.’ He had found what he wanted and now read out some figures to me. ‘That’s the number of your car, isn’t it? So you see there can’t be any mistake. And it is you we want.’ He moved abruptly, leaned right over the desk, bringing his face so near mine that instinctively I drew back from the smell of stale smoke and infrequently cleaned heavy clothes, mixed with a faint sharper, sicklier smell of alcohol.

  ‘Suppose you start telling me the truth now.’ The tone of his voice was surprisingly new and peremptory. His empty, expressionless eyes had suddenly come to life. His dull dummy-policeman’s face looked unexpectedly real and threatening.

  I could feel the black cloud coming closer as I watched him get up and walk around the desk, his gaze and movements now permeated by a chilly deliberation. He stood over me ominously, his big, square, worker’s hands right in my line of vision, yellowish against the dark uniform, ominously powerful; his padded-looking shoulders bending slightly, ominously, towards me – and much too close. I didn’t want to see him. I looked around him, out of the window, instead.

  I could smell the fog, I could taste it, it rasped my throat. Outside, daylight was going fast. The street was completely deserted. I heard no traffic noises from other streets. A low, dirty, foggy ceiling pressed down from above, dingily reflecting the lights of the town. The fog itself was thicker than ever and had turned a dense, bilious yellow, like vomit. The window-panes failed to keep it out of the room. Horizontal lines of fog hung visibly in the air; the lights shone dull yellow through them.

  For a moment I felt trapped again, this time by something darker and deadlier than the fog. I still wasn’t quite there. But my injected tranquillity was gradually wearing off, and, even without being fully identified with the situation, it was becoming difficult to ignore the existence of some sort of threat somewhere. I suspected that I was about to lose my detachment, and then everything would become intolerable.

  So, after all, this did somehow concern me, although I couldn’t see how, on account of the fog. The fog was everywhere; it was inside my head. I seemed not to understand quite what had been happening . . . not to remember . . . it was as if I didn’t quite grasp what was going on. I had the impression of having lost touch, lost control of events, while all the time a black cloud of something like poison gas was surging towards me.

  I suddenly wanted to escape then, before it was too late. I knew I must take immediate action to extricate myself from the situation. But I couldn’t do this as long as things seemed unreal and I wasn’t really here, so first I had to stop feeling absent and disconnected. All of a sudden, I urgently wanted to wake up, not just sit here in my sleep but be really here, instead of nowhere.

  However, it seemed to be too late already. I saw that there was no escape from the situation. The black cloud filled the room; I was breathing in poison as well as fog, inhaling a poisonous mixture of stale smoke and alcohol smell.

  Then I looked around and instantaneously stopped wanting to wake up. The last thing I wanted was to be awake here, when I saw the inspector still standing horribly close, no longer a lifeless dummy, a commonplace cardboard mask, but a sinister human being with frightening powers over me, whose green watching eyes had turned cold, ruthless, piercing, in a hard face now ominously alive and real, accusatory, unmistakably menacing.

  All I wanted then was for everything to go on as before, so that I could stay deeply asleep and be no more than a hole in space, not here or anywhere at all, for as long as possible, preferably for ever.

  WORLD OF HEROES

  I TRY NOT TO look at the stars. I can’t bear to see them. They make me remember the time when I used to look at them and think, I’m alive, I’m in love and I’m loved. I only really lived that part of my life. I don’t feel alive now. I don’t love the stars. They never loved me. I wish they wouldn’t remind me of being loved.

  I was slow in starting to live at all. It wasn’t my fault. If there had ever been any kindness I would not have suffered from a delayed maturity. If so much apprehension had not been instilled into me, I shouldn’t have been terrified to leave my solitary unwanted childhood in case something still worse was waiting ahead. However, there was no kindness. The nearest approach to it was being allowed to sit on the back seats of the big cars my mother drove about in with her different admirers. This was, in fact, no kindness at all. I was taken along to lend an air of respectability. The two in front never looked around or paid the slightest attention to me, and I took no notice of them. I sat for hours and hours and for hundreds of miles inventing endless fantasies at the back of large and expensive cars.

