The Body Farm, page 19
“Okay,” I say. “I’m awake now. What time is it? We have to leave for our flight.”
Hank sits down in the armchair again. “Well,” he says. “The thing is, Baylor had to have his stomach pumped.”
“What?”
“I said, he had—”
“What?”
“It happened last night. I guess you’d call it alcohol poisoning.”
A sound escapes me, somewhere between a gasp and a groan.
“We took him to the ER. All of us went together.” Hank raises a hand, tapping thoughtfully at his temple. “You know, maybe they didn’t pump his stomach. Maybe they just gave him that stuff that makes you puke. What’s that stuff? I’ve had it. Man, it tastes terrible.”
“Is he all right?” I say. Glancing down, I realize that I am still holding the glass of water. With a bang, I set it on the coffee table. “Where is he? I should be . . . Let me get my purse, and I’ll be ready to go.”
Hank holds up his palms. “Whoa, whoa. Baylor’s just fine.”
“He had his stomach pumped.”
“Happens to the best of us.”
“Not to Baylor,” I fire back. “It’s never been that bad. He’s never been hospitalized before.”
Hank nods solemnly, taking this in. “It just got away from him, I think. We hit Joe’s Bar. Stayed up late. Headed over to Big E’s place. We noticed that Baylor seemed . . . well. He had blacked out. We couldn’t wake him.”
“Why the hell didn’t anyone call me?”
“We didn’t want to bug you until we knew how serious it was.” He darts his eyes sheepishly to the side. “And then, in the hospital, Baylor told us not to.”
All the fight goes out of me, and I sink back against the couch.
“He’s doing good,” Hank says. “Really.”
“Cross your heart?”
“Hope to die. Stick a needle in my eye.”
I nod. The full weight of his news is still sinking in. There is a strange sensation in my chest, as though my heart has become dislodged, slipping to the side. A silence descends. Hank has my husband’s calm composure, the ability to weather an uncomfortable pause with equanimity.
“We’re not leaving today, are we?” I ask. “We were supposed to leave today.”
“Well,” Hank says. “That’s a funny thing too.”
“I bet.”
“The doctors seemed to think that it might be hard for him to fly the same day he . . . he . . .”
Hank trails off, looking at me as though I might suddenly go for his throat. I hear the wind scraping against the wall outside. I hear the turkeys in the distance, warbling their dissonant song. The peace of the countryside is a myth.
“He’s never had to go to the hospital before,” I say again. “We’ve been through a lot, but never that.”
Hank blushes. “There’s one more thing. Baylor wanted me to tell you—I told him I didn’t feel quite right about it, but—”
“Spit it out,” I say coldly.
He is crimson now, all the way up to the tips of his ears. “He’s going to stay at Emil’s place once he’s discharged. He doesn’t want to see you.” Quickly, he corrects himself, “I mean, he doesn’t want you to see him. Not like this.”
“Fine by me,” I say.
“Right.” At once, Hank is on his feet, moving toward the door. “Well, it’s been real nice talking with you.”
This little pleasantry almost makes me laugh aloud. He offers it automatically, as a penance, perhaps, for having shoved himself so awkwardly into the middle of my marriage. He fumbles for the doorknob and escapes into the sunshine.
○
Three weeks ago, Baylor told me that he wanted to come to Tennessee. Almost before the words were out of his mouth, I heard alarm bells ringing. He had been sober for fourteen months, he said, as though I hadn’t been keeping my own count. He told me that he could not bear to go any longer without seeing his brothers. I was on my summer break, and he had vacation days accrued. It was time, he said.
On the morning of our trip, I woke to a sinking feeling—a crumbling, as of hope deflating. We spent the ride to the airport sniping at each other. The highway was a mass of angry red taillights, winking and flashing like morse code. Horns blared. There was a musical precision to it; one would shrill, another would answer, and a conversation would ensue, back and forth, each side trying to get in the last word. Our driver bawled ceaselessly into his radio. Baylor’s shoulders hunched together. My knuckles went white. A quarrel about our respective packing styles carried us all the way to the airport, through the security checkpoint, and onto the plane.
