Machine (6 page)

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.'

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-HT
₂
receptor-antagonist, but in addition shows agonistic activities in 5-HT
_1A
and 5-HT
_1C
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-HT
₂
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.