Fluency, Faking, and the Residue of Scent

The three of us had been assigned the same corner table at a tea room in Montreux that Nabokov claimed to remember, though the staff didn’t remember him. He didn’t seem bothered by this. He ordered a linden-blossom tisane and sat examining the menu as though it were a lepidopteran specimen — holding it at a distance, tilting it toward the window light, squinting. Ogawa had already ordered green tea and was watching the rain on the lake with what I can only describe as professional patience. She’d brought a small notebook, closed, aligned precisely with the table’s edge.

I was drinking coffee that was too hot and trying to figure out how to explain a story about a man losing his sense of smell in a world where smell was language.

“The premise,” I said, “is that in this society, adults communicate primarily through pheromone secretion. Chemical signals that carry semantic content — not just emotion, not just pheromonal attraction, but actual propositional meaning. Nuance. Argument. Irony, even. And our protagonist is losing his ability to perceive any of it.”

Nabokov set down the menu. “How old is he?”

“Mid-forties. An actuary.”

“An actuary.” He said it as though tasting something and finding it adequate but unsurprising. “And he was once fluent in this chemical language?”

“Completely. He grew up in it. Words — spoken language — are for children in this world. Like baby talk. Adults don’t speak aloud any more than we’d point and grunt.”

“Then the irony you need,” Nabokov said, leaning forward, “is not merely situational. The prose itself must be the irony. You are writing in English, a verbal language, about a man who has lost access to a language vastly more expressive than English. The reader receives the story in the inferior medium. Every beautiful sentence you write is already a reduction, a loss. The story speaks in what the character considers baby talk.”

This was the first of several moments in the conversation where I felt the ground shift under me. I’d been thinking about the protagonist’s predicament as tragic. Nabokov was suggesting it was also comic — or at least structurally ironic in a way that should inform every line.

“But the character doesn’t experience it as comic,” Ogawa said quietly. It was the first thing she’d said since we sat down. “He experiences it as — ” She paused. Her English was careful, each word placed like a stone in a garden. “He experiences it as the world becoming quieter. Not louder, not more chaotic. Quieter. The signals are still there. Everyone else is still secreting. He simply cannot hear them anymore.”

“Hear,” Nabokov said.

“I use ‘hear’ deliberately. When you lose a sense, you describe the absence in terms borrowed from the senses that remain. A deaf person says the room went silent. A blind person says it went dark. He will say the room went quiet, or still, or empty — but these are all approximations. The actual experience of not perceiving chemical language has no vocabulary, because the vocabulary was chemical.”

I wrote that down. Not in a notebook — I don’t carry one — but in my head, where I keep a disorderly file of things that are better than what I would have thought of myself.

Nabokov was watching Ogawa with something like respect, which for him manifested as a slightly reduced level of fidgeting. “You’re describing what I would call a translation problem,” he said. “The man is living in a world he can no longer translate. He receives no input. But he still produces output — his glands are still active, he still secretes — and he has no idea what he’s saying. He is a man speaking a language he cannot hear, producing sentences he cannot check.”

“Like writing in a language you’ve forgotten,” I said.

“No.” Nabokov’s correction was immediate and, I thought, slightly annoyed. “Writing in a language you’ve forgotten is nostalgia. This is something worse. He hasn’t forgotten the language. He remembers it perfectly. He remembers what fluency felt like. He can recall specific chemical phrases — the particular compound that meant reluctant agreement, or the one that carried the connotation of suppressed affection. He remembers their textures. What he’s lost is the organ of perception. The library is intact. The eyes are gone.”

This distinction felt important and I sat with it for a moment. The tea room was nearly empty. Rain was coming down harder on the lake. A waitress passed our table carrying a tray of petits fours arranged in a pattern that seemed, for one irrational moment, like it might be trying to tell me something.

“I want to ask about the professional meeting,” I said. “There’s a scene where he has to sit through a work meeting — an actuarial presentation, or a negotiation, something with stakes — and he’s faking fluency in the pheromone language the entire time. He’s secreting things and watching people’s faces for reactions, trying to reverse-engineer what he just said from how they respond.”

“This scene must be excruciating,” Ogawa said. “Not dramatic. Not a crisis. Excruciating in the way that — ” She touched her teacup but didn’t lift it. “In the way that a person with hearing loss nods along in a group conversation. Smiling when others smile. Laughing a half-second after the others laugh. The terror is not of being caught. The terror is of the effort.”

“The effort of performing normalcy,” I said.

“No. The effort of not knowing whether you are performing it successfully. He cannot tell if his performance is working. He reads faces, but faces were never the primary channel. In this society, facial expressions are — what would you call them? Vestigial. Unreliable. Like trying to navigate by the position of the stars when you’ve been using GPS for thirty years. The stars are real, but your ability to read them is atrophied.”

Nabokov had been quiet during this exchange, stirring his tisane with a small silver spoon. “You’re both being too kind to him,” he said.

We waited.

“The scene needs to include the possibility that he’s not just failing to communicate. He might be saying terrible things. Obscene things. His glands are producing chemical speech that he cannot monitor. Imagine walking into a business meeting and, unknown to you, your mouth is producing a stream of profanity. Or — worse — not profanity. Something more nuanced. Something tonally wrong. The chemical equivalent of discussing your colleague’s dead mother in the register of mild amusement. You are committing social atrocities and you cannot perceive your own crimes.”

Ogawa nodded slowly. “And the others in the meeting — do they know about his condition?”

“I think some might suspect,” I said. “But in this society, acknowledging that someone has lost their chemical fluency would be — ”

“Like asking an adult why they’re wearing a diaper,” Nabokov said. He seemed pleased with this.