  The frightful slowness of a child’s time. The interminable years of inferiority and struggling to win a kind word that is never spoken. The torment of self-accusation, thinking one must be to blame. The bitterness of longed-for affection bestowed on indifferent strangers. What future could have been worse? What could have been done to me to make me afraid to grow up out of such a childhood?

  Later on, when I saw things more in proportion, I was always afraid of falling back into that ghastly black isolation of an uncomprehending, solitary, over-sensitive child, the worst fate I could imagine.

  My mother disliked and despised me for being a girl. From her I got the idea that men were a superior breed, the free, the fortunate, the splendid, the strong. My small adolescent adventures and timid experiments with boys who occasionally gave me rides on the backs of their motorbikes confirmed this. All heroes were automatically masculine. Men are kinder than women; they could afford to be. They were also fierce, unpredictable, dangerous animals: one had to be constantly on guard against them.

  My feeling for high-powered cars presumably came from my mother, too. Periodically, ever since I can remember, the craving has come over me to drive and drive, from one country to another, in a fast car. Hearing people talk about danger and death on the roads seems ludicrous, laughable. To me, a big car is a very safe refuge and the only means of escape from all the ferocious cruel forces lurking in life and in human beings. Its metal body surrounds me like magic armour, inside which I’m invulnerable. Everybody I meet in the outside world treats me in the same contemptuous, heartless way, discrediting what I do, refusing to admit my existence. Only the man in the car is different. Even the first time I drive with him, I feel that he appreciates, understands me; I know I can make him love me. The car is a small speeding substitute world, just big enough for us both. A sense of intimacy is generated, a bond created between us. At once I start to love him a little. Occasionally it’s the car I love first: the car can attract me to the man. When we are driving together, the three of us form one unit. We grow into each other. I forget about loneliness and inferiority. I feel fine.

  In the outside world catastrophe always threatens. The news is always bad. Life tears into one like a mad rocket off course. The only hope of escaping is in a racing car.

  At last I reached the age of freedom and was considered adult, but still my over-prolonged adolescence made me look less than my age. X, a young American with a 2.6-litre Alfa Romeo and lots of money, took me for fifteen or sixteen. When I told him I was twenty-one he burst out laughing, called me a case of retarded development, seemed to be making fun of me in a cruel way. I was frightened, ran away from him, travelled around with some so-called friends with whom I was hopelessly bored. After knowing X, they seemed insufferably dull, mediocre, conventional. Obsessed by longing for him and his car, I sent a telegram asking him to meet us. As soon as I’d done it, I grew feverish with excitement and dread, finally felt convinced the message would be ignored. How idiotic to invite such a crushing rejection. I should never survive the disappointment and shame.

  I was shaking all over when we got to the place. It was evening. I hid in the shadows, kept my eyes down so as not to see him – not to see that he wasn’t there. Then he was coming towards us. He shook hands with the others one by one, leaving me to the last. I thought, he wants to humiliate
me. He’s no more interested in me than he is in them. Utterly miserable, I wanted to rush off and lose myself in the dark. Suddenly he said my name, said he was driving me to another town, said goodbye to the rest so abruptly that they seemed to stand there, suspended, amazed, for the instant before I forgot their existence. He had taken hold of my arm and was walking me rapidly to his car. He installed me in the huge, docile, captivating machine, and we shot away, the stars spinning loops of white fire all over the sky as we raced along the deserted roads.

  That was how it began. I always think gratefully of X, who introduced me to the world of heroes.

