But I hadn’t finished my climbing routine, so I felt edgy when I took the shuttle back to the Olfanautics housing complex, and my nose hurt like hell. The pain from my fall had spread from the base of my skull to my shoulders, and seemed to be wrapping itself around my chest.
My apartment had two bedrooms, a small balcony, and one and a half bathrooms. Behind it, I had a tolerable view of a tennis court surrounded by electrified razor wire. My unit was subsidized so it was still cheaper than living in the city, and I was permitted to invite guests, usually my parents, to stay with me for six days per month.
Aubrey was sipping on a beer at the living room table when I opened the door.
“What happened to your face?”
“Took a fall at the gym.”
“What about those bandages?”
“It’s to keep my nostrils open. Doctor said there might be some temporary blockage.” When she didn’t say anything, I added: “I should still be able to put in my shift tomorrow.”
“I’m not worried about that anymore.”
Her face was as distraught as when we’d met in the cafeteria. If she’d been wearing her Quantiband, it would have been twisted tight around her wrist like a tourniquet. But she still didn’t have it on. Maybe it was that sense of freedom that made her come over to me. Because the next thing I knew, she began opening the buttons of my shirt. I didn’t stop her. Aubrey was the most beautiful woman I had ever met. Her natural odor was enough to turn my head, and she layered on essential oils so that she was a fragrant mosaic, a true artiste who could compose entire olfascapes of inspired brilliance. I had never been able to resist her. On our first secret date, she had guessed what cologne I would wear and applied an extract of argan nuts on her skin, so that when we touched we smelled like buttered popcorn. I found other women repulsive by comparison, as if they had showered themselves in crude perfume.
But as she slowly peeled off my shirt, my bashed-in nose seemed to be obscuring everything. “I can’t smell you.”
“Then feel me.”
In the Private Review rooms, Aubrey and I would sniff each other more than we licked or kissed, and this took time. When we were really horny, we’d inhale each other’s most private scents—our groins, armpits, and anuses—like animals in the throes of estrus. But with my swollen nose I felt clumsy, as if I was watching myself make love from a distance, and my fingertips couldn’t make up for the lack of sensation. Aubrey, on the other hand, enjoyed every second of it. She lingered over my bandages and wrapped herself around me. Then she dug her hips into mine until she came. Even with her breasts flopping against my face and her full buttocks in my hands I couldn’t stay aroused without my sense of smell, and we both gave up trying.
As we lay on my bed, Aubrey announced: “This isn’t working.” She always said depressing things after sex.
“It’s my fault. I couldn’t get into it.”
“No, Renton. I mean us. I’m your boss. We can’t do this anymore.”
I turned to face her, suddenly concerned. “What do you mean?”
“The Deciders know.”
“You told them?”
“No, the Private Review rooms are all monitored. They’ve known for some time and they confronted me about it.”
I tried to remember everything we might have done or said to each other. She normally made me take off my Quantiband in the Private Review rooms.
“Did they whyff it, too?”
“I don’t think so—at least, I wouldn’t see the point of that. They tracked our bands to see how often we were meeting. I clearly violated my Terms of Reference. I’m your boss and it should never have happened. I’ve got to go see them tomorrow.”
“They’re flying you to Copenhagen?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s a good sign, right? They wouldn’t fly you up there if they wanted to fire you.”
She considered this. “I suppose so.”
“Why did you come here tonight, Aubs?”
“I wanted to do it one last time.”
I raised from the bed to look out the window. Beyond the tennis court were rows upon rows of sagging acacia trees that the Danish architect had planted all around the campus, but the soil was too damp for the trees and their roots were slowly drowning. I had never liked them. Their pollen gave me sneezing fits. If I had my way, I’d have them all cut down. “How can you say it’s the last time? How is that fair? Shouldn’t I also know when it’s the last time? You can’t break it off and say it’s the last time without telling me!”
“I’m sorry, Renton. It’s not just the Deciders. It’s—it’s the unreality of it.”
