Season to Taste (20 page)

A few months afterward, while visiting another friend whose child was putting together a model airplane, Dalton experienced a sudden onset of anxiety, of panic. “Out of nowhere my heart started racing,” she said. “I felt faint. I thought I was going to pass out and I had no idea what was going on. I thought I was having a heart attack.” It happened again, weeks later, when she visited her uncle on his sailboat, as he worked on the deck. Then she realized the common thread: scent. The scent of glue. Her mugger must have been a glue sniffer; the smell must have been on his hands. This specific scent triggered these symptoms of her fear.

“How did you recover?” I asked. “How do you erase a smell?” Dalton approached it scientifically.

“You can extinguish the effects by desensitization,” she said. This can be done in a therapeutic environment on a large scale—for example, with programs like Virtual Iraq, an experiment in Virtual Reality designed by University of Southern California scientist Albert “Skip” Rizzo, which is gaining momentum in the United States. In Virtual Iraq, a three-dimensional program of exposure with funding from the Department of Defense, war veterans suffering from PTSD enter a three-dimensional world of armored vehicles and desertscapes, vibrating mock machine guns, and manufactured scents (among them burning rubber, gun powder, body odor, and smoke) in order to habituate to the powerful sensory triggers tied to traumatic memory. Dalton, however, did it herself. “I went out and bought some glue. I would get myself calm and then I would bring the bottle a little closer . . .” She mimicked a sniff and a grimace, her arm extended straight out parallel to the ground. “And I would stop when I could feel my heart racing, and then I would take it back and relax again.” Over and over, she trained herself not to react.

FAR FROM IRAQ,
far from war, I stared at my cell phone for a long moment before I picked it up and made a call. My hand shook, almost imperceptibly, as I dialed the numbers. I held it to my ear as it rang.

“Hallo?” A French accent.

It was Christophe Laudamiel, the young perfumer with a bright red Mohawk who had spoken onstage at the Cornelia Street Café. Not long after my first meeting with Sacks, here I was, doing it myself.

I had made the appointment to talk with Laudamiel because the process of creating perfume fascinated me. Even though I hadn’t worn it since those awkward years book-ending my bat mitzvah, when I thought that the scent of
ck one
was a portal to social acceptance and not simply the sweet, vaguely tropical smell reminiscent of green tea, I marveled at the art of fragrance. I called because I wanted to know about the perfumer’s sense of smell. Laudamiel, I had read, was a phenom of fragrance, a creative wunderkind. The scents for
Perfume,
which I had attempted to smell at the Cornelia Street Café, simply brushed the surface of his potential. I wanted to know if he, like Grenouille, was born with an unusual ability, or if it was something he had to learn.

“It’s all about the training,” Laudamiel told me. He compared the process of learning to smell to that of a composer, who goes through years of study before he or she is able to write symphonies. A musician must learn all the notes. A perfumer must learn all the smells. “A composer has learned to understand which instruments play what part in his orchestra, and how to fix the individual sections of trouble,” he told me. “I have no idea what happens in music. But when I smell a fragrance I know exactly what to fix and where.”

Laudamiel asked me why I was interested. I told him. I had recounted my tale of loss and partial regain so many times I was used to the response: the slightly strained silence, the effusive apologies, the not-quite-understanding-it sympathies. Laudamiel’s reaction was different, though. He got it. Immediately. “What a tragedy,” he said. “I would be lost without scent.”

And then he offered to help. I was surprised—but I felt moved by his generosity, as I had with Sacks.

“Maybe I give you some tests?” Laudamiel said. “And, voilà, maybe we can help you to smell, to train?” I was doubtful that it would work, but he seemed convinced.

“Yes, please.”

On a bright April afternoon, I found myself sitting in Laudamiel’s office on the eighth floor of the International Flavor and Fragrance building, which overlooks the Hudson River in Midtown Manhattan. I sat across from him at his desk, on which he had balanced a box filled with glass bottles of scent. They were raw materials, the kind he used daily to create commercial fragrances.