  The racetrack justifies tendencies and behaviour which would be condemned as antisocial in other circumstances. Risks encountered nowhere else but in war are a commonplace of the racing drivers’ existence. Knowing they may be killed any day, they live in a war time atmosphere of recklessness, camaraderie and heightened perception. The contrast of their light-hearted audacity and their sombre, sinister, menacing background gave them a personal glamour I found irresistible. They were all attractive to me, heroes, the bravest men in the world. Vaguely, I realized that they were also psychopaths, misfits, who played with death because they’d been unable to come to terms with life in the world. Their games could only end badly: few of them survived more than a few years. They were finished, anyhow, at thirty-five, when their reactions began to slow down, disqualifying them for the one thing they did so outstandingly well. They preferred to die before this happened.

  Whether they lived or died, tragedy was waiting for them, only just around the corner, and the fact that they had so little time added to their attraction. It also united them in a peculiar, almost metaphysical way, as though something of all of them was in each individual. I thought of them as a sort of brotherhood, dedicated to their fatal profession of speed.

  They all knew one another, met frequently, often lived in the same hotels. Their life was strictly nomadic. None of them had, or wanted to have, a place of his own to live in, even temporarily, far less a permanent home. The demands of their work made any kind of settled existence impossible. Only a few got married, and these marriages always came unstuck very quickly. The wives were jealous of the group feeling; they could not stand the strain, the eternal separation, the homelessness.

  I had never had a home, and, like the drivers, never wanted one. But wherever I stayed with them was my proper place, and I felt at home there. All my complicated emotions were shut inside hotel rooms, like boxes inside larger ones. A door, a window, a looking-glass, impersonal walls. The door and the window opened only on things that had become unreal, the mirror only revealed myself. I felt protected, shut away from the world as I was in a car, safe in my retreat.

  Although, after winning a race, they became for a short time objects of adulation and public acclaim, these men were not popular; the rest of humanity did not understand them. Their clannishness, their flippant remarks and casual manners were considered insulting; their unconventional conduct judged as immoral. The world seemed not to see either the careless elegance that appealed to me or their strict aristocratic code, based on absolute loyalty to each other, absolute professional integrity, absolute fearlessness.

  I loved them for being somehow above and apart from the general gregarious mass of mankind, born adventurers, with a breezy disrespect for authority. Perhaps they felt I was another misfit, a rebel, too. Or perhaps they were intrigued or amused by the odd combination of my excessively youthful appearance and wholly pessimistic intelligence. At all events, they received me as no other social group could ever have done – conventions, families, finances would have prevented it. Straight away they accepted my presence among them as perfectly natural, adopted me as a sort of mascot. They were regarded as wild, irresponsible daredevils, but they were the only people I’d ever trusted. I was sure that, unlike all the others I’d known, they would not let me down.

  Their code prohibited jealousy or any bad feeling. Unpleasant emotional situations did not arise. Finding that I was safe among them, I perceived that it was unnecessary to be on my guard any longer. Their attitude was at the same time flattering and matter-of-fact. They were considerate without any elaborate chivalry, which would have embarrassed me, and they displayed a frank, if restrained, physical interest, quite willing, apparently, to love me for as long or short a time as I liked. When my affair with A was finally over, I simply got into B’s car, and that was that. It all seemed exceedingly simple and civilized.

  The situation was perfect for me. They gave me what I had always wanted but never had: a background, true friends. They were kind in their unsentimental racetrack way, treated me as one of themselves, shared with me their life histories and their cynical jokes, listened to me with attention but did not press me to talk. I sewed on buttons for them, checked hotel and garage accounts, acted as unskilled mechanic, looked after them if they were injured in crashes or caught influenza.

  At last I felt wanted, valued, as I’d longed to be all my life. At last I belonged somewhere, had a place, was some use in the world. For the very first time I understood the meaning of happiness, and it was easy for me to be truly in love with each of them. I could hardly believe I wasn’t dreaming. It was incredible; but it was true, it was really happening. I never had time now to think or to get depressed, I was always in a car with one of them. I went on all the long rallies, won Grand Prix races, acted as co-driver or passenger as the occasion required. I loved it all: the speed, the exhaustion, the danger. I loved rushing down icy roads at ninety miles an hour, spinning around three times and continuing non-stop without even touching the banked-up snow.

