Machine

by Peter Adolphsen

  The rhythm and behaviour of the haiku form, almost like the breathing of a small animal, seemed to Jimmy an accessible format, and after a winter spent reading Basho, Issa and his other heroes, and tinkering every evening with his newfound form of expression, he produced two poems, which pleased him:

  The wind turns pages

  in the book one of us left

  on the garden chair

  And:

  One appears to hear

  the refrigerator’s hum

  just before it stops

  Only one adhered to the rule of stating the season, but Jimmy felt that the differences between a haiku in Japanese and one in (American) English, respectively, were so fundamentally profound as to render any comparison meaningless, hence it was preferable to cultivate the English haiku for its own sake. He attempted the Glassian double haiku; however, the form denied him access, the two stanzas slamming shut like an oyster. It was all very mysterious: he was able to compose two haiku on roughly the same subject, but never a double poem whose parts formed a whole. It was as if the young, late Seymour Glass had shut the door behind him as he left.

  Over time his ‘Jimmy’ identity had practically replaced ‘Djamolidine’, or rather . His original material had been melted down and poured into a new mould. Jimmy, a first-generation American, had swelled up inside the sack of skin which used to be the Soviet citizen, Djamolidine. All the way to the tips of his fingers. Almost making a small plop sound, he thought. He never spoke Azerbaijani or Russian now; since his arrival in the US he had not missed his racing bike, and his mania for reeling off or listing items had, if not disappeared, then been allocated an appropriate parking space in the periphery of his consciousness. Gradually he became more normal and more American.

  One morning in April 1973 he awoke with the certain knowledge of having dreamt in English.

  ‘May I take your coat, sir?’ was the question he put to a two-metre-tall rabbit wearing a dinner jacket jumping towards him in a desert where he stood desperate for a drink of water.

  ‘Certainly not, you filthy human!’ the rabbit replied, rapping Jimmy’s knuckles with his cane, whose knob, he noticed, was made of cut glass.

  Then he woke up with aching fingers.

  In biological terms an organism never exists as an isolated phenomenon, but must be understood as a function that resolves the issue of survival of a particular species in time and space. Structure, function and life conditions are symbiotic and evolve in an ever-changing game, like nature’s never-ending game of patience, where basic forms and materials have created diversity of the species through simple variation. Certain patterns repeat, for instance blood plasma, nerve cells, enzymatic digestion systems, eyes with pupils and retina, etc. All mammals have fur and three separate auditory ossicles in the air-filled middle ear, and all, except primates, have their shoulder blades either side of their ribcage. All mammals, birds and reptiles – with the exception of snakes, who have lost their limbs in the course of evolution – are tetrapods. This is a basic form which has proven itself to be particularly effective whether movements are quadru- or bipedal, as four-legged creatures have been able to use their front limbs for taking in food, defending themselves, digging etc., while the upright walk of the two-legged ones has freed up their front extremities and allowed them to evolve either into wings or arms with hands, and furthermore, in the case of Homo sapiens, with opposing thumbs protruding from a saddle-shaped root joint. The thumb is a precondition for man’s undoubted, if somewhat brief, evolutionary success, as his brain expanded in parallel with the increase in possibilities offered by this versatile digit. Our two hands, including our thumbs and their interaction, thus constitute the basic element of what it means to be a functioning human being, which is why the industrial accident that occurred on the 9th of May 1973 robbed Jimmy not only of half his arm, but also his functionality and hence, in a wider context, his existence.

  The fatal steel wire, which supported the eight-inch pipeline at Walker Hollow, consisted of nine twisted bundles, each made up of nine smaller bundles, which were each constructed from three individual steel wires. One of these wires had a manufacturing defect, which, once the wire was mounted and suspended on the 7th of February 1953 and subjected to constant tension, provided a mathematical calculation of the date when it would eventually break. Ten years, one month and nineteen days passed before steel wire number two snapped. After another five years and twenty-five days a third wire went and two years, six months and fourteen days later it was the end of number four. This process followed a curve of acceleration and after 7,396 days, on the 9th of May 1973, the last of the 243 wires finally snapped.