But the real war didn’t start until we were airborne. It was a gorgeous sunset, all watercolor hues and smoky clouds. In the window seat, I watched the ground fall away. Down below, Boston was in darkness, the roads a network of glittering lines, reminiscent of the lava rivers on Io, one of Jupiter’s moons, the most volcanic world in our solar system. When we reached the cloud layer, my view was swallowed up by gray.
I glanced over and saw that Baylor had ordered himself a glass of wine.
Before I could open my mouth, he snapped, “I don’t like flying. You know that.”
When he ordered his second glass, he said, “I’m going to drink this week. No choice, once my brothers get involved. Might as well start now.”
By the third glass, he had his headphones on and was humming along to the music. I would nudge him to be quiet, and he would pause momentarily as I gritted my teeth, counting. Seven, eight, nine, ten—and he would be humming again.
The plane climbed above the clouds. Through the window, a milky landscape emerged, pale peaks and ghostly valleys. Bulbous puffs drifted eerily above the plateau. The upper atmosphere appeared to be a wild place, judging by the shapes carved out of the cloud layer by the wind—whorls and loops, towers and hillsides.
Baylor ordered another glass of wine, and I wiped the tears from my eyes.
○
That night, the silence in Cade’s house is oppressive, the guest bed too wide. The television is full of nothing but love stories. I do not want to think about my husband. I do not want to picture him nestled, ashen and shaky, in Emil’s blankets. I do not want to wonder whether anyone is taking care of him as I have so often done—bringing him tea, aspirin, a cool cloth for his brow. I do not want to think at all.
My cell phone rings. I fumble for my purse and answer without bothering to check the screen. I know who it is. I’m sure Baylor has been picking up his phone all day, almost dialing, and putting it away again.
“Hi.” He clears his throat and tries again. “Hey, babe.”
“You sound terrible.”
“Been better.”
“This is a new low, huh?” I ask, unable to keep the rancor out of my voice. “I thought you hit bottom last time, but I guess not.”
There is a pause, and then, without anger, he says, “There’s always somewhere further down.”
I get to my feet and walk to the window. The woods are a silvery mesh. A flowering tree releases a cloud of white petals, floating on the air like snow.
“Our flight is at four,” Baylor says. “Tomorrow afternoon.”
“Fine.”
“I’ll pick you up. Hank will drive us out.”
“Okay.”
“You know I love you,” he says.
“I know.”
He waits for reciprocation. I do not offer it.
“I can’t talk much,” he says. “They put a tube down my throat. I’m pretty sore. Listen, honey—”
I interrupt him. “I’m not going to take care of you this time.”
“I’m quitting,” he says pleadingly. “For real. For good. I mean it.”
I breathe steadily, my eyes closed.
“I’ve learned my lesson,” he says. “This whole thing has shown me the light. I’m on the wagon now. Forever. I promise.”
“If you ever drink again, I’ll kill you,” I say.
“What?”
“I will kill you.”
The words come out in a rush, as though someone else is saying them. Baylor takes in an astonished breath. I hang up and turn off my phone.
○
At midnight, sleepless, anguished, I step outside. The night is full of wind, a chaotic breeze swelling this way and that. I walk into the grass. In the distance, an owl shrieks, shrill and grating.
My own words to Baylor ring through my mind. I hear my voice, hardened by emotion into a rough tenor: I will kill you. In this moment, however, the words come back to me differently. I hear myself saying, I will leave you.
Because that’s what I meant, what I should have told him, what I will tell him once we’re back home and somewhat recovered. If you ever drink again, I will leave you. That is the truth I have come to understand during my final trip to Tennessee.
Saturn glimmers overhead, the ringed planet, first spotted by Galileo Galilei’s telescope. Venus is visible too, a fiery hellscape of ochre-colored sulfuric acid that looks serene from this distance. Light pollution usually obscures the Milky Way in Boston, but here I can see it clearly, a beaded quilt thrown over the treetops.
