The Old Capital: A Novel of Taipei

This is something a middle-aged man who was about my age, looked a lot like me, and had pretty much the same job told me after he’d had a couple of drinks.

Obviously, in keeping with common practice, I need to set it in the proper time and place.

We met at a party thrown by a mutual friend—my college classmate and his high school classmate from the same town. The party was held in a little beer bar on a big illegal building site, and invited guests kept coming and going, with about a dozen people present at any given time. The guest of honor that night was the friend of our mutual friend, someone, I’d heard, who hadn’t been back to Taiwan for more than a decade; this return visit was probably not part of the current love Taiwan fad, since we’d heard that he was either moving his company or being moved by his company to the Chinese mainland.

At a particular moment—when guests who drank were enjoying their liquor buzz and those who didn’t, obviously bored, were sneaking looks at their watches—this guy I didn’t know—I’ll call him A—staggered toward me clutching an empty glass like a real boozer and, with a grin, first apologized for being a boor, then, in true boorish fashion, asked me, “How come you smell like that?”

By the time I realized that he meant exactly what he said, with a pretended show of politeness, I sniffed the sleeve of my comfortably cool wool suit, then spread my arms as a gesture that I couldn’t smell anything.

A set down his glass and cordially helped me lift my elbow up to my nose for me to try again. He looked on expectantly.

So I sniffed again and, what do you know, I detected the rank garlicky odor of clams in wine sauce I’d spilled on my sleeve, and the cheap fragrance—cheaper than a certain toilet water, hardly worthy of the name “fragrance”—on the damp cloth I’d used to wipe it off. That and …

He spotted my “that and,” and happily supplied the answer: “Citronella! I haven’t smelled that in thirty years. Hungarian Water” A sniffed deeply.

It came rushing back to me: the late-spring rainy season had just begun, and my wife had discovered to her irritation what seemed to be evidence of termites, and had abandoned the camphor oil with alcohol she’d used for years and had gotten her hands on a bottle of yellow Vitali Tonic, on which the words “citronella oil” had been written; she’d used it to clean the closet, inside and out, and the smell was enough to suffocate everything within range, including termites and humans. Naturally, my clothes, especially my absorbent wool suit, were affected. But that was during the rainy season, and the suit had gone out to the cleaners no fewer than three times since then.

Ignoring my confirmation and implied praise of his sense of smell, A kept talking.

“At the time, up and down the entire street—in truth, it was the only street in the town—you couldn’t avoid the smell of citronella oil, day or night, and it wasn’t until I’d grown up that I learned it was extracted and exported to Japan. My aunt took me to do something, I forget what, and we went to the biggest general store in town—thinking back now, it couldn’t have been more than sixty square feet—to buy me some clothes. The whole time we were shopping, she talked to the owner in Japanese. I put up with it because she promised to buy me a toy I’d been pestering her about, probably a plastic gun or a long-handled knife…. I haven’t thought about my aunt for at least thirty years, just about forgot she’d ever existed, because not long after that they got a divorce, but for a time I lived with her, I shared her bed and she bathed me, even tweaking my little pee-pee while she was washing, just like a real mother. Where had my parents gone …? I think she stuck so close to me during those days and nights because she didn’t want to face my uncle. He worked out of town and came home only on weekends. While he was away, she and I slept like babies, at least I did. Some really scary noises woke me up once. My uncle was stomping on my aunt, and he looked like a giant on top of the tatami mat; she was crying, I think, and the only resistance she put up was to keep him from stomping on me or waking me up…. Now I wonder if that was an ordinary domestic fight or some kind of savage sexual behavior. They had no children and treated me like one of their own, that goes without saying, and she often called me her ‘little treasure’ in Japanese. When she had something to say to me, she’d bend down real low or squat on her haunches and straighten my clothes while she talked, just like housewives treated their husbands in Japanese movies we’d seen…. Honestly, I haven’t thought about her in thirty years, even though I believe she was living in her family home not far from town, but you know, back then divorced couples were bitter enemies, and my grandmother forbade us to even talk about anything that involved the woman. My aunt always smelled so good; it wasn’t citronella oil, but now the smell of citronella oil on you has reminded me of her. She had a lovely figure, but maybe that was because of the bindings. I saw her in her underwear once, and it was a lot like our modern-day adjustable corsets, squeezing her really tight to flatten her tummy and uplift her breasts. I guess appearance was important to her. She often took Japanese books and magazines to a shop where she bought fabrics and asked the dressmaker to copy the patterns, but somehow they always came out looking more or less alike, a lot like the clothes my wife started buying last year, the sort of things worn by Jacqueline, who had just died, Kennedy Onassis, that Jacqueline. Fashions those days were strange, and now it all comes back to me, when they went out they carried little rattan baskets painted in high-gloss soft colors. My aunt, for instance, owned a butter-colored one, I think with a broken hasp—that was my doing, so she gave it to me. I pretended it was a little prison by keeping marbles or captured insects in it to torture them, but I also turned it into a nursery for fledgling sparrows a few times …”

I listened patiently, praying, Do me a favor, please make him forget I even exist when he sobers up, because the last thing I want is to start up a friendship, even a bullshitting one, with this sort of beginning.

After my shower that night I saw my wife frown at the smell as she hung up my suit. She usually sniffed clothes to see whether or not they needed to be cleaned, and that always embarrassed the hell out of me, and more than once I stopped her from sniffing underwear, or socks I’d just taken off, saying that anybody with half a brain (nose) could tell they should be washed without having to sniff them, so why did she insist on doing it?

More than once she replied, “To prove to myself they need cleaning.” But that was when she was in a good mood.

I kept her from complaining about the garlicky smell by asking her where the citronella oil had come from, and she said a friend had brought it back from her native home in the countryside, saying it protected you against mosquitoes, and she wanted to keep the children safe from dengue fever and Japanese encephalitis, so she assumed that, logically, the stuff ought to protect against termites as well, and so she asked for a bottle, and asked me what I thought. I asked her if she didn’t think it had a funny smell, and she glared at me: “Why didn’t you say so before?”

I ran into A again not long after that, at a place, what should I call it, one of those places you see all the time in Taipei, designed to have a bar and several small tables, specializing in coffee, but over time, thanks to people like me who drop in after work to avoid rush-hour traffic, they start serving set-menu boxes, light snacks, even invent sandwiches with strange names and tastes that I’d never try, and later go ahead and start serving cocktails.

A and I were sitting a few tables apart reading our evening papers and, as we were both turning a page and yawning, our eyes met, but there was only indifference, and I secretly rejoiced that he hadn’t remembered me after sobering up. Are you that way too? Now that I’m over forty, I no longer have the will or the energy to listen to other people’s problems, and “other people” includes my wife and myself.

I often try to convince myself that this world is only one of a great many hells.

My pager beeped; it was my wife, she was at her parents’ home; she often paged me to come get her after she’d been shopping or watching a soap opera with her parents during rush hour, then drive back to our suburban home, a trip that, at the peak of the rush hour, took two hours.

I tipped my head back, like I would if it was a real drink, and drained my cup of cold coffee, then stood up and went over to the bar, where the girl tending bar was making juice, and asked her to punch my coffee card.

Instinctively, I turned at the sound. What the hell, was that supposed to be my name or something?

It was A, of course, wearing a big grin, a complete reversal of the indifference of a few minutes before.

He wanted me to sit with him and would not take no for an answer. I had to give in, maybe unconsciously assuming the role of the aunt who’d bathed and shared a bed with him.

A ordered Long Island iced tea for both of us; I told him I didn’t want one, but he let the order stand, and picked up where he’d left off in the conversation the other night, unhindered by the elapsed time.

“Later on I phoned her, my aunt, who’d retired the year before, but what hadn’t changed, not a bit, was the primary school where she taught; I insisted on going with her once and sat in a classroom that probably dated back to the Japanese occupation, with straw poking through spots in the beat-up mud walls, but, strangely enough, so hardened I had to gouge with my fingernail to scrape off even a little piece. That was in the summer, and the ground in front of the classroom was cluttered with Burmese gardenias, I’m sure you’ve seen them, thick branches, far apart, the ones people call hen’s-egg flowers, with white petals, a yellow core, and a subtle fragrance, but if you give me one, all I need is one whiff and I can recite the names of at least ten kids in that class, and if you supply me with the odor of a running sore on one of the students’ legs or a whiff of gentian violet, I can conjure up a picture of every boy in the class.”

