Crude Approximations

Evening. The window open. Elis Varga stood at the sill and let the neighborhood pour in.

Temperature: eleven degrees. Direction of wind: southwest, carrying moisture from the canal district. Mineral smell of the building’s limestone facade after six hours of sun. All of this registered. All of this was noise — the static between stations, the crackle of a universe communicating in frequencies below his threshold of reception.

Downstairs, the Petrakis family was eating dinner. He knew this not from the rich polyglot chorus of chemical conversation that would have risen through the floorboards — the sharp base-note of the father’s evening fatigue, the children’s bright secretions of complaint and appetite, the mother’s modulating response that would have woven all of it into a coherent domestic signal — but because it was 7:15 and they always ate at 7:15.

He closed the window. He turned on the lamp. He sat at the kitchen table with a plate of bread and cheese and a glass of water and ate in the particular silence of a man who has stopped expecting the silence to change.

Four years ago, in this room, with Petra, dinner had been a polyphony. She’d return from the university library where she worked — a cataloguer, a woman who organized knowledge for a living — and the chemical conversation would begin before she’d set down her bag. How was your day? Not the words. The compound. The particular secretion that carried, in its molecular structure, the simultaneously expressed meanings of genuine-interest and also-I-need-ten-minutes-before-I-can-fully-engage and also-something-happened-today-that-I-want-to-tell-you-about-but-only-after-you’ve-told-me-your-thing. One compound. One exhalation from the glands along her jaw. And he’d respond with its counterpart — the compound that meant I-hear-all-of-that-and-the-ten-minutes-is-fine-and-my-day-was-ordinary-but-I’ll-make-it-sound-interesting-because-you-like-that.

All of this before either of them had removed their shoes.

He could not, tonight, remember the compound. He remembered its existence. He remembered its function. He remembered the warmth of receiving it. But the sensation itself — the chemical texture, what it felt like to perceive it — was gone. What remained was a description of a description: words about a feeling about a compound. Three layers of mediation between him and the experience. Four years ago, zero layers. The thing itself, arriving, being known.

The commute to the bureau took fourteen minutes by tram. Elis stood near the rear doors, holding the overhead bar, his body producing whatever it produced. The tram car was dense with chemical conversation — he knew this not because he could perceive any of it but because of the passengers’ faces. Not their expressions, which were meaningless, but their gland activity: the visible shimmer at temples, the jaw movements, the occasional flaring of nostrils that accompanied particularly emphatic secretion. The car was full of people having conversations he could not hear, making arguments he could not follow, sharing jokes whose punchlines arrived and departed in a medium he no longer had access to.

A child — perhaps six years old — was standing near her mother, speaking in words. “I want to sit down,” the girl said, in the high, clear voice of someone who hadn’t yet been told that verbal speech was for babies.

“Shh,” the mother said. Not a word. A sound. The verbal equivalent of a chemical nudge — be quiet, use your other voice, the real one.

The child fell silent. Her jaw moved. Her temples shimmered faintly. She was learning. In a year she’d find verbal speech as embarrassing as Elis found it necessary. In two years she’d have forgotten that words had ever been her primary medium, the way adults forget the taste of the formula they were fed as infants.

Elis watched the child and felt something he could not name in either language.

At the bureau he sat through the first forty minutes of an actuarial review by secreting what he hoped was professional attentiveness. The compound for that — what he remembered as the compound for that — was a particular blend he’d once been able to produce at will: something dry and precise, like the smell of cold graphite, but warmer underneath, carrying the sub-frequencies of I-am-following-your-reasoning and I-may-have-questions-but-not-yet. He’d been good at it. He’d been good at all of it.

Annika Dahl, senior risk assessor, was presenting mortality tables for the southwestern district. Her mouth moved occasionally — not to speak, of course, but in the small involuntary movements the mouth makes when the chemical glands are producing complex output. Elis watched her lips the way a deaf person watches a conductor’s baton: for tempo, for emphasis, for the visual echo of something he could not hear.

She paused. Others in the room shifted. Several faces turned toward him. Someone — Bram, probably, from his position at the end of the table — had directed a chemical question at Elis and was waiting for a response.

Elis did what he always did. He leaned forward three degrees, narrowed his eyes slightly, and secreted.

What he secreted, he could not know. His glands were functioning — that was the obscenity of his condition. The machinery of production was intact. Only the machinery of reception had failed. He was a radio transmitter with a broken receiver, broadcasting on frequencies he could not monitor, saying things he could not verify, speaking into a room that heard him perfectly.

The faces around the table showed nothing he could read. In this society, faces were vestigial as communication tools — the pheromone channel carried so much bandwidth that expressions had atrophied into mere physiological artifacts. A smile might accompany a chemical statement of contempt. A frown might coexist with deep chemical warmth. Reading faces was like reading tea leaves: possible, in theory, but the signal-to-noise ratio was humiliating.

Annika resumed her presentation. Elis exhaled. He’d gotten through it. Or he hadn’t. He would never know.

