Machine (8 page)

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 pores 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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Epub ISBN: 9781407013732

Version 1.0

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Published by Harvill Secker 2008

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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

20 Vauxhall Bridge Road

London SW1V 2SA

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 9781846551031