Machine

by Peter Adolphsen

  At a biochemical level it has been established that LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) interacts with a series of serotonin receptor subtypes (5-HT), primarily in the limbic system, but also in the hippocampus and the hypothalamus – but precisely how and which of the influences determine the hallucinogenic effect is uncertain. The increased presence of serotonin’s primary metabolite, hydroxyindoleacetic acid, suggests an increase in the production of this transmitter substance. LSD is probably a potent 5-HT2 receptor-antagonist, but in addition shows agonistic activities in 5-HT1A and 5-HT1C receptors, which might turn out to be of primary relevance for the effect, given that a number of substances with an antagonistic effect on the central 5-HT2 receptors are non-hallucinogenic. By means of electroencephalography a generalised excitation of the central nervous system can be seen, and from a physiological point of view there is an increase of activity in the sympathetic nervous system accompanied by a slight rise in body temperature, a faster pulse, higher blood pressure, dizziness and dilated pupils. The effect varies strongly according to dosage, a person’s body weight, and, presumably, susceptibility.

  Clarissa and Jimmy became aware of the stomach-tingling sensation almost simultaneously; they had each taken a whole tab, but by chance the drop which had been absorbed by his square of paper measured 0.43 microlitre, whereas hers was only 0.36, a variance which was cancelled out by their bodyweights of sixty-seven and fifty-six kilos respectively. At his suggestion she took the next exit and they found a lay-by with a table, benches and a barbeque, all of them concrete, and a swing, a seesaw, and a drinking water fountain. A cluster of pine trees provided the shade.

  ‘Perfect,’ he said as she turned off the engine, and by chance she was thinking of the exact same word. The drop, which had once been the heart of a horse, splashed around in the petrol tank.

  From the outside there were no discernible changes except their laughter which constantly bubbled up through a pretend suppression and they interrupted themselves frequently and for longer and added a lethargy to their actions which translated into their body language as they emptied out his rucksack looking for chocolate or perhaps some nuts which soon became irrelevant anyway as this magic bag contained random objects revealing profound stories about themselves and indirectly their owner and much later when every object discovered had been placed in lines as straight as an arrow on the concrete table she surveyed them and felt that she possessed a knowledge of him which exceeded what any biography could provide as insight could be gained through objects but what are things he asked her and together they explored the limits of the world of objects by looking into each others eyes and around the lay-by until their investigation focused on the drinking fountain with its life-giving fluidum which is also an object even though water is a liquid or that is to say so is steam and ice snow hailstone fog and the water in our bodies whereupon they returned to the table and the objects on display which they in their individual ways examined his old trousers red plastic lunchbox with transparent lid sunglasses the folder with the greyhound bus timetable but not the notebook which had burned in her hand the very first time it appeared from the magic bag and now lay in serene silence and mild closure and she was not going to and everything was fine that way that he said there is nothing there and she well there must be something he sure but nothing of interest not even for me i never read what i once wrote it served a purpose at the time and cleared my head but the object of writing on the page is a by-product just leftovers and if i happen one day to be leafing through it and here his breathing made a strange rasping noise an old notebook it is like seeing embarrassing photos where you are drunk and gross at some party that you now only recall on account of something stupid you said to someone who was important in those days and it is vital they told each other to keep the focus on a given action or train of thought gratifying your needs experiences or mere sentence for continuously overturned detours and sidelines just cross them and when they tried to get back to the main track that too turned out to be a diversion just an older one perhaps several hours and they found her watch and not even one hour had passed since time had started to swell up in their heads and they gave each moment their complete attention and all the time responded with a pliable elasticity in a rhythm of tension and relaxation and again as the secondhand pushed its way around the dial as if moving through jelly rather than air not stopping for an instant even though she felt that every single tick had to be the last one but every time the hand overcame the resistance and shifted at the very last moment and she looked up again he had gone back to the car and the sight of his half arm inside the shirtsleeve with a knot tied at the end made her remember that she had been allowed to touch but then it struck her that this remembered touch was surely just a memory of an imagined touch when he in response to her question had shown her his arm stump but even that she was no longer sure of and at the same time a bird flew past at low height she ducked as he turned on the car radio and angry guitar music poured out and when she thought of asking him to turn it off he did and left the car with the door open and started out on the vast journey to the water fountain and she followed and they got their hair wet and felt it dry and saw patterns in the steam and the sun caught in the floating water throwing barely visible prisms of some similarity to thoughts he imagined and said so and then she was thinking the same and soon they had reached a new ants nest under the table they live on crumbs and garbage he said they get their water from over there she added pointing to the water fountain the trees too live off the spilt water and so it was and he talked about a zarathustrian shrine in iran where a single drop constantly drips from a mountain side and feeds a huge pale green cluster of plants and being an ordinary american she has only the vaguest ideas of zarathustrians and iran but she did not have the energy to ask as the implications of structuring a sentence grew exponentially and left her hanging on an arbitrary branch weightless happily lost and fully aware of the chemical basis of her condition plus where she was and what she was doing nothing mysterious there then she visualised the pattern of his iris and asked to see it again and she remembered rightly that there was a circular marking in his left eye paler in the dark brown with offshoots to both sides to the right down towards the nose the lines spread out into a triangle and the whole composition looked like a trumpet or perhaps a postman’s bugle perhaps with the corner of his eye acting as a muffler she thought an entire jazz orchestra behind his forehead and the music poured out of his mouth he was singing and then said that it was an old russian melody and gestured towards the dry slopes as far as the eye could see she looked at him once more and gave him an imaginary kiss and reached the conclusion no mainly because the hyper complex motor skills required to carry out such an act exhausted her in advance as she had to have herself present in every single movement there was no other way in this state the task would grow outside her control so she chose not to and outlined the contours of the slopes with her finger in the air accompanied by a whistling corresponding in pitch and then he wanted to eat and opened his lunchbox again and took one of the sandwiches ham cheese tomato and gave it to her and sunk his teeth into the other one straight away followed by energetic munching and she turned her attention to this peculiar edibility which took on a wealth of detail the closer she looked and the urge to eat was far removed from her or rather beyond her capability it was too complicated as everything ultimately is and suddenly the light changed as a small cloud blocked out the sun and the light behind this elevated lump of moisture made it beautiful but it was not an hallucination she knew that and did not need to remind herself to be constantly present in the patient enthusiastic churning of her consciousness.

