Tom Robbins - Jitterbug Perfume

At that moment, La Salle, the penniless young nobleman, approached the bow, intending to engage Alobar in genteel conversation, but Alobar's gaze was sweeping the Atlantic, and so absorbed was he in trying to imagine a soup as vast as that ocean that he heard not a word of the fellow's greeting. Miffed, La Salle walked away, his stride, despite the heaving of the deck, revealing the stubborn pride that a few years later would prevent him from admitting that he was lost in Texas when he was supposed to be exploring Louisiana (his frustrated men finally assassinated him, depriving him of the opportunity to found New Orleans, America's perfumed metropolis).

Alobar continued to survey the sea. Was that wave over there Kudra and this one Wren? Or was there a drop of Kudra, a drop of Wren in each and every wave that rose and fell? Wren. He had loved Kudra so long and so well that he'd almost forgotten how he'd once loved Wren. It had been Wren who comforted him when that first white hair slithered like a viper into his happy garden, Wren who had aided and abetted his subsequent subterfuge even though she'd been shocked by his crazy notions of personal identity and survival, Wren who had plucked him from the burial mound — and that very night spread her legs for his successor. Ah, women: the mystery of them sometimes seemed greater than the mystery of death.

One thing was certain, had it not been for Wren he wouldn't be here, seven hundred — yes, seven hundred! — years later, embarked upon the strangest adventure of his strange life. And now, after all that time, Wren had contacted him. To tell him what? Lighten up!

Very well. He'd lighten up. As a matter of fact, he felt as light as the bubbly froth that flew from the lips of the waves. Whatever else his long, unprecedented life might have been, it had been fun. Fun! If others should find that appraisal shallow, frivolous, so be it. To him, it seemed now to largely have been some form of play. And he vowed that in the future he would strive to keep that sense of play more in mind, for he'd grown convinced that play — more than piety, more than charity or vigilance — was what allowed human beings to transcend evil.

Quite damp now from the spray, Alobar took no step to go below. He had made one promise in the teeth of the sea, and he would stay to make another. He thought that he would persist in his devotion to his individual consciousness. Perhaps it was selfish. Perhaps someday, despite his efforts, he would end up in the one big soup, anyhow. Yet, looking at his life and the life of the world from the vantage of seven continuous and well-traveled centuries, he would say this to anyone with ears brave enough to hear it: the spirit of one individual can supersede and dismiss the entire clockworks of history.

“Our individuality is all, all , that we have. There are those who barter it for security, those who repress it for what they believe is the betterment of the whole society, but blessed in the twinkle of the morning star is the one who nurtures it and rides it, in grace and love and wit, from peculiar station to peculiar station along life's bittersweet route.”

If there was any crack in his conviction, a seam opened, perhaps, by remembered teachings of the Buddhists at Samye, it closed when he turned his face from the stiff salt air and caught a whiff of K23 .

Alobar was benefiting from the voyage, but for Pan it was a sea horse of a different color. It was, in fact, the most terrible experience of his life.

The old god had endured severe setbacks in the past: the disdain of Apollo and his snooty followers, the rise of cities, the hostility of the philosophers — from Aristotle to Descartes — with their smug contentions that man was reasonable and nature defective, and, most damaging of all, the concentrated efforts of the Christian church to discredit his authority by identifying him as Satan. The arrogant attacks, the dirty tricks, the indifference had rendered him weak and invisible, and might have destroyed him altogether had not an unreasonable affection for him persisted in isolated places: hidden valleys and distant mountain huts; and in the hearts of heretics, lusty women, madmen, and poets.

Recently, he'd been yanked from his indigenous crags and set down in an urban environment, a move that some might have thought would apply the coup de grace. Indeed, it was hard on him, but one cannot truly escape nature by paving streets and erecting buildings, and Pan found in Paris enough grass and trees in its parks and vacant lots, enough animal compulsions in the souls of its citizens, to sustain him. A ship, however, was a different matter.

Never had he felt so confined. The crowded hold, the unrelieved ocean. He was totally out of his realm, totally in weird Poseidon's. It was foreign and insubstantial. Were he free to play his pipes, he might set fish to jumping, might roust a mermaid from the deep (if mermaids had not died out like the nymphs). But he dare not pipe. He dare not move about or cause mischief. Even if he were free to do so, he was in no condition. He was seasick.

If that were only the worst of it. . The idea of an invisible leaning over a rail, broadcasting green bile from a stomach nobody could see, is almost comic. Alas, something more insidious than the rocking ship was sickening Pan. He was becoming emotionally ill, as well. And the cause was the perfume.

Pan had hit upon the perfect disguise, all right. He no longer knew who he was. The perfume separated him from him, dismantled his persona. Invisibility itself was alienating. When he drank from a spring, only waterbugs looked back at him, and whose body was that that itched, whose hand that did the scratching? In his invisibility he had become increasingly attached to his odor, occupying it as though it were a shell, a second body, familiar and orienting, home foul home. From the start, the various perfumes had had a confusing effect on him, but his native aroma made short work of them, generally, and it was seldom very long before he was cheerfully, securely stinking again like an old furnace stoked with gonads. K23 was a different matter. It obscured his house of smell the way a mist would sometimes erase his favorite crag; a cloud without pockets, drifting in the direction of the Void.

Ironically, he rather liked the new perfume. The jasmine blew like a soft wind from Egypt across the scruffy pastures of his mind, the beet thumped a dance drum with scrotum-tightening rhythms. Together, they dulled the ache that had pierced his breast since birth. But could it be that that ancient sadness was as necessary to his identity as his odor?

On dry land, he had managed to keep some bearings. The rocks and leaves had seen to that. At sea, however, he was lost. He retched and did not recognize who was retching. Twice a day, Alobar came to anoint him, sniffing him out at whatever rail he clung to or in whatever rope bin he lay groaning. Pan realized that each application of the scent only made him foggier, but, like a drug addict, he was already too foggy to resist further fogginess.

As the Mississippi Poodle approached New France, smelling sweeter by far than any ship ever had after a transatlantic crossing, its crew whistling as it worked, its mates hiding behind some barrels in tender embrace, Alobar on the bow facing the future with a silly grin, Pan was curled in pukey delirium close to dying.

What caused him to suddenly leap to his wobbly hooves? What burst of madness fired his motor? Two things, probably. A gull, the first they'd seen in weeks, swooped low over the mastpole, shrieking loudly. At that very instant, one of the few women aboard walked by the corner where Pan lay. She happened to be menstruating. Perhaps the smell of blood, dark and chthonian, at the precise moment that the bird screamed, awakened something deep and intrinsic in what remained of Pan's consciousness. Perhaps it would have spoken to something inside us, as well, were our barriers down, and perhaps we had just as soon not probe that primal pie. In any event, the god sprang up, possessed. Stumbling and reeling, he rushed through the bulkhead toward Alobar's hammock.