The Human Smell

The smell strikes you before anything. Piercing nasal passages and clinging long after the source of it is gone, leaving it's tenacious molecules in your memory and sinuses.

Valerie was familiar with horse smells, the cat and dog smells, the smell of the city in winter and in summer, the smell of the subway, each one conjuring memories and imprinting new ones. But this? This was the aroma of neglect and hopelessness. The odor of sorrows swallowed so deep they’d sprouted roots in the soul that grew into their own unique and individual disturbances. That time the stone hit the windshield one seventy-five mile per hour day and that nick, that ding grew into spidery, iridescent tendrils eventually compromising the intention of the glass to block the wind without shattering. That unmistakably human smell.

Valerie could see the old railroad trestle and his blanket fort from her kitchen window. She wondered what he wanted to be when he was young. She wondered how his parents treated him as a child, if he’d ever fallen in love, if he had any children, what he believed his life purpose to be or if he ever believed his life had a purpose. How did he come to this end? She wondered who he cared about. Does his head ache? His feet hurt?

The soul survives death, but can a soul survive the abyss of grief? Can a soul survive a wound not flesh enough to kill the body outright, but gores like a rage blind bull through the heart and brain and leaves a deep, bleeding hole in the psyche? The sympathetic nervous system once again choosing not to die today despite the bitter cold, soaking rain, or scorching heat from one season to the next.

She wondered, who he saw when he conversed with no one she could see. What if someone really is there? Some ghostly, magical antagonist, an emissary from the God of deeply confused and tangled minds. Perhaps some ancient culture had a Deity in charge of all things hallucinated that this poor soul has fallen into the trap of. The demon tormentor of ancient lore or maybe just the relentless haunt of heartbreaking unresolved traumas, unquietly fucking around in the attic.

Pete, who’s family had not heard from him in decades and did not care to know whether he was alive or dead, was being visited by his chief antagonist. A shadow of a guy who taunted and accused him and woke him from his sleep with loud and forceful proclamations.

“Pete… you stinking piece of shit…”

“Leave me be!”

He sat wrapped in a filthy blanket and hugged his knees as a snow flurry began to fall on this not quite freezing winter afternoon. A glancing shadow of a scowling man’s face entered his peripheral vision and then was gone. He poked him and laughed at him, as Pete huddled in his refrigerator box shelter, eyes closed tightly against the onslaught.

“You’re taking up too much space! You need to shrink down…shrink down to nothing Pete… ”

Every muscle in his body tensed and tightened and he cried out in frustration. There was no winning this fight, he knew that. He wasn’t sure this thing was really a person. But he responded to him as if he were real. He had no choice. There was a time when he thought he’d killed him. He stabbed him with his knife and saw him fall and yet the next day there he was, right there laughing at him, insulting him, mocking him as if nothing had happened.

Valerie walked by him daily in her travels through the neighborhood. He had built a shelter for himself out of refrigerator boxes under the old railroad trestle at tenth street and Ridge Avenue. Blankets draped across the top like the forts built in the living room by children. He frightened her a little and her heart broke for him, but she’d keep walking, sometimes making uneasy eye contact if he was outside, sometimes no eye contact at all. Couldn’t be late for work…

The night before Gina’s wedding, Valerie dreamt of Brian. He looked well and they laughed and talked and hugged as if nothing ever happened. His dark hair in unruly waves around his beautiful, latte colored face. In her dream it was Brian in their teenage years, the Brian that so many girls in school wished they could’ve gone out with but couldn’t because he belonged to her. He was on her mind a lot recently. He’d been dead almost twenty-five years and his memory was still as fresh to her as if she’d spoken to him last week.

The police never found the man who knifed him and left him bleeding to death on the sidewalk in the middle of the night. Not far, actually, from where she now lived. No witnesses, no one came forward. Just another life in the city snuffed out and the world kept turning. Whenever she reminisced to a time when she felt truly loved, she would think of him. It was a time before all the heartbreaks and the baggage. Before they knew how tough life would turn out to be.

She sent Brian her love and broke through the haze of the dream and got out of bed. Gina’s wedding was this afternoon, and it was time to shower and get dressed. Valerie knew Gina from work and they’d become good friends.

It was a small humble church wedding. No expense was wasted on creative decorations, elaborate flowers, or fancy caterers. There was no alcohol, just sodas, juices, water. Simple but delicious food made by the ladies who make the food for all the church functions. Gina was a lovely bride and Aaron seemed like a nice guy.

After the ceremony in the chapel the forty or so guests went downstairs to the basement where a DJ had set up in the corner. Buffet style they filled their plates with roasted chicken, baked ziti and sausages, stuffed peppers, mixed vegetables, salad, and bread, chatting casually, small talkey, little conversations that people have in the polite basements of churches.

The wedding cake was a large sheet cake with purple and blue flowers made of icing. On it was written Mr & Mrs Hoffman in a swirly blue cursive. Everyone danced, they drank watery church coffee, and ate the sheet cake.

When it was time to leave, Gina made it known that she wanted all the guests to take the leftover food. Valerie picked up a container went to the buffet and filled it with chicken, pasta and sausage, stuffed peppers, and salad. The church ladies were pushing her to take more, so she filled another container. She gave her well wishes and goodbyes and walked out into the chilly, damp, already dark early evening.

Through the light snowfall she spotted that homeless man sitting on a milk crate on the sidewalk outside of his blanket fort, talking to some unseen person. That smell. That human smell. Valerie knew she wasn’t going to eat all of the food she was carrying.

“I’m sorry it’s not hot” she said as she handed him one of the containers. “It’s from my friend’s wedding.”

Pete looked up and saw a pretty lady handing him a container of food.

“Ohhhh… God bless you…bless you.”

He took it from her slender hand and dug into the best meal he’d had in a long time. A sadness came over her, she half smiled at him with pitying eyes and walked home gratefully to her warm, dry apartment.