Jitterbug Perfume

by Tom Robbins

  Wiggs wasn't buying that “live on in memories” number. He had typed himself a small footnote in academic and social history. More important, he had, in his opinion, contributed to the evolution of consciousness in his time. But that sort of immortality was a hollow prize. If what he had accomplished in his “electronic shaman” days in the sixties was destined to have an impact on the future, he wanted to be around to enjoy it.

  Not that he hadn't enjoyed himself already. He'd had more fun than an electric eel in a public bath, and, prison or no prison, eye patch or no eye patch, doom or no doom, he was confident the joy wasn't over yet. (As Wiggs related this sentiment to Priscilla, he patted her bare bottom for emphasis.) What's more, he didn't classify himself as a greedy fellow. It was simply that aging was so rapid and death so final that ultimately they robbed life of any meaning.

  PHYSICAL PLEASURE

  SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY

  ARTISTIC MASTERPIECES

  SOCIAL IMPROVEMENT

  TECHNOLOGICAL INNOVATIONS

  even

  LOVING RELATIONSHIPS

  or even

  SPIRITUAL ECSTASY

  Could any or all of these balance the dark weight? The certainty that the most gifted, the most beautiful, the most wise, the most virtuous of us must grow old and die?

  “It was then and there, wallowin' on me cot in Concord Prison, that I decided to do somethin' about it,” Wiggs said.

  “Because every bloody thing else is secondary to the creepin' chill o' personal extinction.

  “Death is the fly in everybody's ointment.

  “Death has never been acceptable to humanity, and 'tis less so today.

  “To the religious chap, I say, if God loves ye, he wouldn't sicken ye and then murder ye. To the rational fellow, and to the hedonist, as well, I say, death makes a mockery of your logic and your pleasure, alike.

  “Folks can never be truly happy, or truly free, or even truly sane as long as they got to be expectin' the vigor to decline and the swatter to fall.

  “So, darlin', I pushed aside everything else, cleared me jail cell o' professional journals and scholarly books and, yes, girlie magazines, too, although Alobar was to teach me that was a mistake, and I vowed to dedicate me every erg o' energy to this modest pursuit: the eradication o' death.”

  Priscilla looked at him with respectful disbelief. “Well, frankly,” she said, “I've got to classify that under the label of beating the old head against the old brick wall.”

  “Indeed?”

  “Why, yes, Wiggs. Of course. Everything that's alive was born, and everything that was born has got to die. There's no getting around it. It's the law of the universe.”

  Nude though he was, Dr. Dannyboy drew himself up like a bank president. He tapped his patch portentiously, like a master of ceremonies testing a microphone. Then, in a surprisingly soft and even tone, he said:

  “The universe does not have laws.

  “It has habits.

  “And habits can be broken.”

  Above Seattle, the many-buttocked sky continued to grind. It taxed the wipers, ragged and lame, that limped, complaining every step of the way, back and forth across Ricki's windshield; first plangent, then lambent, then plangent again, it addressed the tarpaper roof of V'lu's motel, adding an extra dimension to her dreams; it stacked its liquid telegrams against the windowpanes of the Last Laugh Foundation.

  Ricki pulled the VW into the driveway of her duplex, killed the engine (a mercy killing), and dashed for her door. She ran not to minimize rain-soak but in order to catch the ring of the telephone should Pris be on the line.

  A horned man with the haunches of a goat forced his way into V'lu's dream. The dreamscape was lit by a yellow flame, and there was a suck suck sound as the creature, advancing on her, pulled his hooves in and out of soupy mud. V'lu was awakened by the pounding of her own heart. She was surprised and disturbed to find her pussy quite wet. Realizing that the man in the dream and the man on the bottle were the same, she wisely removed the bottle from under her pillow and buried it beneath the neatly folded clothes in her suitcase. In the darkness, tinted slightly by a seepage of NO VACANCY neon, she walked to the window. Although it was permanently sealed, through it she could smell the rain. Seattle rain smelled different from New Orleans rain, thought V'lu. She was right. New Orleans rain smelled of sulfur and hibiscus, trumpet metal, thunder, and sweat. Seattle rain, the widespread rain of the Great Northwest, smelled of green ice and sumi ink, of geology and silence and minnow breath.

