The Smell

When Anthony Powel entered his apartment on the first floor of the converted Victorian house in the quiet neighborhood in which he dwelled, he instantly became angry. A nasty smell wafted in from the back porch area, and he was quite certain his roommates were again neglecting their duties. The reek could only be trash that had been left to rot. Damn, he hated irresponsible people. He charged through the apartment toward the back, dropping his backpack with his books and made a bee-line for the odor. Then he stopped. No, his inner voice said, leave it, let it rot. It was not his job. Let his roommates deal with the horrible stench as he was, damn them.

He then returned to his books and took them to the apartment’s dining room. Sitting at the table he spread the books out and retrieved his notes from his backpack. He tried to concentrate on his work through the constant reminder of nauseating reek. He fumed.

Anthony, ‘Tony’ to his friends, had two roommates, Mike Stephenson, and Carol Ward. Mike and Carol were something of an item, so Tony often felt like the third wheel, but even one floor of the old house made for plenty of room for the three of them, and the cost was low to be sure. The only real drawback was that Mike was an utter slob.

Tony gathered his things and went to his room. Once there he spread all his work out on his bed and started back at his studies. Tony kept his concentration on his studies for over an hour. Then, he decided he’d like something to eat. Leaving his room, he was once again assaulted by the smell of garbage gone bad. God, it was gross.

He grabbed his car keys and jumped into his Cavalier, deciding food would go better farther away from his nasty smelling flat. On the way to the strip that he referred to as junk food heaven, he saw a classmate, Steve ‘Stoney’ Isley. Tony slowed his car, and rolled down the passenger window.

‘Hey, Steve’ he called. Steve glanced over, and after recognition, came over to the car.

‘Hey, I’m headed over to grab a burger at Wendy’s. Care to tag along?’ Tony said.

‘Yeah man, but I’m a little strapped for cash…’ Steve and Tony had this unspoken agreement. Tony bought the grub, and Steve supplied the weed. Without asking, Steve packed a small one-hitter with a fresh little bud of MJ and passed it to Tony. The pipe was painted to look like a cigarette and neither of them felt paranoid about firing it up while driving. Tony took the first hit, and passed it to Steve. After exhaling, he started.

‘Man, you know what my ass-hole roommate did?’

‘Whazzat?’ Steve managed while holding his toke.

‘He left the frickin nasty-ass trash to stink up the apartment. That’s just wrong. I mean, you don’t like the way something looks, you just don’t look at it, but how do you not smell something?’ A rhetorical question of course.

‘Olfactory adaptation.’ Steve said after exhaling. Steve was the master of holding toke. He’d hold his breath for three minutes or more some times. It amazed Tony, as did his warehouse of worthless trivia.

‘What?’

‘Olfactory adaptation. It’s when your olfactory receptors, your sense of smell, no longer register something. See, my hometown has pig farms on one side, and the smell blows across the whole town, but I never noticed, until I left for college. Now whenever I go home, I want to barf my guts out from the smell. Whooo, I tell ya man, pig shit is the worst.’ While talking, Steve’s nimble fingers cleared and repacked the bowl of the diminutive pipe.

‘Well, I wish my old-factory whatevers would adapt. That shit reeks.’ They turned into the parking lot of Wendy’s.

Tony stood feeling like a cow in a herd, waiting in line for his chunk of… dude, his mind thought… He was waiting in line feeling like a cow, waiting for his chunk of cow. He was performing a bizarre ritual of cannibalism of metaphor… and suddenly he realized, he was stoned. Then, even worse, he realized he was about to be speaking to a very unhappy teenager making minimum wage, and he had no idea what he wanted. He was about to start laughing uncontrollably. He smiled, BIG. He was finding it all unbearably humorous. And at the same time, his expression he knew would alert others to his being, you know, buzzed in public… and he snickered.

He shuffled up to the young girl at the register and smiled, not a 'hey, I'm a stoner' smile, a warm friendly smile, and in response, the girl behind the counter changed her expression of artificial congeniality to sincere warmth. Her young eyes sparkled. What beautiful eyes, Tony thought. He briefly wondered how old she was, and for some reason, wondered what her life was like.

Tony's voice flowed flawlessly. He felt as if his voice were on auto-pilot, his mind disengaged as the unscripted monologue of his dietary desires poured forth, and while it did, his now-somehow-detached rational mind read nuances of facial features and expression, of wardrobe, stature, dictation, hairstyle, hygiene, and a hundred other minute details of 'Alice', as the name tag read. Tony inhaled the mild scent of her perfume, somehow gleaned over the burger grease that hung in the air.