  Unfortunately Jimmy was leaning his outstretched arm against the pipeline at the very second when the severance process reached its final point. A few moments before, he had become aware of tiny harp-like sounds from the now rapidly snapping steel wires; he had turned his gaze towards the source of the sound and grasped just a second too late what was about to happen. The wire swiped through the air and tore off his arm just above his elbow with such force that the severed arm spun through the air and left circular traces of scarlet blood on the dry ground. Jimmy, at the mercy of gravity and hypovolemic shock, collapsed against the pipeline.

  Simultaneously, a few millimetres from the place where his blood coloured the metal pipes warmed by the sun, our drop of oil rushed past him inside the pipeline on its way to the refinery in Salt Lake City, where, after time spent in a crude-oil tank, it would undergo first an atmospheric and later a vacuum distillation. At 165º Celsius the majority of what was once the horse’s heart separated from the rest of the crude oil in the form of heavy naphtha and was taken via an ingenious system of pipes to the desulphurisation plant, where catalytic hydrogenation removed hydrogen sulphide from the now paler, but still cloudy liquid. The next step in the refining process was reconstitution in a heated hydrogen atmosphere over a catalyst of platinum and rhenium, which converted the naphthas to aromates, and some of the paraffins to isoparaffins, while the heavier paraffins were broken down into smaller molecules, thus increasing the octane count. And so yet another link was added to the chain of transformation that the heart of the horse had undergone: the state of petrol.

  After a long time spent in 10,000-gallon storage tanks, the petrol was drawn off to a tank truck and distributed to a range of petrol stations. Our drop ended up, via various detours, at an Amoco petrol station in Austin, Texas, where it managed a couple of days rest in an underground, concreted-in container before, via pipes and a petrol pump, it ended up in the petrol tank of a Ford Pinto.

  This occurred on the 23rd of June 1975. The hand holding the handle of the petrol nozzle and the gaze which absentmindedly followed the small revolving counters on the petrol pump, both belonged to a young woman by the name of Clarissa Sanders. The car belonged to her parents.

  The Pinto was a nice, small, subcompact, cheap and streamlined model, which appealed to the American consumer. It had only one flaw: a rear collision at 30 mph or above was likely to cause the petrol tank to explode. The Ford Motor Company discovered the fault before the car was launched in 1970, but it was at that point already in the process of constructing assembly lines and it was consequently deemed unprofitable to alter the design. A cost–benefit analysis was carried out which showed that it was cheaper to pay compensation for 180 fatalities and 180 injured than to fit the petrol tank with one of several possible safety precautions. In the following years Ford lobbied fiercely to prevent the implementation of the Auto Vehicle Safety Act, which would have forced them to modify the Pinto.

  At the time when Clarissa was absentmindedly filling up her car, concepts such as ‘moderate speed rear-end collision’ and ‘fuel-fed fire’ were unknown to her. Mark Dowie’s exposure in Mother Jones Magazine was still two years away, and the recall of over 1.5 million cars would not occur for another year after that. What she was wondering about, however, was a smell she recognised, but could not remember why.
It came from a tube of sun block she had found in the glove compartment: ‘Sun-block on a stick!!!’ The three exclamation marks formed the rays of a small sun. The very second she took the cap off the stick a childhood memory of some sort overwhelmed her.

  Clarissa Sanders was twenty-two years old, the daughter of a physics teacher and a nurse, and born and bred in Austin, Texas where she was now a second-year biology student. She regarded herself as more or less average: not stupid, but no genius either, neither ugly nor particularly attractive, below average height, mousy brown hair and her breasts an unremarkable B cup. She did not share the interests of other young people of her generation such as rock music, politics or personal development; biology, however, was to her a source of constant fascination. Simultaneously the hippie obsession with nature irritated her exceedingly: holding up a (misunderstood) concept such as ‘nature’ as an ideal for humanity was, she thought, at the very least profoundly naïve and probably dangerous. Our evolutionary success depends specifically on the brain and the product of it, civilisation, if civilisation is indeed a counter-concept to nature. Clarissa simply had no truck with their argument, as our concepts of nature, civilisation, human beings and animals are so distorted that they must be excluded as useful role models to emulate. Humans themselves are animals, and thus subject to the Darwinist reality: survival of the fittest. At the same time she wondered if this phrase was not indeed a tautology, given that the survivors would always be deemed the fittest, and because it is difficult to measure ability according to anything other than survival.

