Jitterbug Perfume

by Tom Robbins

  The bottle was between them, and Kudra spoke over the top of it. “Suppose, just suppose, that we should become separated in our—our journeys into the Other Side. If we were marked by a unique scent, a fragrance all our own, we could always identify each other, even if the light was not clear, even if our vision was clouded or our shapes physically altered; we could find each other no matter if we were lost in the rooms of Death.”

  That kind of talk was a bit spooky for Alobar's taste. He suggested that they get on with the experiment while he was still in the mood. So they shut their eyes again and reset their breaths upon a circular track. Kudra's plan was that they should slow themselves down until their “humors” buzzed at a rate below that of the visible world, then merge with the vibrations and broadcast themselves through a crack. Which crack? Why, the crack at the top of the Indian rope trick. Okay. Alobar would give it a whirl. After all, his goal always had been to be complete, and were he restricted to occupancy of this one world, as round and fully packed as it might be, he supposed he could not claim completion. He was as nervous as a praying mantis at an atheists' picnic, but he bore down gently, intensifying his concentration, letting go of his attachment to gravity, applying the brakes to his bodily functions. Just before he abandoned himself to the process, however, he heard Kudra whisper, “The bottle must be filled.”

  From corner to corner, silence webbed the room. Gradually, there commenced a ringing in Alobar's ears. The sound was produced, no doubt, by his central nervous system, though he imagined it the ringing of the spheres. Stars, in fact, had begun to colonize the darkness behind his lids. At first they were as faint and icy as the pimples on an albino's backside, but they grew in brilliance and size until a sewing basket of flaming buttons spilled on his head, and the Great Bear raked him with her sidereal paws.

  Motionless, he sat inside himself as if in a planetarium. Neither a twitch nor a flicker, a pulse nor a discernible breath marred his smooth facade. His heart slowed until it seemed to have frozen in its burrow. His lungs were as immobile as sponges. The wheel rolled to a stop, and bubbles of oxygen slid off of it to skitter upon the surface of his stagnant blood like waterbugs attending to some dizzy business. He tingled, he sparked, and he rang. He felt light and loose and large. The more static his functions became, the more he seemed to expand, as if he had entered a state where there was progress without duration, advance without movement.

  He was becoming unstuck, he was sure of that—his bones were no longer wrapped in flesh but in clouds of dust, in hummingbirds, dragonflies, and luminous moths—but so perfect was his equilibrium that he felt no fear. He was vast, he was many, he was dynamic, he was eternal.

  Then, suddenly, he was falling, not downward but outward, beyond the horizon—as if the earth had an edge after all. And with that thought, his life started to unreel before him. He saw himself as a babe, gnawing at the nipple of his great golden mother; as a child, rolling in pine needles; as a youth, swimming rivers. He witnessed himself in battle after battle, smoke winding 'round his helmet, his right sleeve stiff with gore. He occupied the throne, skinned a fox, drained a mead goblet, spread the yellow short-hairs of Alma, Ruba, and Frol. There, over the watchtower, was the winter moon in its ermine snood; here, in the harem mirror, was his good old beard, unsullied by silver; yonder was Noog sawing a chicken in half; here stood Wren, advice forming in her mouth like spittle; and—oh joy!—up bounded the huge hound, Mik, jowls a-drool and tail a-wag. Alobar embraced the dog and buried his face in its coat, only to be knocked back by an overpowering odor.

  Upon first contact, the smell was acrid and offensive, but by the second or third whiff it was acceptable enough, and by the fourth or fifth, downright agreeable. A shock of olfactory recognition reverberated in Alobar, and he said to himself—his light, loose, large, and falling self—"Ah, 'tis late in summer and the dogs have been in the crops.”

