Temporally Out of Order

by Unknown

  Philip hesitated. It could still be neurological. Maybe Mukerjee’s subconscious was only triggered when he put it on. “Well, you’ve got the nose on right now. What are you smelling?”

  Mukerjee sniffed a few times. “I think it’s a car. It smells like I’m in a car. But it’s hard to say.”

  Philip kept silent.

  Mukerjee made a condescending noise. “Look, I can see you don’t believe me. Let me prove it to you.”

  “Okay. How?”

  “Aren’t you the doctor? We’re going to be scientific about this. First, you blindfold me. Make sure I can’t see a thing. Then you’re going to take this sample nose they sent me”—he produced a rubberized prototype from a box—“and my prosthetic”—he pulled off his nose and pressed it into Philip’s hand—“and press whichever one you want to my face. They feel and smell the same, so I won’t know which one it is. Give them a sniff if you don’t believe me.”

  “No thanks,” said Philip quickly. Something about the idea of holding someone else’s nose in his hand and smelling it made his stomach twist. “I’ll take your word for it.” He shook his head skeptically. “Pass me that handkerchief.”

  He took the offered handkerchief, folded a nice, thick blindfold and looped it over Mukerjee’s head. He tested Mukerjee by flicking a finger in front of his face. No reaction.

  “Okay. Here’s the first nose. You ready?” He held the two noses, the sample and the real prosthetic, in his hands.

  Mukerjee nodded.

  Philip pressed the sample against Mukerjee’s nose-holes.

  “No smell,” said Mukerjee immediately.

  “Okay, good,” said Philip. He retracted the sample, waited a moment, then pressed the same nose back to Mukerjee’s face. “How about now?”

  “No smell.”

  “Okay, good.”

  Philip had been rubbing the other prosthetic, the real one, against his palm to warm it up. In one motion, he pulled the sample away and replaced it with the warm prosthetic, as if he had hesitated a bit in lifting the sample off.

  But Mukerjee noticed immediately. His face changed and he said, “It’s not a car anymore. I smell the supermarket. The freezer section, where they keep tubs of ice cream. It smells cold … like raw chicken. Like freezer burn. I think this is the Albertsons on Woodrow Avenue.”

  Philip pulled the nose away, his mind reeling. What in the world?

  Mukerjee reached up and removed the blindfold. He knew he had proven his point.

  Philip let his arm fall into his lap. “I don’t know what to say, Mr. Mukerjee. I’ve never seen one of our prosthetics malfunction like this.”

  “You still think I’m fooling you somehow.”

  “No, it’s not that. If you like, I can call the hospital, have them recommend a specialist.”

  Mukerjee stared at him for a full five seconds. His expression grew strangely mournful. “Ah, don’t worry about it,” he said finally, “I don’t want a specialist.” He pushed himself up off the sofa, stooping to retrieve Philip’s untouched cup of tea. “Better not drink this. I’ve botched it, I think. It’s been a few years since I brewed a cup on my own.”

  As Mukerjee tottered away to the kitchen, Philip sat thinking. He vaguely remembered reading that Mukerjee’s wife had died in the car accident that landed him in the hospital, and felt a surge of pity for the guy. It must be tough. He didn’t remember seeing anyone on Mukerjee’s visitor log at the hospital either.

  Mukerjee reentered the room, but did not sit. He extended a hand to Philip, and they shook. “Well, I feel silly,” Mukerjee said. “I don’t know what I was expecting you to do. Of course it’s not a problem you can fix.” He took the prosthetic and pocketed it. “I’ll put it on with the glue and everything later. Thank you for coming out here.”

  “You’re very welcome,” said Philip, standing to leave. Mukerjee ushered him down the hall, moving slowly. On the way out, Philip noticed a couple of interesting photos and knick-knacks scattered around the mantel and the living room. He imagined living in this house alone, mourning a dead wife. It was unfortunate that elderly people ended up in situations like these.