Before my eyes, a pinpoint of light detaches itself from the sky and falls. I would make a wish, but I know it is not a star. It is starlike, an asteroid wrenched from its family, untethered from Jupiter’s thrall, achieving escape velocity, plunging through miles of inky void to enter our atmosphere. Maybe it will burn up in the air, charring and crumbling into harmless ash. But I hope it survives the terrible descent. I hope it beats the ground hollow when it lands on the other side of the world.
Petrichor
The first sign was a sandwich. Tuna fish on rye, homemade. Hannah sealed it in Tupperware, slipped it into her purse, and left for work. The sandwich was unimportant at the time, discernible as the turning point only in retrospect.
At the office, everyone was murmuring about this new virus. It was still in Asia then, an ocean away, but the media could talk of little else. “Much ado about nothing,” Hannah said, leaning against the copier as it shuddered and squeaked. “They’re just trying to scare us. Anything for a headline. Tomorrow they’ll be freaking out about North Korean nukes again.” She believed this, believed that the media had become a perpetual motion machine, powered by panic, that created an endless supply of its own fuel.
But still, throughout the morning, she found herself googling viruses. The body count in Asia was rising, she learned. Viruses were not living things at all, she learned. They inhabited a nether realm of existence, inert until they came into contact with life, which activated them, inducing them to replicate. Zombies, Hannah thought, and turned off her computer for lunch.
After one bite, she threw her sandwich away in horror. The celery crunched, the mayonnaise oozed, everything looked and felt normal. But the whole thing was wrong in a way she could not initially define, something she had never in her thirty-six years of life encountered. There was a terrible sweetness, a misalignment of sandwich and smell: an aftertaste, or maybe an afterthought, of peaches and cream.
○
Next came the roses with a potent aroma of peanut butter. Hannah leaned in to feel the velvet petals against her face and recoiled in confusion. Her morning coffee tasted like spaghetti. On a fitness walk with her sister, Hannah kept pausing, sniffing the air, wondering aloud if a fire was burning somewhere near. But no—it was pollen on the wind, not smoke, according to both her sister and the internet.
Strange, but not yet frightening. Hannah examined her nose in the mirror, familiar, freckled, and flat. Was the glitch in her nostrils or in her brain? Perimenopause, her sister suggested. Cancer, WebMD offered.
And still, the news could talk of nothing but the virus, which had reached the shores of Europe, battering Italy and Germany. The body count rose by the day, by the hour.
Hannah woke in a panic on Sunday morning. Something was missing—something so primal and essential that she could not immediately identify it. She counted her limbs and digits. She laid a palm on her chest, checking for a heartbeat. She inhaled deeply, trying to calm herself, but the feeling persisted—a raw absence, as if some fundamental aspect of the world, or of Hannah herself, had been erased.
Another inhale. Deeper, choking her lungs with air. She understood now what was lacking. The lemony odor of her apartment, the lingering tang of fabric softener in her sheets, the pleasant stink of her own garish sweat. Gone.
○
“Anosmia,” her doctor said, and then chuckled. “It’s a funny word, isn’t it?”
Hannah did not return his smile. “How do we fix this?”
The doctor gave a longwinded, hand-wavy reply that meant I don’t know.
“How long will it go on?” Hannah asked, trying to keep the desperation out of her voice. “I can’t just stay like this forever.”
Her first thought had been to call the police. The loss felt as violent as theft, as intimate as a break-in. Someone had stolen one of her five senses.
“We’ll keep an eye on it,” the doctor said, nodding sagely and ushering her out of his office.
In another month, everyone would recognize anosmia as one of the first symptoms of the virus. Just then, however, Hannah’s private suffering seemed unrelated to the news coverage of the first recorded case found on American soil, a couple hundred miles north near Seattle.
○
She took the rest of the day off work. The internet told her that food would now lose its savor, which was true; everything tasted like cardboard. She spritzed perfume directly into her face and smelled nothing, though her sinuses ached afterward. She took a long walk along the river, pausing to breathe intensely when she spied a dead fish. Everywhere, anywhere, the air was blank and meaningless.
