Tom Robbins - Jitterbug Perfume

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. When, 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.