  Anyway, the hippie fantasy of being at one with nature was most charitably regarded as harmless talk, but could – and would theoretically, Clarissa thought, if nature had its way – lead to a regression to primate family herds and ultimately to a configuration of human society along the same model as the naked mole-rat, Heterocephalus glaber, one of the mole species that lives in families of fifty to three hundred individuals and spends its entire life in underground tunnel systems. Only one large and aggressive female, the queen, gives birth to the young. She suppresses the sexually active cycles of the other females with pheromones, and permits only one to three of the males to mate with her and inhabit the central chamber where the young are also cared for. The individual naked mole-rat colonies are isolated, as a result of which inbreeding is widespread. This was how any society imitating nature would end up. No, Clarissa thought, nature must be studied because it will further our civilisation. Any understanding of our behaviour should therefore be achieved through controlled experiments in a sterile laboratory; the very opposite of pseudo free love and badly tuned guitar strumming around a campfire.

  This spring term she had taken a course in molecular genetics. In her opinion the discovery of the double helix of the DNA molecule had to be the scientific achievement of the century. Moon landings and hydrogen bombs, who cared? Genetics would have the greatest impact on any future society. Once the techniques had been mastered, which for now were mere ideas, it would be possible to eliminate a range of hereditary diseases and minor, as well as major, deformities – but the methods could also be applied to further the improvement of embryos. The augmentation of various physiological aspects, muscle strength, cardiovascular capacity etc., was one option, but it might also be possible to increase logical, deductive, musical or empathetic abilities, for example – and when these generations of super humans began their own research and inventions, their minds would know few limits. That was what she imagined. As she stood there filling up the car with petrol the words ‘Above us only sky’ and their accompanying melody surfaced in her mind. Her consciousness had long drifted from the smell of the sun block and it was not until the petrol started splashing down onto the tarmac that she became aware of her lack of concentration.

  Having paid for the petrol and her regular soda, Mountain Dew, she headed on south. Not that she was going anywhere in particular; she was just passing the afternoon driving. A little later she turned off onto Interstate Highway 35 to San Antonio. At the foot of the access road was a hitchhiker whom she picked up on impulse. He was skinny, with a sallow complexion, and dressed a little shabbily. He also had no lower right arm, something Clarissa only noticed when he stuck out his left hand towards her, and twisted it in order to reach her right one, saying: ‘Hi, I’m Jimmy.’

  In terms of logic, coincidence is a property or an incident whose existence can be denied without this being a contradiction. According to Aristotle coincidence is a random property, as opposed to a given quantity, which exists independently; that is, it has substance and/or essence. The random element is one of the properties of the substance, which does not form part of its definition and thus does not presuppose its existence. Epistemologically a random sequence of events may be determined by a cause; however, these elude scientific recognition. At the same time they are evidence that all sequences of events are subject to the law of coincidence, given that every single one of the countless events in the universe originates from the very first coincidence, which ripped the nothingness prior to the Big Bang out of its original stability. Or what?

  Please would you, dear reader, at this point be so good as to turn back to the beginning of this book and find the word ‘somehow’ in the third line of the second paragraph? This diffuse adverb carries in the three tiny bellies of its consonants not just the aforementioned coincidence, but also a last hideout for none other than God himself. Because how did this bubble come about? Why was this crushed together space-time unstable? Why is there now something rather than nothing? Science says: because of an impurity in nothingness – a trace element, a ripple – a submicroscopic spot appeared in infinity. But it cannot explain how or why, and thus a vacuum arose for the very human urge to invent a god who can endow man’s inexplicable existence with a gloss coat of sense. So this is what the once Almighty Creator has been reduced to: a random impurity in the void. Accident, not substance. And certainly not essence.

  ‘Accident,’ was Jimmy’s brief answer when Clarissa enquired about his missing arm.

  ‘Not Vietnam?’

  ‘No.’

  Whereupon they drove on in silence. The motorway continued in an almost straight line. It was already conspicuous, they both thought, that neither of them had mentioned where they were going. Finally Jimmy made the first move. Her reply with its related counter-question came promptly: ‘I don’t know. Where are you going?’