Her friends offered their condolences, but politely, briskly. Even her sister did not seem particularly interested. Jo kept changing the subject to the virus, which was spreading through the Pacific Northwest like a wildfire. It would reach their small Oregon town any minute, if it hadn’t already. Jo was considering pulling her children out of school as a precaution, but she and her husband could not agree.
Sleepless, Hannah sat up late. She couldn’t bear the thought that she would never again inhale the spice of a freshly peeled orange or the bright, brassy scent of her niece’s hair after a long day in the sun. It occurred to her for the first time that vision was the favorite child of the English language. Every color had a synonym. There were a dozen descriptors for the quality of light alone—glitter, gleam, shine, flash, shimmer—but not a single word for so many of the things she had lost: the mouthwatering, sugary bouquet of a bakery, the sting of fresh nail polish, or the omnipresent fume rising from the ocean. Why were there not more nouns like petrichor? Hannah had learned the word in childhood, a musical encapsulation of the smell of rain on dry earth. Her late mother had loved its specificity and rhythm, rolling the r’s down her tongue.
Now Hannah whispered it like a mantra, “Petrichor, petrichor,” and wept.
○
Without smell, she was reduced to taste, a lesser version of the olfactory rainbow. Smell infused the world with context and significance. Smell offered a thousand shades, while taste provided only five: sweet, sour, bitter, salt, and umami.
On her lunch break, Hannah sat on a bench outside, despite the drizzle. A couple walked past, nestled under a single umbrella, both wearing cloth masks. She watched them, wondering if they were doctors, though they were awfully young, and dressed in jeans, not scrubs. Was the woman wearing perfume? Did the man have stinky feet? Hannah would never know. Without smell, the world stood at a remove. She might have been a filmgoer watching the biopic of her own life; everything was flattened as though on a screen, lacking the verisimilitude of odiferous reality.
Hannah opened her lunch. Since the onset of her anosmia, she had packed meals that encompassed the sad little spectrum that was left to her. Today: sliced apple for sweet, sauerkraut for sour, gouda for umami, sautéed Brussels sprouts for bitter, and dried seaweed for salt. As a kindness to the unimpaired noses of her coworkers, Hannah ate outside now, even in the pervasive Oregon rain.
She had prepared the Brussels sprouts according to her late mother’s recipe, sautéed in oil and liberally spiced, though, as she chewed, she realized she might as well have eaten them raw. Plain bitterness, nothing more. Sauerkraut: the bracing tartness of vinegar. Gouda: a round, meaty contentment. The apple gave no lingering aroma of the forest, no multifaceted juices, only bare sweetness, unaccompanied. Smell was a wide-open gift, billowing on the wind, available for the taking. Taste was stingy and small, cloistered in the hollow of the human mouth.
Hannah saved salt, her favorite, for last. Dried seaweed on her tongue. Crunchy, melting into spongy. She waited for the top note of salt. Waited. She probed the seaweed, the feel of it, nap and grain, but no taste—nothing but texture.
Where was salt?
Salt was gone.
○
She lost sweet that same afternoon. Umami and sour had vanished by the next morning. Bitter lingered long enough that Hannah thought, even hoped, that it might stay with her forever; a bitter world was better than an empty one. She sipped coffee all the way to the doctor’s office, relishing each charred, earthy mouthful.
Ensconced in the plastic coffin of the MRI machine, Hannah thought of Bergamo, Italy, the latest virus hotspot. A doctor over there had described it as a war zone, bodies filling the morgue, crematoriums at capacity, funerals unattended because the loved ones of the bereaved were sick too. A military caravan had carried the dead through the streets; no other vehicles were large enough. Would that happen here, in the small town where Hannah had lived since childhood? Neither she nor Jo had ever felt the inclination to leave their bucolic home.
Her brain was fine. The doctor showed it to her on a screen. To her the image was a Rorschach; to him, a diagnosis of good health. He pointed: “Here, you see, and here?” No lesions, no tumors, nothing at all to explain her symptoms.
Hannah reached for her thermos of coffee with shaking hands, took a lukewarm sip, and found that bitter, too, had abandoned her.
