She smells like every want your adolescent mind has ever desired. Some men notice her like a focused dog: momentarily distracted, only to return to the task at hand. Not me. When a girl she’s wearing walks by, picture a giant, slow-moving sound wave bruising my eyelids and rolling my head back. The first time I met her was a snowy day in seventh grade. She was drowsing lethargic on a cute girl in French class. I had to sit next to her for forty-two minutes straight trying not to pass out. She was so fucking present, like a fog. When the bell rang, I hurried outside, guzzled thin air and threw up. Thinking back, it makes sense that she would like French.
I’m getting ahead of myself. I’m on my way to work, on the N-train. I loathe my job just like everyone else in the car. That’s why we all push so hard getting in and out: because on the subway, it’s acceptable to take your aggression out on the people around you. I miss my girlfriend, away at grad school. God I miss her. Things would be better if she was here. As I looked up from turning my thoughts over and over in my head, the doors opened and in she came.
When I was a senior in high school, a kid I knew drove his car into the highway divider. That’s what the police said. He wasn’t drunk and there was no one else on the road. Just him. Middle of the night. I had dreams about it. I dreamt that I was driving a blue Ford Explorer, alone in the dark on the cross-county parkway. I looked to the passenger seat and saw no one. I glanced at the road, at the radio, then again at the passenger seat and saw Victoria. In my dream Victoria was a man, forty some-odd years old, thin hair slicked back, stubble painted on a gaunt face, hollow eyes, and teeth that weren’t quite crooked but were far from straight. Despite his appearance, in my dream he didn’t smell like anything. I was so alone. He smiled at me and I knew he was the End. Then he grabbed the steering wheel and launched the car into the divider.
As I watched her in the subway, I remembered her appearing here and there in college, usually on young, attractive women on the go. She never wore girls who used too much make-up. Never really diversified her population. When I moved to New York after graduating, she showed up no less frequently or infrequently. The hair-dresser’s assistant, the girl walking down the street, the brunette leaving the pizza place. Once, she was on a very unattractive heavy-set German! I think that was either an accident or a lapse of judgment. She’s never worn my girlfriend or any other girls I’ve dated. Thank God. I wonder if she can live forever.
Today, she was wearing the program-coordinatorish girl standing in front of me on the subway. The girl was very pretty: mid twenties, wavy brown hair, green eyes. Her blouse accentuated her breasts, slim stomach and long neck. She wore a dark skirt, nice shoes and jacket to match. I was taking all of this in, when in an utterly unpredictable and unprecedented move, she left the train. Let me clarify: she left the GIRL on the train. Thinking back, I should’ve seen that as a warning.
Trains are heavy. Trains feel heavy. As the engine turns the wheels, I can feel the resistance; I can sense the effort, the struggle against gravity and friction. A moment ago, the train I’m riding eased passed normal. Unperceivable at first, then more pronounced, the car was rumbling through the tunnel without gravity or friction, faster than the force of the engine pushing it forward. The only resistance came from the inconsistencies of the train tracks, whose rhythm and push were much quicker than usual. In addition, the windows revealed the kind of darkness in the tunnel that stretches space to infinity. Every few seconds, the wall outside the car scraped by my window reinforcing what my body was telling me.
Click.
The veins and tendons of the bench I sat on swelled and buckled exploding paint and plastic everywhere. The shattering of the floors sounded like an accordion of dead leaves. The windows turned to powder and the walls to bent bread. The lights ticked out as a hundred people were forced towards the front of the car like tea in a French-press. Clothes luffed like dead sails. Skin rippled like a hurricane cove. Bones held, flexed, broke, splintered, shattered into a collapsing crimson bonfire.
But all of this was lost on me because at the exact moment that the train hit, I thought of her and how she left. It turns out I was right: smells don’t wear death.
