Machine (2 page)

This period of sleep gave the animal's organism the chance to concentrate on the healing process which had commenced within seconds of her sustaining her injuries. First the body tried to cleanse its wounds of impurities and dead tissue by allowing white blood corpuscles to emigrate from the bloodstream out into the tissue, where the neutrophil granulocytes carried out a number of functions, such as fagocytosis and the excretion of enzymes to break down tissue and bacteria. The product of this process, inflammatory exudate, was now gradually turning into granulation tissue though angiogenesis and fibroblast proliferation: the wound was forming a scab.

Throughout the night another process persevered: the seepage from the brook and the considerable weight of the maple, together with the mare's small,
but nevertheless crucial weight, eroded the slope, which eventually gave way round about midnight. A huge chunk of soil crashed into the lake with a rumble and a splash, and these noises roused the horse out of her sleep, but, before she had time to look around, the tree, with a deep groan, tilted 30º whereupon the horse lost her footing and tumbled towards the water, landing first on a small floating island formed from a chunk of the collapsed slope. During the few seconds that passed before the temporary vessel sank, the mare had time to smell the newly upturned soil and watch the tree keel over so it hung diagonally downwards. What were formerly the top branches now dangled just beyond her reach. Simultaneously the unstable ground beneath her gave way. Another splash. Wide-eyed she struggled for just under a minute, but then gave up. The mud on the bottom enveloped the little horse almost lovingly. Her final thought concerned the taste of fern shoots.

Death exists, but only in a practical, macroscopic sense. Biologically one cannot distinguish between life and death; the transition is a continuum. Furthermore, at this point nature consists of irreducible processes rather than clearly defined categories. The
problem of defining death mirrors a corresponding difficulty with the definition of life: a living organism is formed of non-living material, organised so it can absorb energy to maintain its system, and death is thus the irreversible cessation of these functions. However, this definition feels too simplistic since the extent to which and how a system should be organised in order to be described as living, and precisely what aspects of its functions need to cease before death can be considered as having occurred, will always depend on an estimate. Besides, according to this definition certain sea anemones that reproduce through asexual division are immortal; as are bacteria, which merely replicate themselves as the old cells perish – which, incidentally, is a stroke of luck for us, as the globe would otherwise be covered by a metre-thick layer of them within a matter of days. However, we mammals are not distracted by the relationship that bacteria and sea anemones have with death; instinctively we know that death occurs when the heart stops beating – but even that is merely an illusion: partly because the heart can be kept pumping after all brain activity has ceased, partly because the majority of cells in the body continue to live a period of time after the heart has stopped,
and finally because the death of any major organism means the start of a veritable explosion of another, primarily bacterial, form of life.

The chain of transformation continues indefinitely; precisely how depends on the actual circumstances and in this instance – our horse at the bottom of the lake – the change of state occurred anaerobically as mire and mud completely enveloped the animal. A few minutes after the heart had stopped beating, the cytoplasm of the muscle cells solidified to a gel due to the accumulation of lactic acid from the heart's failed attempt to pump without oxygen. The blood, saturated by carbon dioxide, stopped circulating and flowed towards the lowest parts of the cadaver where haemoglobin seeped into the surrounding tissue and began to appear as dark spots beneath the skin under the speckled coat. The small body emitted its heat to the mire and was soon in balance with the temperature of its surroundings, approximately 9º Celsius. Various enzymes associated with the decomposition and breakdown functions of living tissue took advantage of their newly found freedom to instigate an internal dissolution of cells until these exploded and released their highly nutritious contents. Enzyme-rich organs,
such as the stomach and the pancreas, and watery organs, such as the brain, were the first to be attacked. The decomposition resulted in the creation of air in the soft parts of the animal; the liver and the brain were quickly transformed into a foam-like structure with tiny, closely positioned blisters. Once the contents of the decomposed cells were added, it was time for micro-organisms – bacteria, fungi and protozoa from the airways, the stomach and especially the intestines – to carry out the actual putrefaction. At breakneck speed they broke down tissue into fluids such as indole, scatole, putrescine, cadaverine, as well as a range of fatty acids, while simultaneously forming gases such as methane, ammoniac, hydrogen sulphide, sulphur dioxide and carbon dioxide. An incalculable throng of minute existences participated in this explosive activity and what follows is merely an incomplete list of the strains of bacteria present:
Acinetobacter
,
Actinobacillus
,
Butyrivibrio
,
Clostridium
,
Desulfotomaculum
,
Desul fovibrio
,
Enterobacter
,
Escherichia
,
Fusobacterium
,
Methanobacterium
,
Methanococcus
,
Moraxella
,
Nitro somona
,
Proteus
,
Salmonella
,
Thiobacillus
,
Vibrio
and
Zymomona
. A metropolis of microscopic beings were created in the deceased horse and, in the course
of time, they converted its soft parts into a viscous, green-black mass of bacteria busy eating their dead parentage. The bones retained their state for a while, but eventually they too succumbed and began to dissolve.

