Synesthesia: Chapter One

serial fiction

Happiness smells like shit.

Literally, it smells like dog shit. Or perhaps more accurately, it’s the aroma you’d be hit with walking into a house with six cats and one litterbox that hasn’t been changed in two weeks.

So you can understand why I can’t stand being around happy people.

And you can understand why I do what I have to do to make them smell a little better.

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Ever since I can remember, I’ve been able to smell people’s emotions. I don’t know why I’m like this or how it works. Growing up, I thought it was a normal thing that everyone could do. My mom still laughs about the time she fell off a stepladder and broke her wrist. I was only two or three years old when it happened. She was sprawled out on the kitchen floor, crying in pain, and I had toddled up to her, pressed my nose up to her face, and told her that she smelled delicious.

She thinks I was just a little kid doing cute, weird little kid things.

But you see, it’s because pain smells like strawberries mixed with mango.

All of your emotions have a smell. Bet you didn’t know that, did you?

Sadness smells like fresh-baked bread.

Embarrassment smells like cotton candy: faint, almost imperceptible, but pleasant nonetheless.

Anger smells just okay. Like generic, store-brand soap. Not great, but at least clean and unoffensive.

But my favorite is the smell of fear.

Fear smells like orange blossoms.

Image: mine

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I didn’t grow up around orange trees. It was far too cold for them in the Indiana college town where I was born and raised.

The first time I smelled orange blossoms was during a solo road trip out to Arizona. I was driving past an orange grove, enjoying the scenery, blasting Empire of the Sun, when I was suddenly hit by the delicious scent of fear all around me.

Had I forgotten a hooker in the back seat, I wondered? Had she just come to, realized she was trapped, and released her glorious fear-scent into the air?

But no; if that were the case, I would have smelled panic too.

Panic smells a little bit moldy, like a poorly insulated house that’s been left abandoned with its windows shut through one too many humid winters.

It was only later on, at a truck stop about fifty miles outside of Tucson, that I picked up a scented candle and recognized it. The smell of fear, poured into a glass jar, with a cotton wick stuck into it.

It didn’t smell quite as good as the real thing.

I bought it anyway, along with an orange-blossom air freshener for my car.

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I’ve always loved the smell of fear. I used to sneak downstairs at night when I heard screams coming from the TV in the living room, because I knew it meant my parents were up watching horror movies. Positioned stealthily halfway up the staircase, I would sniff and sniff, trying to pull all of the delicious fear into my nostrils. Sometimes I would get caught and sent to bed. Usually I wouldn’t.

Later, when puberty had ravaged my face with acne and turned my body into something broad and muscular, I chased the scent down dark streets, following women who were walking alone at night. God, their fear smelled good. Way better than my parents’ tepid fright watching slasher movies they’d already seen and forgotten several times before.

But at some point, tailing women down the sidewalk stopped being enough. I needed more.

That’s when I started experimenting with kidnapping.

No white-van stuff; not yet, anyway. No, at this early stage, I mostly just invited girls over to my place, then locked them up for a while. “Forcible imprisonment,” I think it’s called. I used to keep them around just to make the place smell good. Like air fresheners, you know? Some people use Glade plug-ins or those little bamboo sticks in a jar of scented oil. Me, I keep a scared woman in a dog crate.

The problem is, though, that they make noise.

Telling my neighbors that the screams coming from my apartment were the result of rough sex only worked up to a point. The trouble was that the girls kept screaming even when I wasn’t home.

So after a while, I had to figure out a different solution.

That’s why I was out here in Arizona in the first place. I needed a nice, private place where I could find a way to get my fix of fear-scent without the threat of law enforcement showing up to do a “well-check” on my “girlfriend.”

So I had come out west, into the desert, to do some scouting.

My car moved smoothly down the flat, straight highway. To my left, the sky burned orange-gold, little flecks of purple cloud lined with fluorescent red dotting the deepening blue above me. I got off at the next exit and pulled off into a patch of gravel next to the frontage road, then got out to stretch my legs. I leaned up against the hot metal body of my car and watched the changing colors of the desert sunset.

Growing up in the Midwest, I’d pretty much always been surrounded by the smells of other people. It’s the kind of thing you just get used to, I guess, like light pollution or the hum of wind turbines. It’s the kind of thing you never really notice until it isn’t there.

The desert smelled like nothing at all. It was disorienting at first. Hot, dusty wind, with no trace of anybody’s dog-shit happiness. I gulped the unscented air down in great breaths until I started feeling light-headed.

When I got back into the car, the orange-blossom scent of the air freshener smelled fake and cloying. I yanked it off the rearview mirror and threw it out onto the road.

Then I drove down I-10 looking for a new girl to pick up.

Yes, I was going to like it out here.

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