The car started to stall somewhere past Wrocław. It was a last-year model, a hybrid, and Henryk still hasn’t fully grasped all of its peculiarities. He has leased it only recently. “What’s wrong with the engine?” Henryk asked the car. A crisp female voice offered him a litany of possible causes. Despite the surround sound, none of it made the issue less cryptic. Henryk cursed at the voice in a creatively vulgar way, which made him feel better for a short time.
Henryk was on his way to the wine country. He had been invited as a judge to an inaugural festival of regional wine. The invitation was the result of a series of articles he had written about the smell of wine, which, to Henryk, was a more powerful sensation than the taste itself. Henryk was a firm believer in aroma as the harbinger of things to come.
After the third time the engine wavered, Henryk smelled a hint of parched plastic. The odor molecules entered his nasal tissue and lingered. Henryk squeezed the bridge of his nose, promoting the mucous absorption. He could feel the neuron receptors breaking down the scent molecules and binding them with protein.
Henryk waited patiently as the olfactory bulb at the base of his brain received the expected electrical signals. When they came, the signals started to be distributed to various areas of his cerebral cortex. First came the identification. It wasn’t just any burned plastic, Henryk pondered. It was probably PVC or, wait, wait, no, it’s definitely silicone rubber. Dummy. How can you get the two confused?
The emotional response was next. It wasn’t anger. It was exasperation. With a hint of smoky despair. A brand-new car, almost, from a highly respectable dealer. Go figure. He shouldn’t have given up his classic Mercedes, but, hey, his ex-wife looked good in it, and more power to her for snatching it in the settlement.
Henryk suddenly realized that the divorce memory came from another part of the brain. Careful now, you don’t want any cerebral overlapping, boy. You don’t want any confusion. Keep your brain functions in order, keep them compartmentalized. Now, let’s see what the orbitofrontal cortex has to say in that burned plastic matter. What decision is it going to offer?
As expected, the orbitofrontal cortex summarized all the incoming information, integrated it with other stimuli, including awareness of time, location, and weather, and presented the only logical option: pull over at the next service station.
“Where is the closest authorized service station for this car, car?” asked Henryk. The station was forty-three kilometers ahead. Next, he asked the car lady to activate the GPS and calculate if the vehicle would make it in its present condition. If he slows down to forty, he’s going to make it, he learned from the voice. Henryk slowed down to forty-five.
The service station was there, alright, but in no shape resembled an authorized establishment. The hand-painted lettering above the entrance said “Zenek’s Garage.” It was an old, cinder block edifice with chipped-off plaster and a roof patched up with corrugated sheeting. Henryk’s confidence was not being inspired, but, as the satnav indicated, the shop was the only game in the area. He pulled into the lot and parked next to a rusty tow truck. A faded emblem on the truck’s door repeated the name “Zenek’s Garage.”
Henryk opened the office door. It creaked mournfully. The inside was predictably messy. A poster-size calendar was duct-taped to the back wall. On it, a lady in the bottom half of a black bikini contorted over a stripped engine block. She was wielding a wrench gleaming with grease. Some of the lubricant dripped over her upper thigh. Apparently, the tableau advertised a rust remover. Henryk noticed that the year on the calendar had passed long ago.
Mr. Zenek was nowhere in sight. His presence was hinted at by some papers, stains of suspicious origin, and a forearm exercise spring, all scattered over a small metal desk. There was also a coffee mug with a broken-off handle. It had a logo of a political party with which Henryk was not associated. He leaned over the desk to check if there was anything in the mug. He saw some beige streaks dried over a crusty bottom. The pattern tempted Henryk to foretell Mr. Zenek’s fortune, but he chose to move on toward the workshop door. He passed a storage rack full of oblong car fluid containers. Among them, he noticed a few beer cans and an empty bottle of vodka. He paused to read its white-and-blue label. The vodka was made of potatoes.
There was a printed sign on the workshop door featuring a cartoon of a naked, bent-over male posterior. The bold letters below suggested: DO NOT ENTER. Henryk pulled on the handle and stepped into the work area. It was larger than it looked from outside. There were three fairly modern cars in there, all in various stages of repair. One of them was straddling the service pit. There was a work-light moving underneath. Henryk started to navigate around old tires and tool boxes, trying not to step into puddles of oil and assorted liquids. He came to the edge of the pit and peeked under the car.
“Are you Mr. Zenek, sir?”
“What, ah, yes, yes, be right up.”
Two clinks and a shuffle later, Mr. Zenek stepped out of the pit. He was a full head shorter than Henryk. His face was crisscrossed with furrows which looked like scars. His skin had an unusually dark complexion.
“I’m sorry, sir, I didn’t hear you there.” Mr. Zenek pulled out a rag and started to wipe the tarry gunk off his hands. “You shouldn’t be here, sir. You could get hurt.” Henryk picked up a faint Silesian accent. The mechanic went to the garage door, unlatched one of the wings with nimble fingers, and pushed it open. Both men squinted at the harsh daylight as they walked out.
“That your car? Nice.” Mr. Zenek stood with his feet far apart, continuing to wipe his hands. “These don’t break often,” he said in a questioning tone.
“It sort of chokes and idles, and it smells like some plastic is burning.”
“Pop the hood, please.”
Henryk got in the car and felt for the hood latch.
