Ugly Behavior

The Stench

It is the smell of the body laboring for survival. It is the stink of fear. It is the odor of cooking and cleaning and the lingering aroma of sex in darkened rooms. It is the reek of poverty and the sharp tang of desperation. It is the sour bouquet of bodies aging into death, the whiff of illness and the fragrance of failing organs. It is the scent and the sense of sadness that comes with realizations hard won. It is the stench.

Riley had no use for uncleanliness. He’d been raised by grandparents who by the end of their lives had lost their sense of smell. They did not know how unpleasant the odors from their bodies had become, although he thought his grandmother sometimes guessed, judging by her periodic and frantic binges of scrubbing and scouring on hands and knees as if praying before some ferocious god. But these spells would pass and when next he was in her proximity his nose would hum and his eyes water from the smell of her dying in the small rooms of their farmhouse.

His grandfather claimed that food had turned on him years back, barely able to nourish him and unpleasant in both taste and digestion. He’d spent long hours each day locked in the bathroom, and walking around the house smelled like a leaky oil furnace ready to explode.

Riley had left his grandparents at a relatively young age, unwilling to wait with them to some inevitable and unpleasant conclusion. He’d felt compelled to travel to the city in order to secure employment, even though it was the most unsanitary place he could imagine. Here you were forced to walk closely with other people, breathing the air directly from their mouths, rubbing against their sweat and touching what tens of thousands had touched before. Whenever possible he bundled up well, covering as much skin as he could, wearing gloves when he thought he could without drawing too much attention. For the last thing he wanted to do was to draw attention to himself.

“A quarter, please, sir? All I need is a quarter.”

At first he couldn’t find the source of the request and wondered if he’d imagined it or caught a stray fragment of conversation from some passing car. Then he saw the rag-wrapped figure, so close to him he should have not only seen but smelled it.

A woman. There were no obvious signs of femininity, only a patch of unwashed face peering from the rags, but somehow unmistakably a woman. “What was that?” He was too off-balance to think of stepping away.

“A quarter, a dime, whatever you can spare?” A rank scum on corn-colored teeth. Riley could not imagine what she could have eaten to create such a stench. Her eyes were lightly shielded by the worn cloth covering her head. Riley thought of untouchables, lepers, blind beggars in some Asian slum.

“You’ll just… you’ll just drink it away!” he stammered, then stepped back, shocked by his own boldness. He’d always followed a simple policy regarding the city’s homeless population: for him they would not exist. He wouldn’t talk to them; he wouldn’t even see them.

The beggar’s grin cast a yellow glow over the lower part of her face. She couldn’t have looked more frightening if she’d transformed into some sort of animal. And the stench, like half a dozen things dying in her mouth. “A simple coin, sir? It’s all I ask. Little trouble for you, yet such great benefits will it bring to me.”

For pity’s sake. He almost laughed at the ridiculousness of her statement: what good would a quarter or a dime do her? She couldn’t even buy a candy bar for that.

But still he found himself reaching into his pocket, pulling out what jingled there: a quarter, two quarters, a dime and a few pennies. He shoved them into her outstretched palm and turned to escape. But she grabbed his wrist, her hand a claw-like thing malformed by layers of callous and stain, and to his amazement pulled him to her, and pulled him into the alley behind, where in the darkness she surrounded him with her rank lips and sour laughter and reeking thighs, and took him out of his own head for an unknown period of time.

And when he struggled his way back, she lay dead at his feet, rags torn away and bits of cloth scattered like flesh after a predator’s feast, and he saw how lovely she had been under her rags, and wondered how she could have influenced him to do such a terrible thing.

He could not think of such things for long; there was too much to do. He picked up her body—acutely aware that her smell had subsided, that in death she smelled rather pleasantly—and struggled with it into the darkest recess of the alley, where torn boxes and cloth all the colors of mud and a range of garbage resided, where some awful creature might have made its nest, and laid her there, and covered her with what was available, even though it repulsed him to have his hands in such filth.