  Except to the extent that it enhanced the coziness of their fireside chat, Priscilla and Wiggs were oblivious to the rain. It was simply there in the background, like the feeble fire in the grate. In the foreground were hormones, questions, and wild ideas.

  Priscilla was willing to accept Dr. Dannyboy's notion that mortality was the principal source of misery for the human race. She might, moreover, sympathize with his painful conclusion that his previous philosophy had been a sham because it had been friendly to death, accommodating it, making excuses for it, even celebrating our vulnerability to it. But his apparently sincere conviction that he could snatch the mouse hair and remove the scimitar struck her as the kind of high-pitched delusion that can shatter a man's mind like a cut-glass punching bag.

  “Wiggs,” she said, “all those strange drugs you took, jungle berries and Amazon sap and stuff, not to mention regular old LSD, do you think they might have, you know, physically, uh, barbecued your brain?”

  “Oh, no, darlin', none o' that. Sure and they destroyed some cells, no doubt about it, but 'twas for the good. If you want your tree to produce plenty o' fruit, you've got to cut it back from time to time. Same thing with your neural cells. Some people might call it brain damage. I call it prunin'.”

  At that, even the rain backed away.

  Things were quiet for a while, what with the slack in the weather and a conversational pause. After a bit, Wiggs took her nipple in his lips, applying a rubbery, rolling pressure, like Captain Queeg worrying those steel peas in his fingers during the Caine Mutiny Court Martial. Boing! The little pink pea stiffened with pleasure, much as an aged veteran will sometimes stiffen with patriotism. Pris was beginning to experience a resurgence of powerful urges in her loins when all at once there was a thumping noise from the floor above them.

  “What's that?” she asked.

  Wiggs spat out the nipple. “Morgenstern. I hope he doesn't wake Huxley Anne.”

  “What's he doing up there?”

  “Oh, 'tis a dance that he does, a dance against dying.”

  “Wiggs, what is going on in this nuthouse? I mean, you don't have a laboratory on the whole blessed premises, but you've got a Nobel chemist dancing with himself at three in the morning—or is he dancing with a full-grown kangaroo? It sounds like it—and do you actually believe you're going to live forever? Tell me you don't believe it. Please.”

  “I don't believe it.”

  “You don't?” She sounded relieved.

  “No, I don't believe that Wiggs Dannyboy will be livin' forever, but future generations will, Huxley Anne quite likely will, and even so, I expect to outlast me detractors. I could see me hundred-and-twentieth birthday, I could easily.”

  “But how? And why? Is this some sort of grandiose and rococo midlife crisis? Are you that afraid of getting old? Aging is the most natural thing in the world.”

  He snorted. “Sure and there's where you're bloody mistaken, me darlin'. There's where you're as wrong as garters on a nun.” He snorted again, and his knuckle began rapping at his eye patch like a mongoloid woodpecker drilling for worms in a poker chip. “Agin' is a disease. Maybe disease is natural, but health is natural, too, and a hell of a heap more desirable. Rust is natural, wouldn't you say? But rust can be prevented. And if you don't be preventin' it, it will ruin your machinery. 'Tis the same with agin'. Your man ages because he lets his body rust.”

  “Rust? I don't—”

  “I'm talkin' about the degeneration o
' cells. I'm talkin' about the gumming up o' cells with superoxide free radicals and toxins, I'm talkin' about the gradual breakdown o' healthy cell reproduction due to progressive deterioration o' nucleic acids. 'Tis all a form o' rustin'.”

  “And it can be prevented?”

  “It can.”

  “Why don't doctors know about it then?”

  “You might as well ask why didn't mariners in the Middle Ages know the world was round?”

  “A few did.”

  “Sure and a few doctors today know the truth of agin'.” He paused, gazing into the fire. Eventually, he smiled and said, “Your man, Alobar, he knew the world was round way back then. And in his own fashion, he knows the truth about age.”

  “Ah, yes, Alobar: the janitor who never rusts.”