The Long Island iced tea arrived. He picked up a glass, but instead of drinking, he breathed in the smell and muttered, “4711, X X.” It sounded to me like a series of numbers, followed by someone’s name in code.

A was lost in thought for a moment, until I was sure a current of air passed between us (maybe it was the smell of citronella oil on me) and brought a more familiar expression back to his face, and he continued.

“In the end, a member of her family, the person I’d addressed as kin when I’d gone to her parents’ home with her, told me she died soon afterward, a scant few days after the death of my grandmother, and I assumed that their mutual enmity had led to a power struggle to see who would die first, like the Empress Dowager and the Guangxu Emperor, or Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong, until, like those others, at some point they merged into a symbiotic unit, and when one left the scene, the other lost the will to go on living. I think my aunt must have blamed my grandmother for breaking up her marriage. You know that she, my aunt, was a reserved woman, to the point of being incapable of protecting herself or her marriage, whether my grandmother intended to torment her or not. I can recall how prone she was to sulking; she often stayed upstairs at mealtime, with the light off, either crying or sulking or sleeping, I didn’t know which, but refusing to come downstairs to eat, so my grandmother would send me up with food on a tray, often pan-fried croaker, and once when I was on the stairs I did something disgraceful, I popped out one of the fish eyes and ate it, it was so nauseatingly fishy.”

If you think he talked only about two old ladies who were dead and gone and the nauseating eye of a croaker, you’re wrong, but at the time, I reacted pretty much like you would: I looked down at my watch as a sign that it was time to go (my god! I’d rather have been at my in-laws’ house watching Tokyo Love Story).

Before letting me go, he begged, pathetically, I thought, asking me to bring along a bottle of citronella oil the next time we met (he said he worked in a nearby office). Without waiting for him to finish, I promised to get my hands on a large bottle of the stuff as soon as possible and rush it over to his office or his home (anything to avoid having to see him again).

A mustered up the courage, in spite of his embarrassment over my comment, to ask me to get him something—anything I no longer wanted—from my dresser drawer, like a used handkerchief or a floppy sock I was going to throw away—Please, don’t ask for a pair of underpants I’ve outgrown!—hurrying to explain that it wasn’t just the citronella oil, but a mixture of other fragrances that duplicated the smell of his aunt (“I want to preserve that”).

Except for my wife, I hadn’t heard the sound of an adult about to cry for years.

In my drawer I found an environmental protection T-shirt a factory owner had passed out to celebrate Earth Day, but I was concerned that the smell might have been contaminated since the plastic bag was still sealed, so I asked him to assess it. He took it from me and sniffed it. “Thanks,” he said, “a perfect mix.”

A perfect mix, like I was a parfumeur, or, more correctly, my wife was. She regularly put nearly empty perfume bottles into our drawers, in a thoughtful, if seemingly random, manner, and I never found it strange, since I didn’t realize they’d leave their smell on me, and even if they did, I’d have assumed that the various perfumes the women in the office wore would have overwhelmed them. My god, the air pollution they cause is worse than cigarette smoke.

He then told me a story that was much more interesting than the tale of the two old women and the nauseating fish eye, apparently to show his thanks.

Nineteen-ninety? The seventy-ninth year of the Republic? I needed a minute to think back to what happened that year. At the beginning of the year, the president stunned everyone by choosing someone without a voice as his vice-president¹³ … a “horror story” about the National Assembly … stupid, ugly political power struggles … in mid-year, when everyone in the country said he couldn’t do it, the president willfully picked a man in uniform as his premier….¹⁴

I didn’t know if A’s disaster had its origins in any of those. But given his provincial background, there’s no way he was related to the cashiered Treasurer Zhang, Premier Li, or Military Commander Wang.

“—Nineteen-ninety, customs duty and commodities taxes dropped and the value of the New Taiwan dollar rose dramatically. Thanks to substantial imports, perfume was no longer considered a luxury item.”

Ah, then it occurred to me that A’s wife, like mine, probably could not control what we considered an irrational expenditure on perfume … but could this be considered a disaster?

“I forget if it’s a Japanese saying, but it refers to how, owing to chance and karma, extraordinary, unforgettable sexual experiences come around only once a decade. No matter how many times we do it in a lifetime, starting in our teens—the pros manage to do it daily, while the amateurs or those who don’t have a partner are good for at least several hundred times—when all is said and done, when you come to the end, there won’t be more than a few times in your life that were truly unforgettable.”

Actually, everything is repeated over and over, and if you forced yourself to record each experience, you’d likely run out of things to say after 300 or so words, or you could simply repeat what you wrote the time before, and the time before that … and just when was that? In the morning? Before bed at night? Lights on? Early morning, when the sky was blue-gray? … What CD was playing? Which pajamas was she wearing? How did it start? Was there anything out of the ordinary about it? …

I’m waiting for this guy I’ve only met three times to tell me about his once-in-a-decade experience.

“The difficulty in achieving or finding that once in a decade isn’t the key issue….”

He seemed not to know where to begin, and I couldn’t help wondering if it might be the citronella oil and powder smell on me that was getting in the way.

That, as you can imagine, surprised me. His once-in-a-decade partner was his wife.

It was clear that that wife of his was going to be a lot harder to describe than “that aunt of his.”

“That wife of mine is a wild woman. We’ve got two kids still in grade school, and she doesn’t care if we wake them up. And that’s not all. You know, whenever a new perfume is imported into Taiwan she’s the first to buy it, and she really wears it, laying it on thick and encasing herself in such a spray I can barely see her. Then that night, my god, she throws herself into it with all the energy of final exam week, like a fox spirit or sex demon, doing everything in her power to suck me dry, body and soul, before the light of dawn … and so, I guess you could say that this perfume history is my once in a decade. For instance, if you don’t mind my saying so, you’ve got” (he laughed at this point) “the smell of Kenzo on your underwear; the fruit odors are gone, but the smells of wood and pungent Oriental spices still linger—”

A held up his hand to stop me from saying anything—even I wasn’t sure what—in my defense, and continued the flow of words. “—That time in the bathroom I got her hair wet and washed off her light makeup, like the time we ran into a thunderstorm in the suburbs when we were dating. She wasn’t yet forty and water beaded on her newly washed skin, and she knew that the bathroom was nothing but hard surfaces. Well, we did it twice, and we were so sore we couldn’t get out of bed the next morning.”

That reminded me of a similar incident … I smiled, my face must have turned red, and I had to explain why: How can you call that a disaster?

“Remember the perfume called Red Door? Reputedly, tens of millions of NT were spent on advertising when it first came to Taiwan. I’m sure my wife saw the print ads. She was on pins and needles until it went on sale—she bought it the first day and, as always, laid it on thick, even though she’s allergic to ethanol-based perfumes, which cause a rash wherever they touch her skin, turning it red and itchy.”

Needless to say, he went on to describe a sexual encounter that surpassed the previous one, its subtleties and shuddering effects, until I’d heard all I could endure. I interrupted him again, since I still didn’t understand how any of this could be considered a disaster.

“They targeted bold, confident, ultramodern working women with strong personalities, age twenty-five to thirty-five—”

“So, my wife was worried that the ads would work on the girls in my office, who’d all run out and buy a bottle of Red Door, and that spelled trouble!”

“You really don’t get it, do you? She used it first, so if every bold, confident, modern moron in my office started using it, the aroma would remind me of my wife, and that longing would lead inevitably to another once in a decade. You can imagine, can’t you, the sort of embarrassment that could lead to? You know, not every person, place, or situation is appropriate. Once, for instance, I was talking business with a factory owner over lunch, and his special assistant had on the perfume my wife wore several times during our honeymoon, which, I seem to recall, was no longer on the market. It was a gift her second brother, who was studying abroad, sent her when she graduated from college. I hadn’t smelled it in more than a decade, and it really threw me; I nearly fell in love with that special assistant, and spent the whole afternoon like a dog on the make, trying to find my wife to take her to bed. Don’t tell me you’ve never had an experience like that.”

