The centrifugal force inside the car created by the right-hand turn caused the sun stick in the glove compartment to roll to the left until it was stopped by a folder of stiff, dark blue plastic, which contained a road map of the state of Texas, published by Lone Star State maps. It was a complimentary map, which had been given to Clarissa’s mother when she bought the car nearly two years ago, and it had only been taken out of its plastic folder once when the dealer had shown it to her. In addition, the glove compartment contained a scrunched up chewing-gum wrapper, an invoice from Johnston Motor Repairs to the tune of $4.95, a black ballpoint pen, a pair of tweezers and a nail file, plus a child’s drawing depicting a house, a tree and a black bird with bloodshot eyes. The same red colour had been used for the angular signature ‘Jennifer’.
The radio had been turned off and neither of them spoke; there was silence inside the car, but the small space was nevertheless penetrated by a vast number of electromagnetic waves: various AM and FM wavelength radio stations, TV-signals from twenty-three different channels, microwaves, radar, X-ray, gamma and heat radiation together with visible light, and all of them, with the exception of the last, went more or less directly through the passengers and the car.
Subconscious processes triggered by the fly splattering on the windscreen caused Jimmy’s saliva secretion to increase. His parasympathetic nervous system had passed a command on to the muscle-like structures surrounding his salivary glands, which, thus stimulated, released their mixture of water, mucus and mucines. The saliva also contained basic substances such as chlorides, phosphates and bicarbonates in concentrations matching those of the blood. In addition to those there were enzymes such as ptyalin which breaks down starch, and lysozyme which kills bacteria. However, as there was no food in Jimmy’s mouth, the unused saliva ended up gliding down the darkness of his throat.
Clarissa turned her eyes in the direction of driving. The photoreceptors of her retinas adjusted to the distance, the light etc. and sent their images, converted into neurochemicals, to her occipital lobe from where they were dispatched for interpretation by the relevant areas of the brain, which, without any difficulties, found a template that matched her visual impression: the car park outside her apartment block.
Thousands of sand and dust particles that over time had accumulated in every nook and cranny of the car, underneath the windscreen wipers, around the headlights, the radiator grille, the doors etc. were also affected by the centrifugal force of the turn and formed new, fleeting patterns. One particular ovoid grain of sand – an oolith as it is known: concentrically precipitated calcium carbonate surrounding a quartz grain barely half a millimetre in length – had been stuck to the underside of the car for months, trapped by a smidgen of oil. The history of the oolith stretches far back to a fiery inferno 1.6 billion years ago, and continued to unfold at a lake shore in the Permian period 250 million years ago, but as this grain of sand plays only a minor role in our story, that is all I’m going to say on that subject. The wind had slowly moved it from the petrol tank, across the rear axle and the differential housing, to the exhaust pipe where it was now being torn from the mouth of the pipe in a filament of oil.
The majority of the soot particles that swirled around the portion of exhaust gas fumes, which had once been the heart of a horse, were compressed into a small constellation which was snapped up by the greasy oolith at the mouth of the exhaust pipe. A little later this small assemblage of grain of sand, oil and exhaust particles loosened itself from the pipe and was carried by the wind up to a height of twenty metres. Having ascended for a fair amount of time, then fallen and flown here and there, our little fragment ended up underneath the eaves, where it attached itself to a gangling thread from a long-since-abandoned spider’s web. Here it hung for just under twenty-four hours, swaying in the warm, lazy, Texan breeze until a balcony door below was pushed open, thus creating a subpressure wind that ripped the soot particles from the grain of sand, oil and cobweb.
The hand on the balcony door belonged to Clarissa and the scream, which echoed through the trees on the slope a moment later, came from her throat. Its piercing sound stopped me in my tracks as I was playing on the balcony of the neighbouring flat; I was nine years old at the time. As I recall, the scream was entirely devoid of any shades of emotion and lasted for as long as she had sufficient breath.
Afterwards she gasped for air and, apart from her panting, the breeze in the trees was the only sound to be heard. At that moment of near silence Clarissa’s fate was sealed as the soot particles of the ex-heart of the horse were caught by one of her forceful inhalations and sucked into the darkness of her lungs.
Cancer is both a slow and a fast-moving disease. The second the carcinogenic agent penetrates the healthy cell, it launches a frenzied attack on the double helix of the hereditary genes, but decades can pass before external symptoms manifest themselves. In Clarissa’s case less than one minute passed from when the soot particles hit the inner surface of the bronchiole to when benzapyrene, the carcinogenic agent, buried itself in a specific epithelial cell where it deprogrammed the death of the cell, apoptosis, thus rendering the cell immortal – that is, transforming it into a cancer cell. However, thirty whole years would pass until she was diagnosed with ‘metastasised adenocarcinoma (stage III)’.