Hank sits down in the armchair again. “Well,” he says. “The thing is, Baylor had to have his stomach pumped.”
“What?”
“I said, he had—”
“What?”
“It happened last night. I guess you’d call it alcohol poisoning.”
A sound escapes me, somewhere between a gasp and a groan.
“We took him to the ER. All of us went together.” Hank raises a hand, tapping thoughtfully at his temple. “You know, maybe they didn’t pump his stomach. Maybe they just gave him that stuff that makes you puke. What’s that stuff? I’ve had it. Man, it tastes terrible.”
“Is he all right?” I say. Glancing down, I realize that I am still holding the glass of water. With a bang, I set it on the coffee table. “Where is he? I should be . . . Let me get my purse, and I’ll be ready to go.”
Hank holds up his palms. “Whoa, whoa. Baylor’s just fine.”
“He had his stomach pumped.”
“Happens to the best of us.”
“Not to Baylor,” I fire back. “It’s never been that bad. He’s never been hospitalized before.”
Hank nods solemnly, taking this in. “It just got away from him, I think. We hit Joe’s Bar. Stayed up late. Headed over to Big E’s place. We noticed that Baylor seemed . . . well. He had blacked out. We couldn’t wake him.”
“Why the hell didn’t anyone call me?”
“We didn’t want to bug you until we knew how serious it was.” He darts his eyes sheepishly to the side. “And then, in the hospital, Baylor told us not to.”
All the fight goes out of me, and I sink back against the couch.
“He’s doing good,” Hank says. “Really.”
“Cross your heart?”
“Hope to die. Stick a needle in my eye.”
I nod. The full weight of his news is still sinking in. There is a strange sensation in my chest, as though my heart has become dislodged, slipping to the side. A silence descends. Hank has my husband’s calm composure, the ability to weather an uncomfortable pause with equanimity.
“We’re not leaving today, are we?” I ask. “We were supposed to leave today.”
“Well,” Hank says. “That’s a funny thing too.”
“I bet.”
“The doctors seemed to think that it might be hard for him to fly the same day he . . . he . . .”
Hank trails off, looking at me as though I might suddenly go for his throat. I hear the wind scraping against the wall outside. I hear the turkeys in the distance, warbling their dissonant song. The peace of the countryside is a myth.
“He’s never had to go to the hospital before,” I say again. “We’ve been through a lot, but never that.”
Hank blushes. “There’s one more thing. Baylor wanted me to tell you—I told him I didn’t feel quite right about it, but—”
“Spit it out,” I say coldly.
He is crimson now, all the way up to the tips of his ears. “He’s going to stay at Emil’s place once he’s discharged. He doesn’t want to see you.” Quickly, he corrects himself, “I mean, he doesn’t want you to see him. Not like this.”
“Fine by me,” I say.
“Right.” At once, Hank is on his feet, moving toward the door. “Well, it’s been real nice talking with you.”
This little pleasantry almost makes me laugh aloud. He offers it automatically, as a penance, perhaps, for having shoved himself so awkwardly into the middle of my marriage. He fumbles for the doorknob and escapes into the sunshine.
○
Three weeks ago, Baylor told me that he wanted to come to Tennessee. Almost before the words were out of his mouth, I heard alarm bells ringing. He had been sober for fourteen months, he said, as though I hadn’t been keeping my own count. He told me that he could not bear to go any longer without seeing his brothers. I was on my summer break, and he had vacation days accrued. It was time, he said.
On the morning of our trip, I woke to a sinking feeling—a crumbling, as of hope deflating. We spent the ride to the airport sniping at each other. The highway was a mass of angry red taillights, winking and flashing like morse code. Horns blared. There was a musical precision to it; one would shrill, another would answer, and a conversation would ensue, back and forth, each side trying to get in the last word. Our driver bawled ceaselessly into his radio. Baylor’s shoulders hunched together. My knuckles went white. A quarrel about our respective packing styles carried us all the way to the airport, through the security checkpoint, and onto the plane.