Layer upon layer of material was deposited at the bottom of the lake as time passed; over millions of years the patient micrometres of sediments became kilometres of strata on top of the heart of the small
Eohippus
. The pressure from the multiple tonnes of material, the heat from the earth's core and the general heaving and nudging of the landscape in the form of shifts, folds and faults eventually broke down the decayed remains of the horse into oil or more precisely, a vast amount of hydrocarbon bonds, variations on the basal structure C
_(x)
H
_(2x+2)
.

The lake and the forest had long since disappeared and been replaced by arid mountains intersected by rivers. The slowly forming oil meandered through the surrounding minerals and accumulated in pockets – collectively known as the Green River Formation, once oil in serious quantities was discovered in the area in 1948. The small quantity of oil that had once been the heart of a mare, was now located just under one kilometre below ground level, thirteen kilo metres
south of the town of Jensen. The area was called the Uinta Basin and belonged to the federal state of Utah in the United States of America.

The darkness and the silence of underground were broken one day in 1973 when the 3 x 3 slanted, individually rotating, toothed rims of a drilling crown carved their way to the oil pocket. Under high pressure, water was injected down into the borehole, forcing oil up to the surface where it was transferred through a pipeline to Chevron's refinery in Salt Lake City. At the very moment when our drop of oil was on its way through the pipeline at Walker Hollow an accident occurred there, which cost a worker his lower right arm.

At the time in question this worker called himself Jimmy Nash, but his original name was Djamolidine Hasanov. He was born in 1948, the only child of Hosni, an oil worker, and Ivana, a shop assistant in the local Produkty; both were Kumyks and residents of Baku, the capital of Azerbaijani SSR. When Djamolidine was ten years old two things occurred which were to shape his future destiny: he was given a racer bike, and the Central Commission for Statistics of the Soviet Union carried out a national
census. His father had miraculously conjured up the bike: a brand new Velosipedov with genuine rubber tyres, perforated leather saddle, drop handlebars, toe brackets on the pedals and hand brakes. The frame was pillar-box red with a yellow hammer and sickle on the head tube. From this day onwards Djamolidine spent as much time as possible in the saddle; school lessons were spent pining for the Velosipedov and, as soon as he got home, he would scamper down the stairwell of their block of flats with his bike slung across his shoulder, leap onto the saddle and race around until just before sunset. It was a rule that he had to be back in time for evening prayers and there were no exceptions.

Djamolidine's parents were a tad more religious than most people in Baku and insisted that all three members of the family – Hosni, Ivana and Djamolidine – joined in the daily prayers at sunrise and sunset as well as the noon prayer on Fridays. Also, pork and alcohol were rarely allowed inside the door of their allocated flat, which consisted of three rooms plus a bathroom with a sit-in bathtub. Apart from that Djamolidine was free to do whatever he wanted outside in the officially atheist country. He wanted to ride his bike.

