Perfume Wars

“USS Alabam” by Molly Phalan

Clyde Lott, a revivalist and cattle rancher from Mississippi, has been trying to jump start the apocalypse for years by sending red cattle to the Holy Land. Without the ashes of a sacrificed red heifer, the Jewish people will not be able to achieve ritual purification, and won’t be able to build the Third Temple, the construction of which would signify to certain Christians that the gears of the End Times have begun their long-awaited grinding. The cow—a red heifer—would need to be slaughtered and then burned on an altar with cedar wood, hyssop and crimson wool; its ashes, mixed with water from a spring, would then have the power to purify. Volume Three of My Bible Friends, a children’s book published by the denomination in which I was raised, and whose pages I closely studied thousands of times over the course of my own childhood, features a story called “Elijah and the Time of No-Rain,” during which the prophet Elijah, a man who is depicted—as is every character in the book—as handsome and white, challenges King Ahab—who wears red, tasseled robes and a hat in the shape of a pen cap—to a burnt-offering battle between their respective gods, to see which one could relieve an ongoing drought by making it rain. “Let us build two altars,” Elijah says, in the book, “one to the Lord, and one to Baal. Let us place wood on the altars, and an offering upon the wood. The God who answers by fire—HE IS GOD.” And so, the prophets of Baal build their altar out of stones and place an offering upon it and begin to dance, praying to their god while cutting themselves with knives. Nada. Elijah then kneels before his altar and says a prayer, and before he can say, “Amen,” fire flashes down from heaven like lightning. A website dedicated to lightning safety claims that more people are killed by lightning every year than hurricanes and tornadoes combined, but that didn’t inoculate me from contracting the inevitable paranoia generated by Weather Channel predictions concerning the approaching hurricane, which threatened, according to some forecasts, to dump up to 20 inches of rain in the mountains where my family lives. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one who’d been convinced that prevention was the key to survival; during an early morning trek to my local big box store, the soup aisle looked like it’d been ransacked, and the only remaining varietals were the more expensive organic vegetable soups and a couple cans of the suspiciously-titled “Spicy Chicken Quesadilla.” Though the potato chip and yogurt aisles had also been plundered, shoppers seemed to have cared little about trail mix, of which there was an abundance. In sporting goods, only two rechargeable flashlights were available; each cost $27. I snagged both but later, after discovering electric votives in the candle section, abandoned one in Home Décor, laying it on a towel as a surprise for another shopper who might’ve come to the store with a mindset similar to mine. At the self-checkout, I pretended not to notice the umbrella I’d left un-scanned in my cart, exited the store without anyone noticing, and remembered that, in the days before credit card readers at gas pumps, my friend Andrew, who believed that a person could get away with anything if he or she proceeded with the requisite confidence,  used to fill up his gas tank and drive away without paying; I also once watched him walk right out the front door of a Walmart, bypassing all cashiers, with a stack of CDs under one arm. At a stop light, I felt the vibration of my phone in my pocket; it was my wife texting me to say that I had to keep the basement door shut; the cat had gotten out and for a while couldn’t be located and this had caused my son to become severely distressed. Instead of replying, I checked a social media site, where a friend of mine, an economics instructor who plays bass in a local cover band, had implored his followers to read the comments on a post by National Hurricane Updates; a map of the storm’s projected path resembled a giant penis about to penetrate the North Carolina Coast. A user named Sam from Fairhope, Alabama, said, “Forget the milk and bread, they need to stock up on lube,” while a nursing student named Corinne suggested that “This storm will probably be finished before we even feel anything. They say 10 inches is expected, but we will most likely only get 3’ and then have to clean up the mess it makes.” Meanwhile, all over the country, young children have been the victims of a so-called “invisibility prank,” which involves an adult taking a picture of themselves with their arm around an empty chair, then asking a kid—who is unaware of photo—to come sit in the same chair, and then call other adults—who are all in on the joke—into the room and say, “I’m now going to make this kid disappear,” then throw blanket over kid, say magic words, and then yank the blanket off the kid. At this moment, everyone gasps. Somebody says, “where’d he go” or “bring her back!” and kid says, “I’m right here!” but adult says, “but we can’t see you!” and when the kid says, “But I can see me,” magician says, “Ok, I’ll prove it,” and then pretends to take a selfie with the kid, afterwards showing kid similarly posed selfie with empty chair. Best case scenario? Kid loses it. Back at home, after placing battery packs in chargers and stacking soup cans in garage, I finally ate breakfast—two eggs on toast—and wondered when I was going to stop thinking, every time I end up not eating the entirety of my meal, that I should place the remnants in the bowl of the dog who is no longer with us, and who, according to a friend of mine in a comment she’d posted online, had been escorted, at the moment of her death, straight to heaven and that