I wasn’t entirely sure what we were going to do, and I watched curiously as Laudamiel took small strips of white paper and dipped them into bottle after bottle of raw material, which had strange names, foreign names—ones like hedione, iso e super, and galaxolide. They were synthetic things, chemical things. Things that, Laudamiel explained, could be combined by the dozens, by the hundreds, to make a new fragrance, a popular fragrance, a lasting fragrance. Laudamiel handed the smelling strips to me, one at a time, and asked me to sniff.

“What do you smell?” he asked.

I
could
smell—vague, ephemeral odors, though, ones for which I had no words. Laudamiel guided: “This one smells of jasmine,” he said, “and this one of musk.” His face bent in a grimace when he opened a bottle of material that smelled like a pair of sweaty socks. But then he opened one of citrus and another of birch. “What do you smell?” he asked, again and again. My face began to turn red. Embarrassed, I could hardly tell. “It smells . . . sweet?” I would say, not even sure of that. It all seemed indefinable, ferociously dim. We went through twenty samples before the end of the afternoon and when I stopped sniffing, I felt deflated. I felt like I had failed.

“Now this is a start,” Laudamiel said kindly. He had studied as a chemist in France and the United States before turning to perfume and was very interested in the science of smell, in the aberrations of smell, and in the ability to learn. He had even been working with the Sense of Smell Institute to create lesson plans to teach children how to smell.

When I left, Laudamiel handed me a collection of small bottles of raw materials, instructing me to smell them each day. Practice, he said, would strengthen my nose. It would train my olfactory neurons to recognize more. I wanted to believe him. But I could hardly smell many of the scents he gave me. I wondered how smelling “nothing” could help me out.

I ARRIVED AT SACKS’S OFFICE
ten minutes before our second scheduled meeting, the week after he returned from a four-month book tour. Though we had met before, I again entered nervous, uncomfortable around celebrity, unsure of myself.

Sacks sat in a rolling chair cushioned with two pillows in his office, which was a room filled with knickknacks and books, a compendium of whimsy and learning that fit well with the neurologist’s public image. He wore a green sweater, pressed khaki pants, and a pair of gray sneakers. Behind me was a couch covered in pillows and a desk stacked with books on Darwin. There was another, larger desk by the door. A pegboard hung above, covered in pictures of the gray-haired scientist and friends.

Sacks was not working on anything to do with smell; I knew that. Nothing had changed. But this time, I expected it. The scents of Laudamiel’s office still lingered in my nose and I had a lunch meeting scheduled with smell scientist Stuart Firestein for the next week. I had begun my exploration of scent. And Sacks, I knew, believed in the exploration. He defined it.

In the preface to
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
, Sacks writes about the importance of turning a medical case history into a narrative: “To restore the human subject at the centre—the suffering, afflicted, fighting, human subject—we must deepen a case history to a narrative tale; only then do we have a ‘who’ as well as a ‘what,’ a real person, a patient, in relation to disease—in relation to the physical.” In his work, Sacks doesn’t solely examine the deficits, excesses, and distortions of the brain—he explores the meaning of the human body through its aberrations. He writes stories, stripping the neurology down to what is most important: identity. “The patient’s essential being is very relevant in the higher reaches of neurology, and in psychology; for here the patient’s personhood is essentially involved, and the study of disease and of identity cannot be disjoined,” Sacks writes. He calls it the “Neurology of Identity.” When I had sat across from him in the Cornelia Street Café’s basement room, twirling with anxiety over my lack of understanding, my conflicting desires to know and to not, I wondered where my own had gone. In the years since the accident, I often asked myself: “Who am I without my sense of smell?” I felt more confident just sitting in the presence of this man who had dedicated his career to answering this question, in many different forms, for himself and for others.

And Sacks was interested in my nose. As we spoke, he seemed fascinated with the smells that came back to me first, and why some were stronger than others. He spoke slowly and elegantly, effortlessly combining science and psychology. While shy at first, his slight awkwardness melted away to reveal a wild, almost childlike enthusiasm. It was contagious.

