Jitterbug Perfume

by Tom Robbins

  “Because,” answered Alobar, “Death is the master of that house. My ambition has been to free myself from Death, not to visit him in his parlor and share tea.”

  “Death is not a resident of the house. 'Death' is merely the name we give to certain rooms of the house, rooms that we, the so-called 'living,' fear for the simple reason that we have not passed through them.”

  Alobar righted the overturned basket and began to pick up pieces of bark. “Again, my little refugee from suttee, I must question your authority in such matters.”

  Kudra wished then to tell him the truth about Lalo, that the nymph had not run off with a mariner while Alobar was in Greece but had died, peacefully, happily, in the bed where Pan now slept; that she had attended Lalo's demise and, indeed, had followed her out of her body, traveling with her for a ways into the white light of the Other Side, until a sudden thought of Alobar caused her to turn back. Her concept of death was altered thereafter, and she wished to tell Alobar about that, as well, but she had promised the nymph to keep secret her passing. “The world must not think of nymphs as aged or dying,” said Lalo, “for that runs counter to the girlish sexual things that we represent.” Perhaps Lalo was vain to the end, but it must be noted that she cared about the world, even the modern world (whose replacement of cosmic order with a riotous contest between would-be equals had helped to kill her).

  “Listen,” said Kudra. “When we were in the caves, we learned by experimenting, by trial and error, guided by some intelligence, perhaps divine, that radiated from the minerals there. What harm would there be in experimenting with dematerialization here in our shop? It is a temple of Pan now, after all. I feel strongly that we will be guided once again. The divine energy doesn't limit itself to some caverns in India. It is everywhere if we are only open to it. Trust my intuition, Alobar. What harm to try?”

  “Well, all right, I shall consider it,” grumbled Alobar. “Just so long as it does not involve aging.”

  She thumped him with a look of iron. “Should the monks or any other folk start to trouble us before we have either discovered dematerialization or a base note for Pan's perfume, then I shall age fast and furiously, without hesitation, and you would be wise to follow suit.”

  At that, their quarreling commenced all over again.

  Their quarreling chewed through the curtains, pierced the casements, and rattled over the cobblestones outside. How strange it must have sounded, this quarreling about dematerialization, voluntary aging, goat gods, and immortality, to a city that was primed for the Age of Reason, a populace that was beginning to put Descartes before des horse.

  Although the contention that matter can transcend, at will, its material character would have had Descartes spinning in one or the other of his graves, a person who can believe in physical immortality is merely a step away from believing in dematerialization. Kudra believed in it and was prepared to experiment. Alobar probably believed in it but was reluctant—frightened, honestly—to pursue it. Wiggs Dannyboy of the Last Laugh Foundation, trained in the tradition of Cartersian doubt (deliberate suspension of all interpretations of experience that are not absolutely certain), had, unlike Kudra, never witnessed the Indian rope trick, nor had he, unlike Alobar, ever been flabbergasted by Bandaloop, yet to him the notion of material transcendence was credible. Perhaps that was because he was Irish.

  “Subatomic particles apparently de- and rematerialize fairly routinely,” Dr. Dannyboy has written. “Some of them actually can be in two places at once. Their freedom from the normal confines of the space-time continuum is thought to be the result of a weird electricity, an intelligent, creative, playful, and unpredictable interaction among oppositely charged entities in motion.” On at least one occasion, Dr. Dannyboy has described those energized particles as “fairies,” and, unfortunately, there is doubt that he was speaking metaphorically. But, again, he is Irish and, moreover, has swallowed in his day a lot of drugs.

  At any rate, Dr. Dannyboy continued: “We ourselves are built of subatomic particles (and the spaces in between them), and our organisms are electrically as well as chemically powered. Our cells, or something that occupies our cells, transmit an electrical pulse. When we breathe, bathe, eat, make love, and think the way that Kudra and Alobar did, we alter the cellular amperage until we find ourselves vibrating at the frequency of the eternal: immortality.

  “When interrogated about how they can walk through flames without being burned, 'primitives' have conveyed to anthropologists that they raise the vibratory level of their flesh to equal that of the fire. In like manner, then, an adept might raise—or lower—his or her vibratory rate to match that of another dimension, thereby disappearing from our customary universe and popping up in the other: dematerialization.”