By racking my brain I recalled a girl who’d worked in my office for six months before leaving to study abroad—I can’t even remember her name and had no particularly strong feelings for her. I believe she was a regular user of a subtle, slightly sweet perfume at a time when not a lot of women wore perfume, since it was still pretty expensive, and I assumed she wore it to mask a body odor.

Several years later, my wife and I attended a relative’s wedding banquet, and the same fragrance suddenly reminded me of the girl, the lush, shoulder-length hair that covered her face when she was bent over her desk at work, only the tip of her nose and her chin poking through, and, once or twice, revealing a bit of cleavage…. She didn’t appreciate the way her male colleagues teased her by telling stupid jokes. She’d just smile and complain, “That’s stupid!”

“You see, that’s what really scares my wife: a fragrance she wears reminding me of other women. Which is why she’s tried every perfume on the market—that way, no matter what fragrance I smell on other women, I’ll immediately think of her, something beyond my control, and if I ever have thoughts of cheating, the only way my wife will not be on my mind is if the other woman wears no perfume or makeup (unlikely) or wears one my wife hasn’t tried (even less likely). Take, for instance, the girls at Flower X Flower Cocktail Lounge. Don’t they all wear Chanel No. 5, which the madam imports directly from Paris? Well, when the supplier learned that, they sent instructions that no more large orders from Taiwan were to be filled, to keep the desirability of their perfume from tumbling. So you see, with a lovely and desirable young woman sitting across from me, my mind was filled with the image of my wife in a purple satin negligée (see what a good memory I have), and you can imagine what that did to my libido. It killed it. That ended that….”

A picked up the second glass of Long Island iced tea, sniffed it, and brought his remarks to a conclusion. “Of course, I had no burning need to stray, but when I considered the long road stretching out ahead of me, the thought that this possibility would no longer exist someday was too depressing for words.”

So the idea of an extramarital affair depended upon finding a woman who wore a perfume your wife had never tried, right?

A muttered something before finally taking a drink from the glass he’d lifted to his lips several times, leaving a sniffable amount at the bottom.

I couldn’t be sure. Just then the dense mist of a strange odor enveloped us, and I discovered it came from the waitress who was removing our empty glasses and giving us a clean ashtray, and whose armpits were at the level of our faces.

A and I exchanged glances, like ants with their antennas, but said nothing until the waitress had cleared our table and walked off.

Curry rice. We were let out of grammar school at noon after the monthly exams, so I always went home for lunch. Mother would make fried rice with tomatoes or curry rice, filling a bowl and then turning it upside down onto a plate, so it lay there nice and round, like a cupcake, and I’d eat it with a spoon. My younger sister and I would try to talk like Americans while we ate. My god, the days were so hot then we had to be careful to keep our shoes from getting stuck in the soft, sticky asphalt … if that smell had lingered a few more seconds I’d have had more memories…. How about you?

“A dressmaker’s shop. Ume-san’s Dressmaker’s Shop. Back then it was called a foreign tailor shop. My aunt often took me there, and once in a while my grandmother went there. Most of the time Ume-san came to our house to take my grandmother’s measurements, but if she’d received a gift from a Japanese or some imported fabric or things made for younger women, Grandma would visit the shop herself, since Ume-san kept copies of the latest fashion magazines. The strange thing was, all Ume-san’s fabrics were brand new, yet the overpowering smell of hundreds of armpits hung in the air of her shop. I wonder why? You know, she had a basket in which she tossed the remnants, and, as a boy of five or six, I was allowed to play in it. Sometimes I’d fall asleep, and all the new fabric combined to produce that smell. My grandmother and aunt would often gather intelligence on each other; my grandmother would casually ask Ume-san how many outfits my aunt had had made for the summer, and my aunt would step up to one of the racks to feel fabrics to be made into dresses for my grandmother, most of which had been given to her by Japanese, things that weren’t available at any price. My aunt would be deeply envious, but my grandmother never treated her to any of those gift fabrics….”

“Never asked. She was emaciated, and always on edge. If it wasn’t cancer, it must have been a bad heart…. I’ve never understood death, like this minute, right now, I can describe everything about her at a certain time in her thirties in perfect detail, but what does that mean in terms of her death, of her no longer being there? I recall something a foreign writer once said: ‘Death is the subtraction of me from the world to which I have been added.’ For a time, I found that comment totally convincing, because I was constantly brooding over death. A Jew, maybe a prophet or something like that, once said: ‘Death is simply pushing open a door and walking from this world into another,’ but what if I get stuck somewhere in between? I was frightened and curious about every detail of death, such as what does it mean for me to remember my aunt so vividly? Does that also work for organ donating? Say her corneas or kidneys are still living in someone else’s body. If so, then it’s no longer a case of her subtracted from the world to which she has been added, is it?”

What could I say? The last time I’d heard anyone talk about things like this was probably in college with a studious girlfriend … now that I’m over forty, there are a lot of things I can’t recall, and couldn’t no matter how much time you gave me. I admit I can’t recall the girl’s name, and even though things didn’t work out between us, I should at least be able to come up with her name. I’m superstitious enough to believe that if you provided me with an odor, I could recall her, at least her name and what she looked like.

“So what’s the meaning of death? If there’s anything more vivid than donated organs you can leave behind in this world, that is.”

But seeking a smell tied to her would be far less easily accomplished than trying to come up with her name or appearance, since after all, finding a copy of a class yearbook wouldn’t be that hard.

“Take, for example, that vivid memory I referred to a moment ago, sensory to the nth degree, olfactory, and how it’s totally different from the abstract words or works left behind by artists and writers—”

What sort of smell would it take for me to recall her? Something vivid and sensory, totally different from the words and images of a class yearbook, as A just said.

It can’t be perfume, for back then, perfume was rare in Taiwan. Then how about the cafeteria outside the school gate? For a time, we regularly agreed to meet for lunch; or we went to the grassy area outside the library, and sometimes the caretaker was mowing the lawn, so maybe the fresh, green smell of newly mowed grass could spark memories of her; or a downpour on a summer afternoon, since we’d huddled together under one umbrella and, drenched, walked past her house many, many times.

When I said good-bye to A that day, surrounded by the heavy aroma of organic coffee, that simple question droned in my head. I picked a leaf from the decorative plant on the table, rubbed it between my fingers to squeeze out a few drops, and held it up to my nose. Nothing about it gave rise to any memories. On weekends, when we ate at home, I’d sometimes search among the various vegetables for any thread that might help me solve this puzzle. Unfortunately, my wife was almost obsessively fond of Italian pasta and soup at the time, and I’d accumulated bottles of unfamiliar ingredients, with labels like “parsley,” “sage,” “thyme,” and “oregano,” but only their names were familiar, and I was reminded of a song that had been popular the summer after we took the college entrance exams, and I’d looked up each of these strange and unfamiliar names in a dictionary, at a time when my memory was excellent, which is why I never forgot them.

Overcome with boredom, I went out onto the balcony to visit my wife’s potted plants. They were all leafy plants—no flowers and no fruit—twenty or thirty of them all together, and all different. But to me they were all the same. What was her name?

The next time we met, with some embarrassment, I revealed my simple problem to A: compared to his major question about death, my inability to recall the name of an old girlfriend showed I wasn’t trying hard enough.

Like a cinematic sage and his disciple, or Holmes and Watson, we walked down a lane made barely passable by lines of parked cars or, where there were no cars, large potted plants used to reserve parking places. A reached out and picked a stem with leaves and a thick white flower from one of the roadside plants; holding it out as far as he could, so I couldn’t smell the fragrance, he asked, What does that remind you of? The leaves were shiny green, almost black; I think one of those was among my wife’s twenty or thirty plants…. I described it hesitantly.

