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“Wherefore art thou, Violet?” Precious Martin had a habit of asking this every time she walked into the nursing home. She would ask it even before the urine and fecal matter bouquet assaulted her nostrils. She would ask it even before the sight of that bent and crooked frame made the color empty out of her face. She would ask it and care not the least if anyone heard.

On a very typical day on that very typical street in that very typical Midwestern city, Precious walked once again into the residential care facility that had been her daily destination since her sister was admitted to the Alzheimer's unit some three years ago. “Wherefore are thou, Violet?” she called out, almost audibly. She smelled the onion and fish-stick melange from the kitchen even before the urine and fecal matter. “Wherefore art thou, Violet?”

It was a small thing, to be sure, the brief visits, but maybe they meant something to Violet. They sure as hell meant something to Precious – they meant a dread fear that she would end up in the same place in a few years. Precious was the baby of the family, and she watched the onset of her oldest sister's disease for years. And Precious tried so hard...so very, very hard to keep the wolf of that disease at bay. That bastard wolf that took the mind and left the body – the neutron bomb of diseases. Take your fish oil capsules. Eat the leafy greens. Plenty of water and exercise. Best of luck, Precious.

“Wherefore art thou, Violet?” Her voice was just a little sing-songy today. She knew this visit would be different, though, and it seemed right to sing a little bit. The onions and fish sticks were less noticeable now, she thought. Other aromas had crowded them out as she neared Violet's room.

It is amazing, Precious thought as she looked at her sister, how similar the teeth look to the fingernails. Not so much in color as in composition. A little washcloth had been rolled up and tucked under her sister's chin to keep it from curling tightly against her chest, and her mouth was open a little bit, allowing Precious to make this observation about her teeth.

It had been several hours and already the effects were evident. Death comes quickly and keeps on working, she thought. Efficient. Thorough. Violet's skin was already appearing kind of waxy and foreign – nothing like the skin of the sister with whom she had grown up and laughed and lived and cried and joked and grown up and grown old. The skin on this corpse was just that – skin on a corpse. A husk. A rind, more or less. Precious would wonder about this over a big glass of gin four days from now after the family had gathered to say goodbye. She would swallow a chewed up olive and want to vomit it all over the floor of that banquet hall. Rind. Skin. Husk. Violet. All that was good mingled with all that was bad and all that was scary and all that would never again be and she would just want to vomit all that right up onto the floor.

“Would you like her eyeglasses in the bag or do you want to just take them with you?” The nursing assistant broke the silence and Precious lifted her eyes away from her sister.

“Thank you. You've been so good to her. I'll take them with me. Thank you.” Precious hardly knew what else to say. The eyes on the face above the chin that was propped up on the rolled-up washcloth were not fully closed, and even though they no longer needed the eyeglasses, Precious could almost feel them looking at her. The nursing assistant obliged and closed the door behind her as she left. No hint at all of onion or fish stick was in the room.

“Wherefore art thou, Violet?” Precious sang out in a tiny, tiny voice.

But Everything Tastes Like Chicken

On Tuesday I sat down in the dentist's chair, and suddenly I was at a monastery in upstate New York. Strange as that may be, there is occasionally a wool sweater than takes me from wherever I might be to a concourse waiting area at Orly airport in Paris.  Bam. Just like that.  And every now and again I step out of my office and I am stepping out of the Cherry Court Hotel near Victoria Station in London.  Whammo.

Smells.

Amazing, aren't they?  There is a type of low-lying ground cover that, when it is run over with a mower, will transport my wife from wherever she is back to her grandmother's house.  The smell of chlorine takes me back, of course, to high school and the pool that I loved so much.  My friend John has the opposite reaction to chlorine:  the smell of it can produce a panic attack as it sends him right back to swimming lessons during grammar school - bad memories of some sort rush to the surface and make him sweat, get all cotton-mouthed and start coughing.

I guess we start associating smells as soon as we notice them, and if the emotions or whatnot are strong enough at the time, something sticks. I am obviously not a student of cognitive science or anything close, as you can tell from that description, but I do know this - scent is powerful...

***

Mike Stencil was about 23 years old when he smelled the burning flesh.  "Sweet," he thought to himself.  Sweet like a sugary, caramel-ly, sweety meaty stench that nearly made him retch.  Not sweet as in "a sweet deal."  You know what I mean.

Gasoline and human flesh and hair and vinyl seats and a windy day made for a roaring conflagration.  The smoke pouring out from the auto accident carried with it that unmistakable fragrance, and Mike paused to say a Hail Mary.  "God," he thought to himself.  And that was all this young guy who would one day be a priest could think at that moment, "God."

The smoke seemed a lot thicker than smoke he was used to seeing from barbecues and campfires and it was a lot thicker and sweeter than the smoke that would pour from the incinerator that Mike would have to use to burn rubbish for his boss at the shoe store.  Mike didn't know about that smoke yet, though...the shoe store would be ten years off in the future. Today's smoke was thick and dense and sweet as any smoke he'd ever smelled.  "...now and at the hour of our death. Amen," concluded Mike, as he sent the Ave wafting heavenward.  "God," he repeated in the confines of his thoughts.