What happened was that she knocked on my door for the first time after having been my neighbour for all these years. The restraint was not a sign of hostility; as a rule you rarely greeted your neighbours in Timber Creek Apartments with anything more than a silent nod of the head. I did know who she was though. Miss Sanders, laboratory technician at the Department of Biology; after all we had had adjacent balconies for more than thirty years. Through the spyglass I could see that she was holding her hand over her mouth. I opened the door.
‘I’m not feeling very well. Please would you drive me to the hospital?’ Her voice broke into a cough. A trickle of blood seeped out between her fingers.
‘Just a moment,’ I said and fetched my car keys, and a packet of paper tissues which I handed to her as we walked across the car park. She coughed up more blood, stumbled, and I had to support her. I eased her into the passenger seat. She was bound to stain the upholstery, but I wasn’t bothered about that because, for once, I was doing something motivated by genuine altruism. I was seven months into a depression caused by the realisation of man’s total and inescapable selfishness and I’m aware that pedants might argue that I was only driving my neighbour to the hospital in order to avoid a guilty conscience and find myself subjected to condemnation by all and sundry, but at that moment these objections were invalid. The car started without any trouble even though it had sat there unused for weeks.
I drove her to South Austin Hospital at Ben White Boulevard where they asked me to wait. After two hours a nurse appeared and told me that Clarissa Sanders had been admitted, that she (Clarissa) had asked her (the nurse) to thank me and that I was free to go home now.
A week later there was a knock on my door, and again it was Clarissa. She had now been equipped with an oxygen device which she plugged into a socket, having come inside and accepted my offer of a cup of tea. She opened the apparatus: inside hung two small plastic bottles and she tipped a small amount from each of them into a mouthpiece. Then she closed the machine which began emitting a faint humming when she pressed a button, and put on a transparent plastic mask connected to the device via a tube.
After a pause where only the humming of the machine and her breathing could be heard, she pulled the mask down to her chin and said: ‘They tell me I’ve got cancer.’
I replied: ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ And not much else happened during this visit.
Three months later she was taken away in an ambulance never to return.
Around that time I had started to frequent a health centre in the Appalachian Mountains, whose facilities included an Indian sweat hut. It is possible that I had entertained a naïve belief that I could force my depression out through the por
es of my skin and I had therefore decided to participate in a modified version of a Native American sweat hut ritual.
Including the master of ceremony we were seven people in total going into the hut that day. Inside darkness and silence reigned, but my senses were quickly heightened and I was able to make out the faint, dark red light from the hot stones and the multitude of tiny sounds coming from the participants. The intense heat instantly made you sweat and feel thirsty. The master of ceremony threw a cup of water on the stones, which resulted in a whiplash sound and a wave of steam that smashed against our bodies. We sat in silence in the hot darkness for what I was told afterwards was forty-five minutes.
No book in the world is big enough to contain all the thoughts you can think in that period of time. My brain exploded with images, feelings and words, mixing them all up as it visited an infinite number of nooks and crannies from my past, my present and my notions of the future, but slowly my inner monologue acquired a sense of direction and headed for the horizon. After a while I was cleansed of irrelevant thoughts and accepted this winding path, which was matched by the sweat trickling down my body. My mental state grew denser, and I had started to wonder if I had actually fainted when I came across a creature which I immediately recognised as my totem animal.
It was a horse, quite a small one, the size of a smallish dog, with grey and brown flecked fur and paws rather than hooves. It was visible in the darkness – not luminous, it was just there. The horse opened its mouth and started talking and I understood everything, even though it wasn’t speaking in English or any other human language. The language of the horse was one modulated sound with myriad meanings, associations and overlapping images. In my cleansed and possibly unconscious state, I understood that it was telling me the story of the fate of its heart.
Over the past year I have tried to reconstruct and translate this wordless equine language, and these pages are the outcome of my efforts. It has been a laborious task, filled with frustration at my many inadequacies, but it has occupied me to such an extent that I, I now realise, have entirely forgotten to be depressed.
Now I will go for a walk by the river.
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Copyright © Peter Adolphsen 2006
English translation copyright © Charlotte Barslund 2007
Peter Adolphsen has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work
First published with the title Machine in 2006
by Samleren GB-forlagene A/S, København 2006
First published in Great Britain in 2008 by
Harvill Secker, Random House
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