  A small eternity later, descending from the altitude of the trip, they got ready to leave the lay-by. However, they still did not know where to go. He was standing by the passenger door, she by the driver’s door as they talked across the roof of the car.

  ‘Where did you come from?’ he asked, attempting to reverse the logic. ‘Per
haps you need to go back to your starting point in order to know where you want to go?’

  ‘That’s a bit feeble, don’t you think? Surely all you’ll learn is where you wanted to go at that time. Besides ‘my starting point’, where is that? When I got out of bed this morning? The hospital where I was born? The country my ancestors came from? And which ancestors? The apes?’

  Jimmy’s only response to this cascade of questions was a defensive half-grunt. Then he had an idea. ‘Let me drive.’

  ‘You want to drive? With one arm?’

  ‘I only need one hand for steering.’

  ‘How about changing gears? It’s a stick-shift.’

  ‘I’ll need your help there. I’ll let you know when I put down the clutch.’

  ‘Okay.’

  They walked around the car, and at the tip of the bonnet, where more luxurious models display an insignia, their elbows brushed against each other. They got in. He adjusted the seat and the mirrors, put down the clutch and reached over with his left arm to turn the key in the ignition. She put the car into first gear. He turned his attention to the area delineated by the windows and mirrors and started driving.

  Once the engine had settled into fourth gear Clarissa said: ‘When I was a child I used to imagine that if aliens were watching the earth from outer space they would think that the planet was ruled by a strange species called cars. Most of them have four wheels, but there are much bigger beasts with up to twelve giant wheels and smaller creatures with only two. The cars are served by two-legged, smaller animals that spend their lives waiting on them; the cars need regular feeding with liquid food and must be healed after illnesses and accidents; the two-legged slave animals assist even when cars are born or when they die and they are kept in cages next to the cars, so they’re ready to accompany the cars whenever they want to go somewhere new. The slave animals build and service complex networks of roads, which allows the cars to move unhindered from place to place.’

  It had quickly become superfluous to mention when the gears needed changing; she listened out for differences in the engine sounds and could tell from the state of the traffic whether the gears would need to go up or down.

  Then he said: ‘Maybe that’s how it is: cars control the world, and we, their slaves in our cages, just don’t know it.’

  She did not reply immediately, but was silent for a while and then she suggested: ‘Perhaps we should drive back to my cage in Austin. At least there’ll be tea and probably some bread or biscuits.’

  ‘Super,’ said Jimmy and prepared to turn the car around. On their way back to the city, Clarissa told him about the glorious future which she believed gene manipulation techniques would bring. When he had finally understood what she was talking about, Jimmy countered: ‘But don’t you think these glorious possibilities will be available to the rich only? With the introduction of gene technology the gap between the haves and the have-nots can only widen; indeed it will be possible to tell if a person belongs to the upper or the lower class purely from their body. Once upon a time it would be calloused hands that gave away the farmer or the worker. In your version of the future, we’ll be able to spot the poor because they wear glasses, are less than six feet tall or have other minor physical flaws. It’s going to be one ugly world.’

  ‘What are you, a Communist?’ Clarissa asked sceptically.

  ‘No I’m not, and certainly not in the Soviet sense of the word. I believe in the freedom of the individual. That’s what you have here in the US, but I believe that poverty and racism will ultimately cause the system to break down from the inside, though I accept that it will take time. The materialistic escapism of the white middle classes seemingly knows no bounds, and that is why the inertia of the system can be sustained for a very long time.’

