The Shortcut

The museum smelled like every old building smells, which is to say it smelled like nothing at first, and then like paper, and then, if you stood still long enough, like something older underneath the paper.

Soren was cataloguing a box of donated things. A cracked pocket watch. A tin of buttons. A woman named Dolores ran the museum and had given him white cotton gloves and a clipboard and then wandered off to argue on the phone about a leaking gutter, so it was just Soren and the box and the buzzing light.

He worked through the tin of buttons. He wrote down the pocket watch. Then his glove touched a small brown bottle, corked, with a faded label he could not read, and he pulled the cork out to see if anything was inside.

It hit him before he decided to smell it.

He was four years old. He was under a table. There was a green blanket and the sound of rain and someone humming, and he knew, the way you know your own hands, that the someone was his grandmother, who had died when he was five and whom he could not otherwise remember at all. Not her face. Not her voice. But here she was, humming, and the memory was not like a photograph. It was like being there. His chest did something it had not asked permission to do.

He put the cork back in fast, like he could trap it.

He sat very still. Then he took the cork out again and smelled it a second time, carefully, testing, and it happened again, exactly as strong. The green blanket. The rain. The humming. It did not fade with the second try the way a surprise usually fades.

He capped it and picked up the pocket watch instead and looked at it hard. The watch was beautiful. It did nothing to him. It was just an object he could see. He held it to his nose. It smelled faintly of metal and told him nothing, took him nowhere.

He went back to the bottle.

Soren had a system for things that did not make sense, and the system was to find the difference between the thing that worked strangely and the thing that worked normally. The watch he could see and hear the tick of, and it stayed outside him, a fact in his hand. The smell reached in and grabbed something and pulled, and the something it pulled was a person four years old had no words for and eleven years old had completely forgotten.

Why would a smell get further in than a sound.

Dolores came back, still frowning about the gutter. Soren asked her what was in the bottle. She squinted at the label.

"Camphor liniment, looks like. Old medicine. People rubbed it on sore muscles." She wrinkled her nose. "Whole generations grew up with that smell. My mother's whole house." She stopped. Something crossed her face, quick, and then she busied herself with the clipboard. "Funny," she said, in a different voice. "Haven't thought about that house in years."

Soren watched it happen to her. The same thing. One breath and she was somewhere else, a place she had not visited on purpose, a place she had not been able to reach by trying.

"Did you see anything?" he asked.

"See?"

"When you smelled it. Did you see the house."

She looked at him strangely. "I was standing in the kitchen doorway," she said slowly. "I could tell you where the chairs were."

He took his glove off to hold the pencil better and wrote down camphor liniment and then, underneath, the word doorway, and then he stopped writing and thought.

A smell and a sound had gone into the same person and come out completely different. The tick of the watch stayed a tick. The camphor became a kitchen with the chairs in known places. That was not about the museum and it was not about the bottle. That was about the road each one took to get inside.

He thought about roads. If everything you saw and heard went to the same station first to be sorted, and got a ticket, and waited in line, then by the time it reached the deep part of you it had already been handled, labeled, made into a fact. That was the watch. Sorted. Filed. Kept at a distance where you could look at it.

But the smell had not waited in any line. The smell had gone straight in, with no station, no sorting, no ticket, right to the room where the four-year-old and the green blanket were still kept, the room feelings came from and old memories were stored in, and it had opened the door without knocking.

That was why it was stronger. Not because the memory was better. Because the smell had a shortcut and nothing else did. Every other sense took the long way around and got processed on the trip. Smell went in raw.

"Soren?" Dolores said. "You've gone quiet."

"There's a shortcut," he said. "In your head. Smells don't line up with everything else. They skip the line and go straight to the oldest part. That's why your kitchen was so real. You didn't remember it. You went back to it."

Dolores held out her hand. "Let me try again," she said, quiet now.

He passed her the bottle and she pulled the cork and closed her eyes, and this grown woman who had been arguing about gutters stood in the buzzing light and went somewhere Soren could not follow, somewhere behind her own face, thirty years deep, in half a breath.

He looked down at the box. A cracked watch. A tin of buttons. A bottle. He had thought of them as old things that people had saved. But every single object in the museum was silent to him, gave him nothing, kept its distance, because he could only see them and seeing kept things outside.

Somewhere in his own house right now there was a smell he walked past every day that was wired straight to a room he had forgotten he had. A grandmother he could not picture was waiting in there, humming, for the one door that opened without knocking.

He corked the bottle gently and set it back in the box and did not write down what he was thinking, because there were not chairs he could place yet.

Dolores opened her eyes and touched the doorway of a kitchen that was not there.