  “Well, until recently he didn't. I should be gettin' back to me story.”

  “That's for sure.”

  “A kiss first.”

  “Mmm.”

  At Concord, Dr. Dannyboy had cleared his cubicle of journals and papers relating to his erstwhile (and some said, alleged) profession, only to gradually replace them with material relating to gerontology, genetics, and life extension. From prison, he became privy to the latest longevity research at universities in North America, Europe, and Japan, and at private institutions such as the Bjorksten Research Foundation, Montesano Laboratories, the Menninger Clinic, and the Institute of Experimental Morphology in Soviet Georgia. Allowed one telephone call per week, he found himself, guiltily, dialing a biologist at Cornell or a gerontologist at the University of Nebraska Medical School, rather than his wife and infant daughter in nearby Boston.

  It was far from easy, keeping pace with the leading edge of some of the most esoteric science, but Dr. Dannyboy was resourceful and, despite his unfashionable address, charming. What he learned encouraged and delighted him. To be sure, it also frustrated him in the saddest way that there wasn't more effort and money behind rejuvenation research. With an immense national effort, such as the project that brought us the atomic bomb, we could add fifty years to the average life span in no time at all, he was convinced of that. Wiggs also was depressed by the fact that he was unable to benefit personally from the information that he was accumulating. Nutrition was one area, for example, where he might have done some immediately salubrious work, but, alas, there were few diets on Earth so perfect for rusting out the machinery as the starch-and-sugar blizzard, the fatty acid monsoon of prison fare.

  Wiggs began to fall prey to wide swings in mood. One day, brightened by the latest report from the UCLA Medical Center or some such place, he would be as optimistic as a newborn fly in a Mexican restaurant (an insect that might have its own vision of “the perfect taco"), but the next day, crushed by the realities of the slowness of underfunded research and the deadlines of prison life, he'd be aboard that nickel submarine that is anchored at the bottom of the Black Lagoon.

  Then, late one evening, as Wiggs whispered coarse curses at the Capital of Adjectives—the moon—there was an explosion across Middlesex County at MIT, at one of the very laboratories that Wiggs was monitoring; and about three months later, as if in slow motion or delayed reaction, that blast blew into Concord Prison a new inmate named Al Barr, who would soon have incandescent beet leaves curling out of the eye of Dannyboy's periscope.

  When he first learned about the bombing of the MIT lab, Wiggs was irate. A lot of progress was being made there at MIT. Those guys had molecules jumping through hoops like poodles in a circus. While other experts in the field spoke of “the challenges presented by the mysterious and implacable process called aging,” scientists in the MIT experiment talked about slowing down aging as if that feat were already possible, and they stated publicly that in the future, “society might be able to abolish death from natural causes entirely.” Dannyboy admired people who could rescue themselves from modest objectives.

  He had expected the “middle-aged” janitor convicted of destroying the lab to be a fundamentalist Christian fanatic, a sexually repressed lout driven loony as an outhouse rat by charlatan evangelists and the ambiguous poetry of the Bible; a knife-nosed, tight-lipped, lost-eyed ignoramus on a self-appointed mission to punish scientists for playing God, like those peasants who burn down the mad doctor's castle at the conclusion of countless monster movies.

  When Wiggs thought of lodging with this yahoo under a common roof, the green Spanish worm of revenge began to turn in his heart.

  Therefore he was not only surprised but a bit abashed when Al Barr proved to be the most dignified prisoner in Concord. Straight of spine and sapphirine of eye, Barr appeared poised, intelligent, and master of a certain smile. Whereas Wiggs, on his good days, had a smile that snipped the tense prison air like musical scissors, Barr's smile was on the order of those stone-cut enigmas that, wired to a heroic nerve, grace the faces of classical statues. He wore an air of mystery and some very interesting scars.

  Having decided that this chap was no ordinary janitor (although it was known that he had swabbed the tiles of Boston's Turkish Bath House for years), and having become increasingly curious about the motives for the vandalism at MIT, and, further, having had little luck in generating conversation with Barr in the exercise yard (where the new inmate was occupied with a strange kind of yoga), Wiggs pulled some strings (had Wiggs been Geppetto, Pinocchio never would have left home) and arranged for Barr to become his cellmate.

