‘It's Only Us, Hyenas, Who Profit Out of It’: Wrecked Cars, Leaked Humans, and the Death of the Person-car

Abstract

On a sunny late morning in September 2019, just before a lunch break, Pan Vedoucí (Mr Headman) left the yard. Hynek and I decided to use this rare moment without being controlled to chill, chat, and stroll the yard. We spent a significant part of the time throwing stones at an old car window. While still chatting, we stopped at a car that seemed untouched by us, the breakers, yet was placed among metal bodies of dismantled cars, ready to be taken to a scrapyard. The car was heavily damaged as the result of a car accident. Nothing unusual, all the cars that we broke up at the yard were damaged; they were objects that were no longer ‘auto-mobile.’ However, this particular Kia was full of food, portable refrigerators, and beach accessories that suggested a family going to spend their vacation on the Croatian coast. I asked Hynek about the car, and he replied that no one wanted to break it up because it was pretty messy and stinky inside – the car was dirty. The only thing that had been taken from the car by the breakers was the most valuable part, the engine – the ‘heart’ (srdce) of the car. I realized later that humans had died in the car. It was not only sausages or schnitzels and their pungent odor that discouraged breakers from processing the Kia – although odors do have the power to contaminate, and therefore, might be vehicles of contagion (Miller, 1997: 66–79). It was primarily because someone had died inside it; traces of