this was “absolutely true.” I wanted to believe that. I also wanted to believe we’d done the right thing in putting her to sleep when we did, and that my wife’s panic when the vet med student began to inject the Propofol could be categorized as irrational. As sad as I was to say goodbye to an animal that had been a friend to my family for nearly 11 years, I was happy to stuff our garbage bin full of the dog beds that had been drying in the back yard, and happy, too, that my son’s room would no longer smell like shit or piss or even “dog.” Later that same day, the members of the English Department where I work spent at least twenty minutes discussing a problem that won’t seem to go away: those members of the faculty and staff who insist on wearing perfume, and those who are so sensitive to certain scents that being confined in an elevator or the same room for even a minute with any kind of strong odor will cause them to have an allergic reaction; in one case, a person who had been given flowers had taken them home and set them on the sidewalk outside her house, in front of a window, so that she could view them safely from inside. One of our perfume-wearers raised a hand and self-identified as one of the offenders; publicly, she announced that she would continue to wear perfume no matter what, because it was an extension of her personality, though privately she confessed that she did it because it reminded her of her mother and her sister, both of whom were now dead. One instructor claimed that she had to take a medication that made her smell “repugnant”; therefore, she had no choice but to wear a particular kind of scented lotion. After the meeting, I told my friend that another friend and I had discussed a plan to write a screenplay about an English Department called “The Department”; he poked me in the chest and said, “Hey man, that was us!” I assured him it wasn’t. The one thing we could agree on was that when and if we did ever get around to writing this episode, it should be named “Perfume Wars.” The website Girl Musuem claims that Tapputi Belatekallim, a Babylonian who lived in 1200 BC, was the world’s first chemist and maker of perfume and that archaeologists discovered a cuneiform tablet with the recipe, whose ingredients include water, flowers, oil, and calamus. 77 years before, on the very same day of the year that our department’s so-called “perfume wars” were made public, Marcel Ravidat, and three other French teenagers and their dog, “Robot,” discovered the ancient cave paintings of Lascaux, which feature hunters and bison. Ravidat devoted his life to both protecting and promoting these paintings, first as a self-appointed guard who camped at the cave’s entrance, and then afterwards as a guide, giving tours to thousands of people, before it was discovered that the carbon dioxide emitted by breathing mouths was damaging the artwork. Critics might call these paintings “primitive,” due to the lack of the kind of details one might come to associate with “realistic” representations of the human body, but not Michael Booth, who believes that the reason that humans were drawn as stick people so long ago and like slender aliens during the middle ages is that this is what people actually looked like then. In his book Secret History of the World, Booth claims that contrary to what we were taught to believe, matter emerged from mind, and that in the very beginning, the only thing that existed were thoughts. “In the beginning,” he writes, “there precipitated out of the void matter that was finer and more subtle than light. Then came an exceptionally fine gas. If a human eye had been looking at the dawn of history, it would have seen a vast cosmic mist.” This mist gradually “became denser” and became matter. Thus, ancient people were not as defined as modern humans. There’s a reason, then, that the Greeks created the first statues of human bodies as we know them to look now. It’s because “human bodies only became perfectly formed at this point in time.” Eventually, Booth believes, perhaps in 9000 years or so, we humans will begin to devolve back into spirit form. Unlike the view I tend to take, which is that all stories are myths, Booth thinks that all myths are true, from Zeus to Jesus. I should add here that humans aren’t allowed to visit the original cave at Lascaux anymore but one can book a tour at a nearby museum that aims to replicate the cave and its paintings. From reading reviews at TripAdvisor, I learned that while many tourists enjoyed their tours, a great many were disappointed, citing long lines, entry tickets that wouldn’t scan, guides who spoke too softly, and defective iPads. As one user put it, “there is no feeling of wonder when going through a fake.” Even so, a management representative from Lascaux International Center for Cave Art was kind enough to post a reply that apologized for the visitor’s disappointment and assured him that their site was accessible to all and that it could adapt to a wide variety of audiences, including children, and that all of the museum’s contents are validated by a scientific expert committee, and that their guides were trained for several weeks to give visitors complete information. As for me, I needed no such assurance, as I could think of many fakes worthy of admiration; I only wondered what the visitor who claimed not to had thought he had signed up for, and what he, claiming to know the difference between truth and fiction, was entitled to receive.

Matthew Vollmer’s most recent book, PERMANENT EXHIBIT, is a collection of lyric essays, originally posted as status updates on a popular social media platform. He is at work on a long memoir about growing up Seventh-day Adventist. An Associate Professor of English, he teaches at Virginia Tech.