But the real war didn’t start until we were airborne. It was a gorgeous sunset, all watercolor hues and smoky clouds. In the window seat, I watched the ground fall away. Down below, Boston was in darkness, the roads a network of glittering lines, reminiscent of the lava rivers on Io, one of Jupiter’s moons, the most volcanic world in our solar system. When we reached the cloud layer, my view was swallowed up by gray.
I glanced over and saw that Baylor had ordered himself a glass of wine.
Before I could open my mouth, he snapped, “I don’t like flying. You know that.”
When he ordered his second glass, he said, “I’m going to drink this week. No choice, once my brothers get involved. Might as well start now.”
By the third glass, he had his headphones on and was humming along to the music. I would nudge him to be quiet, and he would pause momentarily as I gritted my teeth, counting. Seven, eight, nine, ten—and he would be humming again.
The plane climbed above the clouds. Through the window, a milky landscape emerged, pale peaks and ghostly valleys. Bulbous puffs drifted eerily above the plateau. The upper atmosphere appeared to be a wild place, judging by the shapes carved out of the cloud layer by the wind—whorls and loops, towers and hillsides.
Baylor ordered another glass of wine, and I wiped the tears from my eyes.
○
That night, the silence in Cade’s house is oppressive, the guest bed too wide. The television is full of nothing but love stories. I do not want to think about my husband. I do not want to picture him nestled, ashen and shaky, in Emil’s blankets. I do not want to wonder whether anyone is taking care of him as I have so often done—bringing him tea, aspirin, a cool cloth for his brow. I do not want to think at all.
My cell phone rings. I fumble for my purse and answer without bothering to check the screen. I know who it is. I’m sure Baylor has been picking up his phone all day, almost dialing, and putting it away again.
“Hi.” He clears his throat and tries again. “Hey, babe.”
“You sound terrible.”
“Been better.”
“This is a new low, huh?” I ask, unable to keep the rancor out of my voice. “I thought you hit bottom last time, but I guess not.”
There is a pause, and then, without anger, he says, “There’s always somewhere further down.”
I get to my feet and walk to the window. The woods are a silvery mesh. A flowering tree releases a cloud of white petals, floating on the air like snow.
“Our flight is at four,” Baylor says. “Tomorrow afternoon.”
“Fine.”
“I’ll pick you up. Hank will drive us out.”
“Okay.”
“You know I love you,” he says.
“I know.”
He waits for reciprocation. I do not offer it.
“I can’t talk much,” he says. “They put a tube down my throat. I’m pretty sore. Listen, honey—”
I interrupt him. “I’m not going to take care of you this time.”
“I’m quitting,” he says pleadingly. “For real. For good. I mean it.”
I breathe steadily, my eyes closed.
“I’ve learned my lesson,” he says. “This whole thing has shown me the light. I’m on the wagon now. Forever. I promise.”
“If you ever drink again, I’ll kill you,” I say.
“What?”
“I will kill you.”
The words come out in a rush, as though someone else is saying them. Baylor takes in an astonished breath. I hang up and turn off my phone.
○
At midnight, sleepless, anguished, I step outside. The night is full of wind, a chaotic breeze swelling this way and that. I walk into the grass. In the distance, an owl shrieks, shrill and grating.
My own words to Baylor ring through my mind. I hear my voice, hardened by emotion into a rough tenor: I will kill you. In this moment, however, the words come back to me differently. I hear myself saying, I will leave you.
Because that’s what I meant, what I should have told him, what I will tell him once we’re back home and somewhat recovered. If you ever drink again, I will leave you. That is the truth I have come to understand during my final trip to Tennessee.
Saturn glimmers overhead, the ringed planet, first spotted by Galileo Galilei’s telescope. Venus is visible too, a fiery hellscape of ochre-colored sulfuric acid that looks serene from this distance. Light pollution usually obscures the Milky Way in Boston, but here I can see it clearly, a beaded quilt thrown over the treetops.