  From his vantage point in the twentieth century, Dannyboy was privileged to marshal a fair amount of scientific evidence that supposedly explains Alobar's and Kudra's accomplishments. No doubt, such data have their benefits, if for no other reason than that the couple's immortalist methodology often sounds too simplistic to be feasible: the result was far more dramatic than the process, even though, for all practical purposes, the result was the process.

  Whether guided by a divine intelligence, as Kudra suggested, or inspired in some supranatural fashion by the absent Bandaloop doctors (maybe the Bandaloop were agents of a divine intelligence), or simply informed by their own intuition, she and Alobar devised, during their residency in the caves, a program based upon the four elements: air, water, earth, and fire. If encouraged, Wiggs Dannyboy will expound upon each element in turn, detailing how it legitimately manifested itself in Kudra and Alobar's program. Dr. Dannyboy is simply mad for the subject of immortality and will yak about it until the cows come home, although the precise time and date of bovine arrival has yet to be reckoned to his satisfaction.

  At some later point, it might be rewarding to examine Dannyboy's arguments. For the moment, let it suffice to say that he has connected air to breath, water to bath, earth to food, and fire to sex, supplying a mixture of empirical fact and medical theory to support his case for the life-extending properties of this quartet, when ritualistically and resolutely embraced.

  In addition, Dr. Dannyboy has suggested a fifth element: positive thought. Pointing out that their breathing, bathing, dining, and screwing brought Alobar and Kudra much physical pleasure, and that an organism steeped in pleasure is an organism disposed to continue, he has said that the will to live cannot be overestimated as a stimulant to longevity. Indeed, Dr. Dannyboy goes so far as to claim that ninety percent of all deaths are suicides. Persons, says Wiggs, who lack curiosity about life, who find minimal joy in existence, are all to willing, subconsciously, to cooperate with—and attract—disease, accident, and violence.

  Enough for now. In urbanized, technologized society—that institutional home for the orphans of Pan—there may be few who can even relate anymore to the Four Elements. At least not in any primal sense. V'lu Jackson, for example, once inquired of Madame Devalier if the Four Elements weren't some Motown jive group, while Ricki the bartender has defined the Four Elements as cocaine, champagne, pussy, and chocolate.

  Paris. April. Twilight. A few flat clouds folded themselves like crepes over fillings of apricot sky. Pompadours of supper-time smoke billowed from chimneys, separating into girlish pigtails as the breeze combed them out, above the slate rooftops. Chestnut blossoms, weary from having been admired all day, wore faint smiles of anticipation with the approach of the private night. Or else the blossoms were being tickled by the sleepy insects that were entering them as if they were hotels. Stiff-legged corks squeaked loose from bottlenecks where they'd stood guard since noon. Stiff-legged nags, tiny harness bells jingling, dragged market carts toward the suburbs. At intervals along the boulevards, lamplighters set their gay fires. A wounded tongue licked the shine off cathedral domes. A bat broke loose from a belfry, a loaf broke loose from an oven, six chimes broke loose from a clock. Everywhere a huge, enveloping sof
tness; soft as face powder, soft as petticoats, soft as the snuff in a courtesan's box.

  Now, the clock chimed seven times. Nightfall was almost complete. The softness was suddenly interrupted by harsh hoofbeats, not four hooves, oddly enough, but two, striking a stone bridge—clink! clink!—upon which no beast could be seen to trod; and the peachy, powdery softness was further violated by a release of fumes so fetid it seemed almost evil. Clink! clink! Sparks were struck from cobblestones. Clink! clink! To the innocent nostrils of spring there was caterwauled a filthy serenade.

  Pan had waited until dark to return home so that he might more stealthily transport the wig stolen from Descartes's redundant funeral. He'd not eaten since early morning, and to the scrape of his hooves (not meant for city streets) and the blast of his stench (meant for no place save the rutting grounds) were added stomach growls, terrible and rude. From grass, he had woven a short rope, which he tied to the wig so that he might pull it along behind him. In the dim light, those pedestrians who saw it scurrying up the street believed it to be blown along by the breeze. Several gave pursuit, only to have it yanked away each time they thought they had it in their grasp. One by one, they gave up. “It stinks, anyway,” said the last to quit the chase. And Pan arrived at the incense shop with wig in tow, having painted the gentle April gloaming with shades of Halloween.