Ah, I said before he even asked, Zhu Meijun, who shared a desk with me in the first grade, brought one of those to school in her pencil box every day (A interrupted me to say it was a gardenia). Zhu Meijun was a cute girl, and smart, and every kid in the class eagerly followed her example by picking a gardenia from somebody’s garden on the way to school and putting it in their pencil boxes. Zhu Meijun also kept the shavings from her Moonlight brand perfumed pencil in her pencil box, and so did the other kids who owned those pencils. In a word, we kept our little treasures in our pencil boxes, and we all had personal treasure troves on our desks, which we sometimes guarded like deep, dark secrets but on other times opened up for public display. In addition to the gardenias and perfumed pencil shavings, for a time the third most popular keepsakes were teeth, baby teeth that had just fallen out and were scrubbed clean, despite the fact that the cavities lent them a terrible smell, but which, when mixed with the flower and pencil perfumes, produced a captivating aroma…. Zhu Meijun, a name I hadn’t thought of for thirty years, except once, when I spotted it on the college entrance exam announcement. I think she was admitted to Soochow University.

The fragrance of those flowers had stuck with me all this time, and as I regained my composure, my embarrassment was palpable, like someone seeing a hypnotist or psychologist.

“So I’m not afraid of coming down with Alzheimer’s or winding up as a vegetable for one reason or another, because I believe that all I’ll need to relive my past is exposure to my nurses’ perfume, and it will be a truthful revisitation, like watching a movie, unaffected by the crafty revisions we impose upon our past as we grow older. I suggest that if your wife isn’t in the habit of wearing perfume, you should make a point of using a fragrance yourself for a time. Some people call this a wet memory, and, of course, you needn’t actually put it on your body, if that doesn’t appeal to you, and you can find some other place for it in your life that feels natural. Storing your clothes in a closet or dresser with citronella isn’t a bad idea … over time, a fragrance can help preserve a memory or preserve the woman in your memory, if holding on to memories of the past is something that interests you, that is, or is important.”

A fondness for one’s past, for one’s memories, is no different than a fondness for one’s present, one’s future, one’s life, isn’t it? Could a compelling fondness for life be why A is so afraid of death, so mindful of it?

Even though he was no help in my attempt to recall the name of my former girlfriend, he had served as a catalyst for me in recalling Zhu Meijun, impossible though that seems, the girl I was secretly fond of in the first grade. For that I felt obliged to try to answer the question he’d posed the last time.

Here’s what I think, and this is a hard thing to consider: everything dies, not just people. Look around you, everything dies: the flower you’re holding, termites, turtles, sperm whales, moss, red cypresses up on Mount Ali, germs … actually, I don’t know what scientists think, but if the goals of the medical and biology communities are to ease the difficulties of old age and make death less painful, I’m okay with that; if, on the other hand, they think that once they prevent the onset of disease altogether, they can keep death at bay permanently, then their naïveté is a little scary. I recall what a scientist who had studied medicine once said: insects are incapable of developing defenses against the ailments that will kill them. They are what they are, and when they reach a certain age, they die.

I couldn’t go on, first, because my concern over death was so shallow, and second, because it felt funny to cite insects in a discussion of the death of humans.

“I’m delighted to hear you say that everything dies. That may be common sense, but it sounds fresh when you say it. Insects, what a great example! At any moment on this earth there are a billion times more insects than humans, and virtually all of them live much shorter lives than we do. In simplest terms, the frequency of death among insects is so concentrated that not a second goes by without their deaths, and yet they’ve developed no philosophy that we can detect. What I mean to say is, they don’t struggle to keep living, however ignobly. You know those seventeen-year cicadas, well, when I was young, I got a kick out of finding their hiding places in trees. I just looked, I never caught them. Then a few days later, I’d see them lying belly-up on the ground, and if not for the occasional swarm of ants that tore off their limbs to make it easier to move them, they’d be so whole I wondered how they’d so easily accommodated death. It used to bother me, but now I envy them their willingness to just up and die—”

But it’s not a matter of a willingness to just up and die, it could actually be a mechanism of dying. Someone once said, I recall, that animals have a built-in self-protection mechanism that, when death approaches, switches on to lead them to a painless death. People of faith might concretize this as the embrace and guidance of their gods or God’s messengers. Don’t heart attack victims who have been revived after several hours say that they passed through a tunnel into a gentle, warm, and merciful light?

I had to find a way to console A, in the belief that I’d rarely met anyone more afraid of dying.

“What I’m saying is, with or without a major war or calamitous natural disaster, the more than 5 billion people living on earth today will all die off within the next hundred years, and even though they cannot be compared to insects, which seem to do nothing but die, on average 50 million people die every year, yet we are witness to death only a few times in our lifetime, like you” (here I interrupted to agree that my only time was in the army, where one of our company’s reserve officers committed suicide, but no one in my family has died yet), “but we separate these few deaths from the 50 million people who die off every year, and we attend their funerals, bearing our grief as best we can, recalling them tearfully, as if their deaths were unnatural, an exception, as if to say, if not for this accident or this illness or this age, they needn’t have died. This petrifies me, increasing the horrifying aspect of death, a hateful, avoidable, strange and unfamiliar event….

“So instead of saying I’m concerned about dying, or afraid of dying, you could say I’m concerned about and afraid of the way people avoid talking about it, how it’s become the ultimate taboo.”

I thought he was worrying too much, finding the time to ponder how other people deal with death, but here I discovered that there are two types of people in the world: one type isn’t afraid of dying, or should I say has never given any thought to matters associated with death, yet they normally buy all the life insurance they need; the second type is like A, though they, surprisingly, shun life insurance.

The sky had turned dark, and we’d reached a small neighborhood park at the end of the lane; several mentally disturbed individuals (or so I assumed) were sitting in a daze in the park, in spite of a notice posted at the entrance that stated, with remarkable inhumanity, that the park was closed to the mentally disturbed, along with bicycles, peddlers, and pets.

We sat on a low wall bordering a flower bed, and I probably crushed some of the plants. I smelled crab mums; back in the third grade I’d ruined a bed of crab mums in the back yard by burying a dog that had died of measles, and then laying a bunch of the yellow flowers on the grave mound….

I wondered if there were odors in A’s memory that he was unable to find, the way I was unable to recall the name of my former girlfriend.

In the darkness, instead of answering my question, A began singing the opening lines of a song, which he repeated over and over, but the only word he seemed to recall was “Ramona.” I didn’t know the words to the song either, but it sounded like one I’d heard as a child, which had then been turned into a pop song, but now A had taken it back to what might have been a foreign folk song.

“My aunt, that aunt of mine, played this for me on her phonograph, called it a bad luck song. I asked her why, but she wouldn’t say. When I threatened to go ask my uncle if she didn’t tell me, she said simply that my uncle had a close friend in middle school who also lived in town, and he’d show up anytime my uncle had a new book or a new record; when my uncle was in vocational school, this ‘Ramona’ was his friend’s favorite song. Later on, the friend was executed, and my uncle spent six years in prison for a different crime. I didn’t learn that my uncle had served time until I’d grown up, and all my aunt would say was that his classmate had been ‘popped’ and every time he heard that song he called it a bad luck song.”

I sniffed the night breeze to see if I could discover what had triggered this memory.

“It was fallen leaves from a camphor tree, swept into a pile on the muddy ground with a bamboo broom.”

“My grandfather loved to prune trees, all sorts of them. Every year he cruelly, ruthlessly trimmed them until there was hardly anything left. The sawed-off branches and limbs wound up in piles in the back yard between a star fruit and a mango tree, where they dried in the sun until they were ready to burn. I played in that wood pile just about every day. The first few days, when the leaves were still green and cool, and still fragrant, I lay on top, like a dead animal when the body heat has left it. There were all kinds of trees, but the camphor, eucalyptus, and Chinese magnolia smelled the best; the magnolia branches were actually more fragrant than their flowers. Sometimes we didn’t burn them all. In the years before my grandfather had a gas line into the house, he used coal and kindling, plus these branches, and I helped him and the woman who cooked for him stack the dead wood. He was responsible for chopping up the branches; she bundled up the twigs and leaves to start fires in the stove. The branches, long dead, were still fragrant, no matter how they were split, stripped, or snapped in two…. My grandfather wasn’t much older then than I am now.”

Camphor, eucalyptus, Chinese magnolia, mango, star fruit, what do they get me thinking about?

Violet, Chinese lantern, orange, day lily, it was almost as if I could smell them more clearly from how they sounded, and they sparked memories, often appearing on the specials menu at the coffee shop where I passed the time at dusk during rush hour, the ingredients of a flavored tea called Star of the Desert, which the girls mixed, treating tea like a perfume by giving it a name.