“Start the engine, sir.” Henryk did. “Rev it up a bit now.” Henryk pumped the gas pedal a few times. “Okay, okay, you can turn it off now, sir.” Mr. Zenek shuffled back to the garage. Henryk noticed the man had a slight limp. He must be at least eighty, he thought.
Mr. Zenek returned in thirty seconds. He was polishing something in his hand with the rag. Then he disappeared behind the hood again. Henryk heard a few soft clicks. Ten seconds later, the mechanic gently lowered the hood and pressed on it to lock it. He wiped his finger marks off the surface, then jokingly snapped the rag against the grill.
“That’s about it.”
“Should I turn it on again to check?”
“If you turn it on, sir, you may as well get on your way. Nothing to check.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” said Henryk without getting out of the car, and turned the ignition on. The engine hummed without a glitch. Surprised, Henryk nodded approvingly. “Fantastic. How much do I owe you, sir?”
The mechanic stepped back and looked the car over with a half-smile. Then he waved his rag nonchalantly. “No bother, sir. You have a good trip.” Henryk extended his right hand through the window. “Well, thank you kindly, Mr. Zenek. Thank you very much.”
Mr. Zenek took a step forward and shook Henryk’s hand. Henryk was surprised how soft the man’s grip was. And not sticky at all.
Back on the freeway the car behaved like new. Henryk started to feel better. He checked the current time of his arrival at the wine fair. The car informed him he was only half an hour behind. Henryk sped up and reached into the center console for a cigarette. As he was placing it between his lips, he smelled something. Something familiar. The scent of tobacco got in the way, so he threw the cigarette out the window. He sniffed around. Nothing much in the air. He lifted his right hand to his nostrils. It was the hand. The hand that shook Mr. Zenek’s hand.
His receptors quickly identified the minty, peppery note of a coolant. Next came the oily lubricant, slightly tangy, with a metallic finish. The third scent, the one that clinched it, was oaky rubber. There were other notes on the skin of his hand, but they were irrelevant to the emotion that followed.
Henryk felt instantly remorseful. For a split second he wished he could block his higher brain from formulating the predictable memory, but the memory came and it was pungent. And it was simple. It was the memory of his father’s hands. A machinist’s hands, tool-wielding hands, hands that oiled and lubricated and operated presses and lathes, hands that never smelled like soap, even at home, even when checking his temperature or feeding him when he got sick, hands that waved goodbye at the train station when he went off to university, the rough and uncouth hands that Henryk educated himself to amputate on his path to a career that followed, as detrimental to everything fragrant in his life that he had worked for, deserved, and finally reached, all of which was suddenly leading him to a rancid wine festival through a smarmy twenty-year detour and a vision of his father with two phantom-limbs smelling like Mr. Zenek’s rag.
“Give me directions to the nearest liquor store,” said Henryk to the car. Within ten minutes, he was there. It wasn’t even a liquor store, just a small-town grocery mart with a scant alcohol section behind the counter. The cashier was a woman in her forties, with a burgundy perm. She didn’t get up from her chair. She was busy texting. “Good morning,” said Henryk.
The woman’s thumbs took a break. Her eyes rolled up slowly without any head movement. She had tattoo eyebrows. Henryk looked at the alcohol selection above her perm.
“What’s needed?” the woman asked finally.
“One moment, I’m looking.”
Only one shelf was devoted to wine. Three bottles of red, four bottles of white. He evaluated them quickly out of habit. None of the offerings were local, and all of them were very low-priced. Bottom-shelf stuff on the top shelf, Henryk wanted to quip, but didn’t.
“Uhm, well… Oh, there. Give me that big one on the left. The vodka.”
The woman rose to her feet and turned to the shelves. Her hand veered to the far right.
“No, no, the other left. The big one at the end. With the white-and-blue label.”
She found the bottle and set it on the counter. The bottle was covered with dust. The woman wiped her fingers on the apron. Somehow, she managed a smile.
“Not many here drink the potato vodka,” she said with a wink.
“I know one person who does.”
“Anything else with that? Any snacks?”
“Not a bad idea,” concurred Henryk. He was smiling now, too. “What do you have?”
Henryk placed the grocery bag in the passenger seat and put a seatbelt around it. He heard a few chips crunch inside the bag. He took out one stick of pork jerky and went around the car chewing on it. He got behind the wheel and buckled himself in. Then he said to the car, “Tesht Mrs. Yeleska.” “Sorry, I didn’t quite get that,” the car replied. Henryk took the jerky out of his mouth and swallowed what he was chewing. “Text Mrs. Kielecka: I’m extremely sorry, but I have to cancel my participation in your wine festival due to a family emergency. Thank you for understanding.” “Message sent,” confirmed the car.
It took Henryk about five minutes to figure out how to disengage all vocal commands and other convenience features in the vehicle. “Car?” he finally said, testing his efforts. No answer. “Speak to me, lady,” he asked just to make sure. The silence was soothing.
Henryk loosened the seatbelt around the grocery bag and pulled out the vodka bottle. He unscrewed the top and took a nice swig with his eyes closed. He felt the warmth in his throat. Then the warmth spilled into his chest. He opened his eyes. “Okay,” said Henryk, and put the bottle back in the bag. He shifted gears from PARK to DRIVE and placed both hands on the wheel. “Take me back to where I just came from,” he asked himself in a decisive voice. “Take me to Zenek’s Garage.”
Great combination of new world technology with old world humanity.