Jitterbug Perfume

by Tom Robbins

  Alobar did not dream at all. He was as awake as the guards on the cell block. More awake, actually, for the guards dozed over their detective magazines, dreamily musing about the long Thanksgiving weekend that was approaching, while Alobar was kept fully conscious by the smell of his body aging.

  Yes, he could smell it. During the first year of his sentence, he hadn't aged a notch. His body was still running on the impetus of a millennium of immortalist practices. With the exception of breathing techniques, he was unable to continue those practices in prison, however, and one day it dawned on his cellular bankers that the immunity accounts were overdrawn and there hadn't been a deposit in fifteen months. The DNA demanded an audit. It was learned that Alobar's figures were juggled. He had successfully embezzled more than nine hundred years.

  Outraged, the DNA must have petitioned for compensation, because within a week, Alobar's salt-and-pepper hair had turned into a pillar of sodium. Wrinkle troops hit the beaches under his eyes, dug trenches, and immediately radioed for reinforcements. Someone was mixing cement in his joints.

  Now, in his third year behind bars, he could smell, taste, and hear the accelerated aging going on inside him. It smelled like mothballs. It tasted like stale chip dip. It sounded like Lawrence Welk.

  That very morning, Doc Palmer (five-to-ten for Medicare fraud) had said to him, “Al, you looked your age when you got to Concord.” (In prison records, “Albert Barr” was listed as forty-six years old.) “Now, I swear you're looking twice that much. You want a slip for the infirmary, let us have a look?”

  “No, I'm okay.”

  “But your skin . . .”

  “Must have been something I ate.”

  Doc Palmer shook his head. “If you say so, Albert.”

  Alobar smiled. He enjoyed being called “Albert.” It reminded him of all the nights he spent cleaning up after Einstein.

  Looking back, it was amazing how few male friends he had had in his lifetime. Some men make more friends in a day than Alobar had made in a thousand years. There was Pan, of course, if one could describe their odd association as friendship. There had been the shaman, but they'd met only once. Fosco, the Tibetan artist, might be included, although Fosco had been often withdrawn and enigmatic, and as for Wiggs Dannyboy, well, he just wasn't sure about Dannyboy. Albert Einstein, on the other hand, was a pal.

  Sort of a pal. They never went bowling together or guzzled beer in a bar, but Einstein had lent him money, as a true friend will do, and they'd had some wonderful talks. If you and another guy know things about each other that nobody else knows, and you keep those things confidential, then you and the guy must be pals.

  Only a month or two before, while leafing through a magazine in the day room, Alobar had chanced upon an article that began, “When Albert Einstein died in Princeton Hospital at 1:15 on the morning of April 18, 1955, having mumbled his last words in German to a night nurse who knew no German . . .” He couldn't help but laugh. The magazine implied that Einstein's last words were tragically lost to history. Alobar conceded that such might be the case. But he knew what Einstein's last words were.

  Did they imagine that the dying Einstein suddenly pulled himself up in bed and uttered, “E equals MC cubed"?

  Did they think that he had mumbled, “Der perfekt Tako"?

  On numerous occasions during the past three centuries, Alobar had come to the brink of suicide, driven there not by despair, or even boredom, but by the longing for reunion with Kudra and the wish to prove incorrect her accusation that longevity for longevity's sake was for him a limiting obsession. To some degree, Kudra's charge must have been accurate, because he never lowered the shade. He would decide that he was finally ready to die, or, at least, to dematerialize, for he had no intention of leaving his dear body behind to be poked at by policemen and lied over by priests, but always something would come up at the last minute to change his mind.

  Alobar was fairly certain that he could manage a dematerialization. He was uncertain that he could rematerialize. Since Kudra had failed to reappear, he supposed that it must be impossible. His ego prevented him, except in rare moments of self-doubt, from believing that Kudra had remained on the Other Side by choice.

  In any case, Alobar would decide to board the spook express at last, and he'd dust off his antique lab equipment in order to whip up some K23. He had to be reeking of the perfume when he reached the Other Side, he reasoned, to insure that Kudra would recognize him. So, he'd proceed to assemble the ingredients, which was not quite as easy as making cherry pie, since citron was scarce, quality jasmine oil scarcer, and beet pollen scarcer yet (it was available only a few weeks out of the year, and then in widely scattered locations). Invariably, before he had his aromatics together, he'd find a reason to postpone the journey.