  Adjacent to the door stood a small wooden table, an ornate little place to drop keys and mail. On it stood a pair of grotesque Indian dolls. The male figure wore a tiny turban, made of colored silks, and the female wore a baglike dress made of what looked like red napkins. A tiny golden ring glittered in her nose. It made Philip suddenly sad.

  “You know,” said Philip, as he slipped into his shoes. “It can’t hurt if I come back in two weeks to check in on the problem. Maybe you could start keeping a diary of the smells. We could go over the entries together. I’ll come here and we can do it in the sitting room. Just make sure to write down all the relevant information: time, place, description of the smell. You know what I mean?”

  Philip stepped out the door. He turned to shake Mukerjee’s hand again, and was surprised to see that Mukerjee had not moved. He was loitering back near the table with the dolls. His nose-holes glared like a skull’s.

  Then Mukerjee twitched and wiped a self-conscious hand on his shirt. “No … no, that won’t be necessary. I’ll be fine on my own.” His voice hid a tremble of emotion as he moved to close the door. “Thank you for offering, though.”

  oOo

  8 a.m., wrote Walter Mukerjee, pressing the nib of his pen into the notebook. Coffee smell. Folgers?

  He put the pen down and sniffed the air again. It was a rich, wafting kind of smell, the kind of fragrance that pierces through to your sleeping brain in an instant. He glanced out the window. The sky outside was gray, and dewdrops collected on the freezing windowpanes. An instant ago he would have called it gloomy. But the coffee smell, so tangible and … real, made the fog almost comforting. It was so strange. When he’d first smelled it, he’d actually gone down to the kitchen to check if the coffeemaker had started up on its own. It hadn’t.

  He inhaled deeply, leaned back in his chair, and closed his eyes. Was that the smell of buttered toast?

  God, there really is something wrong with me, he thought.

  8:15 a.m. Buttered toast, he wrote.

  He sat like that, alone, for the next several hours, identifying and transcribing smells. He had always had quite a sensitive nose. It was why he and Ana had eventually settled on things like her taking out the trash every Tuesday, despite the fact that it was supposed to be the husband’s job. His mother would have given him hell for it. And they had gotten into more than a few fights when Ana had left something too long in the fridge and couldn’t smell it rotting.

  He shook his head, trying to clear the heavy ache in his chest. He missed her. He wished he could just turn and see her, reading, or bustling about the living room like she used to. The emptiness in the house now was like slow agony. He wished he could tell her how sorry he was, for picking stupid fights. His biggest regret was saying no to adopting a child after their son Pradesh had come out stillborn and the doctor said it was probably best for her not to try again.

  Sometimes he thought he even smelled her in the house still, that curious mixture of lemon and cumin that was uniquely her. Or he caught a whiff of her shampoo, the kind that smelled like apples.

  But he was getting distracted. Already a couple of strange smells had gone by unidentified. He bent over the notebook again.

  By afternoon, the first page was full. Shoe leather, it read. Cleaning solution. Trees. The smell of wind off cold water. Grocery store. Chinese restaurant.

  At around 4 p.m., he decided to test something. He went to the kitchen, opened the fridge, and unwrapped a block of orange cheddar. He took a deep sniff.

  Nothing. No smell at all. Instead, he smelled fresh, outdoor air with a hint of automobile exhaust.

  He reached up and peeled his nose off. He tried the cheese again. This time, the sharpness of the cheddar almost made his eyes water. Interesting.

  The rest of the evening went by in this way. He’d sit in the study wi
th nose on, pen at the ready, and daydream about Ana and the accident until a new smell hit him. He’d record the time and smell, put the pen back down, and repeat the process.

  Walter smelled bedsheets and tepid air around 8:30, when he usually went to bed. He closed the notebook, deciding that it was as good a time as any to call it a night. He had not spoken to a single person or gone outside all day.

  A smell hit him, so intense and familiar that his chest tightened instantly. He froze, half in his chair and half out, not wanting to move lest the smell disappear. He took long, careful breaths, savoring each note like a relapsed smoker. A horrible, warm, sweet feeling welled up inside him, spreading from the pit of his stomach out into his arms and fingers and toes.

