Aromatic

Carcinogenesis and whatnot

Polycyclic. Imagine big, flat, greasy flakes of hydrocarbon snowing down under a blue sky, pumped out of undissolved exhaust clouds on a winter day. Imagine them lodging in my lungs, worming their way into my alveoli and diffusing into my blood. I make one into a sticky diol epoxide and it wiggles into my DNA, stacking itself in and unwinding the helix. It likes my important genes, it likes my tumor suppressor. It wants to jam itself in there and screw it up, make it fail, let it replicate wrong and let the daughters proliferate.

Proliferate they do and now tumors channel my blood to their mouths and drink, drink of me and swell unconcerned with my body plan. And then bits of them are unconcerned with the tumor plan and leave the nest, drifting in the red lazy river and maybe they’ll settle and form something new but for now they don’t care, they’ve reverted to something older and self-serving and their inheritance is shared with no one and they are finally, finally alone.

Alone. Inhale the hydrocarbons and imagine. Imagine my cells torn from each other, and my body falls away like sand and each one worms around and disappears into the ground. It’s cold and the ground is hard. Maybe they would freeze to death before they got a chance.

Inhale more exhaust. The truck has vanished over the hill but the exhaust won’t disperse. My stomach turns, my body rejects it. Tough shit, I think. My cells don’t need the contract. Let them separate, violate that deal that they’ll arrest themselves so I can put half of myself somewhere else. Let them put all of themselves everywhere. I’ll split myself into all my trillions of pieces and spread them all around and the survivors, if any, will survive and the rest will die as they ought to. They should all be torn apart and every piece should be alone and their progeny will be alone and all alike and only luck will separate them.

Those hydrocarbons used to be something. Now they’re burnt in the cold, alone in the air, almost atomized, finding their homes wherever they fall, wherever they’re absorbed. They’re lucky I let them hang around. Maybe in so many millions of years I will be so lucky, when all my descendants have long been split apart to their barest elements, and someone else will stand in the gray shadows of naked trees and let me mix our molecules, form their code as I like, change them as I have been changed, fracture their being to nothing.