  The pageantry of his life continued to flash by, but he clung to the brief encounter with Mik, galvanized, somehow, by the familiar smell. And then it hit him. “That is it!” he cried. “That is it!” So deep was he in “his” time, so removed from exterior time, that he made no sound in the room, but he cried “Methinks I have found it!” with force enough that the breath wheel was jarred into motion again, a wild thump rattled his heart, and all at once his trajectory reversed itself and he came flying back, shedding stars like dandruff, gaining weight, contracting, shrinking, until he tumbled back over the edge into the shallow bowl of our reality, his plasma sluggish in the pump, his eyes pasted shut with some atomic glue, but voice finally audible in the little sitting room: “Kudra! I have got it.”

  A beet, by and large, has little odor; its leaves, stalk, and famous red root are, to the nose, equally, relatively bland. Around August, however, when the plants go to seed, a pungent and singular aroma rises from them, like a gaseous wrench that gives the surrounding atmosphere a sharp turn to the left, twisting it into strange new configurations. When dogs run through August beet fields, the pollen dusts their coats, and they return to their masters so strongly scented that no scour brush, however vigorously wielded, will leave them fit to sleep in the house. As Alobar recalled, only time—days of it—would relieve the dogs of their odd olfactory burden, “odd” because once the nose was past the initial shock of it, it was not unpleasant; yet, unless substantially diluted, its pleasure was difficult to endure.

  If the waft that streams from a freshly opened hive is intimate to the point of embarrassment (ask any sensitive beekeeper), so it is with beet pollen. There is something personal about it, and something primeval. If there is a comparable odor, it is, indeed, the moldly inner sanctum of some fermenting, bursting hive; but beet pollen is honey squared, royal jelly cubed, nectar raised to the nth power; the intensified secretions of the Earth's apiarian gland, reeking of ancient bridal chambers and intimacies half as old as time.

  However, on Nature's cluttered dressing table, there is no scent to truly match it, not hashish, not ambergris, not decaying honey itself. Beet pollen, in its fascinating ambivalence, is the aroma of paradox, of yang and yin commingled, of life and death combined in vegetable absolute. And Alobar intuited that it was the missing link in the evolution of the perfect perfume. “Beet is our base note,” he said. “Why did I not think of it before?”

  Maybe he was right. Beet pollen had the muscle, the stamina, the tenacity to both establish the jasmine and to stand up to its detractors. Like that rarity, the wise husband, it was strong enough to possess its mate, secure enough to allow her freedom. If Pan's musk was the dark and convulsive essence of animal behavior, then beet's musk was its floral counterbalance, the olfactory interface where the fuck of beast and the pollenization of plant became roughly equivalent. “Kudra, methinks I have found it!

  “Kudra.

  “Kudra?”

  With effort, Alobar forced his lids apart. The light was piercing, but the pain passed quickly. He squinted, striving to focus. Slowly, the walls came into relief and, in turn, the fireplace, curtains, furniture, and empty bottle at his stockinged feet. Kudra, alas, was not to be seen. He blinked furiously and rubbed his eyes with his fists. His vision was back to normal. That wasn't the problem. The sun was setting, but the room was still adequately lit. That wasn't the problem. Kudra was gone.

  Life is too small a container for certain individuals. Some of them, such as Alobar, huff and puff and try to expand the container. Others, such as Kudra, seek to pry the lid off and hop out.

  “Both of thee wert going,” said Pan from his post in the corner. “Thou stopped and came back. She went.”

  Naturally, Alobar was tempted to restart the experiment, to try to join her—wherever she might be. Upon reflection, however, he submitted to his truer nature and elected to wait for her return.

  As darkness fell, he lit candle after candle in the sitting room, indifferent to what the monks might think of the concentrated brilliance. Should any tiny part of her wink on, he didn't want to miss it. Whe
n, by midnight, not so much as a chin dimple had shown up, he experienced alternate states of panic and relief; panic that her disappearance might be permanent, relief that he had not disappeared.

  At dawn, he blew out the candles, which had come to resemble the fingers of careless mill workers, and continued the vigil by sunlight. Above Pan's cataractous snoring, he could hear carts creaking to market, birds blowing the bugs out of their pipes, and monks marching to and fro in front of the shop, but he couldn't hear a peep from the Other Side. There was simply nothing left of Kudra but a pair of empty shoes. In some kind of desperate attempt to get her attention, he set fire to the left shoe and smoked it.