  That was exactly what had happened the last time, back in 1953. It was the Eisenhower Years and things were slow. The Eisenhower Years were so slow that if they fell off a cliff they'd only be going ten miles an hour. The Eisenhower Years were a slow boat to Abilene, and it looked as if it would be many a crewcut moon before America turned lively again.

  For nearly half a century, Alobar had owned and operated a spa outside Livingston, Montana. This enterprise afforded him daily access to mineral springs. Hot baths, remember, are part of the immortalist process. In rural Montana, he also was convenient to the disintegrated spirit of Pan, which roamed the Wild West in the company of the disintegrated spirit of Coyote. Occasionally, Pan and Coyote would blow by (for they were like the winds), stirring things up (for Coyote was an agent of mischief) and causing spa guests to clamp towels against their faces (for Pan still stank to the stars).

  It had been quite a while since Pan had come to call, however. If the Eisenhower Years bored Alobar, imagine what they did to Pan. If anything could finish Pan off, it was the vibration of all those self-righteous Eisenhower puritans shuffling canasta decks and defense contracts. This was no time for the strong of heart. If Alobar was ever going to take the step, if he was ever going to kick the longevity habit and rejoin his beloved Kudra (or Wren, or Kudra and Wren: who knew how heavenly the Other Side might really be?), 1953 was opportune.

  Moreover, while he had arrived in Montana with his hair dyed ebony, gradually allowing it, over the decades, to return to its natural salt-and-pepper (he had learned a few tricks in his millennium), fifty whole years had passed, and curiosity was rising among neighboring ranchers. The same old problem alas, that back around 1031 had ejected him from Constantinople just ahead of a mob. It was time to move along.

  So, Alobar sent away to New York for citron and jasmine, and, from inquiries, pinpointed where Minnesota beet fields would be ripening in a matter of weeks. He had never actually concocted a single drop of K23 since the original batch, but he was confident that he could reproduce it.

  Ah, but then, a fortnight before he was to set off for Minnesota to procure the beet pollen, an outhouse copy of Reader's Digest called his attention to the news that geneticists at Princeton University seemed to be on the verge of discoveries that could more than double human life span. Toward the end of the article one of the scientists was quoted as saying that if the experiments panned out, he imagined that the White House would assume direct control, assuring America's leaders primary access. Federal grants, after all, were funding much of the research.

  Small wonder that Alobar was alarmed. Consider the prospect of Ike, John Foster Dulles, and Dick Nixon indefinitely preserved. Consider the prospect of the Eisenhower Years going on forever.

  Such frightening thoughts might have been by themselves enough to motivate him. However, it was the promise that he had made to Lalo the nymph nine hundred years earlier that caused Alobar to cancel his trip to the beet fields, sell his spa, desert his current mistress, and head for Princeton to become Einstein's janitor.

  “Someday,” Lalo had said, “there wilt be men who seek to defeat death by intelligence alone.” She warned that huge evil would result if those men should attain im
mortality, or rather, “false immortality,” since true immortality requires advancement of heart and soul as well as mind.

  Were the Princeton geneticists the false immortalists of whom Lalo had prophesied? To find out, Alobar wrangled a job as assistant custodian at the Institute for Advanced Study, where the geneticists had their offices and lab. Assigned originally to boiler room duties, Alobar had to bribe the chief custodian to be allowed to clean the wing in which the geneticists worked. Upon finding documents that proved White House and Pentagon interest in the experiments, Alobar began to throw monkey wrenches at the delicate machinery. He flicked drops of dirty mop water into culture dishes, waxed the guinea pig's protein pellets, unplugged incubators, and altered figures on charts. Once he fed a prize long-lived white rat one of Einstein's cigar butts. The rat was kaput by morning.

  Professor Einstein's office was down the hall from the genetics area. It was a mess. And not just a common two-plus-two-equals-four mess. Einstein's office was a genius equation mess. (A disarray in which Priscilla might have felt at home.)

