It’s hot on the top floor of my little house. I sleep with the skylight windows open. When the wind is in the right direction, I can hear the platform announcements of the train station at the bottom of the road. Every week, I clean the thick layer of back diesel particulates from the plaster under the windows. Those are the compounds that didn’t quite make it into my lungs. The bigger particles I inhaled are coughed away. The smaller ones get stuck in the alveolar sacs, caus