“I’d love to be able to recall the girlfriend I left when I went into the army. One look told you her parents were from the mainland, like you. We met just before graduation and were madly in love, but I had to fulfill my military obligation. I can’t say which was the cause and which was the effect, and what I’m trying to say is, I don’t know if it was the short time before I had to go into the army that sped up the process—she wrote to me every day, which gave me a lot of ‘face’ in my unit—or if our passion, which lacked a foundation, died off because we were separated, but a few months before I was to be discharged, she went abroad to study,¹⁵ taking all the books I’d left at her place, all my letters, and the few pictures of us with her, or maybe she burned them….”

But there ought to be some sort of formula, say, camphor leaves with eucalyptus, a bamboo broom, and mud, all swept together, which called to mind “Ramona.” …

“There is. She came to visit a few times in Longquan, a little village on the outskirts of Pingdong and Neipu, and took a room in the best hotel in the area, across from where I was stationed. I found a way to sneak out of camp at night to be with her and keep her from being afraid, since for Taipei girls like her, there was plenty to be afraid of. You know, what they called the bathroom had no door, and was separated from the sleeping area by a curtain, a lot like the kindling shed, which also served as an outhouse, in my grandfather’s mountainside quadrangle compound, where the tenant farmers lived. Whenever I was there at festival time, I refused to use it. There was no screen over the barred window, which looked out onto a vegetable garden and a pigsty, and all night long I heard the pigs moving around and smelled liquid manure. Because the fluorescent light was so ugly, she refused to turn on anything but a little lamp, one of those things farmers used thirty years ago, with a five-watt yellow bulb, to save electricity. And the comforter, well, it was the ugliest thing even I’d ever seen, and it had soaked up the sweat and other bodily fluids of who knows how many other people. How could anyone expect her to use that?

“She didn’t want to go out during the day, so I rented dozens of Japanese robot manga so she wouldn’t be bored. I went to see her one evening, earlier than usual, and maybe it was too hot, because she was lying on the bed in her underwear, her hair in braids, reading a manga. The sight was a real turn-on, like the femme fatale in a French movie, or the legendary Quemoy 813th—don’t people say those girls used to read martial arts novels while they were servicing the soldiers to keep from being bored?—stuff like that … that was the first time we did it, and I was inexperienced at the time, and I don’t know if it was her first time, but it didn’t seem to bother her, for some strange reason. Afterward, after that, the room was steaming hot, so I took her out to walk around town, the town I’d lived in for a couple of years, and told her all about this place and that place, like the Western pharmacy where the daughter attended a business college in Kaohsiung, and came home on the weekends to help out, not bad looking, and people spent the week trying to come up with an ailment they could bring over to the pharmacy and ask the girl what they should take for it; I also pointed out a little eatery where I’d written the price list for the owner with a calligraphy brush.

“After a rain squall, all the trees and plants were green, lush green, saturated with rainwater, and I was in a terrific mood, though I neglected to think about how she was doing. We walked to the end of the town’s main street, where the veterans’ hospital was located, fronted by a grove of mango trees. Insistent upon eating some pickled mango, she told me to sneak over and steal some for her. I picked so many my hands were stained by the sap and wouldn’t wash clean for days. We bought some granulated sugar and a little pencil-sharpening knife at a nearby convenience store, then went back to her room and made pickled mangoes: after washing, peeling, and slicing the fruit, we squeezed out the sour juice and added sugar, which kept us busy all evening. She ate every last one of them. I remember that after she returned to Taipei she wrote to tell me that she discovered blood from her stomach or intestines when she went to the toilet, probably caused by the pickled mangoes, but at the time I was so paranoid I assumed she was hinting that it was because she’d done it for the first time….”

The smell of pig manure, pickled mangoes, an afternoon rain squall in May, soggy rented manga, a little knife … to which his sweat-soaked army uniform had to be added … we reminded each other of missing items and supplemented the lists, created a list of essential items, like devising a formula for a mysterious perfume.

Supposedly we humans can distinguish over a thousand smells. Is that more than you expected? Or fewer?

Sheepdogs have 220 million olfactory cells, 44 times more than we, and I can’t help wondering if we’ve lost something because of that. Or maybe we’ve lost it by design. Say, like before I met A. What I mean is, maybe, over the millennia, our ancestors have passed down to us only those organs and functions they found useful, the precisely appropriate degree of memory, and that all we need are those things that are essential to our existence. And so the number of olfactory cells we have today can be likened to me before I met A, in that I was never interested in recalling long-hidden memories or those that had already vanished.

Not only that, a sense of fear lurks in the background, even though in these memories we’ve done nothing wicked or outrageous.

I vaguely recall something a foreign writer once said: “The purpose of literature,” he said, “is not to educate.” I am not saying that literature is unrelated to morality, but that it represents one person’s morality, and that any one person’s morality is seldom shared by the larger body of people to which that person belongs.

By substituting the word “memory” for “morality,” we discover how frightened we are by the conscious or unconscious calling up of those authentic memories. My god! They are in conflict with collectively altered memories that can be made known to people, in such resolute conflict that one nearly feels oneself to be a traitor.

The best strategy for staying clear of danger is to hold on to utilitarian memory alone.

Suddenly, for the first time, I no longer felt that the game I was playing with A was either enjoyable or interesting.

I switched to a smaller coffee shop to avoid rush-hour traffic and wait for my wife to page me.

In a bookstore I found a popular science book on the sense of smell, in which I hoped to find relative rationality that would allow me to dissolve the mysterious atmosphere that characterized my relationship with A.

—In a rose garden, what makes a rose a rose is a chemical compound composed of ten carbons—related to vanilla spirits—and it is formed geometrically by atoms whose bonding angles determine its fragrance. The unique vibrations of these atoms or atom clusters within the odor molecules, or the chorus of vibrations in all the molecules, have all become the basis for a variety of theories, and this basis postulates that the “osmium frequency” is the origin of smell.

—If the external arrangement of any collection of atoms is identical, then no matter what chemical designation it is given, the fragrance may be identical.

—We don’t know how odors excite olfactory cells; one way of looking at the issue is that odors poke tiny holes in receptor membranes and create depolarization, but other researchers believe that this element may have been confined by cells with special receptors and immobilized there, sending out its signal from a distance with a particular method, like the antibodies in an immune cell.

Grape, Chinese lantern, rose, pulp … for Martinique, the coffee shop manager’s recommended flavored tea.

Pig manure, pickled mangoes, an afternoon rain squall in May, soggy rented manga, a little knife … smells that cannot be formulated decreed that A would not be able to recall what his little French girlfriend looked like.

I couldn’t help being curious during those days about which scent—something I could neither control nor select, whether vivid or functional—would aid me in recalling A, if one day, as he said, he was subtracted from the world to which he’d been added.

As I strolled alone in the lane we’d walked down many times, I picked a white gardenia that had nearly opened all the way, eager to know what memories it would spark. Ah, still Zhu Meijun, my first-grade “filial” classroom in Zhongshan Primary School, the parings of Moonlight brand perfumed pencils, baby teeth with cavities … plus our teacher, Wu Zhengying.

My god, our teacher, Wu Zhengying … I hadn’t thought of her in nearly forty years, our pretty teacher, Wu Zhengying, Wu Zhengying, who was passionately in love with her boyfriend, and every time he came to see her at the teachers’ dormitory, she had me go with her; he would sit at her desk by the window, so she and I had to sit together on the bed. She’d let me eat the treats he’d brought her, and I’d glare at him, trying hard to keep my animus in check, and he was never conscious of it, since all he could do was stare at our teacher and smile. She, on the other hand, kept her eyes on me, watching me eat and praising me: “Such a big head, a true sign of intelligence.” I sort of felt that, in their eyes, for the moment at least, I was the son who would one day fill out their ideal little family, so I played along as best I could, at the same time lamenting every precious second of class break I was giving up.

Our young teacher, Wu Zhengying, with her shoulder-length hair, swept up in a sweet, happy atmosphere, did this boyfriend, or should I say future husband, treat her well?

Suddenly my eyes filled with warm tears, and I was in the grip of sentimentality.

