by Melanie Tem
His head hurts. She feeds him the whole carton of yogurt. He can’t taste it. He doesn’t think he can taste it—-the cool, thick, mucousy feel of it is so intense that it seems like a taste sometimes and he can smell it which is a lot like tasting, but he tastes no hint of strawberry or banana or yogurt tartness. “Coffee,” he says, then makes an extra effort. “Could I have a cup of coffee, please? With lots of sugar?”
“Since when do you drink coffee?”
“It sounds good right now. Maybe falling off a cliff changed my taste in drinks.” He laughs, and she obviously doesn’t know what’s funny, and it really isn’t anything to laugh about even though puns are the highest form of humor.
Molly was right in front of him on the trail. Jillian had lagged behind to look at something. They were all high, and the sun was warm, and the mountains were awesome, the weed smoothing out all his sensations so it didn’t matter that there were so many of them. He was feeling good. Molly stopped, he almost ran into her, he was saying what the fuck when she turned around and punched him in the groin and he yelled and stepped backward and fell.
He remembers that.
He smells coffee, dust, plants on the windowsill, lemon-scented spray cleaner, rain, a shitload of other odors he doesn’t bother to label. He’s learned you can get tangled up in labels, and he can’t always tell when it matters what some sensation is and when it doesn’t. He likes the smell of coffee brewing, just not the taste. But it’s the most definite taste he can think of off the top of his head. So to speak. There’s a bandage on his head. Molly cleaned the wound and put the bandage there. He remembers that. Did they take him to the ER? They should have taken him to the ER.
Once when they were like thirteen Molly said they were all going to go around blindfolded for a week. Open-minded and so goddamn tolerant it could drive you fuckin’ crazy, Xavier’s parents said it was a good exercise in sensitivity. Jillian’s grandma said it was the most ridiculous thing she’d ever heard of, why would you want to make yourself blind, and kept confiscating Jillian’s bandannas. He didn’t know what Molly’s mom thought about it. Molly never said much about her mom, and Xavier only saw her a couple of times before she died, never actually met her.
“St. Teresa of Avila said if you want to know the true meaning of life—well, actually, she said if you want to know God—you have to go inside and not be distracted by stuff from the outside,” Molly told them while they were walking blindfolded around the zoo, holding onto each other, bumping into things, Jillian and Xavier giggling and exaggerating.
Guiltily Xavier could see pieces of things from under the scarf Molly had tied too tight over his eyes, and through it he could detect light and shadow. He didn’t tell her that. “Who?” he asked, staggering around like he was more drunk than blind.
“St. Teresa. Of. Avila,” Molly enunciated. “She was a Christian mystic. She said our senses, like vision and hearing and taste and smell and touch, are like bees that go out from the hive and gather up information and bring it back. She said you have to keep the bees from leaving the hive if you want to really understand life and death and the universe and God and stuff like that. Actually, what she wrote was—” and here Xavier knew she was drawing herself up the way she always did when she recited something word-for-word; Molly was awesome at memorization “ ‘As soon as you apply yourself to prison, you will at once feel your senses gather themselves together: they seem like bees which return to the hive and there shut themselves up to work at the making of honey. God disposes them to a state of utter rest and of perfect contemplation.’ ”
“Prison?”
Molly punched his shoulder. “Asshole. I tell you all that and you get stuck on one word at the very beginning? See, that’s why you’ll never be great, Xavier. You’ve got a small mind, you know that?”
It isn’t often that Jillian comes to his defense, but she did that time. “I don’t get the part about prison, either, Molly. What does that mean? And whatever happened to this saint chick? Did she get to know God, or whatever?”
Xavier can’t remember if Molly ever answered that, or about prison. He remembers her saying, but she’s said it so often he’s not sure which time he’s remembering, “I almost died before I was born and when I was being born and lots of times after I was born.”
He and Jillian probably didn’t tell her yeah, yeah, she’d said that a million times already. She had, but this time—whenever it was—she said more. He didn’t understand it at the time, he still doesn’t, but it stuck in his mind.
