October 11 2007 - Chapter 5.02
This has been edited to reflect the new chapter numbering.
Notes - as I mention in the blog post on Nov 7 2006, I've since realized these are two scenes (park and online) and I need to separate them.
When evening came Michael was tired, lazy really, and the smell of roasted garlic made him dawdle, helping Denise set the table for five. When Ellen and Trish arrived, sunburnt and giddy, the air kisses (and an unwelcome hug from plump Ellen) told Michael their day of sailing and light beer before they began to shout about it. "Sausalito is so nice!" Ellen said accusingly, as if everyone else had known but no one had told her. Michael left.
He rode northwest and down, taking streets without marked bike lanes, through the upscale Marina district on the city's northern shore. The streets were quiet, the young rich partygoers at home tonight watching Sunday cable television dramas. Marina Green was almost empty, a few strolling couples, one brown family on the east side finishing their picnic, two gray bums laughing in wheezes behind him. Michael could smell their sharp trash and cheese stench even against the breeze from the bay, over the thirsty grasses fattening themselves on evening dew. In the dusk light Alcatraz fascinated him, its grim forbidding solitude violated by the squat water tower, as alien as a moon lander. He smiled. It was good to be outside. He unhooked his bike bags to use as a cushion and sat down.
His first month with his reawakened sense had been one of bewilderment and suffering, even physical. Two days after taking his new job Michael had come down with a nasty cold. "It's not really a cold," Bill had told him when Michael mentioned it. "It's a psychosomatic reaction. Call it a mind allergy. Your subconscious is trying to fight off all the new things you smell."
"How long does it last?"
"Everyone's different. You're picking up more information than you used to. It's like you feel everything the way you only do exceptional events -- your first kiss, your first car accident. Your body is running in the red, and your brain knows that's unsustainable. Just ride it out." Michael treated it the same as a real cold, loading up on drugstore remedies, but his constant sniffling and congestion exhausted him. Despite the drowsiness from the drugs for several nights he slept fitfully.
He hardly noticed his recovery, for by then he had developed a strange and sad aversion to the world between his home and his office. The world had grown confusing to him, full of smells he'd never noticed. Even the smells he thought he knew, from bus exhaust to salt air to coffee, were vastly more complex. The little man behind the curtain had become the Great and Terrible Oz. It worried Michael. On a couple of dark nights it frightened him.
He tried to puzzle out his feelings, staying up late lurking on the boards Bill recommended. They were secretive places -- Bill had to provide him a formal introduction to many of the moderators -- with a few conventions. Words like "psychic" and "ESP" were forbidden, lest a webcrawler find them; more than one site needed to move domains after being invaded by spam for hypnosis and diet supplements. "Perceptions" and "perceivers" were the most common terms, but hard to use in discussion, and posts often read as if machine-translated from other languages. Some discussions loosely worked toward codifying perceptions, looking for consistencies in how the brains of sensitives represented the emotional states they sensed. Across five senses, however, and with most people isolated for years with their personal shorthands for their abilities, finding common descriptions was difficult. Worse were the boards where people shared their stories and testimonials. They seemed to be the retreat of those most debilitated by their extra perceptions. What some people considered a milestone in their journey toward normal engagement with the outside world was less than Michael did every day. He had assumed he would get better, but here was proof that he might get worse, more fragile and pathetic.
The discussions did reveal how ignorant Michael was about the sense of smell itself, so he researched that too. It only took one evening, from basic entries in web encyclopedias and sites for schoolkids, to detailed scientific explanations that spoke of esters and receptors and were well beyond his half-remembered college scienc. But he got the gist.
Bill Thorn had been right in describing smell as the most powerful sense, at least if one judged by the immediacy of access to the brain. Unlike most senses which sent signals through nerves, the olfactory bulb that processed the air inhaled into the sinuses was essentially part of the brain itself. That one fact alone gave Michael simultaneous creepiness and relief. He imagined himself exploded, like a skinned homunculus, eyes and ears and the nerves of his skin all radiating away from his exposed brain, tethered like satellite dishes. In the center of his distributed self, closer than anything, the olfactory bulb, more naked than his penis. No wonder this new world of odor affected him so profoundly.
The intimacy wasn't merely anatomy, but the very nature of smell itself. The sight and sound of a thing are echoes, vibrations and light. A touch was closer but mediated by skin. To smell a thing, a bit of chemical from the thing had come inside the body. To smell or taste, in fact; at dinner in Tahoe, Tammy had been correct to say taste was mainly smell. The tongue was a basic survival instrument, looking for desired sugars and salts and glutamates, rejecting through bitterness the potentially poisonous. The fineness of taste, the complexities that made him linger of late over the smallest bites and sips, that made him filter tap water and mask the remaining chemicals with slices of lime, these were smell. Smell was the primordial sense, the closest any creature could allow the world to invade it.
Smell was even paramount for humans, who had given up much of their olfactory sensors by walking upright (there was debate; protected from ground filth and with vastly better our brains, some scientists argued we needed far fewer receptors than other animals). We use it to choose mates with complementary immune systems, to detect threat and fear. Smell is the only sense that works during sleep.
Michael was glad for the information but remained unsatisfied. He could understand that smells were compelling but he didn't know how they affected him. Eat too much and grow fat. Hear too loud and go deaf. Could smells exhaust his body? Pheromones excited his lust, but did other smells also affect his brain, making new neurochemicals the way sugars affected insulin? Was there a good smell diet?
He also felt just as isolated from his friends, unable to explain the world he now sensed. To his chagrin he had found no meaningful language to describe smells. He could name aromas and odors and stenches, but slapping the word for a flower on its fragrance said nothing, and approximating one smell with another smell said less. What did it mean about strong cheeses and sweaty feet that they had broadly similar smells? Reviews of perfumes, the only regular writing on scent he had found, were florid and imagistic, like the fanciful names used distinguish different colors of paint. Reading them made Michael feel like a man with new eyes trying to make sense of an art-history book.
A large party boat cruised near enough to the shore that he could see tiny figures moving on its deck. The sight woke him from his reverie. In his youth his family regularly went sailing out of Green Bay, sometimes overnight trips up to Canada, and rented little boats for family regattas on Lake Waubesa on summer evenings. Save for a couple of ferry rides and a tour of Alcatraz Michael had never gone on the Bay. Was that too a symptom of his anosmia, the years he hid from smell? He remembered his moment of connectedness at the farmer's market. He wanted that again. He put his bags back on his bike and walked it off the grass, looking for the marked bike lanes leading east toward the piers.