The best strategy for staying clear of danger is to hold on to utilitarian memory alone.

One theory of smell, J.E. Amoore’s “stereochemical” theory, published in 1949, maps the connections between the geometric shapes of molecules and the odor sensations they produce. When a molecule of the right shape happens along, it fits into its neuron niche and then triggers a nerve impulse to the brain.

Musky odors have disc-shaped molecules that fit into an elliptical, bowl-like slot on the neuron.

Camphoraceous odors have a spherical molecule that fits an elliptical site, but is smaller than that of musk.

Floral odors have a disc-shaped molecule with a tail, which fits a bowl-and-trough-shaped site.

Putrid odors have a negative charge that is attracted to a positively charged site.

Some odors fit a couple of sites at once, and give a bouquet or blend effect.¹⁶

Like a prophecy and like a poem, and, of course, resembling the words in a strange rap song.

I picked a green unripe grape from the bunch my wife bought for me and was unsure to which category its molecules belonged, but definitely not elliptical, or spherical, or rod-shaped, or disc-shaped with a tail, and since immature fruit that will die before it has a chance to grow to full ripeness cannot carry the negative charge of something putrid, then into which sites in the folds of my brain does it fit?

I pondered this question for a long time, until I was certain that the controllable part of my consciousness really did not contain the requisite material to deal with this; I pinched it, squeezed it, and rubbed it, then waited, like Aladdin anticipating the appearance of the genie from his magic lamp.

The fog rolled in, as expected, in Women’s Association Village 1…. I sniffed the air, sniffed it again, and uttered the names of some playmates from several hundred years ago—now I understood why A, when he sipped his Long Island iced tea, had instinctively uttered what to him might have been a secret code. After the exodus out of the village following the flood, we spent our days in an outburst of anarchic hedonism. We’d wake up each morning to the news of which families had moved away, how the plants in a certain large garden could not be moved. A certain person’s yard, where we’d risked our lives to steal grapes and longans, was now ours to leisurely ravage if we felt like it. Yet we weren’t willing to let the fruit ripen, preferring, as before, to pick it when it was still green and no bigger than peas, so sour that more of our saliva fell out of our mouths than went into our stomachs.

Baoxin’s older brother was a small, nimble boy who picked the most fruit by climbing quickly to the top of the bamboo fence. But when he jumped to the ground, a bamboo splinter stuck in his calf; he clenched his teeth and pulled it out, then rubbed dirt on the wound to stanch the bleeding. Just watching him made our skin crawl, but no one was worried he might die.

While we were exploring houses, we happened across an older, ghostlike boy and girl who were getting laid (that’s what we called it then, but when I think back now, they were only hugging and kissing); the summer seemed endless, and our number kept shrinking. The new villages were not the same for everyone; as they left, some would shout a farewell: “We’re going to Nanshijiao.” Someone else would boast, “We’re going to Shanzangli, where there’s a hillside cemetery.” We couldn’t have said where these new places were, but there was no sorrow of parting, no promises to write, as if no matter where everyone went, we’d all meet again someday. Liao Ba, for example, sat in the cab of an army truck that was moving his family, waved with a show of bravado, and shouted, “I’ll meet you in Nanjing after we’ve retaken the mainland!”

I never saw any of them again, nor gave them another thought … the sole exception was X X Liu, whose name I saw in the community section of a newspaper after he’d been sentenced to death for kidnapping a Japanese resident’s child, whose body was never found.

Like me, X X Liu was a member of one of the last families to leave the village; he and I once caught a pet dog someone had left behind, killed it, cooked and ate it. The roly-poly little thing wagged its tail whenever it saw someone. God, Mao Wu and I had actually planned to raise it ourselves, without our parents’ knowledge. It was Liu’s job to do the killing. He didn’t know the first thing about butchering, and blood wound up all over the place, really scary, and putrid smelling. Mao Wu and I hated the idea of being laughed at and called chicken if we didn’t eat any, so, like initiates into a secret society, we ate under Liu’s watchful eye, our mouths covered with dog blood. My one hope was that Liu and I would not wind up in the same village.

X X Liu didn’t kill dogs only; he also dispatched rats, snakes, cats…. With all the insects dead and summer coming to an end, when night fell, no more than a dozen lights were on anywhere in a village that had once claimed several hundred households. Very rarely, someone’s headlights passed down the highway beyond the village, too far for us to hear the car; that was our only proof that the outside world still existed. What was Papa was waiting for? Why couldn’t he make up his mind to move to Nanshijiao or Shanzangli, or to the new villages of Dating or Neihu? What if there wouldn’t be time for me to change schools? I’d have no school to go to, even though, as heaven is my witness, my fondest desire was for summer vacation to last twelve months a year, so I’d never have to go to school. But at this rate, X X Liu would kill a man sooner or later, then roast him and force Mao Wu and me to eat the guy’s dick.

The best strategy for staying clear of danger is to hold on to utilitarian memory alone.

I threw away the green grape I’d squeezed into pulp and wondered why I’d absorbed its odor, with its positive charge, or why it wouldn’t leave me … Did we kill a man or didn’t we?

Some people were lost during an exodus that seemed like a panicky flight. Not until the night the Suns, a family with seven children, moved into their new house did they discover that their second youngest child was missing. They went back to their old house and searched all night, unsuccessfully; undaunted, they returned to their new house and continued searching. Several days later, the stench from a dead rat in a public toilet on the village outskirts rose to the heavens; the child of the Sun family had been taken off by a demon several days earlier, but there were plenty of ghost stories set in public toilets, so it didn’t seem particularly unexpected; there was also Panpan’s older brother, who failed to get in the army truck and turned up the next day, floating in the Dahan river, his ears and penis eaten off by fish, or so I heard from X X Liu, who ran over to see for himself; then there was Old Uncle, the bachelor former noncom who was in charge of emptying trash bins, and it wasn’t until years later that adults who’d kept in touch determined, after years of assuming he’d moved to somebody else’s village, that he’d actually been lost; obviously, no one knew what happened to the homeless guy who haunted the fringes of the public square or the weedy ground near the public toilet…. I saw how X X Liu tricked the homeless guy when his mother told him to take food out to him. Was he someone we killed? The homeless guy? Old Uncle, the former noncom? The Sun child? …

I quickly picked another green grape that wasn’t ever going to ripen, confident that it would solve the great mystery of my universe. I stroked it, once again the fog spread all around … but it would only give me a single thread, which any breeze could snap in two: I had to return to that dusk, to the weeds that covered the ground on three sides of the public toilet and grew taller than us third-graders. We were assaulted by the strong odor of what might have been long grass belonging to the fleabane family, since it resisted our stomping and snapping; we often had contests in that grass to see who could catch the most ladybugs, and when we had several of the frightened little bugs in our dirty, sweaty palms, they released foul-smelling droppings. Sometimes we went crazy looking for lost treasure, because some older kid swore that a couple of days before, so-and-so had found a gold ring while taking a dump in the wild, and we believed every word of it, because all the grownups, including our parents, told us to stay away from the wilds, since that was where thieves went to divvy up their loot, and if you stumbled upon them, they’d have to kill you to shut you up.

Disc-shaped molecules with tails that have positive charges are unwilling to tell me anything more, except, except to return to a night wind in a weed-covered place like that—a night wind contains your and my dream; in the dream, time is borrowed and tightly embraced, the dream embraced is like a gust of wind, like a gust of wind—

In the dream, time is borrowed, I’m positive I’ve been hypnotized. I can’t wake up, I want to see A again, I honestly do, I’m sure he’ll be a hypnotist who can awaken me with a snap of his fingers.

After work, I headed back to the little coffee shop we used to frequent, and as soon as the automatic door slid open, all the familiar odors rushed up to me, as if I’d never left the place.

While I waited for him, like a disciple reading the scriptures without a purpose, I opened a popular science book and read with quiet assurance.

—They say that schizophrenia is a result of misreading signals, one’s own and others’, which is why a person cannot distinguish people from reality—

—Legends say that schizophrenics have an odor not found in other people, and science has recently confirmed that their sweat contains N₃—methylhexilic acid.

—Olfactory receptors, which serve as links among all living creatures, are extraordinarily important in building symbiotic relationships, such as that between crabs and sea anemones.