Before my eyes, a pinpoint of light detaches itself from the sky and falls. I would make a wish, but I know it is not a star. It is starlike, an asteroid wrenched from its family, untethered from Jupiter’s thrall, achieving escape velocity, plunging through miles of inky void to enter our atmosphere. Maybe it will burn up in the air, charring and crumbling into harmless ash. But I hope it survives the terrible descent. I hope it beats the ground hollow when it lands on the other side of the world.
Petrichor
The first sign was a sandwich. Tuna fish on rye, homemade. Hannah sealed it in Tupperware, slipped it into her purse, and left for work. The sandwich was unimportant at the time, discernible as the turning point only in retrospect.
At the office, everyone was murmuring about this new virus. It was still in Asia then, an ocean away, but the media could talk of little else. “Much ado about nothing,” Hannah said, leaning against the copier as it shuddered and squeaked. “They’re just trying to scare us. Anything for a headline. Tomorrow they’ll be freaking out about North Korean nukes again.” She believed this, believed that the media had become a perpetual motion machine, powered by panic, that created an endless supply of its own fuel.
But still, throughout the morning, she found herself googling viruses. The body count in Asia was rising, she learned. Viruses were not living things at all, she learned. They inhabited a nether realm of existence, inert until they came into contact with life, which activated them, inducing them to replicate. Zombies, Hannah thought, and turned off her computer for lunch.
After one bite, she threw her sandwich away in horror. The celery crunched, the mayonnaise oozed, everything looked and felt normal. But the whole thing was wrong in a way she could not initially define, something she had never in her thirty-six years of life encountered. There was a terrible sweetness, a misalignment of sandwich and smell: an aftertaste, or maybe an afterthought, of peaches and cream.
○
Next came the roses with a potent aroma of peanut butter. Hannah leaned in to feel the velvet petals against her face and recoiled in confusion. Her morning coffee tasted like spaghetti. On a fitness walk with her sister, Hannah kept pausing, sniffing the air, wondering aloud if a fire was burning somewhere near. But no—it was pollen on the wind, not smoke, according to both her sister and the internet.
Strange, but not yet frightening. Hannah examined her nose in the mirror, familiar, freckled, and flat. Was the glitch in her nostrils or in her brain? Perimenopause, her sister suggested. Cancer, WebMD offered.
And still, the news could talk of nothing but the virus, which had reached the shores of Europe, battering Italy and Germany. The body count rose by the day, by the hour.
Hannah woke in a panic on Sunday morning. Something was missing—something so primal and essential that she could not immediately identify it. She counted her limbs and digits. She laid a palm on her chest, checking for a heartbeat. She inhaled deeply, trying to calm herself, but the feeling persisted—a raw absence, as if some fundamental aspect of the world, or of Hannah herself, had been erased.
Another inhale. Deeper, choking her lungs with air. She understood now what was lacking. The lemony odor of her apartment, the lingering tang of fabric softener in her sheets, the pleasant stink of her own garish sweat. Gone.
○
“Anosmia,” her doctor said, and then chuckled. “It’s a funny word, isn’t it?”
Hannah did not return his smile. “How do we fix this?”
The doctor gave a longwinded, hand-wavy reply that meant I don’t know.
“How long will it go on?” Hannah asked, trying to keep the desperation out of her voice. “I can’t just stay like this forever.”
Her first thought had been to call the police. The loss felt as violent as theft, as intimate as a break-in. Someone had stolen one of her five senses.
“We’ll keep an eye on it,” the doctor said, nodding sagely and ushering her out of his office.
In another month, everyone would recognize anosmia as one of the first symptoms of the virus. Just then, however, Hannah’s private suffering seemed unrelated to the news coverage of the first recorded case found on American soil, a couple hundred miles north near Seattle.
○
She took the rest of the day off work. The internet told her that food would now lose its savor, which was true; everything tasted like cardboard. She spritzed perfume directly into her face and smelled nothing, though her sinuses ached afterward. She took a long walk along the river, pausing to breathe intensely when she spied a dead fish. Everywhere, anywhere, the air was blank and meaningless.