“How interesting,” he often said as I spoke of my returning smell, jotting down notes on a legal pad on his desk. “Do you have any strong childhood memories of cucumbers?” I tried to think of one, as I didn’t want to disappoint. Then we spoke about the time that I smelled things that weren’t there—skunk, perfume, rotting trash. Sacks asked about the month or so that I was positive I could smell my own brain.

“What did it smell like?” he asked.

“Earthy,” I said. “Like a garden, but without the flowers.”

“It’s interesting,” said Sacks, “that the world can change, can be so different, when you no longer have the means to process it like everyone else.”

I nodded. I had been reading about that, in fact. Tucked away in the library, I had begun to read about smell—the history, the psychology, the science. Every day I found myself held a little bit more in awe by the mystery, the grandeur, the complication of what we know, and what we don’t. In the search for identity in smell, I had quickly realized, there is no normal. Even when healthy, I smelled the world around me differently than others did.

I smelled it differently in part because of gender. Scientists have found that women have a better sense of smell than men. Reproduction plays a role. Scientists have found that women have a heightened sense of smell during certain points of their menstrual cycle. Women are better at labeling odors than men, and they are more attuned to the kin recognition of their children. Almost everyone I’d met had heard of someone who experienced strange aversions or predilections while pregnant.

With age, too, comes a decline in the ability to smell. Threshold odor detection declines. Odor identification declines. The authors of a 2002 study published in the
Journal of the American Medical Association
noted that 24 percent of individuals between the ages of fifty-three and ninety-seven have an impaired ability to smell—62.5 percent of those over eighty. Even before the accident, my only living grandmother, my father’s mother, Ruth, did not smell the world in the same way that I did.

Later, I would learn about the genetics. I met Charles Wysocki, who does work on a phenomenon called
selective anosmia,
or odor blindness, a few months later. Almost every single person is unable to detect the smell of something that others can, he would tell me. This is due in part to gene mutation, the creation of less efficient olfactory receptors, or the natural absence of an important protein. We are simply genetically predisposed to smell the world differently. The classic example is with androstenone, a pheromone found in boar saliva, as well as both male and female human sweat. This steroid smells different to different people, described like stale urine or a sweet floral but never in between. And for others it is completely absent. A fraction of the population cannot smell androstenone at all.

Once, at a conference held in New York City about the use of smell in art and design, I listened to Rockefeller University scientist Leslie Vosshall as she stood onstage and spoke about the differences we all have in our ability to smell—genetics, perception, learning. She mentioned androstenone. She mentioned cilantro and skunk—both scents that receive wildly different reactions, perhaps genetically based. Chandler Burr, the perfume critic for the
New York Times,
sat in the audience. Toward the end of her talk, he raised his hand.

“So if we all smell differently,” he began, and then paused. He started over: “If we all saw colors differently, then we wouldn’t be able to understand art like painting, or if we heard differently, like music. Schoenberg to you would sound like Radiohead to me. Are you saying we could
all
smell completely differently? Mint to me could smell like horse manure to you?”

Vosshall nodded. “That is what we’re studying. There are many examples of disagreement. Does it smell good or bad? Some of the disagreement is cultural, yes. But I think it’s possible that we all smell differently.”

But Sacks and I, sitting in his office that mild February afternoon, were not examples of healthy bodies experiencing the sensory world with a naturally implanted diversity. We were victims of internal damage. Of bodily decay.

“I have problems with my eyes,” he explained. Over a number of years his vision had rapidly decreased. Then, he told me, he barely had any depth perception at all and, unless looking at a paper or book a half foot from his face, could not focus on what was around him.

“Just this morning,” he said with a laugh, “I got out of the pool, where I swim every day, and walked back toward the locker room. I looked at the wall and was surprised to see a new painting of a woman, in dark blue. It was a large painting and I wondered when they had time to hang it up without my notice. But then, as I got closer, I realized that it wasn’t a painting at all. It was a real woman, sitting on a bench. The world isn’t as it should be for me anymore.”