A once said that most perfume ads use music as a metaphor for the compounding process; some ingredients, or some groups of ingredients, for instance, are equated with musical notes, or harmonies, or musical instruments; the initial scent is like a melodic high note, and after the alcohol has dissipated, you can discern the mid-range notes of perfume, usually floral; the low notes come last, and sometimes they remain on the skin for as long as two or three days.

Then A said, Actually, perfume is like sex: foreplay, action, climax, consolation, and finally staying on the skin for as long as two or three days, and almost all of it comes from animals—and not from one’s sex partner—usually it’s ambergris, beaver, civet cat, musk … messengers of ancient smells, accompanying us as we pass through woods and across plains, as someone once described the occasion poetically.

Someone even said that giving a person perfume is like giving them liquid memory.

The Latin perfumum informs us of its origins: per (through or by) and fumum (fumes). The burned body of an animal, sacrificed to the gods, is like the second son of Adam and Eve, Abel, in the fourth chapter of the Book of Genesis. Abel was a shepherd, Abel wanted to offer up the lard from firstborn lambs; Jehovah looked favorably upon Abel and his offering…. Beyond that, he used it in an exorcism, to cure illnesses, and after sex.

Records of the use of incense in old Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, and China have come down to us in ancient texts or on relics; at first it was only the gods, but at some point high priests began using it, and after that came sacred leaders, then mortal leaders … the earliest perfumes were mixtures of fragrances and ointments, and then in the 1370s, alcohol was added to the incense and the mixture called “Hungarian water.” When the Crusaders went east, they brought back spices and knowledge of Arabian skills in alchemy and distillation. Perfume was very popular during the reign of Louis XIV.

Louis XIV kept a stable of servants to perfume his rooms with rose water and marjoram, to wash his shirts and other apparel in a stew of cloves, nutmeg, aloe, jasmine, orange water, and musk; he insisted that a new perfume be invented for him every day. At “The Perfumed Court” of Louis XV servants used to drench doves in different scents and release them at dinner parties.¹⁷

In the waning years of the empire, Napoleon III successfully pursued the Spanish beauty Eugenie, thanks to a creation by parfumeur Pierre Guerlain. An edict was promulgated, conferring on the Guerlain family the hereditary title of Imperial Parfumeur and Cosmetician.

Even though we do not need to use smell the way animals do—marking territory, establishing hierarchies, distinguishing among individuals, or determining when females are in heat—if you look at the vast amounts of perfume we use and the psychological effects it produces, it is clear that smell is an old warhorse in our evolution, one that we groom and feed, and won’t let go of—

I groomed and fed my old warhorse and wouldn’t let it go, as I waited for A to show up.

I ordered Long Island iced tea, A’s drink of choice, in order to think about him, or to recall the name he might have mentioned when we first met and introduced ourselves. I groomed it again and again, but my thoughts were on the cold, clean-scented soap my wife used after returning from a year-long solo trip abroad. I forget what had caused the two-or three-month cold war between us, but all I was allowed each and every day was to know what she smelled like after her bath, not to be near her.

I paid close attention to the girl with the underarm odor, breathing in deeply when she came over with a clean ashtray, but my thoughts were on the curry rice I’d had for lunch at home after the monthly exams one day during primary school.

I thought deeply about the homeless guy X X Liu and I might have killed, as I hummed a song over and over in the strange, shifting sunset clouds that moved like a violent aesthetic: Tonight’s wind, and tomorrow’s dream, what traces have they left in your heart? Tonight can I borrow some time, borrow the night wind to deliver my love straight to your heart? After so long, for the very first time I recalled the theme song from the movie Shanghai Nights without relying upon smells. In the movie the impoverished songwriter plays his new song on a violin on the rooftop, and the sound travels on the night wind throughout the city, down to vagrants, one-time wounded soldiers now in rags and reduced to begging, who are drawn out from under a bridge by the music to look off into the distance. A year or two after that, many of them probably emigrated to Taiwan with the Nationalist government, and, for one reason or another, landed in Nanshijiao, Shanzangli, or Neihu, and may even have ended up being slaughtered.

Tonight’s wind, and tomorrow’s dream, what traces have they left in your heart? God, for the first time in so many years I really missed those mothers, all those mothers from various provinces who hummed and sang songs like this one, made famous by Bai Guang and Zhou Xuan. Do you believe they actually wore cheongsams all the time, even when they were in the kitchen cooking or performing household chores (think about our wives, who dress in expensive casual chic)? For a while, my kid sister, who was collecting gold, silver, and other treasures, insisted that I take her to a playmate’s house. Back then all the mothers were doing needlework, like embroidering beads or patterns; someone came periodically to distribute materials and the money the mothers earned to help out with family expenses. Even I could tell that some of them didn’t know how to do embroidery, and, like young ladies from wealthy families, tried hard to copy from memory the adroit ways of needlework by maids and elderly servants in their hometowns. Beads and sequins were often scattered all over the floor, and my kid sister would quietly retrieve them, with supreme patience, convinced that our family would be “rich” once she collected enough of them.

Sometimes, when they wore their hair in a bird’s-nest style, those mothers would be prettier than the Shaw or Cathay Film Company’s starlets whose pictures appeared in South Country Cinema. All decked out, they’d hail a pedicab and go into town to attend military aid parties at their husbands’ offices. We’d stop playing and watch them like idiots when they passed by.

The third stanza of the song goes like this: The love in my heart, is it the dream in your heart? Can we borrow a bridge to connect us? On this borrowed bridge, the I of tomorrow, the you of tomorrow, will we embrace again like today?

Some mothers worked hard to learn the song, hoping to win first prize at the party, a Tatung electric fan or a U.S. Army blanket. I recalled how they embroidered with their eyes lowered, singing at the same time. The heavy smell of saliva and the rancid odor of children’s urine seemed mixed in the remnants and discarded thread that littered the floor. I found it hard to imagine that those women had ever been younger than they were at that moment, even harder to imagine that after that they would keep growing older. They no longer existed in the memories of hometown relatives, nor were they understood or sympathized with by children who had set down roots here. Borrowed time, borrowed evening breeze. Most are probably no longer around by now.

A once said that a Greek writer from 2,500 years ago had the following recommendation: “mint for the arms, thyme for the knees, cinnamon, rose, or palm oil for the jaws and chest, almond oil for the hands and feet, and marjoram on the hair and eyebrows.”¹⁸ Going through all that trouble to widen their presence and extend their territory. But A never did any of these, so I couldn’t recall him via any scents (such as the smell of citronella oil on me, which I couldn’t detect)—it turned out to be so easy! In the warm, thick mist of coffee that could immediately improve your mood, a tiny thread of—A called out to me from behind, “Hello, Citronella Oil.”

Now that I knew he also had a smell, I couldn’t wait to ask him if he’d been using that Oriental-scented perfume all along. I thought hard and presumed: “It’s got pepper, honey, benzoin, tonga bean, cinnamon, fir, and no animal fragrance.”

Before either of us could ask, we began telling each other all about our recent disappearance.

Maybe I needed to make a trip to Fuzhouli (I’m still not sure if that’s how to write the name of that place, since over the past thirty years I’ve never read any memoir or report that mentions it), if I really wanted to get to the bottom of whether we’d butchered and eaten X X Liu, no, I mean the homeless guy.

“I picked an appropriate season and chose not to drive; instead, just as back then, I boarded a bus by the Pingdong Train Station and rode to Longquan through Neipu, the same trip I’d made twice weekly in the army. I didn’t recognize most of the sights, because the place was congested with new houses so ugly they were beyond salvation. But as soon as I closed my eyes and opened the window, the smells—all the plants mingled with insects on summer nights, you know, like the smell of the air on the day after a typhoon, with the fragrance from broken branches and the clean smell of water—so dense they seemed to be solidifying, cascading toward you, blocking your eyes, ears, nose, and mouth to the point of suffocation.

“How could I not know about that sort of late summer night wind, the kind you get when the kissing and touching arouses you and makes you all sweaty, with an erection that comes and goes several times, then you have to get her back, before the curfew, to the dorm or her home on the last bus with all the windows open to dry the stickiness in your crotch, blowing away the desire and awakening your feelings, until you can’t help but whisper in her ear heartfelt vows, except that the vows are blown away by the same wind? It wasn’t our fault.”