  This was the one beautiful period of my life, when I drove all over the world, saw all its countries. The affection of these men, who risked their lives so casually, made me feel gay and wonderfully alive, and I adored them for it. By liking me, they had made the impossible happen. I was living a real fairy tale.

  This miraculous state of affairs lasted for several years and might have gone on some time longer. But, beyond my euphoria, beyond the warm light-hearted atmosphere they generated between them, the sinister threat in the background was always waiting. Disaster loomed over them like a circle of icy mountains, implacably drawing nearer: they’d developed a special attitude in self-defence. Because crashes and constant danger made each man die many times, they spoke of death as an ordinary event, for which the carelessness or recklessness of the individual was wholly responsible. Nobody ever said ‘Poor old Z’s had it’ but ‘Z asked for it, the crazy bastard, never more than one jump ahead of the mortuary.’ Their jargon had a brutal sound to outsiders. But, by speaking derisively of the victim, they deprived death of terror, made it seem something he could easily have avoided.

  Without conscious reflection, I took it for granted that, when the time came, I would die on the track like my friends, and this very nearly happened. The car crashed and turned four somersaults before it burst into flames, and the driver and the other passengers were killed instantly. I had the extreme bad luck to be dragged out of the blazing wreckage only three-quarters dead. Apparently my case was a challenge to the doctors of several hospitals, who, for the next two years, worked with obstinate persistence to save my life, while I persistently tried to discard it. I used to look in their cold, clinical eyes with loathing and helpless rage. They got their way in the end and discharged me. I was pushed out again into the hateful world, alone, hardly able to walk and disfigured by burns.

  The drivers loyally kept in touch, wrote and sent presents to the hospitals, came to see me whenever they could. It was entirely my own fault that, as the months dragged on, the letters became fewer, the visits less and less frequent, until they finally ceased. I didn’t want them to be sorry for me or to feel any obligation. I was sure my scarred face must repel them, so I deliberately drove them away.

  I couldn’t possibly go back to them: I had no heart, no vitality, for the life I’d so much enjoyed. I was no longer the gay, adventurous g
irl they had liked. All the same, if one of them had really exerted himself to persuade me, I might . . . That nobody made this special effort, or showed a desire for further intimacy, confirmed my conviction that I had become repulsive. Although there was a possible alternative explanation. At the time of the crash, I had been in love with the man who was driving and hadn’t yet reached the stage of singling out his successor. So, as I was the one who always took the initiative, none of them had any cause to feel closer to me than the rest. Perhaps if I had indicated a preference . . . But I was paralysed by the guilt of my survival, as certain they all resented my being alive as if I’d caused their comrade’s death.

  What can I do now? What am I to become? How can I live in this world I’m condemned to but can’t endure? They couldn’t stand it either, so they made a world of their own. Well, they have each other’s company, and they are heroes, whereas I’m quite alone and have none of the qualities essential to heroism – the spirit, the toughness, the dedication. I’m back where I was as a child: solitary, helpless, unwanted, frightened.

  It’s so lonely, so terribly lonely. I hate being always alone. I so badly need someone to talk to, someone to love. Nobody looks at me now, and I don’t want them to; I don’t want to be seen. I can’t bear to look at myself in the glass. I keep away from people as much as I can. I know everyone is repelled and embarrassed by all these scars.

  There is no kindness left. The world is a cruel place full of men I shall never know, whose indifference terrifies me. If once in a way I catch someone’s eye, his glance is as cold as ice, eyes look past eyes like searchlights crossing, with no more humanity or communication. In freezing despair, I walk down the street, trying to attract to myself a suggestion of warmth by showing in my expression . . . something . . . or something . . . And everybody walks past me, refusing to see or to lift a finger. No one cares, no one will help me. An abstract impenetrable indifference in a stranger’s eye is all I ever see.