Jitterbug Perfume (27 page)

"Jasmine may stand us in good stead," said Kudra. "Alone, however, it falls short of perfection. Like a grand orator, it requires a somewhat lesser voice to introduce it. I am positive that a qualified master of ceremonies can be recruited, and failing at that, it would not be ruinous should it be forced to introduce itself. But what is a great orator without a strong platform to stand upon, without an enveloping auditorium to hold his words? Do you follow me? Jasmine is longer-lasting by far than any floral we have tried, but we must find a theater to contain it, an anchor, if you will, to keep it in place, because to be efficient it needs to endure at least thrice as long as it does now."

In other words, they could use a top note and absolutely required a fixative and a base.

Since they couldn't afford to commission such a blend from the monks, Kudra must develop it. She had worked with aromatics much of her long life—we are talking seniority here—but having had no experience with distillation, she was not in the true sense a perfumer. Fortunately, jasmine oil is obtained by extraction rather than distillation, and that she could manage. After a period of trial and error, she found lemony citron an acceptable top note; it gave the featured jasmine a brief but flattering introduction. As for fixative, ambergris was already in wide use, and while its detractors might deride it as "behemoth barf," a finer fixative has yet to be discovered. In this case, however, ambergris failed to deliver total satisfaction. It nailed the bouquet to the perfume, all right, but it didn't nail the perfume to Pan—at least not for very long. Since ambergris couldn't be improved upon, what this meant was that the base note, in addition to its usual function as an accommodating and complementing "platform," must also assist the fixative in prolonging the life of the aroma. A very special base note was called for. Kudra didn't find it right away. Months, in fact, dragged by as she experimented and researched.

In the meantime, a sardonic cuckoo was scrambling Alobar and Kudra's nest eggs, replacing them with obnoxious layings of its own.

At the appointed hour when courtiers of Louis XIV were finally to call at the shop to test its wares, Pan returned prematurely from a stroll in the park, his malodor at high mast due to exercise and the sappy influences of spring. The courtiers, three in number, arrived on his heels. "My goodness," said the first courtier; "Snit," said the second; "Phew," saiJ the third. Whatever credibility incense may have held for them was immediately lost. Lost, too, was the most profitable market to which Kudra had ever aspired.

Pan's lasting impression also cost her several smaller sales, and this at a time when expenses were on the rise. As the hunt for an effective base note went on, money was continually being invested in raw materials that were of no use in incense making. And, now, of course, there was another mouth on the premises, a mouth that, though it could not be seen, watered at mealtime nonetheless. They had a cash flow problem, and unless it was solved, they would never ankle up that gangplank in Marseilles.

In the midst of worrying about finances and Kudra's failure to conceive—none of his deposits seemed to earn interest— Alobar was stopped in the street one day by a neighborhood monk who inquired in the rude manner of children, policemen, and journalists if he and his wife employed heathen practices. The monk was no more specific than that, but Alobar instantly assumed the reference was to longevity. "You mean like that old Bandaloop, Methuselah?" he shot back, and as the Christian brother gargled the froth of his bewilderment, he hurried away in a chilly sweat to warn Kudra, rightly or wrongly, that they'd been found out once again.

For all the reaction he got from Kudra, he might as well have told her that the poodle gods were pooping on the paths of the Louvre. She was up to her elbows in a basket of bark, the leprous but fragrant epidermis of some African tree; unraveling its history, reading its fortune, learning its language, its vocabulary of botanical suffering; coaxing from its ancient sores an iridescent pus that smelled of rains and nests and yellow fruits squashed beneath the feet of heavy animals. "This could be it," she confided, milking. A single bead of resin rolled out of an ulcer and was caught in a vial. Somewhere in Africa a tree stood naked. "This could be the one to support the jasmine."

"Little good it will do if the monks set opinion against us."

When she neglected to respond, he said, "Kudra, what is to be our next move?"

"Express the bouquet from the resin."

"No, no, haven't you been listening? There may be trouble over—"

"Oh, that," she said. "Well, Alobar, I have been thinking. ..." She held another anguished crust of bark over the candle flame, squeezing and pulling until its black boil popped and out bubbled the feverish exudation, hard pearls of honey glistening as if in a prolonged delirium brought on by the pestilence of time. "I have been thinking that the altogether smartest thing would be to dematerialize—and then rematerialize in the New World."

Alobar looked stunned.

"Don't you see, that would save us money and time. We would not require a sou for passage nor would we be forced to bob about in the oceans with a horde of vomiting missionaries. Why, if Pan could dematerialize along with us—he is all but dematerialized already—we would not even need to complete his perfume. Locating the perfect base note may yet prove impossible." She sniffed unconfidently at the wooden warts in her fingers.

"Kudra, we do not
know how
to de-and rematerialize!"

"Then it is time we learned! Have we lived seven hundred years for naught? Except for our longevity, we are no closer to the divine than ordinary folk. Our practices have kept us alive, but they have not revealed to us one divine secret nor one speck of the magic of the gods." She laid down the ugly chips and faced him. He commenced to wring his hands.

"Kudra . . ." he whined.

"But for his age, Alobar the great individualist is just like any common man."

"Kudra! We don't know—"

"What happened to the bold adventurer who seduced me in more ways than one up on the roof of the world?"

"Kudra! You are talking death, I sense that you are."

"There is no death. There are only different levels of life. You must know that by now."

"You who ran away from the funeral pyre! How can you speak with such authority?"

Dealing the bark basket a blow, much as she'd once kicked a wicker of rope, Kudra sent it spinning, setting into motion a brief blizzard of scabious crumbs.