“When you’re dead,” he thinks she said, “your bees don’t go out from the hive anymore. That’d be cool. I want to know what that’d be like, not to take in anything from outside, just to be in there with yourself and God. Or whatever.”
If he’s right that all this happened on the same day, he and Jillian collided again about then and held onto each other laughing. They were in front of the gorilla cage, or maybe orangutans. The jumble of their odors and noises come back to him strong now.
At the end of the week when they met in their spot down by the river to compare notes from the experiment, Xavier and Jillian had lots of comically exaggerated anecdotes about falling over furniture, sticking their hands in disgusting stuff while trying to feel their way, running into people and accidentally touching private parts. They both swore they were already hearing better. Molly listened avidly and asked questions and took notes. Xavier suspected she’d cheated, hadn’t kept her blindfold on except when they were together, but he’s never asked. Maybe he will now.
But he doesn’t think Molly’s here, and instead he croaks out, “Vinegar.” It takes Jillian a minute to get that he wants her to put vinegar in his mouth. When she does, he can’t taste it, although it makes his nose tingle and his tongue curl.
Over the next hours and months, Xavier tries fiery chili, limburger cheese, Tabasco sauce, lye. The cheese makes him throw up. The chili, Tabasco, and lye burn. But he can’t taste them. He never tastes anything again.
He’s recovered from the fall, except for a scar on his arm and one under his hair where you can hardly see it but you can feel it like a thin bunched string, and except for his lost sense of taste. Sometimes his balance is jacked up, too, but it’s so subtle-—just a few seconds of dizziness here and there, the world swooning and then immediately righting itself-—he tries not to think too much about it, or to enjoy the trip, but what if it’s permanent? Molly has always called him “a little dizzy.” He hasn’t told her about it now that it’s literal, but he’s not surprised that Jillian did. Molly is very interested. “This may be a long term issue,” she says solemnly. “We may have to do something with your ears, surgery maybe.”
“ ‘We’?” He means, “What’s this ‘we’ shit? It’s my ears we’re talking about here.” But he’s having a dizzy spell right now. Thoughts and words and sensations are swirling around in his head like loose marbles and he holds onto the doorframe, which is twisting and dissolving and reconfiguring, he can’t think how to sit down, he doesn’t want to lose all this before he can use it in his art. One of the careening sensations is of her saying “we” and “surgery” and “your ears” in the same sentence. He starts to slide down the curvy wall that massages him, wriggles erotically around him, heaves him away. It’s awesome and it’s too much and he wants to go as far into it as he can (oh, Molly) and he wants it to stop (Molly, stop, stop it).
She’s talking. “…where we get our balance, you know, from our inner ears.” Molly loves knowing things and telling you what she knows.
Everything clears up. Xavier sits down in ordinary motion, an ordinary person in an ordinary chair. Molly’s talking. Lately he’s been paying even more attention to her, looking for clues, trying to understand her because maybe his life depends on it. Not the first time he’s thought that. So for the moment he ignores how annoying it is when she acts like he doesn’t know the simplest things. He also ignores his fucked-up memory of her hitting him and knocking him off that led
ge on purpose. Molly wouldn’t do that to him. They love each other. Ashamed for even thinking she’d do that, he tries to make himself feel better by touching the stringy scar under his hair, proof that he’s had a head injury and no wonder he’s paranoid. More for the sound of the word and the feel of it in his mouth, word as object, he repeats, “ ‘We’?”
“Dude! I meant ‘they!’ ” She giggles. Molly doesn’t giggle. “Doctors, people who know what they’re doing. But you don’t have any health insurance, do you? You can’t really afford a doctor.”
She’s doing what she always does, pulling the conversation back to where she wants it. He has the feeling he shouldn’t let her do that this time. But he’s tired and it’s actually kind of a relief to be told what’s real. Molly’s good at that. That may be why he loves her.
You can live without taste. Having one less portal for sensory input to get into you is soothing, in a bizarre sort of way, and interesting, definitely interesting. Molly’s spent a lot of time with him in these months, observing, recording, and she says he’s doing great.