The next moment Tony realized, he became aware he was now standing with a plastic tray in front of him, slowly being filled with various items. In his right hand he noticed he was grasping a handful of crumpled bills, and several coins. He was still looking directly at the girl at the cash register, and she at him. His heart leapt from the strange knowledge of the social situation he was in, he felt for a moment flushed.

Weird. He didn't know what to make of it, but decided to let it slide for now. He didn't know why he'd be interested in a high school girl, he already had a girlfriend. Sort of.

Steve sat at the table after him.

'Dude, are you in love or what? I must admit myself that she's got a nice rack for a hatchling'. 'Hatchling' was Steve's term for 'Jailbait'. He thought of them as not yet old enough to be considered 'chicks'.

Tony was off in thought, his mind had captured that smell, that wonderful fragrance in his mind, and was engraving it in vivid detail. Something to be saved, he thought.

Tony raised the burger to his lips and bit. He chewed the ingredients, barely noticing the flavors registering on his tongue. Then he stopped. Something was wrong, his stomach rolled a little. Something in the smell of the burger clicked. It reminded him of the overwhelming odor in the apartment. Tony stopped eating. Damn, why hadn't he noticed it before? It was nasty bad meat that had stunk up the place. He was totally turned off of the idea of the burger now. Steve, on the other hand, merrily stuffed down his burger and was working on his 'Biggy' fries with enthusiasm.

Tony spoke 'Hey man… I'll trade you my burger for that small frosty'. Steve didn't stop eating to speak. He gave a strong thumbs up with his left hand while moving the small desert across to the adjacent tray, then deftly snatched the burger, wrapper and all in his way back. Tony was both amazed and somewhat repulsed by Steve's actions as an eating machine.

Tony munched a few of his fries, ate the frosty, and tried to think about nothing.

Upon returning, Tony pulled up in front of the old converted Victorian. In the old Cavalier, the smell of cannabis filled the air, under it was the faint scent of burger grease, and somewhere more like a memory than an actual smell was the young lady, Alice. The scent was almost a taste on the back of Tony's tongue. Almost a flavor... He inhaled and imagined the intoxicating scent of her sweat, the faint trace of perfumed soap. Something was stirring in him, a sexual hunger. He fought back the thoughts, feeling somewhat like a lecherous old man, even thought he was only 22.

Mike's van was in the driveway. Maybe he'd gotten home by now, and had cleaned up the mess that Tony was sure awaited him on the back porch.

Tony tried to think back to the last time he'd actually seen Mike. Today was Friday, he'd last seen him... Umm... The pot was messing with his head. A burst of random images went through his head, seeing the apartment from different perspectives, different times, trying to see Mike in time and space. Monday maybe? Their schedules were all so different.

Tony climbed out of his car, closing the door absent-mindedly behind him. Something seemed wrong. It was that annoying sense of wrong you get just before taking off on a road trip, where something has been forgotten, and no matter how hard you try, you won't remember what until you're most of the way to your destination. Tony chuckled at this. He tried to let go of the feeling. Sometimes the release of mental tension allowed the issue to be resolved more quickly.

The front door stood before him. He didn't want to go inside. Something was wrong, and he didn't want to know what. It was in the apartment... something forgotten.

Upon opening the front door, he made a snap decision. He took in a deep breath, and strode brusquely to the back porch, snatched the Hefty trashcan, and hauled it to the back curb. When he had moved some distance from the can, he exhaled, and took in fresh air. No nasty odor. Thankfully. He was expecting to find the can full of flies. Actually, as he looked, he didn't see many flies around it. He tentatively sniffed the air for remnants of the smell. Nothing. He cautiously approached the can, sampling the air... still nothing. He unhooked the safety handles on the lid and opened the can a little. Nothing. The can was empty.

That left either the kitchen trash can or refrigerator as the source of the smell. Yuck. The thought didn't appeal to him. A cool breeze blew past that smelled of rain. Tony decided to open up the apartment, air the place out, and get on about his business. The windows of the apartment were flung wide. Living room, Tony's bedroom, Mike's, Carol's bedroom, where her perfume hung perpetually in the air. He paused. A quick flash of fantasy flickered in his mind of a hot sexual encounter with Carol.

Outside, the first tentative drops of rain began to fall, kicking up the smell of dust and oil from the street.

Tony propped open the back door to the porch with an old fashion iron. The breeze moved quickly through the first floor of the old house. He returned to his room and haphazardly tossed his books and notes to the floor. He lay there on his back, letting the breeze flow over him.

Again his mind wandered to Carol. The strong fantasies returned. Somehow, it seemed stronger than fantasy. And it was. Tony shot bolt upright. How in the hell could he have forgotten ever making love to his roommate? Was it... two days ago? How could he have forgotten?!?