“Or like pretending not to notice,” Ogawa said. “Which is worse, in some ways. The Japanese concept is closer — it’s not cruelty, it’s a kindness that becomes its own prison. They pretend not to notice because noticing would be the greater violation. So he sits in the meeting producing chemical gibberish and everyone responds as though what he said was merely odd, or slightly off, or eccentric, and he can never know if they’re accommodating his disability or if they genuinely didn’t notice because what he said was close enough.”

“Close enough,” I repeated. “That phrase is devastating.”

“It should be the whole story’s engine,” Ogawa said. “Close enough. Almost right. The difference between understanding and almost-understanding is the difference between being a person and being a very convincing imitation of one.”

The rain had stopped. I hadn’t noticed. The lake was gray and still, and the light coming through the windows had that post-rain clarity that makes everything look slightly too sharp, like a photograph with the contrast turned up.

“I want to resist something,” I said. “The temptation to make this a story about restoration. About getting the sense back.”

“Obviously,” Nabokov said.

“But also the temptation to make it a story about heroic acceptance. The brave man who learns to live without. I don’t want it to be brave. I want it to be — ”

“Ongoing,” Ogawa said.

“Ongoing.”

“The best stories about loss are the ones that end in the middle of the loss,” she said. “Not at the bottom of it, not on the other side. In the middle. Where you can still remember what you had and you’re starting to realize that the memory itself is going to become unreliable. He remembers the chemical phrase for reluctant agreement now. In a year he won’t. In two years he won’t remember that he’s forgotten it. That’s the real disappearance — not the loss of the sense, but the loss of the memory of what the sense contained.”

Nabokov was looking at her with that expression again — the one that in anyone else would be called admiration but in him seemed more like the recognition of a worthy adversary. “This is Flowers for Algernon territory,” he said. “The progress reports. The man documenting his own decline in prose that is itself declining. You realize the structural challenge.”

“I do.”

“The prose cannot decline. You are not Charlie Gordon misspelling words. This man is not becoming less intelligent. He’s becoming less perceptive. The prose must remain beautiful — maybe even more beautiful — as the world it describes becomes flatter, more impoverished. The gap between the quality of observation and the poverty of what’s being observed — that gap is where the reader’s heart breaks.”

“I disagree,” Ogawa said. The word came out flat and decisive, like a door closing. “The prose should become simpler. Not less beautiful. Simpler. As he loses the chemical dimension, his world contracts. Fewer adjectives. Shorter sentences. Not because he is less intelligent, but because there is less to describe. When the language of scent disappears, what remains is surface. Color, shape, movement. The prose should feel like a room after the furniture has been removed. The same dimensions, but emptier.”

Nabokov frowned. This was a genuine disagreement and neither of them was going to win it. I could feel the tension and I was, I admit, a little thrilled by it, because this was exactly the kind of productive friction that makes a story unpredictable.

“What if both are true at different points?” I ventured. “Early in the decline, when he can still remember what he’s lost, the prose is lush — Nabokovian, if you’ll forgive the adjective — because the memory of richness is still fresh. Later, as the memories themselves fade, the prose quiets. Goes spare. The room empties.”

Ogawa considered this. Nabokov was already shaking his head. “You’re describing a structural gimmick. The prose should not be a barometer of the character’s condition. The prose is not the weather.”

“Then what is it?”

He didn’t answer immediately. He drank his tisane, set the cup down, adjusted it on the saucer. “The prose is the proof that what he lost was real. If the prose is gorgeous, the reader knows — feels in their body, not just understands intellectually — that this man once had access to a dimension of experience they cannot imagine. The prose is the dimension. Not a description of it. When you write a sentence about the chemical phrase for reluctant agreement and you make that sentence so precisely beautiful that the reader aches, you have done something the character himself can no longer do. You have secreted meaning. In words. In the inferior medium. And the reader receives it.”

Nobody spoke for a while. I think we were all slightly embarrassed by how right he was, and also aware that Ogawa’s counterpoint hadn’t been addressed so much as overwhelmed. She knew it too, and she picked up her notebook — still closed — and turned it over in her hands.

“There is a scene I keep thinking about,” she said. “Not the meeting. Something quieter. He is at home. Evening. He opens a window. In this world, opening a window in a populated area would be like turning on a radio — the chemical chatter of the neighborhood flowing in. Arguments, greetings, the low hum of domestic contentment, a child practicing its first chemical phrases the way a child practices scales on a piano. He opens the window and there is nothing. Air. Temperature. The smell of rain on concrete, which is meaningless — it carries no semantic content. It’s noise. He stands at the window and the world is shouting and he hears white noise.”

“That’s your opening,” I said.

“I didn’t say that.”

“But it could be.”

“It could be many things. I’m not sure it should be the opening. It might be more devastating in the middle. After the reader has already seen him performing normalcy all day. After the effort. He comes home and opens the window and the relief of being alone — of not having to pretend — lasts exactly as long as it takes for the silence to become oppressive rather than restful.”

Nabokov was buttoning his jacket, which I took as a sign that he was getting ready to leave or that he was cold. Both, possibly. “One more thing,” he said. “You need a word for his condition. Not anosmia — that’s medical, clinical. In this society, there would be a word the way we have words for deafness and blindness. But it would be a word that carries shame. A word children use as an insult. A word that adults whisper. He would know this word. He would avoid thinking it. The story needs to circle around this word without ever quite landing on it, the way a person with a terrible diagnosis avoids saying the name of the disease aloud, as though the word itself could accelerate the—”

He stood up. Brushed something off his sleeve. The sentence hung there, unfinished, which I suspected was deliberate. Ogawa was writing something in her notebook — she’d finally opened it — and didn’t look up.

I sat with my cold coffee and the unfinished sentence and the rain starting again outside and the feeling that I had more material than I knew what to do with, which is either the best or the worst position to be in at the start of a story.