Only Faintly (or: Anosmia)
1.
I can’t smell shit.
2.
The previous sentence is accurate no matter how you stress the brown word. I can’t usually smell excrement. In fact, I can’t smell much at all. Does that make me nose-blind, or smell-deaf? Neither of these terms feels correct.
3.
Problematic ontologies: I actually can smell things, except for the things that I can’t, which is a rather long list.
4.
Organic laundry detergent with faint whiffs of lavender and magnolia and chamomile and gentle breezes on the moors in spring is all well and good, but I prefer the fake kind that smells like those tree-shaped deodorizers you hang from the rear-view mirror of your car. That, I can smell if I use enough of it, which I probably don’t.
5.
I don’t bother sniffing food to see if it’s gone off.
6.
An article I read a few days ago extolled the virtues of taking walks in winter weather. Rain, cold, mud, and wind are said to be good for the immune system. Ions and petrichor; fresh air and helpful microbes. But fresh air has a texture, not an odor—for me, anyway. What do ions even smell like?
7.
Speaking of wind, I can’t smell farts. This arrangement works out much better for me than for others.
8.
My grandmother had no sense of smell either, or not much of one. She used to collect Avon perfume bottles. I used to suspect the fumes scorched her sinuses. Now I wonder.
9.
I once had a crush on a guy who wanted to be a nose in the perfume industry. Articulate in the ways of scent, he spoke of layers, notes, and nuances I couldn’t detect. He’d daub himself with essential oils before leaving the house. A little neroli, a drop of cedar, some ylang-ylang. Sandalwood. Lavender. Verbena. Hanging out with him was like sitting next to a forest. I could smell him. I could smell then.
10.
I used to wear Grey Flannel. I thought it fit. He disagreed. It didn’t end well.
11.
My apartment, two floors up from the dumpster into which my fellow tenants tossed their trash, sometimes got a little pungent. I moved in, counting myself lucky to have found a place during the Bay Area’s dotcom craze. The first time I looked out the window, I should have looked down. But the plume of maritime fog that passes through the Golden Gate and disperses against Emeryville and Berkeley kept the place cool. Most days, I didn’t need air conditioning. Now and then, when the sun came out, and the dumpster filled up, the stench of baking garbage could be an issue—not overwhelming, but enough to notice. To cope, I’d burn Nag Champa incense. Those benignly cloying New Age fumes would fill the flat with mystical energies, chasing away the foulness wafting in from outside and almost convincing me (just for a moment) that I lived somewhere far away and keenly interesting. Then the flat flooded in a plumbing disaster, and I came home from a trip to find the floorboards warped and the carpets black. I had to move into a smaller unit upstairs.
12.
I can smell incense. I can smell mildew.
13.
When I moved to Seattle a few years later, the fridge in the condo was older than the outgoing tenants. Things had frozen to the sides and top of the compartment. A gruesome, greyish intrusion of ice from the freezer section looked like an escapee from a John Carpenter film. The smell shocked me because I could smell it, and also because I could smell it. Like cabbage and ass, since you asked.
14.
Halfway through my first year in Korea, where I lived next, I caught a little infection I wish I’d had more fun catching. Antibiotics ensued.
15.
Korea is an olfactory bonanza: barbeque, autumn leaves on hillsides, gochujang, garlic, perfume counters in department stores, hot concrete in the cities, barbeque, seafood markets, skin-care products, cigarette smoke, barbeque. I noticed those scents less after the experience recounted above. I didn’t notice myself not noticing. Not right away.
16.
In late spring, prevailing seasonal winds dump dust from the Gobi Desert onto eastern China, the Koreas, and Japan. The air turns golden amber and gleams with heavy metals and exotic toxins. Everybody gets bronchitis. A few months after my earlier microbial adventure, my lungs filled up with phlegm and sparkly radioactive crap, and my throat felt like I’d swallowed a pine cone. My doctor took a look, blinked a couple of times, and asked Can you swallow? He gave me a shot of antibiotics in one buttock and an anti-inflammatory in the other. More pills, too. The same kind as before.
17.
Time passed.
18.
I got better, in a manner of speaking.
19.
My partner noticed it first. He asked, you can’t smell that? With a grimace, he pointed down: Hong Kong drains after a late-summer spell of no rain. It’s like piss and dead fish, he said, but with other nameless bad things mixed in. I said, not even a little bit. Later: low tide in Victoria Harbour on a windless, humid afternoon. Brackish, fishy rottenness, but sour. You can’t smell that?, he asked, and I couldn’t. Later: drains again. Nope. Wet market. Nope. Every now and then I’d catch whiffs of things, but with the volume turned all the way down. I’d feel the odor whispering against my sinuses, nothing more than a transient hint of existence. I’d ask, Is that sensation a smell? Am I smelling that? I knew about it now, so I noticed myself not noticing.
20.
There were always exceptions. Case in point: a few supermarkets there sold durians, those spiky fruits that look like the insides of iron maidens and are almost as harmful. They reek. The smell is a lethal sinus-tangle of sulfur, horror, roadkill, and unwashed butt. People say durians taste good. I wouldn’t know. I can smell them, though, and I’d steer well clear of that part of the produce section when they were in season.
21.
Exceptions, by definition, aren’t rules. I could only smell the exceptions. Paranoia set in. I started carrying mints everywhere in case I had corpse breath. Taking extra showers. Using more fabric softener and those colorful little odor spheres you toss into the wash to make it smell like pretty chemicals.
22.
At Kew Gardens in London, I sniffed every flower I passed, not to see what it smelled like but to see if I could smell it. There were a few.
23.
I would sniff-test the air in restaurants and restrooms. If I could detect any odor at all, that was both a good sign and a bad one.
24.
I still do that.
25.
On the list of exceptions: Bleach and ammonia. Onions. Cat pee, if there’s enough in the litter box. Wood smoke. Coffee. Roses.
26.
I can taste things. This is not the same as saying I have taste. I don’t know how much taste I still have. Some, evidently.
27.
According to a Google search, the antibiotic I took several times in the space of three years is known to cause olfactory damage, sometimes permanent. Quite a few doctors have looked up my nose.
28.
The testing continues. When I open a bottle of wine, I sniff the cork. A tanginess registers. This is new, and I think it’s a smell. I just don’t know what it is. There are scents in the air here: flowers, grass, trees. I notice them, only faintly; then they’re gone as soon as I realize I’ve smelled something. Cat food breath. Plants in garden centers. Lye fizzing in the drain in the kitchen sink. Certain brands of shower gel. Perhaps it’s not permanent. And if only one category, the one I’d rather not smell, has been wiped out for good, is that much of a loss?
29.
Loss, by definition, has parameters. My vision’s not quite what it used to be. All those years of looking at screens. Bifocals give me a migraine, so I have two pairs of reading glasses now, plus a few other pairs for driving and distance. My knees have never not been jangling twin shit-shows of broken glass and immobility. They just jangle louder now. It takes longer to make up lost time at the gym. Two-day hangovers, as it turns out, exist. Aging takes things away.
30.
And every so often, time brings them back.