Her friends offered their condolences, but politely, briskly. Even her sister did not seem particularly interested. Jo kept changing the subject to the virus, which was spreading through the Pacific Northwest like a wildfire. It would reach their small Oregon town any minute, if it hadn’t already. Jo was considering pulling her children out of school as a precaution, but she and her husband could not agree.
Sleepless, Hannah sat up late. She couldn’t bear the thought that she would never again inhale the spice of a freshly peeled orange or the bright, brassy scent of her niece’s hair after a long day in the sun. It occurred to her for the first time that vision was the favorite child of the English language. Every color had a synonym. There were a dozen descriptors for the quality of light alone—glitter, gleam, shine, flash, shimmer—but not a single word for so many of the things she had lost: the mouthwatering, sugary bouquet of a bakery, the sting of fresh nail polish, or the omnipresent fume rising from the ocean. Why were there not more nouns like petrichor? Hannah had learned the word in childhood, a musical encapsulation of the smell of rain on dry earth. Her late mother had loved its specificity and rhythm, rolling the r’s down her tongue.
Now Hannah whispered it like a mantra, “Petrichor, petrichor,” and wept.
○
Without smell, she was reduced to taste, a lesser version of the olfactory rainbow. Smell infused the world with context and significance. Smell offered a thousand shades, while taste provided only five: sweet, sour, bitter, salt, and umami.
On her lunch break, Hannah sat on a bench outside, despite the drizzle. A couple walked past, nestled under a single umbrella, both wearing cloth masks. She watched them, wondering if they were doctors, though they were awfully young, and dressed in jeans, not scrubs. Was the woman wearing perfume? Did the man have stinky feet? Hannah would never know. Without smell, the world stood at a remove. She might have been a filmgoer watching the biopic of her own life; everything was flattened as though on a screen, lacking the verisimilitude of odiferous reality.
Hannah opened her lunch. Since the onset of her anosmia, she had packed meals that encompassed the sad little spectrum that was left to her. Today: sliced apple for sweet, sauerkraut for sour, gouda for umami, sautéed Brussels sprouts for bitter, and dried seaweed for salt. As a kindness to the unimpaired noses of her coworkers, Hannah ate outside now, even in the pervasive Oregon rain.
She had prepared the Brussels sprouts according to her late mother’s recipe, sautéed in oil and liberally spiced, though, as she chewed, she realized she might as well have eaten them raw. Plain bitterness, nothing more. Sauerkraut: the bracing tartness of vinegar. Gouda: a round, meaty contentment. The apple gave no lingering aroma of the forest, no multifaceted juices, only bare sweetness, unaccompanied. Smell was a wide-open gift, billowing on the wind, available for the taking. Taste was stingy and small, cloistered in the hollow of the human mouth.
Hannah saved salt, her favorite, for last. Dried seaweed on her tongue. Crunchy, melting into spongy. She waited for the top note of salt. Waited. She probed the seaweed, the feel of it, nap and grain, but no taste—nothing but texture.
Where was salt?
Salt was gone.
○
She lost sweet that same afternoon. Umami and sour had vanished by the next morning. Bitter lingered long enough that Hannah thought, even hoped, that it might stay with her forever; a bitter world was better than an empty one. She sipped coffee all the way to the doctor’s office, relishing each charred, earthy mouthful.
Ensconced in the plastic coffin of the MRI machine, Hannah thought of Bergamo, Italy, the latest virus hotspot. A doctor over there had described it as a war zone, bodies filling the morgue, crematoriums at capacity, funerals unattended because the loved ones of the bereaved were sick too. A military caravan had carried the dead through the streets; no other vehicles were large enough. Would that happen here, in the small town where Hannah had lived since childhood? Neither she nor Jo had ever felt the inclination to leave their bucolic home.
Her brain was fine. The doctor showed it to her on a screen. To her the image was a Rorschach; to him, a diagnosis of good health. He pointed: “Here, you see, and here?” No lesions, no tumors, nothing at all to explain her symptoms.
Hannah reached for her thermos of coffee with shaking hands, took a lukewarm sip, and found that bitter, too, had abandoned her.