  Books, reports, binders, sheaves, scrolls, periodicals, letters, and uncashed checks were piled, layers deep, all over the floor and furniture, making it virtually impossible to sweep or dust. It was especially frustrating because the place sorely needed a sweeping. In amongst the piles of paper were strewn orange peels, banana skins, Dixie cups, chalk sticks, pencil nubs, sweater lint, violin strings, and drifts of cigar ash (the snows of El Producto). To make matters worse, Einstein himself was usually in the office until well past midnight, and should so much as a sheet of paper be disturbed, he became agitated.

  Alobar began postponing the cleaning of Einstein's office to the very end of his shift, but still the professor was there, 2:00 A.M., slumped in his chair, looking like a musical teddy bear with its springs and stuffing flying out. By and by, Einstein confessed that he waited for Alobar so that the two of them might talk. His wife mothered him, he complained, and denied him his cigars. Mrs. Einstein thought that a pipe was more dignified. Her favorite topic of conversation was bowel productivity.

  They had some fine discussions, Alobar and Einstein. The special theory of relativity, the general theory of relativity, the unified field theory, they were what Einstein was famous for, but they were not his best work, he said. Einstein told Alobar that he had thought of many more wonderful things than relativity, but he wasn't going to let “der kats out of der bag” because he didn't trust politicians to put his ideas to moral uses.

  Upon hearing some of the unpublished theories, Alobar agreed that they were wonderful, if difficult, and had best be saved for a more enlightened age. Made bold by Einstein's revelations, the janitor told the professor some secrets of his own.

  Whether Einstein actually believed the janitor's stories is questionable, but he relished them. He was fascinated by Alobar's views on life and death. His depression was relieved by Alobar's cheerful nature and strongly regal bearing. When Alobar disclosed, cheerfully, that his financial nose was in the mud, Einstein dropped to his knees, rummaged in his papers until he found a royalty check from The Physical Review, and promptly endorsed it to his late-night friend.

  The reason Alobar was short of cash was because he was being blackmailed. The chief custodian, suspicious of the new janitor from the onset, eventually had caught him tampering with experiments in the genetics lab. Soon he had extorted from him every penny of the proceeds from the spa sale and was demanding the bulk of his salary. It was expensive business, keeping a promise to a nymph.

  That the longevity experiments at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study were terminated in 1956 probably was due as much to faulty procedures on the part of the geneticists as to Alobar's sabotage. In trying to increase human life span by building virus-resistant cells in rodents and dogs, the scientists were barking up the wrong chromosome. In any event, by the time the custodian turned in Alobar to the police, nobody cared very much about the experiments. Alobar was questioned and released. He lost his job, of course. It was just as well. His buddy was dead.

  Einstein's office was now a museum. It was very clean and very tidy. There was a rack of pipes on his desk.

  Alobar hadn't been allowed to visit Albert in the hospital. He was hanging around the waiting room, however, when word came that the professor had refused surgery for the rupturing aorta that was wiping his personal equation off the blackboard of life. “It is tasteless to prolong life artificially,” Einstein had told his physicians.

  Alobar's reaction was summed up ten years later by a British fashion designer named Mary Quant, who, in a different context, announced, “Good taste is death. Vulgarity is life.”

  Saddened by Albert's decision, disappointed that his own philosophy had had no stronger influence upon his friend, Alobar returned to the institute to mop and mope. The following week, after the funeral (which Alobar, on principle, refused to attend), he heard a local radio interview in which the nurse who had ministered to Einstein on his deathbed attempted to re-create the German that the patient had mumbled with his last breath.

  Alobar seized his broom and danced it around the boiler room. His laughter echoed through the heat ducts of the Institute for Advanced Study. No wonder they didn't understand Einstein's last words! Einstein's last words weren't in German at all. Einstein's last words were in the language of an obscure and long-lost Bohemian tribe, and had been taught to him by Alobar.

  Einstein's last words were, “Erleichda, erleichda.”

  Memories of Einstein, and of his own first (but, alas, not last) exploits as a science saboteur, distracted the prisoner “Albert Barr,” permitting him to escape momentarily from the two cells in which he was locked; the chamber of steel, cold and indestructible; the chamber of flesh, feverish and deteriorating.

