Smelling Bad, Smelling Badly
Two guys got on the train at Jay St., but it took me awhile to realize that they were together. It was a few minutes after six, and the car I was riding in was about half-full. One of the men stood with his back to the door, while the other immediately began to pace.
I hadn't noticed any particularly foul odor, and hadn't heard anyone else on the train comment about one either, so I decided that this guy marching around the car was simply insane. Insane and angry, though, so I tried to play it cool while still keeping my guard up every time he swung past.
"Stinks, man," he was still saying. "Jesus, I can't believe how bad it fuckin' stinks in here."
I was beginning to think his reaction was a little overblown (especially since I couldn't smell anything myself), until his friend said, "Yeah, it really does. Smells rotten in here. Smells like shit. Can you believe they wanna charge us $3 a ride for this?"
"Stinks, man."
"It's coming from that guy on the end. That's what stinks in here."
My head had been down, so I didn't see where he was gesturing. I was sitting on an end seat at the time, but so were a lot of others. Still, I couldn't help but wonder-could he have been talking about me? Did I stink, and was that the reason I didn't notice anything?
"Three bucks to ride on a train with filthy rats." The man against the doors said. "Unbelievable. Rats and?dead rodents." I could hear that he was really reaching for something good after "rats," and felt a little sorry that the best he could come up with was the redundant "dead rodents." Before I could offer any suggestions, however, the train pulled into the next station, and the two of them stepped off to breathe fresher air.
I looked around the car after they left. We've all ridden with stinky homeless people before, and know how that thick stench can fill an entire car, hanging around long after the source has left. They're always easy to spot when you get on a train-they're the ones surrounded by the halo of empty seats. But so far as I could tell, that morning everyone seemed distributed pretty evenly, as is nature's way.
So again I began to wonder if I was the smelly one. I have this mild neurosis regarding my own personal odor. I have a thing about smells in general, to be honest, probably because I experience too few of them these days. But I'm too easily convinced that if I can smell myself-a little sweat wafting up from inside my shirt or something-that everyone I come in contact with can smell it too. (I don't much care if people dislike me, so long as it's not because I smell bad.) I surreptitiously dipped my head slightly as I sat there, and inhaled.
Nothing.
But then again, after 20 years of smoking, my sense of smell isn't quite what it should be. Plus, I was a touch under the weather that morning. Maybe I wouldn't be able to smell it even if I did reek.
Beginning the night before, my lungs, then my throat had gone scratchy. And that morning my sinuses were tending toward the stuffy side.
I decided to forget about it. If I did stink, I wasn't aware of it, and so what could I do? Ask someone? ("Excuse me, ma'am, but I was wondering?")
If I smelled bad, and it was bothering somebody, it wouldn't bother them for long-I was getting off in a minute or two.
Still, I had to wonder. If it wasn't me, who was it who worked those two guys up into such a lather? There were no obvious culprits about, and I stopped looking for one. Those guys were probably just nuts of the hypersensitive variety. I was certainly aware of cases like that-people driven mad when one or more of their senses works overtime and overwhelms them with sensation.
Around noon that day, whatever had me feeling under the weather that morning, be it a cold, the flu or that damned Ebola again-exploded. I could feel it scream through my limbs and into my head over the course of an hour. It had been a few years since something had hit me this hard.
I finished up what I could-which was making less and less sense anyway-put my coat on and headed for the train.
As I was walking down 7th Ave., I began to notice something. My legs were moving more and more slowly with each step. There was nothing I could do about it. They were feeling heavy and just moving?slower. It was as if my batteries were running down, or my spring was nearly unwound. Then, in the middle of the block, still three blocks from the train, I stopped.
Just stopped and stood there.
After a minute, I was able to begin moving my legs again, and made it to the train.
Once I got home, I put on some cartoons and crawled into bed. I become an enormous, whiny baby when I'm sick.
And those damned cartoons weren't very funny at all.
The next morning I awoke feeling surprisingly good compared to the day before. So much so, that I got ready and headed into the office. But once again, halfway to the train, my legs slowed to a stop. Instead of turning around and heading back home once I could move again, I continued on into the office. And I did this for two reasons:
First, because I am an idiot.
Second, I still give in to the occasional sociopathic impulse. Maybe it was the mild fever, but there was something awful and attractive in the idea of spreading my flu germs around on the subway, if only to potentially scare the shit out of those people who'd made such an ugly scene about the flu shot shortage of a few months back. Put the fear into them.
After sweating and wincing through another day at the office, smelling nothing, tasting nothing, not taking as much joy as I would've expected from spreading my disease around town, I headed back home again. Along the way, I caught a whiff of something puffing out from inside my coat. That seemed odd, given how thickly my sinuses were clogged. Whatever it was, was cutting straight through. I inhaled again.
It was sweat, and unmistakably my own. There's just something about being sick-your sweat takes on a whole different tang. It was sharper somehow, more metallic. It smelled diseased. Strange that it would be one of the few things, perhaps the only one, I could actually smell in such a state.
Once home, I pulled the half-sopping shirt off and dropped it in the laundry. I put on a sweater and sat down in front of the computer. I would've preferred to lie down again, but thought it best, sinuses the way they were, to keep my head erect. Otherwise I might drown.
I stared at the screen for a bit before my cat rasped and creaked her way in from the other room (she was always yelling at me about something) and hopped up in my lap.
It took her a few minutes to settle down upon my right thigh, but once she did I got back to work.
There the two of us sat in perfect harmony for 10 minutes. Then she stood up, turned around, crossed to the left thigh and hopped down to the floor again.
The stench caught me like a brick to the skull seconds later. I hadn't heard anything, not even a "foof," but you never do with cats.
A moment later it passed and I was back to my odorless world, eyes watering a bit, wondering why it was that the only two things that could successfully penetrate my impacted sinuses to tickle the olfactory nerves were sick sweat and cat farts.