The entire incident seemed to roll in his memory, unlocked with an almost audible click. He and she. They. As one... a union of flesh, of soul... He flashed on the entire incident from Carol's perspective. The feeling of her tongue pressing into his mouth... reaching in. The sensation was just as real, just as firmly a memory.

He had felt what Carol had felt. Now in his mind, a rush of memory from a life he never lived. Life from Carol's perspective. The memory extended to the moment the two of them made love. And suddenly the memory stopped.

Tony's own memory was a blank. The feeling of her tongue slithering down his throat, choking him. Tony gagged, reliving the memory. He bolted for the kitchen and expunged the contents of his belly into the sink. The bitter taste of bile on his tongue. The smell he'd tried so hard to get rid of lingered, and again his stomach rolled. He wretched until dry heaves threatened to break his ribs.

He collapsed and lay propped against the counter beneath the sink, staring at nothing. His mind saw memories of his life, intermingled with memories from Carol's. Which were real? What had happened to Carol? Tony's skin was glistening with sweat, and he shivered in the breeze of the slowly building storm. A hyper-reality to his senses made his head swim. Everything was magnified to deafening intensity as his mind recoiled.

The collision of two worlds, two lives fighting to claim which was true. Under the strain, Tony succumbed, and for an unknown time, he lay there motionless, not seeing through his wide open eyes, not feeling the cold linoleum on his skin. Not hearing the storm build outside. Not tasting the bile in his mouth.

When the mental collision was over, the first thing that came to him was the smell. Not the rancid scent that had permeated the apartment before, but a scent unlike anything he'd ever known before. A smell that called to some part of him. Tony now understood that somehow Carol had merged with him, consumed him... crawled inside him and taken his form. They were now one being. There was no feeling of panic. He accepted it as truth.

He climbed on wobbly limbs back to his feet and lurched toward the back door. He stood on the back porch, staring down. He knew now that the smell was an empty husk, little more than skin and hair from Carol, that he himself had placed under the floorboards here. His mind had locked that bit of information away, conveniently. Something from Edgar Allen Poe's 'Telltale heart' ran across his mind, and he laughed.

He stepped out the back door into a pouring rain. How dramatic, he thought. But more, there was something calling him, a scent so faint as to be nearly undetectable. The rain was washing into the storm grates, and from them rose the smell.

Through the town he staggered, shivering in the cold pelting rain, but not feeling it at all. He felt as though his body responded to his desires like a puppet. The night grew late, and the rain subsided. Still he wandered on, toward the low ground.

He eventually found himself at the opening of a huge rain drainage pipe. The water still rushed out quickly, more than two feet deep. Tony grabbed the rim of the huge steel pipe, and stepped from the muddy bank into the fast flow of water. Against the strong current he walked, and stopped a few strides in.

The dim light of nearby street lamps was already fading nearly to nothing. He would not be able to see in only a few moments. It didn't matter, he pressed on, moving toward a smell which called to him, strong now, commanding. COME BACK TO US.

In the inky blackness, he felt the memories from Carol rolling in his (their) mind. Carol in school, in the apartment, with Mike... Making love to him, choking... merging... joining with him. Mike had done to Carol what she had done to Tony. Now they were all one.

And before Mike? Tony felt as thought the memories went back forever. Each life, touching another, merging...

The water became shallow, and Tony could tell from the echoes that he had emerged into a chamber. He also knew that he was not alone here. Others shifted in the darkness. Moreover, he could smell them all, each a unique but similar scent. Old friends... family... kindred.

He reached out and found his hand touching a cold body, wet and clammy. Not like skin. More like a large scale or shell of a soft crawfish. His hand followed up the thick torso, found a spindly neck, covered in loose leathery skin, and a jaw, bony, with small spiked protrusions on the underside. A toothless maul, and the appendage... first feeling like a thick muscular tongue, then an articulated, barbed proboscis. He felt his own mouth open and his swollen tongue reach out to meet with the other.

His heart raced with something very much like sexual desire. When they met, a new language was expressed. Taste and smell conveyed memories of uncounted lives, and he was in ecstasy. The night passed with him passing through this chamber of unseen lovers, sharing in the delicacy of humanity. He was not alone in still wearing human form, some were cloaked in human skin, some were bare. It didn't matter, they were all ancient lovers, sharing in each other.

At dawn, the one who once knew himself only as Tony stepped out of the dark tunnels of the sewers, and into the feeble light of day. It was a new wonderful world, washed clean by the rains. In one night he had lived thousands and thousands of lives. He began slowly to return to the old Victorian house. His mind sang with the fullness of his newfound existence, and burned with the memory of one thing, the fresh and wonderful scent of a young girl, Alice. He would find her now, following her scent. He would make love to her, and bring her into the fold.