Chapter Six
San Francisco
Executive Investigations sat at the end of a dim windowless hallway on the thirteenth floor of the corporate headquarters, behind a door Gabriel’s badge couldn’t yet open. His new office was a six-foot square with a standing-height desk and a rack of coat hooks. Two computer screens, no chair.
“I’m afraid it’s a bit spartan,” Bill Thorn said.
“Better than a cubicle,” Gabriel said.
“New meat!” A gray-haired white man, deep lines in his tough ugly face, stood in a cloud of tobacco stink. Despite the paunch pushing out his blue Hawaiian shirt, Gabriel immediately knew him for an elite soldier, the kind Gabriel’s father had bowed his head to at VFW barbecues.
“This is Del Murphy,” Thorn said. “He’s our admin.”
“Nice to meet ya,” Del said. Gabriel shook his hard heavy hand. Del’s brightly lit office screamed with flair: surfing photos, war photos, motorcycle photos, a poster of handgun history from flintlocks to automatics.
“You have a chair,” Gabriel said. “Do I get a chair?”
“I have a drafting stool,” Del said. “I’m an old fart. No chair for you, you’d fall asleep. Last office is my assistant Thi Tam. She’s a peach. Makes great coffee. Pretty, too.”
The last office was empty even of furniture. “Where is she?” Gabriel asked.
“Boss keeps forgetting to hire her. Hot-cha! So I get my own coffee. You want a coffee?”
“One sugar, thanks.” Gabriel followed Thorn into his office, the mirror of Gabriel’s but for a glass bowl of Japanese gummy candies. He smelled their fake-fruit aromas through the wrapping. “Does Del know about our—our whatever thing?”
“Some Del knows, some Del doesn’t. This, Del doesn’t.” Thorn wrote a number on the back of his business card. “These people run an online forum. Fax them a copy of your driver’s license. From a public location, a copy shop, not from here. Shred the card when you’re done.”
“Maybe I should eat it,” Gabriel said. “To be safest.”
“If you like,” Thorn said. “Oh, that was sarcasm? We discussed this. There’s Empyrean and there’s people like us. The Venn diagram is a thin sliver. Respect their paranoia. Candy?”
“No thanks.”
“Then we’re done. I have meetings.” Thorn left.
When Del returned he explained the work, reviewing background checks on applicants for executive positions in North American offices. Reports ran from seventy to a hundred pages, including interviews, financial statements, and summaries. Just going through the checklist took until lunch. In the afternoon Del walked him through a completed file, but Gabriel could barely focus. He felt woozy and his nose ran buckets. After his bus ride home he went straight to bed.
Wednesday he found three tissue boxes on his desk. “I pulled strings for that,” Del said.
“You just got them from the supply closet. If you really want to help, stop smoking.”
“That’ll happen. I set you up two practice files. Should keep you busy until lunch.”
Gabriel sneezed. “This is all busy work anyway, right?”
Del clacked his tongue. “Clean a toilet with a toothbrush, that’s busy work. Get to it.”
By lunch Gabriel hadn’t finished the first one. “I’m really behind,” he told Del. “Sorry.”
“You’re not behind,” Del said. “If you had done more, we’d know you were skimming.”
“Ha. Is everything here a test?”
“Until you pass them.”
At lunch Gabriel bought a turkey sandwich in the lobby cafeteria. He unwrapped the cellophane and sneezed a dozen times. His handkerchief had blood on it. He wobbled back to the elevator, throwing the sandwich in the trash. Del sent him home.
Thursday morning Del’s office was dark but Thorn was in. “Del’s surfing North Ocean Beach,” Thorn said. “He told me you’re doing well. Not that it’s challenging for an MBA.”
“It’d be easier if I didn’t have this cold.”
“It’s not a cold,” Thorn said. “It’s like an allergy. Your brain suffers what it used to repress. To protect itself, it’s stuffing your nose. Notice how you get worse through the day?”
“Did you have a mind allergy too?” Gabriel asked.
“I was blinded. Two weeks, full moon to new moon. I was eighteen. And I’ve heard of worse onsets than mine.” Thorn squinted disapprovingly. “Do you know anything about smell? Do you know how it works?”
“I breathe in through my nose. Then—I don’t know how it works.”
“But it rules your life. I think you have homework,” Thorn said. “After you take these.” He gave Gabriel a box of antihistamines. “And more busy work.”
* * *
Antihistamines cleared Gabriel’s nose, but clarity was worse in the poison world: chemicals for drink and food, bile and smoke for air, store shelves of bright new trash to stink up his home en route to the landfill. For breakfasts he ate yogurt and honey; for dinner, fish and chicken, baked unseasoned or with rosemary. He fell asleep to recorded nature sounds, wearing a swimmer’s nose plug. He woke tired from frantic dreams.
Web encyclopedias and science sites gave him a little resolve. The olfactory bulb was part of the brain itself. Smell was the most intimate sense, the closest a person let the world invade. Gabriel had lost that, and regained it.