  ‘You are a Communist,’ she declared. ‘You ought to love your adopted country.’

  ‘Again no, and yes I do. “I pledge allegiance to the flag . . .” and all that and that is precisely why it pains me to see my newly adopted country head for its downfall. On the other hand: everything moves towards its own destruction; all empires collapse eventually. It shouldn’t come as a surprise.’

  She jerked her head a little and proceeded to change the subject by enquiring as to his current occupation.

  He replied: ‘Nothing, just drifting. I get a small pension from my work injury. I used to drive around in a Pontiac, but it broke down.’

  It was almost 8 p.m. on the 23rd of June 1975 when our drop of fuel, which was once the heart of a horse, exploded in the third cylinder in the Kent engine of the Pinto 1.6L. It happened as they turned right into the car park at Timber Creek Apartments: the fibres in the calf muscle of Jimmy’s right leg had reacted to the electrochemical signals from his nervous system with a contraction that rearranged the internal positioning of the ankle bones, thus creating a downward pressure which transmitted through his sock and shoe to the rubber-covered surface of the accelerator pedal. From the pedal the command was transmitted to the throttle valve, which opened up and activated the fuel injection system, thus sucking the drop from the tank and transporting it via the pump to the filter and from there into the carburettor that mixed the fuel with air from the open throttle valve. The mixture was carried through the suction manifold to the injection nozzle of the third cylinder, where the suction valve opened as the piston moved downwards from its uppermost dead centre and created a subpressure which sucked the aerated petrol into the cylinder. At the lowest dead centre of the piston, the valve closed so the piston, returning to its upper dead centre, compressed the gas mixture, and just before its arrival the spark plug gave off a tiny spark and ignited the petrol whose combustion occurred at a temperature of just below 2000º Celsius and a pressure of 40 bar.

  ‘BANG!’ it went.

  Simultaneously as the liquid and the gas were converted into plasma, a veritable infinity of other events occurred inside the car as well as to the car itself. For example, at this very moment Clarissa made a life-changing decision. When she was a little girl her mental picture of a crazy person was a kind of romantic madman-stroke-genius: Beethoven as a tramp, the visionary truth teller who has seen through the pretence of ‘normal’ society and responds with flights of fancy, inappropriate laughter and a lonely toast in cherry brandy. However, at some point, triggered by a cousin’s illness she read a library book: Stafford-Clark’s Psychiatry Today from 1961, where she learned that mental disorders are genuine illnesses with painful symptoms, not a free choice made by elevated people. Reading this book instilled in her a fear that became an almost constant companion in her waking hours – and oddly only then: her dreams were remarkably peaceful; she hardly ever suffered from nightmares. Away from the embrace of sleep, however, she was alone with her fear. All the way through high school, and even today for that matter, she had been waiting for her debut as a schizophrenic. Now, at the very same second as our drop of petrol, which had once been the heart of a horse, exploded, she asked herself entirely without prejudice for the first time the ultimately very simple question: ‘Why don’t I just drop it?’

  At the very same moment the phantom pains in Jimmy’s arm hit the crest of their wave. The fatal steel wire had amputated his lower arm, but not the corresponding parts of his motor and sensory cortex. The cerebral image of his body was thus intact and the lesions in the peripheral nervous system occasionally triggered erroneous transmissions to the nociceptive paths and subsequently he experienced tightening, pulsating and stinging pains in the missing arm. These symptoms had subsided considerably a few months after the accident and stabilised at a level where they only made themselves known a few times every day, though more frequently when he was performing an activity where his right hand should have been involved, such as now when he was driving a car. But instead of his sinewy Caucasian hand, it was her small Caucasian fingers closing round the black knob of the gear stick. An image of pain as dark stormy weather with tiny flashes of lightning, her fingers representing goodness and beauty
, passed in front of his mind’s eye.

  This moment also included a violent death, which took place less than one metre from the tips of their noses. An autumn fly, Musca autumnalis, got smeared against the windscreen of the car just above the left windscreen wiper. It was a young female who had crawled out from a cowpat that very morning and was now eagerly buzzing around without remembering her larval state and thus never having to forget it; she was busy trying out her crisp new wings when her rear body was forced through her head. Jimmy saw the small dark red spot appear and wondered whether to switch on the windscreen wipers.

  Measured doses of dry desert air filled the car through the air conditioning system, which was set at the first of its four levels and directed at the upper bodies of the passengers. The few litres of air that at this time were passing through the system contained thousands of floating particles, including a double digit number of spores of the fungus Ganoderma lucidum, best known by its Chinese name, Lingshi, or its Japanese one, Reishi. The actual fungi, which these spores originated from, were descendants of fungi introduced by Chinese railway workers in the 1860s.