“Was it the video of the girl? The strawberries?”
“No, that’s not it.”
“I meant it as a joke. There’s no need to break up over a thing like that.”
“You know what I spent this morning doing? Watching a woman eat a goat alive. She had filed her teeth into points, Renton. Like a vampire. Even had the makeup on. Her girlfriend—I think that’s who it was—was screaming at her to eat more. Shrieking at her to eat more. The poor beast was pinned down by stakes and the girl was tearing into its belly. The stench! Of piss and shit, the goat was in so much pain it was expelling what little bit of life it had left in it. Trying to die.”
I had never seen Aubrey cry before, and I feared what it might mean.
“Who would do such a thing, Renton? To a harmless animal? I vomited into my Trunk it was so disgusting.”
I could see that she wanted me to feel what she had felt, smell what she had smelled, but I couldn’t let her get to me. Every Olfanaut who burned out tried to drag everyone else down with them. The psychologists had taught us it was called transference. I began searching desperately for my Quantiband, which she must have torn off during sex.
“Why don’t you go see the psychologists, Aubs? That’s what they’re there for.”
“They wouldn’t understand.”
“Of course they would! Mimi helped me with the nun thing. I’m sure she can help you with whatever is bothering you.”
I found my Quantiband beneath my sock at the foot of the bed. I didn’t remember taking the sock off, because I was still wearing the other one.
“Mimi can’t help me, Renton. She can’t help a thing like that. Tell me, when was the last time you left the campus?”
“I go to the Rain Drop all the time.”
“That’s still on the campus!”
“So what? It’s a bar. I like the people there. We have a lot in common.”
“I mean, when was the last time you went downtown? Or anywhere people don’t have to whyff a conversation?”
“My family doesn’t live downtown. They’re out in Kibera.”
“That’s not my point. What we see all day—it’s not right. We made love over a Nazi bookburning last week. A bloody bookburning.”
“We took that video down, Aubrey. We prevented the rest of the world from smelling that filth. That’s something to be proud of. Sure, we had sex in there but we did our job in the end. That’s what matters. We have one job here, and we do it right. I’m sure that’s all the Deciders care about too. That’s why I fired Rocky.”
“What are you talking about?”
I hadn’t meant to tell her, because I knew she’d try to make me feel bad, but now it was too late. “He put me on a dangerous route. That’s how I hurt my nose.”
“So you fired him?”
“Of course! Rocky had it coming to him, Aubs. I’d told him a thousand times that we had to follow the program. It’s not my fault he can’t listen to directions.”
“That’s what I mean by unreality. So what if you hurt your nose—he has a family! How will he survive without this job?”
“What about my family?” I grabbed a glass from the kitchen, and filled it in the sink. “Do you realize this is the only neighborhood within twenty kilometers where you can do this? Drink water straight from the tap? My parents drive here for their drinking wa
ter. I’m putting my sister through school. I pay for every funeral in my family. That’s as real as it gets.” I pointed to my Quantiband. “This says right here that I was climbing the wrong route when I fell. Rocky hurt my nose, the tool of my trade. I’m in line for a promotion now and I can’t take the risk. I need someone reliable. Trustworthy. I don’t need his bloody war stories. I need someone safe. Who can commit to the program.”
Aubrey stared at me blankly for a few moments. “You don’t see what this does to us, do you? Today was my big test to determine if I could join the Deciders. And I failed it, Renton. I failed it horribly. Because I told them that if I had my way I’d exterminate those girls from the face of the Earth. I wasn’t thinking about justice. I was thinking about revenge. Revenge on behalf of a mangy fucking goat.”
I drank my glass slowly, trying to taste the filtered water. They ran it through reverse osmosis and then a layer of sand, which normally gave it a delightful mineral quality. But I couldn’t taste a thing.
“You’re not going to get a promotion, Renton. Look at yourself in the mirror and then take a look at management. I recommended you twice but they said you don’t have the pedigree. When was the last time a local was promoted?”