  The instant the reminiscence faded, the symptoms of deterioration took over, grabbing the limelight like an insecure celebrity, drowning out, with Welkian schmaltz, the shy snores of embezzlers, the out-of-sync rasps of homicidal maniacs, the nocturnal whimpers of lifelong bullyboys. The noise of aging came from deep inside him, and although it was relatively soft, it had an urgency that the distant country/western of the guards' radio did not.

  More disturbing was the odor. What chemical evil could be working in his tissues to cause them to smell like the bottom drawer in a maiden aunt's dresser?

  At that moment, Alobar became aware of a new symptom. His ears had started to burn. Of itself, it wasn't a ruinous sensation, and he recalled the folk wisdom that attributed ear heat to gossip. If your ears burned, it meant that someone was talking about you. That would be okay, Alobar thought, especially if it were the parole board. But at this saw-log hour of the morning, who on Earth could possibly be talking about him?

  Who, indeed?

  “A thousand years old,” said Priscilla. “No-oo! He was feeding you a whopper.”

  “Your man here is a scientist,” said Wiggs. “I am trained in skepticism. I'm not the chap to be swallowin' whoppers.”

  “Ha! I've heard from informed sources that you believe in fairies.”

  Wiggs reddened slightly. “'Tis an entirely different matter,” he said.

  “Maybe not.”

  “Myths explain the world.” He cleared his throat in a pedagogic manner. “Both the psychic and physical world. The world past, present, and future. When your ancient Celts spoke o' fairies, they were describin' the photon. Not the unintelligent pulse o' light that is the basis, the creator, o' all matter, but the pulse o' light charged with consciousness, the new photon that is evolvin' out o' matter. Faith, don't be gettin' me started on quantum physics and the wisdom o' the Irish. Alobar, for all his age, was no bloody fairy.”

  “You know, your brogue is getting worse by the minute.”

  “'Tis the drinkin'. And I shouldn't be drinkin'. Alcohol runs counter to me immortalist aspirations.”

  Priscilla looked at her own glass of spirits. She thought of Ricki, waiting—perhaps worrying—at her apartment. “I
shouldn't have anymore, either. Here, I'm gonna go in the kitchen and get us some ice water.”

  “Arraugh!” Wiggs grabbed his collar as if he were strangling. “Water?” He rolled off the couch, still clutching his throat. “Water! Of all the liquids on Earth, the only one chosen for scrubbin' and flushin'. The liquid they rinse the baby's nappies in, the fluid that floods the gutters o' this cloud-squeezer town; a single drop o' water discolors a glass of Irish, and you, false friend, are wantin' me to pour this abrasive substance into me defenseless body!”

  Priscilla giggled, which delighted him. His heart thought it was an electric toaster, set for “tan.” In her heart, the yeast was rising.

  “Okay, okay, no water. What can I get you to replace the booze?”

  Dr. Dannyboy straightened his tie and his eye patch, and reoccupied his seat on the sofa. The only illumination in the room was from the fireplace. It lent a cheerful glint to the cannibal cutlery above the mantel. “Another nice wet kiss would be fillin' the bill,” he said quietly.

  Pushing aside anxiety about Ricki and curiosity about beets, she slid into his arms.

  Across the continent, near Boston, in a cell inside Concord State Prison, Alobar's ears abruptly ceased burning.

  “Ahh, I do love zippers. Zippers remind me o' crocodiles, lobsters, and Aztec serpents. I wish me tweeds had more than the single fly. . . . Zippers are primal and modern at the very same time. On the one hand, your zipper is primitive and reptilian, on the other, mechanical and slick. A zipper is where the Industrial Revolution meets the Cobra Cult, don't you think? Ahh. Little alligators of ecstasy, that's what zippers are. Sexy, too. Now your button, a button is prim and persnickety. There's somethin' Victorian about a row o' buttons. But a zipper, why a zipper is the very snake at the gate of Eden, waitin' to escort a true believer into the Garden. Faith, I should be sewin' more zippers into me garments, for I have many erogenous zones that require speedy access. Mmm, old zipper creeper, hanging head down like the carcass of a lizard; the phantom viper that we shun in daytime and communicate with at night.”