Member-only story
That sick smell
Chuck was late, which was okay. I was bracing myself as it was. I found a seat at the bar. Covid had eased, things were opening up. I was shoulder to shoulder with someone on my right. A young bearded bartender with a belly approached. I ordered a mezcal cocktail.
Chuck came in the door. He looked worse than ever. I shuddered inside. He made his way toward me. When he took his seat on the barstool beside me, I smelled the hospital on him. A nasty, antiseptic, appalling, astringent, yet filthy, scent. It was the smell of my father’s nursing home. The smell of the Kaiser clinic.
Only once in my life had I encountered that scent outside of a medical setting. It was in a restaurant. It was the soap in the bathroom, and it was such an affront to have that odor assault me in a place I associated with flaky croissants, chewy pasta, tiny espressos, perfect foam, delicate salads. I was actually angry, indignant. And a little sick.
And now, here was Chuck carrying the scent of the hospital on him. The very air of these chambers of death and sorrow and helplessness. I thought of the way my father shuffled closer to me when he sensed I was about to leave. I remembered his shining face, slick with Vaseline applied by his Eritrean attendants. The smell of the soap there: dirty, medical, ugly, deathly, ghastly. Pungent and sickening.