Now I knew Aubrey was planning to move away all along. And she wanted to hurt me while doing it, whatever for I had no idea. That was what happened in the videos. That was what those people did to each other. Even after all we’d been through, I refused to let her do this to me. It was the slippery hold on the wall. The tumble from the granite, the brains in the sand.
“I’m going to be the first one, then.”
You can’t let it all weigh on your shoulders. That’s what Mimi had told me about the nun. You’ve got to let things go.
I snapped my finger. “I know what’s changed—it’s you, Aubrey.”
“Me?”
“Yes, you need a new Passion.”
“You weren’t listening.”
“You made that short film last year, right? That was too close to home. We whyff videos all day, hey. You’ve got to choose something else. Something that really gets you chuffed! Like writing a book. Or dancing. You’ve got to focus on the positive, Aubs! Think of all the value we’re creating for our users. Think about how we protected them from that Nazi video. We saved a little bit of joy for two billion users around the world. We have to celebrate that! You can’t dwell on these things. We’re watching so no one else has to!”
As I went on like this, Aubrey’s face brightened, and before long she seemed to be coming around to the idea. So I was surprised, when I pulled her in for a kiss, and she said: “If evil is humanity turned against itself, Renton, then who are we?”
“We’re the Olfanauts,” I said proudly.
Aubrey left Olfanautics two weeks later, and she was kind enough to say goodbye to me. She also transferred me all of her OlfaBucks, which would allow me to order something from the gift shop, and I think she knew, in her heart, that I would spend it on a Hyperlite Bivouack that I had told her about a few months ago, which I planned to use when I freeclimbed the Orabeskopf Wall in Namibia. I won’t lie—I started dreaming about the nun again as soon as Aubrey left, and I had to work extra hard at my Passion to get that old woman to leave me alone in my sleep. It’s funny how sometimes you only understand what people mean well after they say it. Because I realized that Rocky had been right all along, that I had to be like Prometheus giving the fire to humanity, and that I couldn’t worry about some bird pecking at my fingers as I made my grand ascent.
RIVKA GALCHEN
The Region of Unlikeness
Rivka Galchen is a Canadian American writer who received her MD from Mount Sinai and an MFA from Columbia University. Her first novel, Atmospheric Disturbances, won the Danuta Gleed Literary Award and the William Saroyan International Prize. Her short stories have been collected in American Innovations. Galchen’s work has been published in the New Yorker, Harper’s, the New York Times Magazine, the Believer, Open City, and the Walrus. She is a recipient of the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award and was the Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fiction Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. Galchen was chosen in 2010 by the New Yorker as one of its “20 Under 40.”
“The Region of Unlikeness” follows the fleeting relationship between a young woman and two strange men, Ilan and Jacob, who may be academics, eccentric dilettantes, or something entirely different. The story was first published in the New Yorker.
Some people would consider Jacob a physicist, some would consider him a philosopher or simply a “time expert,” though I tend to think of him in less reverent terms. But not terms of hatred. Ilan used to call Jacob “my cousin from Outer Swabia.” That obscure little joke, which I heard Ilan make a number of times, probably without realizing how many times he’d made it before, always seemed to me to imply a distant blood relation between the two of them. I guess I had the sense (back then) that Jacob and Ilan were shirttail cousins of some kind. But later I came to believe, at least intermittently, that actually Ilan’s little phrase was both a misdirection and a sort of clue, one that hinted at an enormous secret that they’d never let me in on. Not a dully personal secret, like an affair or a small crime or, say, a missing testicle—but a scientific secret, that rare kind of secret that, in our current age, still manages to bend our knee.