  The arrangement was acceptable to Alobar, who intuited that the one-eyed Irish drug maniac would be better company than the blue-collar sister-raper with whom he had previously been bunking. Although Alobar never trusted Wiggs completely (Wiggs was open and eccentric in ways the more closed and conservative Alobar found unsettling), the pair slowly, gradually became such friends that Alobar told him his life story. All thousand years of it. Everything.

  Well, not quite everything. He told Wiggs more than he had told Albert Einstein. He told him of exploits in Asia, adventures in French Canada (when Pan, half-mad from the lingering effects of K23, was still close by), which even the reader of these pages has not been told. He told him, more than once, of the perfume that was so strangely significant in his life. But he never told him how to make the perfume.

  He told him almost how to make the perfume. He told him of the jasmine theme, the citric top note, and how he had finally discovered the great elusive and startling base note of beet. Ah, but Alobar, the fox, left something out. He said “beet” to his bunky, but he did not say “beet pollen.” If he had, things would have gone differently for several people that we know.

  What's more, Alobar forced Wiggs to swear upon his mother's grave, his wife's knickers, the Book of Kells, the fairy hills of County Dublin, his one good eye, and everything else that he held holy, including whiskey, vision root, the true universe, Huxley Anne's future happiness, and the Salmon That Fed on the Nine Hazel Nuts of Poetic Art, that he would never ever mention to anyone that beet was the secret ingredient in an allegedly unique and wonderful perfume.

  Therefore, Wiggs kept the word beet to himself, fine and private, despite his sensitivity to Priscilla's burning curiosity about the comettailed vegetable that had extended its crimson orbit into her atmosphere. He did, however, tell her the rest of Alobar's life story. Rather, he told her the highlights of Alobar's life story, for to tell the whole of it would have taken months. As it was, it took a full two hours, what with Pris getting up twice to pee, and Wiggs tiptoeing upstairs three times to check on Huxley Anne.

  By the end of the story, Dr. Morgenstern had long since ceased his immortalist jitterbug, the fire was out, the windowpanes nearly dry—and Priscilla was practically faint from the knowledge that she was in possession of the ancient bottle that had held the Kudra-baiting, Pan-deodorizing K23.

  Finding herself stunned and upended by that knowledge, like a myopic houseguest who has walked into a patio door, Pris groped for sturdy furniture with which to right herself. “But—” she said, “but if they really truly did live all that t
ime, all those centuries . . . I mean, how? It's medically impossible, isn't it? How could they have done it?” She was stalling. She wasn't prepared to talk about the bottle just yet.

  “Medically impossible 'tis not. Humanly impossible 'tis not. Can it be done? ye ask. Does koala-beer poop smell like cough drops?”

  Wiggs then went on, applying an occasional rat-a-tat to the shamrock, to explain Alobar and Kudra's program and how it was based upon the Four Elements. He took each element in turn and did a little number with it.

  AIR

  “We relate to air through the breath. Most of us don't breathe properly, which is to say, we take in too little or too much and fail to consume it efficiently. Alobar and Kudra developed a method o' breathin' whereby the inhale and exhale were connected in an uninterrupted rhythm, a continuous, circular, flywheel pattern like a serpent swallowin' its own tail. Their breathin' was deep and smooth and regular. When they brought air into their bodies, they visualized suckin' in as much energy and vitality as possible; when they expelled air, they visualized blowin' out all the staleness and flatness inside o' them.

  “Simple, 'tis true, but hardly simplistic when we understand that much o' the cellular damage that leads to tissue breakdown—agin', in other words—is caused by the accumulation in our bodies o' the toxic by-products o' metabolizin' oxygen. Superoxide free radicals, which is what these garbage molecules are called, combine with fatty acids to produce lipofuscin, which is an unstable, repulsive gunk that clogs up a cell like grease clogs a drain. The more goop ye have gummin' up your cells, the greater the strain on your metabolism, and the more taxed the metabolism the easier 'tis for still more poisons to accumulate.