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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. ‘Perhaps 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.

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.