  The smell was of lemons and cumin, with the slightest hint of clean sweat and warm cloth. It smelled like laundry, like chai tea, like mint mouthwash, like Pantene conditioner. It smelled like comfort and stability, like fullness and life. There was even the slightest hint of incense, the exact flavor of which had been imprinted on his brain since the day he married her, forty long years ago.

  He sat back in his chair. He opened the notebook.

  9:00 p.m., he wrote. Ana.

  oOo

  By the third day, it was clear to Walter that the smells coming to him had a certain logic to them. He always smelled the ignition lighter on the stovetop before smelling food. He always smelled the outdoors before the characteristic smell of his car.

  By the fourth day, he had figured it out. He was smelling the smells of someone else’s life. A person who woke up to Ana’s brewed coffee in the mornings, had toast and butter, went to the park and the grocery store with her, cooked curries with garlic and turmeric and coriander in the evenings, sat on the couch with her, and got into bed with her at night. All these places had their own specific smells, which were as clear and distinct to him as the colors of the rainbow.

  His nose, he realized with slow amazement, was living a life where the accident had never happened.

  A life where Ana was still alive.

  And what a world it was. He could smell her all the time now, pick out her indistinct scent from a bouquet of other odors. She was always there, her fragrance an undercurrent. And the more he tried, the more he paid attention, the more information he could pick out of this secret timeline, this universe he could access only through his nose.

  Sometimes, if he closed his eyes and concentrated, he convinced himself that he could hear Ana’s humming, hear the mechanical click as she switched on the water boiler or the honk of the spray bottle as she misted her plants. But then he’d open his eyes, and it would be clear that he was only imagining the sounds. Smell was all he had. And he’d see the empty house around him, feel a sinking in his belly, and retreat beneath the covers again. In his smells, he was somewhere else—in a taxi; in a library, the books musty and brown around the edges; at a pizza restaurant, a drugstore, a parking garage, a doctor’s office. One morning he smelled the distinct smell of frying grease and cotton candy; he was confused until he went to the computer and found that there was some kind of arts festival going on.

  He’d crawled back into bed, closed his eyes, and went to the festival with Ana.

  It was really possible that she was alive somewhere, he thought. Somewhere out there. In the blackness of time. It all sounded very science fiction-y, but the proof was right here, wasn’t it? Right under his nose. He thought back to the accident, how after that truck had plowed into them he had lost consciousness and woken up two weeks later in the hospital. A doctor had told him the horrible news then, that Ana hadn’t made it. He imagined that in this alternate timeline he had woken up to Ana beside him, leaning over to wipe his forehead with a warm, wet cloth. It was possible. He could almost feel it.

  Maybe the road of reality had forked there, at the time of the accident, and in one of the forks Ana lived and in the other she died. Maybe the quantum nose that they had made him was somehow accessing this other timeline.

  The only problem now was that Walter was stuck in the wrong one. The wrong world, the wrong universe, the wrong fork. He didn’t want to be here. He wanted to be there.

  He wanted to talk to someone about it, explain his theory to them. He tried calling up the manufacturer of his prosthetic, a company called Nasex. He got an answering machine. He tried again on two other occasions, with the same result. He tried at Philip Jackson’s company, but the frustrated receptionist said something about a corporate merger and not knowing Philip’s new extension. After a while, he gave up. He was too tired to summon the energy anyway.

  oOo

  Walter pulled himself out of bed. The clock read 1:26p.m. What day was it? It was afternoon, but he still felt tired. How long had he slept? Last night Ana had made a delicious fish curry, and Walter had enjoyed the smells of hot jasmine rice and red wine and something else that smelled a little like fireworks. They’d gone to bed late, past midnight. He wondered what the occasion was.

  He limped to the bathroom sink, his bones hurting. He washed his face in front of the mirror. He toweled himself off and looked at himself for what was probably the first time in a week.

  He was shocked. Where his face had been pudgy before, round and healthy, he was thin, with grayish, sunken cheeks. His bones hurt, and he felt weak. All he wanted to do was curl up back in bed.