  Ceremoniously, Pan presented the wig, frescoed now with grit and offal, to Alobar. Were Alobar bewigged, Pan reasoned, he could hold the white hairs of age at bay for as long as he wished, and no outsider would be the wiser. With that pressure removed, maybe Alobar and Kudra would curtail their quarreling, maybe the household would be merry again.

  As it turned out, Pan found his hosts in a quite congenial mood already. When, that afternoon, the latest candidate for a base note had fallen short of expectations, they had sat down over a flagon of wine and negotiated an agreement to dematerialize.

  For a week, they fasted. They meditated for hours each day and bathed repeatedly. They made love between baths but resisted climax, holding the orgasmic cyclone inside themselves, channeling it up their spinal columns to their brains. Then, one afternoon, the green blush of April still upon the city, they closed the shop an hour earlier than usual and climbed the stairs, one of them for the last time.

  The experiment was to be conducted in their small sitting room. After a brief discussion about whether or not they should disrobe, they concurred that nudity might distract Pan, who was to monitor the attempt, and they remained, but for their shoes, fully clothed. Upon the threadbare carpet, a far cry from the rugs that had purred to their buttocks in Constantinople, they sat cross-legged, facing one another. They closed their eyes and . . .

  Just then there was a commotion in the street. Excited voices were being raised outside their shop. Alobar asked Pan to investigate. “I be a god not an errand boy,” grumbled the old faun, but he hobbled downstairs nevertheless.

  The ruckus was caused by the monks. For more than a year, ever since Pan moved into the neighborhood, things had not been right at the monastery. The good brothers had become increasingly plagued by erotic dreams. Dreams of a lascivious nature are fairly common among those of whom the church requires celibacy, but the frequency and intensity of the dreams on rue Quelle Blague had the confession booth smoking. Some monks had begun to resist sleep and walked about heavy-lidded and nervous. Others lived for bedtime and during the day appeared drained, weak, disinterested. Rome dispatched an exorcist to uproot their torment, but the sticky demons mocked his incantations: he, himself, was visited by a succubus of such seductive talent that upon awakening he packed his exorcisory tools and returned to the Vatican.

  The abbot, too, was stricken. At least twice a week he was stiffened by creamy visions; the other nights, he told his confessor, he dreamed “of rabbits caught in snares, of snakes that swallow birds' eggs whole, of trailing vines that threaten to trip me up, of rockslides, ewes in foal, yammering hornets, belching vultures, yellow eyes that peer out from hollow trees, and all manner of disagreeable things such as Satan has strewn about God's perfect world, things such as I have not seen since my boyhood in rural Provence.”

  The monks under his authority were subject to these “rural” nightmares as well. If they weren't being tortured by the rub of feminine thighs, they were being nauseated by the drool of he-bears eating their cubs. Late in the evening, a person afoot on rue Quelle Blague might, by the moans and shrieks and saccadic protests, have imagined themselves passing not a monastery but a hospital or a brothel or a combination of the two.

  More and more, the monks came to suspect that the incense shop was the source of their collective possession. Despite the aromatic stuffs that were its stock in trade, there was often a gamey odor about the place, “a smell,” as the abbot put it, “of such wild meats as country rogues doth eat.” Never had the shop's owners been seen at Mass, there was a quality of physical wellbeing about them that was nearly supernatural, and the woman—the woman was perversely proportioned and jiggled shamelessly when she walked. Several monks claimed that she, specifically, haunted their cots of a night.

  Still, the two shopkeepers were good customers of the perfumery and were known to cooperate in the acquisition of raw materials. Moreover, the dream epidemic had attacked the monastery but a year before, while the shop had been operating for well over a decade. The superiors urged restraint in placing blame, but accusations were whispered almost daily, and when, with the soft airs and fertile moistures of spring, the dreaming in the cubicles reached a hysterical pitch, small knots of agitated monks began to patrol the block, eager, it seemed, for something demonic to reveal itself.

  It was just such a group that on that fateful afternoon descended on a young man who was timidly rattling the latch at the shop's locked door.

  “What is your business here, boy?” asked one of the monks.