He keeps trying out stuff to see if his sense of taste might have come back. He pours salt straight onto his tongue; it makes the tissues pucker, but he can’t taste it. He washes out his mouth with soap; the strong flowery smell in the back of his throat seems like taste for a second but it isn’t. Depending on the day, he misses the taste of Merlot, Burger King french fries, white chocolate, pineapple, peanut butter, Jillian. He always misses the taste of Molly.
He goes back to school, and he doesn’t like it any better or worse than ever. He lost a semester to the accident so he’ll graduate in August instead of May, but who cares. His senior project is visual and tactile representations of taste. He gets a C. They say it’s immature, superficial. One of the jurors writes that the concept is interesting and “deserves further development and greater personal risk from the artist.” Xavier would like to think he doesn’t know what the fuck that means, but he’s beginning to think he does, thanks mostly to Molly.
Sometime in there Molly starts nagging him to replace some light bulbs. It’s his assigned job in the household. He always procrastinates, and she always nags him. This time she points out acidly that he doesn’t need to taste a light bulb in order to fuckin’ change it. He’ll get to it. He’s painting. He’s an artist, can’t be bothered with mundane shit like that.
Jillian steps closer to the new canvas, squints at it, grabs one wrist with the other hand behind her back and twists her grandmother’s ring in her thinking-super-hard stance, steps back. It’s Xavier who finally says, “Different, huh?”
“Yeah. Something. What is it?”
“I can’t taste it anymore.”
“Taste the paint? What?” Jillian rolls her eyes at him. At least this time she doesn’t say, “You are so cute!” When they’re in one of their sex phases, that can make him want to kiss her. When they’re not, like now, since the accident, it kind of pisses him off.
But this painting is taste. Fruit and seeds and juices, some of it warming in the light, some of it gone to sour and rot. The reds more like blood than fruit. The yellows, the oranges, more like pain. Berries the color of the darkness in the middle of the night, and you wake up all of a sudden, unable to see anything, scared shitless, deep inside yourself, your bees buzzing around not even trying to go out, getting everything they need from deep inside you. It occurs to him he’s never tasted anything so intense as making this painting.
Because he has no clue how to explain what he means, or if he means anything, he says, like she’s the dumbest chick in the world, which in some ways he’s always thought she is, “Yeah, Jillian, taste the paint.” She glares at him and stomps out of the room. If he said that to Molly, she’d tell him what he means. But he doesn’t, and it’s like a guilty secret.
“You’ve lost your sense of taste but not smell,” Molly points out. As if he hadn’t noticed. It makes him feel safer that she’s noticed, too.
Her hair falls straight to her chin now. He liked it best short and velvety, but the silky look and feel of it this way is nice, too. He strokes it while she talks. She doesn’t seem to notice.
“You’ve got ageusia but not anosmia. That only happens 0.5 percent of the time in head injury cases. Interesting.”
“Quit saying that. Makes me feel like a bug.”
“Usually ageusia doesn’t occur without anosmia. Usually ageusia really is anosmia and results from injury to the olfactory nerve. But you can smell even though you can’t taste. You’re an anomaly, sweetie.” She takes his face roughly in her hands and kisses him open-mouthed, a little tongue action, like she’s rewarding him for doing or being something really cool.
Finally all the lights in the kitchen are out. It seems to him they burned out faster than usual. But he can’t put off changing them any longer, and Molly’s got a point when she tells him to earn his keep. Jillian offers to do it, but Molly shoots her a look and Xavier is a little insulted. He’s not helpless. Hand over her mouth, grandmother’s ring glinting, Jillian leaves the room, while Molly steadies the ladder for him. “Just quit rocking your feet,” she orders.
He’s stretching to get the globe loose. “I’m not rocking anything. Quit moving your hands around.” He’s trying not to drop the light bulb or the glass globe.
“You’re shaking the ladder, Xave.”
“I’m not,” he begins, feeling a flash of panic and anger, when he finds himself sideways, descending at the speed of nightmare, his feet gone. It’s a short way down, but before he crashes he’s aware of something small and hard like a fist smashing into his face.