"Damn you, Alobar! By the blue piss of Kali, how you frustrate me! How could any man venture as far as you have and then be unwilling to go further? Is it a failure of imagination that has snipped off your curiosity, or a failure of nerve that leaves you so eager to settle for the one concession you have won from the fates?"

"One concession, eh? You make it sound so trivial. Let me tell you something, Kudra. Each and every morning when I awake, my eyes brim with tears at the realization that I am still here breathing when all who shared my natal day have for half a millennium been dust; each and every morning when first I see the dawn ray take your sleeping face tenderly in its tongs, I tremble in a kind of ecstasy that you and I continue to lie in love together, century after juicy century, while every other pair of lovers who have lived has had to helplessly watch their passion suffocate in the sags of their sickly flesh. Now that may strike you as some small, unworthy thing ..."

Kudra took his cheeks in her hands (he was clean shaven then, in the seventeenth-century style) and kissed him. She shook her head from side to side, blinking back a few tears of her own. "No, my darling, it strikes me as magnificent beyond description." Again she kissed him. "But it happens not to be the end-and-all. If a person have a glass, does that mean he should refuse a bottle; if he have a bottle does it mean he should not want wine? Come now, darling, do not pull away, but hear me out. We have crossed the threshold of the house of divine knowledge, yet we linger in the anteroom admiring its wallpaper and shun the main chambers of the house. Why is it we resist exploring the mansion to which it has been our unique privilege to gain admission?"

"Because," answered Alobar, "Death is the master of that house. My ambition has been to free myself from Death, not to visit him in his parlor and share tea."

"Death is not a resident of the house. 'Death' is merely the name we give to certain rooms of the house, rooms that we, the so-called 'living,' fear for the simple reason that we have not passed through them."

Alobar righted the overturned basket and began to pick up pieces of bark. "Again, my little refugee from suttee, I must question your authority in such matters."

Kudra wished then to tell him the truth about Lalo, that the nymph had not run off with a mariner while Alobar was in Greece but had died, peacefully, happily, in the bed where Pan now slept; that she had attended Lalo's demise and, indeed, had followed her out of her body, traveling with her for a ways into the white light of the Other Side, until a sudden thought of Alobar caused her to turn back. Her concept of death was altered thereafter, and she wished to tell Alobar about that, as well, but she had promised the nymph to keep secret her passing. "The world must not think of nymphs as aged or dying," said Lalo, "for that runs counter to the girlish sexual things that we represent." Perhaps Lalo was vain to the end, but it must be noted that she cared about the world, even the modern world (whose replacement of cosmic order with a riotous contest between would-be equals had helped to kill her).

"Listen," said Kudra. "When we were in the caves, we learned by experimenting, by trial and error, guided by some intelligence, perhaps divine, that radiated from the minerals there. What harm would there be in experimenting with dematerialization here in our shop? It is a temple of Pan now, after all. I feel strongly that we will be guided once again. The divine energy doesn't limit itself to some caverns in India. It is everywhere if we are only open to it. Trust my intuition, Alobar. What harm to try?"

"Well, all right, I shall consider it," grumbled Alobar. "Just so long as it does not involve aging."

She thumped him with a look of iron. "Should the monks or any other folk start to trouble us before we have either discovered dematerialization or a base note for Pan's perfume, then I shall age fast and furiously, without hesitation, and you would be wise to follow suit."

At that, their quarreling commenced all over again.

Their quarreling chewed through the curtains, pierced the casements, and rattled over the cobblestones outside. How strange it must have sounded, this quarreling about dematerialization, voluntary aging, goat gods, and immortality, to a city that was primed for the Age of Reason, a populace that was beginning to put Descartes before des horse.

Although the contention that matter can transcend, at will, its material character would have had Descartes spinning in one or the other of his graves, a person who can believe in physical immortality is merely a step away from believing in dematerialization. Kudra believed in it and was prepared to experiment. Alobar probably believed in it but was reluctant— frightened, honestly—to pursue it. Wiggs Dannyboy of the Last Laugh Foundation, trained in the tradition of Cartersian doubt (deliberate suspension of all interpretations of experience that are not absolutely certain), had, unlike Kudra, never witnessed the Indian rope trick, nor had he, unlike Alobar, ever been flabbergasted by Bandaloop, yet to him the notion of material transcendence was credible. Perhaps that was because he was Irish.

"Subatomic particles apparently de-and rematerialize fairly routinely," Dr. Dannyboy has written. "Some of them actually can be in two places at once. Their freedom from the normal confines of the space-time continuum is thought to be the result of a weird electricity, an intelligent, creative, playful, and unpredictable interaction among oppositely charged entities in motion." On at least one occasion, Dr. Dannyboy has described those energized particles'as "fairies," and, unfortunately, there is doubt that he was speaking metaphorically. But, again, he is Irish and, moreover, has swallowed in his day a lot of drugs.

At any rate, Dr. Dannyboy continued: "We ourselves are built of subatomic particles (and the spaces in between them), and our organisms are electrically as well as chemically powered. Our cells, or something that occupies our cells, transmit an electrical pulse. When we breathe, bathe, eat, make love, and think the way that Kudra and Alobar did, we alter the cellular amperage until we find ourselves vibrating at the frequency of the eternal:
immortality.

"When interrogated about how they can walk through flames without being burned, 'primitives' have conveyed to anthropologists that they raise the vibratory level of their flesh to equal that of the fire. In like manner, then, an adept might raise—or lower—his or her vibratory rate to match that of another dimension, thereby disappearing from our customary universe and popping up in the other:
dematerialization."