My pants smell like the corpse flower. We climbed to the top of Dartmouth’s Life Science building last night for its bloom. Outside the building smelled like flowers. It seemed intentional, like how McDonald’s fans its smell of hamburgers outside locations to lure patrons. Inside the entire building smelled like death (false advertising). This is what brought me there, the perverse idea of smelling the odor of a dead body, with the added bonus of not having to confront one. This is quite sick, in retrospect, and indicative of a certain voyeurism within me (us)—I’ve never claimed not to be a pervert. The smell grew stronger as we climbed the stairs and overwhelmed as we walked into the sticky hot room, in which it sat in one of its corners, enormous, erect, and apparently sweating, the source of all this putridness. A large fleshy-looking thing stood 6 feet high out of a fertile basket of curling maroon leaves, thick like cabbage on an industrial scale. I stuck my head into it and S wafted the smell into my face. I breathed in deeply. I had thought that maybe it’s stench would trigger some primal revulsion within me, or inspire a profound sadness, but it did nothing upon arrival besides stink and then dissolve into the fabric of the room, becoming like a high temperature of which one remains aware but adapts to all the while. What a bizarre thing to adjust to, and in such a short amount of time. I think about my friend’s grandfather, who was shot and killed by my other friend’s cousin. The murderer was something like 19. The grandfather in his seventies, maybe. Afterward, the boy lived with the dead body for days and invited friends over who complained of a smell. The boy had probably forgotten the smell at that point. It had become a part of the rug on the floor and the couch in the corner, like the grandfather’s life had once been woven into the house.
We remained in the room listening to a scientist answer questions, before a team of them ushered us out to conduct tests and collect data. We walked downstairs and the smell lessened in intensity, but still I feigned freshness. I exited and took deep breaths outside. The engineered wafting of flowers didn’t calm me. I noticed apple blossoms across the street and walked toward them and ripped a small bunch off to keep close to my nose the whole way home. It did nothing to make my senses feel normal again. I started to think about the smell of war, to which this odor must be central. I wonder what a soldier does to a blossoming apple tree, if he chops it down in desperation and drags it home, or coolly turns his back on it, realizing a blossom’s futility in the face of death and its overwhelming fragrance. I wonder about a people under siege and the lengths they go to fumigate their nostrils. Perhaps they plant orchards so they will only ever smell sweetness, or perhaps all come to work in them, seek to own, all in pursuit of addressing the rot embedded deep in the floorboards of their nose.
Now it is today, I sit at a cafe and smell death on my pants. I notice it more and more as I sit. Nothing rivals it, no freshly baked croissant or roasted coffee. Its subtlety creeps sickeningly until it grows prolific. It, too, settles into the room or perhaps just my psyche like the build-up of plaque on teeth never brushed or black tar in the lungs of smokers, slowly until it is eventually unacceptable and then unbearable, completely untenable. I leave. In the car the smell grows stronger. I roll down the windows. Wind blows through the car and cleanses it of all staleness, though the scent remains throughout the ride and follows me home. I take off the pants and throw them alone into the washer, set it on high heat, press start. This is a thing never adjusted to.