  He hobbled into the kitchen. When was the last time he had eaten? He couldn’t remember. He smelled foods all the time, but had he actually eaten real food in the last few days? His mind seemed foggy.

  He opened the fridge, gazed at its bare contents, and selected a shrunken apple out of pure fatigue. He sat down at the dining table and took a small bite of skin. He chewed and swallowed. He took another.

  Pointless. What good did it do him to sit here alone at his dining table eating a shriveled apple? Nobody cared. Nobody even noticed him in this reality; his existence went utterly unacknowledged. Nobody cared if he lived or died. A wave of sour hopelessness bubbled up from somewhere, and he set the apple down. He rested his forehead on the table, his stomach convulsing with hunger.

  He was still there four hours later, sleeping with his cheek against the table, when the doorbell rang.

  oOo

  “Come on, old man,” murmured Philip Jackson, standing outside Mukerjee’s door. “Answer.”

  He heard movement inside the house, faint and ponderous. Then the door cracked open.

  “I’ve been calling you all morning,” said Philip. “Did—Holy hell, what happened to you?”

  The man who opened the door was recognizably Mukerjee, but shrunken. He looked almost skeletal: cavernous eyes, yellowed cheeks, messy thin hair.

  “Left my phone somewhere,” mumbled Mukerjee, leaving the door open for Philip. He led him into the kitchen. “Want tea?” Mukerjee slumped into a chair, as if he had used up all his energy just walking to the door.

  “Thanks, I’m good. But hey, listen. Are you feeling alright? You look a little …” Philip trailed off.

  No response from Mukerjee. Not even a twitch. His head lolled sideways.

  Philip felt his heart jump. Holy crap, he’s dead, he thought. He grabbed Mukerjee’s wrist and was relieved when he felt the old man’s pulse thudding weakly against his fingers. His mind raced. He had to call someone. A doctor. An ambulance.

  He had just whipped out his cell phone to dial 911 when Mukerjee grimaced, pulled his arm away, and muttered something.

  Philip’s thumb hovered over the number 9. “What did you say?”

  This time the word was audible. “Hungry.”

  oOo

  Walter was dreaming of food. Ana must be cooking something delicious. It smelled like … eggs. Scrambled eggs. And ketchup. That was strange. Ana hated ketchup.

  He was sprawled face-down on the kitchen table. He breathed in, savoring the smell. Oh, Ana. He shifted in his chair.

  His foot trod on something squishy.

  He cracked an eye open and looked down. It was his
nose. He had just stepped on his own nose. Something about that made him want to laugh hysterically. Instead, a weak chuckle forced itself out, followed by a set of choking coughs. But something was wrong. If his nose was on the floor, it meant that the food smell …

  “Hey, you alright?”

  Walter opened his eyes. The young doctor, Philip Jackson, was standing in his kitchen, wearing an old green apron that sported several wine-colored stains. He was holding a spatula. Something was sizzling on the stove behind him.

  Walter blinked. “What—”

  But Philip slid a plate of food in front of him. A runny mess of eggs and ketchup, with a half-melted block of cheddar cheese on the side.

  “I, uh, couldn’t find anything else. You haven’t got much food in the fridge. But eat it.” Philip forced a fork into his hand.

  Walter stared down at the plate and its miserable pile of eggs. He looked up at Philip. He looked down again. Maybe it was the tiredness, or the weakness in his body, or the sight of that ratty old apron, but emotion flooded into him like burning wine. With shaking hands, he lifted a forkful of glorious, glorious food into his mouth.

  oOo

  For the next ten days, Philip didn’t leave Mukerjee alone. After work he’d pick up a couple of burritos or a sandwich from the food truck outside the newly-renamed Pfalzer-Grumman-Oppenthorp building, zip across town to Mukerjee’s house on his way home, and watch to make sure Mukerjee ate.

  The man was seriously depressed. It seemed to Philip that Mukerjee spent twenty-three hours a day in bed, only venturing out to answer the door when Philip knocked. Then he’d slump into a chair in the kitchen and wait to be fed.