I met Ilan and Jacob by chance. Sitting at the table next to mine in a small Moroccan coffee shop on the Upper West Side, they were discussing Wuthering Heights, too loudly, having the kind of reference-laden conversation that unfortunately never fails to attract me. Jacob looked about forty-five; he was overweight, he was munching obsessively on these unappetizing green leaf-shaped cookies, and he kept saying “obviously.” Ilan was good-looking, and he said that the tragedy of Heathcliff was that he was essentially, on account of his lack of property rights, a woman. Jacob then extolled Catherine’s proclaiming, “I am Heathcliff.” Something about passion was said. And about digging up graves. And a bearded young man next to them moved to a more distant table. Jacob and Ilan talked on, unoffended, praising Brontë, and at some point Ilan added, “But since Jane Austen’s usually the token woman on university syllabi, it’s understandable if your average undergraduate has a hard time shaking the idea that women are half-wits, moved only by the terror that a man might not be as rich as he seems.”
Not necessarily warmly, I chimed in with something. Ilan laughed. Jacob refined Ilan’s statement to “straight women.” Then to straight women “in the Western tradition.” Then the three of us spoke for a long time. That hadn’t been my intention. But there was something about Ilan—manic, fragile, fidgety, womanizing (I imagined) Ilan—that was all at once like fancy coffee and bright-colored smutty flyers. He had a great deal to say, with a steady gaze into my eyes, about my reading the New York Post, which he interpreted as a sign of a highly satiric yet demotically moral intelligence. Jacob nodded. I let the flattery go straight to my heart, despite the fact that I didn’t read the Post—it had simply been left on my table by a previous customer. Ilan called Post writers naïve Nabokovs. Yes, I said. The headline, I remember, read Axis of Weasel. Somehow this led to Jacob’s saying something vague about Proust, and violence, and perception.
“Jacob’s a boor, isn’t he?” Ilan said. Or maybe he said “bore” and I heard “boor” because Ilan’s way of talking seemed so antiquated to me. I had so few operating sources of pride at that time. I was tutoring and making my lonely way through graduate school in civil engineering, where my main sense of joy came from trying to silently outdo the boys—they still played video games—in my courses. I started going to that coffee shop every day.
Everyone I knew seemed to find my new companions arrogant and pathetic, but whenever they called me I ran to join them. Ilan and Jacob were both at least twenty years older than me, and they called themselves philosophers, although only Jacob seemed to have an actual academic position, and maybe a tenuous one, I couldn’t quite tell. I was happy not to ca
re about those things. Jacob had a wife and daughter, too, though I never met them. It was always just the three of us. We would get together and Ilan would go on about Heidegger and “thrownness,” or about Will Ferrell, and Jacob would come up with some way to disagree, and I would mostly just listen, and eat baklava and drink lots of coffee. Then we’d go for a long walk, and Ilan might have some argument in defense of, say, Fascist architecture, and Jacob would say something about the striated and the smooth, and then a pretty girl would walk by and they would talk about her outfit for a long time. Jacob and Ilan always had something to say, which gave me the mistaken impression that I did, too.
Evenings, we’d go to the movies, or eat at an overpriced restaurant, or lie around Ilan’s spacious and oddly neglected apartment. He had no bed frame, nothing hung on the walls, and in his bathroom there was just a single white towel and a T.W.A. mini-toothbrush. But he had a two-hundred-dollar pair of leather gloves. One day, when I went shopping with the two of them, I found myself buying a simple striped sweater so expensive that I couldn’t get to sleep that night.
None of this behavior—the laziness, the happiness, the subservience, even the pretentiousness—was “like me.” I was accustomed to using a day planner and eating my lunch alone, in fifteen minutes; I bought my socks at street fairs. But when I was with them I felt like, well, a girl. Or “the girl.” I would see us from the outside and recognize that I was, in an old-fashioned and maybe even demeaning way, the sidekick, the mascot, the decoration; it was thrilling. And it didn’t hurt that Ilan was so generous with his praise. I fixed his leaking shower and he declared me a genius. Same when I roasted a chicken with lemons. When I wore orange socks with jeans, he kissed my feet. Jacob told Ilan to behave with more dignity; he was just jealous of Ilan’s easy pleasures.
Invaders: 22 Tales From the Outer Limits of Literature Page 11