But at least you should finally be able to recall that little French girlfriend, right? I asked A.

“I even forced myself to stay in the same hotel. The owner, obviously worried about me, kept having his wife come over for one reason or another—bringing me toilet paper or lighting the mosquito incense—maybe thinking that I planned to take poison. The hotel hadn’t changed much, except for the addition of a TV set with lots of cable stations, which probably meant that no one would rent manga to read any more. Citronella Oil, I just can’t recall her—”

It was because there were no fucking moist, dirty mangas! I pestered him with an accusing tone, even more afraid than he was of failing to recall the little French girl.

“Of course there were! I found a pile of them. I even picked some mangoes. God, the veterans’ hospital was doing better than before, with a throng of senile old folks sitting under trees. I also bought some granulated sugar and a little paring knife; I had everything. You remember I told you about the pharmacy beauty—”

But was there still a vegetable garden outside the room for raising pigs? In this day and age, I find it hard to believe that anyone would do something that stupid.

“You’re right, there wasn’t. There was a three-or four-story building where men and women of all ages sang karaoke all night along. But a farm smell lingered in the air, the liquid manure of vegetable gardens. I guess the soldiers were still raising pigs and growing vegetables. That’s what we did back then, to introduce some variety into our meals, and besides, we were truly bored. You know, don’t you, that back then the most common phone conversation we had with our brothers in the MP company guarding the arsenal by our barracks was: Hello, hello, hello, recon company, your pigs have jumped the fence again—”

So what went wrong? My attention was diverted to thoughts of the evening wind of my youth, filled with sexual urges, which I dearly missed. It had been ten or twenty years since I’d last felt that way. For one thing, I had few opportunities to take the bus; for another, now that buses were air-conditioned, the windows could no longer be opened. Besides, in today’s Taipei, where can a bus go forty or fifty miles an hour? Lend me the same kind of evening wind, and maybe I’d remember another two or three girls I’ve been nuts about.

“Citronella Oil, I read a terrifying report a while ago that said that Alzheimer’s patients often lose their sense of smell along with their memory.”

And not just our own deaths. Anything that’s hidden, asleep, or undiscovered will fly away like swarms of buzzing bees, for when they’re no longer remembered, they’ll truly fall into a slumber and disappear forever.

I was disconcerted by their second, unavoidable, true deaths, which, sooner or later, would occur. I really didn’t know if they were leaving without us or if we’d abandoned them.

“I’ve been thinking about this for some time, about how old folks aren’t actually unafraid of dying. Didn’t you once say that the death switch has been activated? Well, I think they’re not afraid of death, not of a year later or five years later, not even the sudden, unanticipated death that can arrive at night. They don’t fear death, because over there, in the world of the dead, there are more friends and relatives, even more than they have now. Don’t you think that the unknown world of the dead with all its friends is actually quite appealing? I wouldn’t be surprised if they secretly welcome the opportunity—”

What, after all, is death, except for no life? That’s what death is all about.

“Citronella, what would you most like to do if there were still a little time before dying, a little remaining sense of smell, and of course a little remaining memory?”

“I mean the first thing you can think of, not the rational actions of taking care of your will or personal effects.”

I want most to, I want most to gather together my playmates from that last summer. We’d forget all our past grudges and wouldn’t be curious or reminiscent or criticize how we looked now that we’re older, but would return to our secret weedy ground. You couldn’t know this but, in addition to searching for wild tomatoes and hunting for treasure, we also dug a tunnel, convinced that, if the direction was right, we could successfully dig all the way to America, so long as no one feigned sickness or got lazy. I really miss them, I mean it, I’d really like to see Liao Ba, Mao Wu, and X X Liu again.

I have no idea why everyone was so intent on going to America, I mean back then.

“After returning from Longquan, I went to see my maternal grandpa, because I’d spent part of my summer breaks with him. He was a real pack rat who kept everything, including letters from his grandchildren, our diplomas, award certificates, useful or useless tuition receipts, even a return receipt for a postal package from more than two decades ago. I found letters I wrote home when I was in the army, plus a notebook that was part diary, but included my friends’ addresses, the amount of money peopled owed me or I owed them, with occasional scribbles of some ideas. Know what I discovered?”

No doubt about it! You found your little French girlfriend’s photo or her letters!

“In the notebook I wrote: A smells so good (I have a habit of assigning each girlfriend a code to avoid complications). I wrote: A smells so good. I asked which shampoo or soap she used, and she said she used a perfume called j’aiosé; A must have come from a wealthy family—”

Say no more. All he had to do now was quickly find some j’aiosé. Since A’s frenzied, overly possessive wife hadn’t yet appeared, whatever was attached to that j’aiosé would be purely, without adulteration, the memory of the little French girl. That is, as soon as you opened or applied a bit of j’aiosé perfume, it would be like, well, just like rubbing Aladdin’s magic lamp, and the French girl would have no choice but to obey and appear, like the genie.

“The problem was, I searched all of Taipei’s perfumeries, department stores, direct import shops for authentic goods, boutiques, consignment shops. Some said they’d never heard of it, while others said they’d stopped selling it. Citronella, I’m afraid the fragrance is no longer available.”

On this day, September 4, many days later, A and I met again as usual at the coffee shop with the girl whose armpits emitted a strong curry smell. Together we pored over the classified ads in two major newspapers: “Wanted: a bottle of j’aiosé perfume, open or unopened, huge reward for any kind person willing to part with one; Please call (02) 2932–1832.”

Confirming that not a single word needed to be corrected or changed, we planned to run the ad indefinitely, until, needless to say, j’aiosé turned up.

We didn’t squander the days of waiting either. Every day we each prepared at least three different items, and then, by way of example, A waved the first item of the day in front me with my eyes closed, and I said, “My teacher, Ren Wenwei.” I opened my eyes and saw a square of ink that primary school students use to practice brush writing. My fifth-grade calligraphy teacher, a tall, pretty, single woman from Shenyang, was Ren Wenwei. Looking back now, I think she was no more than forty, but back then we thought she was very old.

A closed his eyes, while I placed before him a magnolia my wife had put into a crystal bowl with fresh water the night before. After a long while, A opened his eyes, which shone moistly: “Grandma. In the evenings, when Auntie was making a cook fire, my grandma liked to pick one of two varieties of magnolia to wear in the buttonhole of her blouse.”

My turn: grave mounts, fishing, catfish, poor earthworms. The pungent and strange leaves of the alpina flower of the ginger family.

“Rose, jasmine, Joy perfume, X X Hotel, Victoria Harbor—” A was slightly embarrassed, but the precision with which he identified these smells told me it must have been one of those once-in-a-decade experiences his wife had carefully designed.

“My office,” I sighed, exhausted, and opened my eyes to see a sheet of fax paper.

I cut open a hard, green berry, but even after a long time, A could only say, “Some kind of plant.”

It was a chinaberry. In the summer, chinaberry trees flanking the main road in our village were chock full of lilac-hued flowers, so many they gave off a toxic smell. We stood under a tree, stewing from envy as we watched the homeless guy eat a small dish of Heavenly Tyrant ice cream. At the time, we were about to embark on an exploration of Women’s Association Village 2, alongside the north-south highway, each of us armed with a homemade slingshot on our belt and some chinaberry ammo.

We also prepared two draft copies of a classified ad we’d carefully put away so it could be quickly published if something happened to me. The ad read, “To all the boys from the Zhongshan Primary School who lived in Women’s Association Village 1 during Typhoon Gregory, please gather at the bus stop at Fuzhouli at X time on X day of X month. No one leaves until we see each other, Zaizai.”

Naturally I wished I could have added to this draft my own lyrics from the song, “Evening Breeze”:

The love in my heart, is it the dream in your heart?

Can we borrow a bridge to connect us?

On this borrowed bridge,

The I of tomorrow, the you of tomorrow,

Will we embrace again like today—

With such meticulous preparation, A and I could wait with our hearts at peace until the end, with each other as company, outlasting heaven and earth, until yellow rain pours down, until no one leaves unless the other shows.