He made his way out of there as quickly as he could and did not look back.

The smell of fingers was the absolute worst, because they were what touched the world most often and delved into the quiet, hidden places of your body. Sometimes he saw people sniffing their fingers upon exiting public restrooms. Some of them actually appeared to take satisfaction in what they were smelling.

He supposed feet were second, encased in their cloth tubing all day, falling asleep and dreaming of better places to go.

For the next few days, Riley treated his memory of the incident with the same distance and detachment he applied to all things of these odiferous streets. In a place the size of this city, events were occurring at all times, stories were being made, individual dramas were playing and replaying at a bewildering rate. Life in the city was like television: you turned it on and left it on for hours at a time, while you ate, while you talked on the phone, while you made love. You paid no more attention to one program than any other. It was all background noise.

Once, while waiting for a bus near the spot of the incident with the beggar, he had a stray thought that at least with her gone there might be one less foul smell to contend with. Testing his theory, he sniffed. In fact the city appeared to smell worse than ever.

Living in the city, Riley had found it necessary to shower two and three times daily simply to wash away the grime before it interacted with everyday bodily secretions to create a smell. He tried out various kinds of body scrapers, every variety of loofa. Sometimes his skin bled. It was amazing how deep the filth could go. Even after hours of scraping, he could rub his thumb across the back of his heel and a little pellet of skin and dirt and smell would appear like some sort of spontaneous egg. An egg of smell, smell made solid.

Sometimes he was so aware of the smells that he forgot to speak, and people thought him rude. But when the smells were at their strongest there was no need for words.

Riley traveled from restaurant to restaurant for his meals, tried not to repeat himself. He distrusted them all but figured he was less likely to receive a fatal dose of food poisoning if he avoided repeat dining. He liked to travel by alley, which he supposed was actually the dirtiest route a person could take, but gave him a chance to check out the dumpster of the restaurant he intended to eat in before entering the door. That way if he found some insurmountable violation of cleanliness—say the carcass of a cancerous cow—he could simply avoid that particular restaurant.

He met her that way on his way to lunch. He had been peering inside the dumpster just as she was climbing out: wrapped in rags so greasy they stuck to her body like diseased patches of skin. She was a young thing, not much out of her teens. He could see as much from her eyes and mouth: they took him all in hungrily, quickly.

Do me for a dime? She said it so softly she must have been in his head, sneaky about it so that he didn’t notice her climb in.

It was a miserable hot day. They were tarring the roof next door and the workers had left their tar machine, their kettle of tar or whatever it was called, cooking in the alley a few dozen feet from the back entrance of the restaurant and this dumpster she’d peeled out of like a nymph from a bloom. She’d pulled him to a wall halfway between, like halfway between the moon and the sun, and she’d leaned against the bricks and opened herself up from the middle and pushed him inside. And he had to admit it was cool there and surprisingly soft but then the stench of her rolled itself out and climbed onto his face and would not let go. He’d cried and then he’d slapped and then folded her as if he could seal her in an envelope and mail her away. By the time he was done with her all he could really do was slip her into that vat of tar.

She had that unmistakable aroma of fried food. Fried food was the worst for you, he supposed, the worst smell because it was that burning animal fat smell. And he thought about fast food chicken and the awful smell of it and recognized this for the proof of what a foul group we are, just rancid animal fat and not really much more than that.

In some ways the smell of hair was the strangest, so dependent on the particular hair care products the person used. He imagined sometimes that this was the smell of raw thought, bits of it trapped in the hair fibers as the rest made its way up toward heaven.

The back of the neck was another foul-smelling region, the place where the collar rubs, a drainage basin for the hair hanging above. You could scrub there all you wanted and it would never be clean.

You rub and rub all day at your skin to remove the soiled skin and the sour-smelling sweat. You mine the stench. You can’t help yourself.