It would be just a few months later that Mike would be driving down a country highway in the middle of a beautiful autumn, paying no real attention to what he was doing and loads of attention to the fall colors.  As he raced down a long sloping hill, he gave no thought to the oncoming eighteen-wheeler in the distance, and so he was taken quite by surprise at its presence as he skidded into its lane in the low right-hand curve at the bottom of the hill.  Wet leaves and loose gravel aided his car in its slide and Mike in his loss of control. "God..." was all he could get out as he faced the oncoming truck, now wildly blowing its horn.

A fortunately-placed dry patch of road that was free of gravel and leaves grabbed Mike's front left tire, and he shot back into his lane, missing the truck by what seemed like feet but were likely yards.  He coasted to a stop and sat in the driver's seat, shaking and panting, noting an unfamiliar loose feeling in his bowels.  He rolled down the window and took in some air...praying that his heart wasn't going to come pounding right up through his throat.  As he breathed in the cool autumn air he noticed he was being watched by a man on the front lawn of a beautiful farm house.  The man was burning leaves and looking at Mike.  The smoke from the leaf pile was on the breeze and it wafted in through Mike's open window.

"Sweet..."

A Tale of Two Jerries

When Mike Stencil was still in college - well before anyone had ever dreamed of calling him "Father" and a long time before he ever met Jerry O"Brien - there came a winter of confusion and a winter of sadness and a winter of wild introspection.  A small airplane with his brother at the controls and a lot of December winds took them south from Salt Lake City to a coastal town in southern Mexico, where Mike was able to stay up late listening to music in a hotel bar, drink cerveza before noon, stroll through a sleepy little village, write poetry in the afternoons and wish that he had studied Spanish in High School.  The better part of a month was spent in a Mexican haze, looking at people in the streets from behind his sunglasses and growing the first real beard of his life.

A wild New Year's Eve in a club brought many, many beers and an invitation to go sailing the next day - from another Jerry, fancy that, a Jerry much better off than the one who would enter Mike's life many years later on some dirty streets in a city in Upstate.  This Jerry sailed the coast, plying the beautiful waters of the Pacific, drinking beers and giving day trips to Americans he met in exchange for more beers.  "Come around noon," he told Mike, "we'll have something to eat and drink."

A sunburned afternoon of sailing and drinking left Mike woozy and probably staring too much at the young lady from NYU who also happened to be along for the ride.  "I'm Jewish," she kept telling him, cheerily, in different contexts.

"As if I care," thought Mike.

The afternoon lolled along with the waves, and the beer flowed freely.  Captain Jerry steered his gorgeous boat back to the tiny harbor from which they had begun and after swinging at anchor while the last of the beers were finished off, the captain and passengers watched the sun dip low in the western sky.

Suddenly the young Jewish girl sprang up. "Let's go," she cried, grabbing Mike's hand.  She hit the water before Mike really knew what was happening, and like a fool he followed after.  The rush of cool water brought him to his senses, and when he hit the surface he looked up to see Jerry smiling and waving adios.

Mike looked around while he treaded water, and saw the Jewish girl backstroking away from him, smiling and laughing.  "Who the hell is she, and what am I doing in the water swimming after her?" he thought to himself.  Having nowhere else to go, he began lazily paddling toward her and toward the shore, some 150 yards off.

Streaks of orange and yellow sunlight played over the top of the water all around him, the sounds of the tiny harbor bouncing around the inside of his head that was woozy and already hurting from too much beer, and the smell of the salt water and the diesel of distant boats filtered into his nostrils.  "Beautiful," Mike thought.  "Absolutely beautiful."  It was then that he saw the shark.

No, there was no shark in the water - this story does not end with a shark attack and missing limbs.  It ends with a young Mike Stencil asleep in a lounge chair on the veranda of his hotel, hours after swimming to shore in the midst of a panic attack over a non-existent shark.  It was a shark that he saw in his mind's eye - a shark that bared its hideous teeth and sank them deep into his legs and violently thrashed him about from side to side.  It was a shark that he then saw go and attack the young Jewish girl and rend her limb from limb.  It was a shark that had been in his sub-conscious all his life, perhaps.  It was the same shark that would haunt him all his life - those dead, black eyes staring at him whenever he felt insecure, whenever he felt the grip of self-doubt and failure seize him.  The shark that would surface and make a deadly bee-line for him whenever he was at his lowest - it would play upon all his fears and upon all of his insecurities.  Those sharks can be real bastards, and they don't care who they eat...who they dismember...who they leave washed up on life's beach.

Mike Stencil awoke with a pounding headache.  It was Sunday and church bells were ringing.  Fresh clothes and fried bread and a walk and some Kerouac read in the open air of the village square made him feel human again.  He swam no more for the rest of his time in sunny old Mexico.