  ‘Don’t know either. Don’t really care anyway. Just travelling,’ he replied.

  After a short pause she said: ‘That’s good.’

  ‘That neither of us knows where we want to go?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Another silence. Soon the town turned into billboards and industrial areas, which again turned into fruit plantations, wheat fields and more billboards. Clarissa turned on the car radio and after some white noise found a station playing jazz music. A little later, even before the last chord had faded away completely, a speaker’s voice burst through with the familiar phrase: ‘And now a word from our sponsors. Don’t go away.’

  Because of the curve in the road Clarissa needed to concentrate on her driving and so she asked Jimmy to find another radio station, which he was busy doing when she said: ‘I never buy any products they advertise, because advertising costs money and they can only get that from one source: us, the consumers. Ergo, they add the cost of that to the price of the products. Ergo, the products are overpriced. QED.’

  Jimmy glanced sideways at the canned drink in the drinks holder. She noticed his look and explained: ‘They hardly ever advertise Mountain Dew. Not like they do with Coke.’

  ‘Okay. But then what would I know? I’ve only been in the US a few years.’

  Clarissa who had noticed his accent, which gave him away as a foreigner straight away, now asked: ‘Oh, and where are you from?’

  Whereupon he gave her a broad outline of his life story.

  Most of her life, that is since she watched a friend being killed in a road
accident when she was seven years old, Clarissa had been scared of dying. During puberty this had been combined with a fear of going insane, when an older cousin had been sectioned and she had read a book about psychiatry as a result. Fear and attraction are intimately connected, and the fact that she accepted the tiny square of blotting paper which Jimmy held out to her should thus be attributed to the paradoxical ways in which human beings, precisely because of this fact, tend to act. She was perfectly aware of what it was and had actually had no intention of ever taking it. There were plenty of well-documented cases of psychoses. However, on this day already characterised by impulsive gestures, she continued the pattern by responding to his offer with the words: ‘Why not, there’s a first time for everything.’

  Whereupon she held the steering wheel with one hand and, as her pulse accelerated, followed his lead and picked up the second tiny paper square from his palm with a moist fingertip.

  The poisonous ergot, Claviceps purpurea, which in cold and damp years grows on rye and barley in particular, is chemically speaking incredibly complex. The sclerotia, the horn-shaped purple bodies of the fungus, contain secale-alkaloids from which a range of medicines have been extracted – for instance, ergotamine for migraines, methyl ergotamine for post partum haemorrhages and bromocriptine for Parkinson’s disease. However, the real claim to fame of this tiny fungus is a chemical compound, which Albert Hofmann in 1938 at Sandoz Pharmaceutical Laboratories in Basel produced as the twenty-fifth in a series of partly synthetic lysergic acid amines. Apart from the expected uterotonic effect, he detected no remarkable properties in the substance, which was shelved until one spring day in 1943 when Hofmann decided to examine it more closely and thus prepared a new quantity of LSD-25.

  In the course of his work he may accidentally have splashed some of the solution on his fingers, or perhaps he wiped the corners of his mouth. Whichever it was, a strange feeling of restlessness and mild dizziness then forced him to stop work. He went home and experienced a trip of approximately two hours’ duration. Hofmann quite rightly attributed this peculiar disturbance to exogenous poisoning and suspected lysergic acid. Three days later he carried out an experiment on himself and administered – in his own view – an absolutely minute dose of 0.25 milligrammes dissolved in tartaric acid. However, the hallucinogenic effect of LSD is almost unbelievably potent: five to 10,000 times stronger than mescaline (which offers the same experience in terms of quality) and Hofmann had consequently, despite his caution, taken at least five times the effective oral dose. That even such a minute amount of LSD has such a potent effect on the human psyche is, as Hofmann himself notes in his book LSD – mein Sorgenkind (1970), of great scientific interest: ‘With LSD a substance was discovered which, although not naturally occurring in the human body, shows by its existence and effect that abnormal metabolic products, even in trace quantities, might cause mental disturbances. Thus, the opinion that certain mental illnesses have biochemical causes gained further support.’