One day the rain came and it was glorious in its unexpectedness. For a time at least the stench got washed out of the air. Riley could not quite describe what was left behind, what that quality was, but it was an absence of human animal scent, a kind of vague metallic scent, and for him it was glorious. Even his own poor skin smelled like the rain.

Such a reprieve cannot last forever, of course, and soon enough returned the smells of the machinery human beings shared the city with: the aromas and diesel, poorly processed exhausts and spontaneous mechanical belchings.

Then the people: their badly washed bodies and foods only partially digested. Their cigarette smoke and the sour taste of their breath wrapped around a pattern of daily insults.

Then another sudden downpour, and everything seemed blessedly right again.

But eventually the good effects of that rain passed as well, and a foul smell began to issue from the narrow strips of land between the tall buildings: the city mud.

She had come to him out of another downpour, pushing a grocery cart overloaded with plastic garbage bags and paper sacks. Pushing it for all she was worth so that she barely avoided running him down as she turned into the empty lot. At first Riley couldn’t imagine what shelter could be found there, the lot was empty as far as he could see. Then he detected a bulge in a layer of trash near the center of the lot, a rise like a pitcher’s mound. He watched her from behind some bushes as she unloaded the cart and stowed it in a shadowed corner of the lot. With her new things—indistinguishable, he thought, from the trash littering the ground—she approached the small mound.

With her rotting tennis shoes she scraped at the trash until a square of board appeared. She set down her new things and lifted the square from one edge as if it were a basement hatch.

Then, to his amazement, she walked down into the ground, pulling the board and trash back above her to hide the entrance.

Riley watched the bag lady for several days. He always kept his distance, not just to prevent exposure but because her stench was worse each day. Even though it continued to rain so hard and long the streets were flooding, the rain did not lessen her smell. Finally, when he thought she could be no riper, he watched her descend into her underground lair once again, then went over to her board and lifted it. There was no chamber here, just a shallow trench filled with trash. The bag lady lay on her back at its center, as if sleeping in her own future grave.

It’s about time, I have been waiting so long. The words bubbled off her filthy lips, each one an exhalation of foulness.

Without thinking, he lay upon her, and after a time could not distinguish the stink of her body from the stink of her clothes or from the garbage she had made her bed with. As he wept his hands caressed and squeezed.

Over the next few months, Riley returned to the lot, lifted up the board, and checked on the progress of the body’s decomposition. The weather continued uncharacteristically wet. Her clothes and eccentric bedding became exotic vegetables in a rancid soup that filled the trench. The stench became unbearable at times, and yet no neighbors complained, the police were not called, the body remained where he had left it.

City dwellers were used to bad smells; this was nothing unusual for them.

Riley could not say when he stopped bathing, but if you’d asked him why he might have told you it was so that he could better fit in.

After a time, he might say, you cannot tell if the stench is yours or if it comes from everyone else.

When they finally arrested Riley it was not for murder, or for any of a number of other violent acts he had committed over the last several years. They arrested Riley for an egregious number of sanitation violations, for a mound of rotting legal orders he had ignored, then dragged into his apartment to add to the malodorous nest that had become his home.

The police were alarmed when copious amounts of blood were found streaked through this nest, but later it was discovered that the blood was Riley’s own. His arms, legs, and torso were seriously scarred with many poorly-healed wounds. “Fresh blood has this clean, coppery smell,” he would later tell a doctor at the hospital. “You know, when it first hits the air. You can’t smell anything else, at least for a few seconds.”

“And what is it you’re afraid of smelling, Mr. Riley?” the clever young doctor inquired.

“Why, it’s the cooking, the cleaning, the smell of fear. The freshly-shampooed baby’s head, the honey in the lover’s kiss, the aroma, the perfume, the reek. It is the sour bouquet of the body as the organs begin to fail. It is the sadness of when we know what is to come, what is waiting for us when our last foul breath has spread through the room.

“Can’t you smell it, doctor? It is the stench.”