  He had just blown a ring about the size of her left breast when—how embarrassing!—the gendarmes arrived. They arrested Alobar, charging him with heresy, blasphemy, satanism, and witchcraft, and confiscated the new perfume bottle as evidence.

  Breaking into the Bastille was as easy as falling off a ewe for the invisible Pan. Less than twenty-four hours after the arrest, before the whips and lashes had gotten limber, Pan had liberated Alobar, and the bottle as well, leaving nothing in their place but an awful smell.

  Immediately, they made their way to the incense shop. It was boarded up, and a heavy wooden cross was propped against the front door. Prying boards loose from a rear window, they hurried upstairs. The sitting room was just as they had left it. Kudra's right shoe lay upturned on the thin carpet, like a boat washed up on a desolate shore.

  It was barely four in the morning, but already candles were exercising their little flames, left, right, flicker, sputter, left, right, in the monastery halls across the street. Alobar knew he must get out of there, but first he bundled up as much fragrance equipment as he could carry, and left a note in Kudra's shoe telling her to look for him in the beet fields of Bohemia.

  To Alobar's mind, there were several possible reasons why Kudra hadn't rematerialized. To wit:

  (1) Once she had fallen over the edge (Alobar was assuming that her experience paralleled his own), she had just kept falling, growing lighter, looser, and larger until she became nothing—or everything—and was, therefore, in a rather grandiose way, “dead,” or, at least, irretrievable.

  (2) In the world of the nonliving, she had been reunited with her parents, with Navin the Ropemaker, and with her abandoned children, about whom she felt, Alobar knew, continued remorse. (Alobar secretly blamed himself—no seventeenth-century male would publicly admit to such a shortcoming—for Kudra's failure to conceive in their recent efforts, but, of course, the fault lay with the pennyroyal that she had ingested for over seven hundred years and which had left a contraceptive residue that would bash sperm in the head for a long time to come.) In that case, she would choose not to rematerialize for a while, if ever.

  (3) She had landed safely on the Other Side and was searching there for him. Since she had no way of knowing that his dematerialization had been aborted, perhaps she feared that he was lost.

  (4) She had landed on the Other Side and become lost there, herself. Maybe she longed to come back but couldn't find her way.

  (5) Since their practical objective in learning to dematerialize was to transport themselves across the Atlantic, it could be that Kudra had crossed directly and was waiting for Pan and him to join her in the New World.

  In the event that it was reason number one that detained her, there was nothing Alobar could do but grieve. If it was number two, he could only carry a torch, as they say, and hope that his love would eventually draw her back to him. To deal with possibility three or four might or might not require him to dematerialize, but, in either case, he instinctively felt that their long-sought perfume would be the key to their finding one another again. For that matter, if it was number five that was correct, if she had taken advantage of a free and easy passage to the New World and was counting on Pan and him following her, the perfume would also be necessary, both as a mask for goat gas and as a signal in case their seeing one another directly was prevented by natural or supernatural obstructions.

  Well, at least he could provide the perfume now. Or could he? That question—and a sack of beakers, tubes, crucibles, industrial-strength candles, citron, jasmine oil, and a five-ounce bottle with Pan on its side—weighed him down on the long trek to Bohemia.

  The beet harvest was right on schedule. Toward the tail of July, peasants were in the fields from morning until night, ripping whiskered fetuses from the planetary mud. A steady parade of oxcarts wound toward the villages, bearing baskets of smokeless coals and sacks of idol eyes. Concealed in a hillside thicket, Alobar kept one eye on the harvest, one on the road to the west, down which he expected at any moment to see an hashish-colored woman jiggling and swaying: jumping beans in aspic, a satin ship rolling in a tide of licorice sauce.