He tried a journal but he was no writer, and besides there were no words for the orders of sensation he perceived. Constellations of sweaty feet and blue cheese, of peanut butter and brown rice. The Internet had no spectrum of smells, no table explaining bases and combinations. Reviews of perfumes and food were florid and imagistic, like fanciful names for paint colors. Gabriel read them like a new language, flashes of recognition in a blizzard of nonsense.
* * *
Welcome ritegard! Posts since your last login:
—BEGIN DIGEST—
[bathouse] [thread: support] [yesterday 22:54]
The helicopters thunder over the house to the base nearby. I hear them approaching and plug my ears but they take so long, I hear them after they go. I can’t afford to move.
—
[oeri2319] [thread: support] [yesterday 23:21]
> I can’t afford to move.
Can you insulate a room? Basement is best. Did they just start? Maybe they’ll stop soon.
—
[ritegard] [thread: What are we?] [today 02:09]
> clear the sensitive nature is a superior connection to the noosphere
clear the witch is in deeper league with the prince of lies? A theory isn’t just saying. It has to be right a lot of the time. I know what I feel but no one can explain it. I don’t know if it’s damage with a neat side effect. I just want to live with it.
—
[trigrfin] [thread: What are we?] [today 08:53]
> I just want to live with it.
So do we all. I don’t want to be mean brother but this is not a place to ape normality. People come to reflect on their hidden natures and yes to whine a bit too. Try a little tenderness.
—
[oldpinok] [thread: What are we?] [today 12:37]
> not a place to ape normality
I ape normality in a nursing home with dusty vents. I’m the doddering simpleton. This is where I can be honest but unafraid. Good luck in your real world ritegard. Never did much for me.
—END DIGEST—
* * *
Saturday morning, two weeks after Tahoe, Gabriel woke in clammy sheets. Dust swirled in the bright sunlight. He turned on the ceiling fan while he stretched. Pipes in the ceiling knocked slowly. Eleven-thirty, late for Gabriel. But he felt all right.
Gabriel rented a second-floor room with bath from Denise Tong, a craft potter who got the house in her divorce but couldn’t afford it alone. Downstairs, Denise was watching television in stained work clothes. She had a wiry build, with a long face and hollow cheeks like a forensic reconstruction. “How was the open mike night?” she asked, pausing the TV.
“Patricia’s brother needs to practice his guitar,” Gabriel said. “I met this woman, Gita Tiwari. Cute face, sharp tongue. Didn’t get a number. You went shopping.”
“Do they smell good?” Denise accepted Gabriel’s recovered senses easily, as the spiritual upgrade due to all San Franciscans. “I was at Ferry Plaza. I decided to splurge for tonight’s dinner party.” She unpaused the TV. “Find that woman online. You need to get out more.”
In the kitchen, food spread across the counter like a giant toy xylophone. Mottled orange heirloom tomatoes, red bell peppers, purple and jade baby lettuces, wrist-thick teal leeks, fist-sized magenta eggplant. Sprigs of ruffled basil, yellow oregano, purslane. He felt the wet and waxy skins, opened tubs of goat cheese and tofu. Smells draped the world in help balloons, informative but quickly fading. He had learned to take an extra breath.
A narrow loaf of pumpernickel sat in the breadbox. Sweet aromas, dough and salt and caramel. He ate a slice. Fine foam like a head of beer, salt crystals dissolving in puffs, yeast and coffee to balance the sugars. Another slice, a third. It was heavenly.
Denise came into the kitchen. “Must escape evil TV—Gabriel, what the fuck?”
He’d eaten half the loaf. “I’m sorry,” he said, his mouth full. He brushed dark crumbs off his shirt. “I don’t know, it just smelled so good. I couldn’t stop. I’ll replace it.”
“Then get going.” She gave him directions to her bakery’s stand. “They’re the only ones with pumpernickel.” She menaced him with celery. “Pray they still have it.”
By bicycle to Ferry Plaza, he took the same route as his work commute, east through tidy Russian Hill, then south and downhill. His tires hummed past stately homes and tired apartments a century younger. His phone shuffled fast loud songs: a ribald chantey, a pouty punk dismissing a lover. On bright bleached Columbus, a hip-hop remix of a folk song wove him through parking tourist cars. He raced past Embarcadero Center, trying not to breathe the heat-lamp air. Blocks later he coasted through a park, gasping for cool Bay breeze.
In Ferry Plaza, hundreds of people shuffled between white canvas tents. Gabriel smelled a dozen kinds of skin, stale sweat and fresh bacteria, suntan oil and vinyl and leather.
He stopped for samples at orchard stands, sweet pears and apples, acidic yellow tomato. He pricked a leaf of purple basil with his thumbnail and inhaled the licorice oil. Dizzying scents came from vegetables in pine crates: spice and bitter, cream and sugar, rust and glass. Fat and thin hot peppers, long spiny cucumbers, baby squash, string beans, turnips, radishes. He felt like Abel, suffused with awe and delight at the profusion of the earth. He stood and breathed through his jittery rush, as if he’d just made the last flight home.