  “I am making delivery, Father.”

  “Delivery from whom?”

  “From the glassblower. I am his apprentice.” This last, the boy said proudly.

  “And what is in the package?”

  “Why, glass, Father. A glass bottle.”

  “A bottle of what?”

  “A bottle of nothing.”

  “Eh?”

  “The bottle is empty. The woman of this shop commissioned it from my master. Someday I shall blow fine bottles and—”

  “Hush! We shall have a look at this bottle.”

  “But, your holiness—”

  The monk cuffed the lad on the ear. It felt so good he cuffed him again. “We shall see the bottle!”

  Confused, the boy drew away, clutching the package to his silica-caked apron. His ear was turning as red as a whore's lantern. The circle of monks closed around him. “The bottle! The bottle!” they demanded. They forced the package from the frightened boy's grasp and tore it open. A shaft of afternoon sunlight illuminated a bluish container, shaped like a perfume vessel, though three or four times larger. As if focusing, the sun ray narrowed its beam upon a finely wrought figure embossed on the glass. It was the monks' turn to pale.

  For a moment or two, they were speechless, and there was much trembling of skullcap and rosary. “'Tis him,” one managed to whisper. “Him,” repeated another, somewhat louder. “The incense shop and him,” said a third. “'Tis what we thought all along. They are allied with Lucifer!”

  The monk who was holding the dreadful object raised it, cocking his arm as if to dash it against the cobblestones, but, lo and behold, the bottle squirmed free from his fingers and floated away, flying under its own power—or so it seemed to the terrified monks—about five feet above the street. Slowly it bobbed down the block, rounded a corner, and disappeared. Only then, crossing themselves so furiously that it was a wonder no wrists were sprained, only then did the monks become fully aware of the vulgar aroma—naturally, they assumed it was sulfur or brimstone—that the bottle left in its wake.

  Entering the shop from the rear (a familiar route for a Gre
ek), Pan fetched the bottle up to the sitting room, where Kudra admired it at length. Normally, Alobar would have been too concerned about the monks to pay much attention to an oversize perfume bottle, but preparations for the dematerialization attempt had so tranquillized him that he brushed aside all thought of events in the street, concentrating, instead, on the pale fruit of the glassblower's rod.

  “How exactly the fellow copied your design!”

  “Yes,” said Kudra, “isn't it splendid? Pan, it is you on the side. What think you?”

  Pan rarely replied to direct questions, but in this instance he did stampede a flock of little sighs, hairy and wistful: full udders and quick feet running over a cliff.

  “The rendering flatters you, I daresay,” joked Alobar to Pan. Then, to Kudra he said, “It is a marvelous container for a potentially marvelous liquid, but, alas, it is all academic now. We still haven't the what-you-call-it, base note, and, besides, if the three of us can rematerialize ourselves in the New World, Pan shall not require a cover for his stink.”

  “Oh, I would not be so sure of that. He might find a cover handy even in a wild and distant land. And should he need it not, well, still I want that base note, I want that perfume, I want this bottle filled with its intended contents. I want it for you and me, now, as much as for Pan.”

  “But, why?”

  Slowly, Kudra turned the bottle in her hands. Then, she sat it on the floor between them. It was about six inches tall, square-bottomed but rounded at the shoulders, with a short, flared neck tightly fitted with a glass stopper. There was a ridge down each side of the body, seams left by the wooden mold in which it was formed. The neck, lip, and stopper were seamless, having been formed by hand and added after the blowing. On the bottom of the bottle was a scar not unlike an umbilicus, where an iron pontil rod had held the hot, freshly blown bottle while its neck was being shaped. The cute little pontil scar measured one cubic centimeter, the same, on the average, as the human navel that it resembled. (A Harley-Davidson motorcycle with a 1000cc engine has room in its chamber for a thousand belly buttons, a piece of information that may or may not interest the Hell's Angels.) The bottle glass was clear but had a bluish tinge because of impurities, and it contained the odd bubble, ripple, and tiny bit of stone. One side of the body was embossed with an oval “frame,” within whose boundaries there was an image of none other than Mr. Goat Foot himself, in a jaunty stance, his horns freely displayed, his reeds pressed to his leer, a garland of weeds encircling his bushy brow.