  The harvest petered out, the woman never appeared, but the Bohemian farmers, as they had done since Alobar could remember, left a few acres of beets undug so that they might complete their cycle and provide the seed for next year's crop. There was a patch of seed-beets here, a patch there, often miles apart. Alobar mapped the countryside, X-ing the fields where the treasure lay. He needn't have bothered. By mid-August, his nose could have led him blindfolded to the places where the pollen was congregating.

  In the dark of night, Alobar and Pan collected the viscous powder from the plant tops, filling beakers that they stashed in a particularly dense thicket. Twigs and branches jabbed at their eyes, briers tore Pan's flesh and Alobar's clothing, but each dawn they kicked and shoved their way into the coppice, where they added another couple of beakers to the stash and lay down to sleep in a chaos of sweating vines, mucous leaves, and maggoty logs. Mistletoe dripped an unsavory liquid on them, a living confetti of spiders and earwigs dotted them from head to heel, curds of mushrooms and scrumbles of lichen soiled them to the bone, but Pan slept as if he were to that foul manor born, and Alobar was too desperate to care. His fitful dreams were all of Kudra, and when he lay awake in the rot and tangle, he sniffed at the contrasting clouds of musk that billowed from the god and the beakers of beet pollen, noting with immense satisfaction that they nearly cancelled one another out.

  After a dozen containers had been filled, they hiked into the high hills, where smoke would not be noticed, and, while Pan lay on the humus, noodling his pipes (Alobar had fetched them in his sack, and they put the local fauna into a tizzy), Alobar constructed a crude laboratory. He boiled down the beet pollen into an extract, gray, gooey, and possessed of a basso profondo that could have brought the rafters down in the grand opera of smell.

  When all the extract had been made, Alobar shook the wood lice out of his britches, washed his face in a creek, and set out for a large town on the Russian border, where he knew a vodka master to reside. Pan was left behind to guard their equipment. Without the feeble god to slow him, Alobar reached the town in a week. There, he approached the vodka maker, who, in return for the last of Alobar's French gold pieces, agreed to distill the beet pollen extract, an operation that, to Alobar's displeasure, consumed the better part of a month.

  The job at last complete, Alobar tied a gallon jug of distillate to each end of a stout pole, rested the pole across both shoulders, and left the town at a trot. Were it not for the preciousness and weight of his cargo, he might have left at a gallop. He was anxious about Kudra, who could have returned in his absence, anxious about Pan, who could have strayed. In as much as his health would permit, Pan had cooperated in the venture to disguise his malodor and transport him to the New World, but he hardly could be rated enthusiastic. He was, in fact, so nonverbal, so distant, distracted, solitary, and, even in his invisibility, especially in his invisibility, charged with psychic shock, that nothing he might have done would really have surprised Alobar, who had little choice but to withhold trust. Stopping neither to eat nor sleep, his brain hot with imagined disasters, the man who once was a king in this land flapped through the countryside in his filthy rags, his boots falling away from his feet, his latest beard
flying in the wind like a nauseated Chinaman losing his bird's nest soup.

  Their camp proved blessedly intact, Pan present and accounted for, molesting a confused doe that he had attracted by his piping. As the poor deer sprang into the bushes, Alobar lifted the pole from his raw shoulders. “'Tis done,” he said, and lay down in the lean-to, falling immediately into a wife-infested slumber.

  Twelve hours later, he awoke and set at once to mixing the beet pollen distillate with jasmine oil and citron essence, in varying proportions. After five days of experimenting, he hit upon what seemed the ideal mixture: one part beet to twenty parts jasmine to two parts citron, a ratio that inspired him to name the scent K23. The K was for Kudra.

  Like a lobster with a pearl in its claw, the beet held the jasmine firmly without crushing or obscuring it. Beet lifted jasmine, the way a bullnecked partner lifts a ballerina, and the pair came on stage on citron's fluty cue. As if jasmine were a collection of beautiful paintings, beet hung it in the galleries of the nose, insured it against fire or theft, threw a party to celebrate it. Citron mailed the invitations.