Jillian and Molly are standing over him, and he thinks he’s just landed at the bottom of the drop-off from the mountain trail. Then he’s aware of the pillows arranged on either side of his head, lumpy, pale, and huge (the pillows, not his head, or maybe in fact it’s both). He wants to push them off the bed—he doesn’t want them anywhere near him. But for the moment he can’t make himself move.
“Oh, sweetie, you fell again,” Jillian says, patting somewhere on his body below eye level.
“Yeah, we’ve really got to do something about your balance,” Molly says. “But right now we’ve got to take care of your nose.”
“By…bose?” he croaks.
Jillian lets loose a snort of laughter, apologizes for laughing, can’t stop laughing, leaves the room. Molly explains, “Oh, yeah, you bled all over everything. Must have really cracked it when you fell. But I’ve packed your nasal passages good and tight. Good thing my grandmother taught me some great remedies for nosebleeds. My dad used to get them all the time.”
He is aware, now, of the stuffed, swollen feeling of his nose, as if his face has been taken away from him and she’s grafted random meat to the underlying muscle. He can’t smell anything but the bandages, a faint whiff of blood, and an odd metallic scent that reminds him of batteries.
“You’re going to be fine,” Molly pronounces. It scares him a little that he believes her.
After a week or so, not being able to smell starts to get to him. He bends over a simmering pot of Jillian’s chicken soup until his face starts to burn, without capturing even a hint of aroma. He buries his nose in flowers and gets only their softness or prickliness or texture like tissue paper. Desperate, he sticks his face right down to his own shit in the toilet bowl and it might as well be a lump of clay floating there.
Now he can’t taste or smell. It feels like more than that. The whole organic world seems denied him. He supposes this could be artistically interesting if he weren’t so fucking scared and sad.
One night at dinner he is slowly chewing his way through a pile of shrimp when he becomes aware that Jillian and Molly are watching him closely from across the table. “What?” A couple of well-chewed lumps drop from his mouth. Jillian gags and covers her face. “What!” he shouts, spitting the rest of the shrimp out over the table.
“I’m sorry, Xave.” Molly’s face looks genuinely sorry so she’s
lying to him somehow. “I wasn’t paying good enough attention. It looks like that batch of shrimp was spoiled. My bad. I am so sorry.”
The shrimp starts up his throat. He barely makes it to the toilet bowl, hears himself retch as if his throat were turning inside out, dumps pints of colorful but remarkably odorless and tasteless puke.
“I don’t think I need that anymore,” Xavier says later that evening as Molly takes the packing out. Her hand on his forehead almost makes up for the tweezers up his nose and the sharp tug to get the cotton out. Breathing feels good. Then, seeing she’s not done, he gets to his feet, swaying a little. “I don’t think I need that anymore.” When she ignores him, he tries, “I can’t remember the last time there was any blood.”
“There’s still infection, and you appear to have developed a rash and some real sensitivity up there. You know how a doctor tells you to take all your antibiotics until your prescription runs out, even if you’re feeling lots better? Same principle.”
“What is that stuff you’re soaking them in? It’s dark. Looks metallic.”
She hesitates, half a beat. Molly never hesitates, and it alarms him. Why doesn’t he just get the fuck out of there? “My grandmother used this on my dad. She was a real natural healer, an actual expert. There’s a little zinc, just a smidgen of lead, some other things.”
“It’s not toxic, right?” What a stupid question. Like she’s going to tell him, yeah, Xave, I’m poisoning you.
What she says is, “Oh, Xave, do you think I’d give you something toxic?”
It’s not a rhetorical question. She actually wants an answer, and he’s forced to say, “No,” and, when he says it to her, it’s true, he doesn’t think she’d do anything like that.
She nods. “It’s fine in these amounts. You wait, you’ll be better in no time.”
“So it worked with your dad?”
“Well, for a while. But he had lots of other problems. He was a mess, actually. My grandma said he was like that from when he was a little boy.”