He followed the various roads out of town towards Siazan, Maraza or Alyat. He crisscrossed areas with flamboyant houses, once the homes of rich people in pre-revolutionary times and now the oil districts. There thousands of drilling towers soared, making up a kind of anti-forest complete with abandoned and producing wells to represent dead and living trees respectively, and anti-lakes in the form of oil pools with hardened surfaces. Flares, rusty oil barrels, damaged drill pipes and drilling crowns and a range of abandoned machinery assumed the character of animals and bushes. On Saturdays Djamolidine always brought a packed lunch out to the drilling operation where his father was working. Every week he cut a couple of seconds off the time it took him to ride this distance.

Nature had blessed Djamolidine with a photographic memory for lists and registers; for example he could reel off the contents page of the popular edition of Lenin's writings, including pagination, or the Shiite line of imams from Ali up until the present day, including Islamic as well as Christian calendar dates. He soon memorised the names and the order of the road signs for the various routes he took and would, on his way home, recite them
out loud or simply visualise them in his head, even spelling their names backwards as he cycled past.

One afternoon, as he was riding very slowly in order to improve his balance, a Lada pulled in on the square in front of his apartment block. The emblem on the bonnet indicated that it belonged to the Central Commission for Statistics for the Soviet Union. It was a well-known fact that a national census was being carried out this year. One of his school friends owned a sheet of stamps which depicted a census official, an apparatchik in a nice tie, visiting a range of Soviet people: Russians, Mongolians, Turks etc. All the stamps showed the same dark blond official, as a result of which Djamolidine, perhaps subconsciously, had imagined that all census officials would look like that, but his illusions were shattered when the car door opened and a wheezing, black-haired dumpling of a man got out. The two of them briefly made eye contact, the fat man and the boy on his bike, whereupon the official plodded in the direction of the first stairwell. There was a blotch of sweat on the back of his shirt.

When there was a knock on their door four hours later, the family was ready, their hair wet combed and everyone holding their identity papers. The flat was
in the top corner of the block and was consequently the twelfth and final stop on today's list for ‘comrade Boris Zverev, senior assistant from SCKS' as he introduced himself. He was clearly in no hurry to leave and only made a brief show of turning down the offer of a cup of tea. Having processed the registration of the family, Zverev made himself even more comfortable on the sofa with a fresh cup of tea and said:

‘Even though a census is and indeed should be the epitome of exact, factual truth – one, two, three is an indisputable sequence, isn't it? – there exists a degree of uncertainty both before and after the census, and that is in choosing
what
to count to begin with and how to
interpret
the results afterwards. Both these elements are the antithesis to numbers: selection and interpretation are activities which presume an acting subject, a human being, and all human beings are fallible. However, here in the Soviet Union we are fortunate that the state apparatus, in this instance the Interior Ministry, employs the most refined and rational science to compute these two tasks for us. The principles behind this census . . .'

At this point Zverev placed his briefcase on his lap and began looking for some documents, but
stopped halfway to add: ‘Our task is to count the people, who broadly speaking can be defined on the basis of whatever language they speak. But when is a language a language and not merely a dialect? In real life there are plenty of hybrid and transitional forms, and yet the vast majority speak a clearly defined language. Languages are a product of the dynamics of history. History passes through a series of phases, as you well know, from the hunter-gatherer stage on to feudalism to capitalism, socialism and finally communism. Language development likewise progresses in parallel phases, which are also characterised by an increasing rationality in their construction. After all, we live in the imperfect socialist period where language differences still exist. However, with the arrival of communism, and this is my personal theory, people will naturally, because they are equal men and women of intertwined cultures, acquire a common language, which for historical reasons will be Russian.'

He said that in Russian. A moment's silence followed. Zverev, peering around the spartanly furnished living room and then remembering that his hand was halfway down his briefcase, twitched slightly and pulled out the desired piece of paper.