The word for his condition was felslukt. He tried not to think it, the way a person with a terminal diagnosis avoids the name of the disease, as though the syllables were catalytic. Felslukt. From the old compound fels- (false, wrong, emptied) and -lukt (the chemical field, the perceptible world). Wrongly-worlded. The children’s insult. The word they used on the playground when someone was slow to pick up a chemical idiom: You’re felslukt! Meaning: you are broken in the fundamental way. You are less than a person. You are a body with glands but no ears.

There was an inverse condition — stumsekret, chemical mutism. People who could perceive but not produce. They received the world’s chemical speech perfectly and could never respond. The society was kinder to them. A person who listened but could not speak was tragic. A person who spoke but could not listen was dangerous. An adult swearing in front of children without knowing he was swearing.

Elis had read, years ago, about a neurological condition in which a patient could no longer recognize familiar faces despite perfect vision. The inverse existed too: patients who recognized faces unconsciously but not consciously, responding emotionally to loved ones they could not name. Mirror conditions, the textbook called them. Two ways of being broken along the same fault line. He remembered thinking the taxonomy was elegant. He did not remember what the conditions were called. The memory was eroding at the edges, like a photograph left in sunlight, the details bleaching out while the center — the feeling of finding it interesting, of being a person who found neurological curiosities interesting — remained sharp and useless.

On Thursdays he visited his mother at the Vesterholm Home. She was eighty-one and her chemical fluency was undiminished — an old woman who could still compose the most intricate pheromone sentences, dense with allusion and emotional subtext, aimed at a son who received nothing. For her part, she received everything he broadcast and had never said a word about it.

Whether this was mercy or obliviousness, he couldn’t determine.

“I brought oranges,” he said. Out loud. In words.

She looked at him the way she always did when he spoke aloud — the way one looks at an adult child who has reverted to a childhood habit. Not disgust. Something worse than disgust. Patience.

He set the bag on her side table. She was secreting something — he could see it in the faint shimmer at her temples, the slight dilation of the glands along her jaw. A complex statement. It might have been gratitude, or commentary on the oranges, or an observation about the weather, or an account of her night, or a question about his marriage that she’d been composing for weeks, layering implication on implication the way a perfumer layers notes.

He smiled. She stopped secreting. The shimmer faded. Whatever she’d said dissolved into the room’s ambient chemistry and was gone.

“The oranges are from Almeda,” he said. “The orchard by the bridge.”

She closed her eyes. He sat in the visitor’s chair and watched her and tried to remember the compound she used to secrete when he was a child and had fallen and scraped his knee. A maternal compound. Not comfort, exactly — comfort was too broad. It was the specific chemical phrase that meant the pain is real and temporary and I am here and this is what here means. He’d received it hundreds of times. He could describe its function perfectly. He could not remember its texture. He could not recall how it felt to receive it, only that receiving it had once felt like something, and that the something was important, and that the word “important” was itself a crude approximation of a state of being that the chemical language had expressed with the precision of a key in a lock.

She opened her eyes and looked at him and he could not read her look and she could not — or would not — read aloud what she perceived from him, and the two of them sat in the visiting room of the Vesterholm Home in a silence that was, for her, rich with the chemical texture of a son’s grief and, for him, empty of everything except the sound of other residents’ televisions playing through the walls.

In the evenings he kept a notebook. He’d started it three years ago, when the loss was still partial — when he could detect the seven fundamental bases but had lost the ability to parse their combinations. The seven bases were what children learned first: the chemical alphabet from which all adult expression was built. Seven compounds, each with a distinct character. He’d known them the way a musician knows scales, the way a speaker knows vowels — not as abstract categories but as textures, as presences, as the irreducible atoms of meaning.

He’d tried to record them.

Base One, he’d written. The foundation. What does it feel like? Not like a smell — that’s the wrong frame. It feels like certainty. Like the physical sensation of knowing where you are in a room with your eyes closed. It is the chemical equivalent of ground beneath your feet. When someone secretes Base One cleanly, you feel oriented. When they withhold it, you feel the way you feel in a dream when the floor is missing.

That was three years ago. Reading it now, he could tell that the description was a crude approximation — a verbal sketch of a chemical reality, the way a child’s crayon drawing of a face captures the general idea of eyes and mouth while missing everything that makes a face a face. And yet the description was also the best he had. He couldn’t improve it because the referent was gone. He couldn’t compare his description to the thing described, because the thing described no longer existed in his perceptual world.

Base Four, he’d written, and this entry was from later, from when the decline had accelerated. Something warm. Something like — I keep wanting to say “amber” but I don’t mean the color. I mean the substance. The old resin. The quality of being solid and transparent at the same time. Preserved warmth? That’s wrong. That’s not it. But it’s close enough and I don’t have better words because the words were never meant to do this job.

Close enough. He wrote that phrase more and more often as the entries progressed. The journal traced his decline the way a river traces the landscape it’s eroding — the shape of the loss preserved in the language of the losing. Early entries were long, ornate, frustrated by their own inadequacy. Recent entries were short. Not because he cared less but because there was less to describe. The room was emptying.

Base Six. I remember that it exists. I don’t remember what it felt like. I know it was associated with — something social? Agreement? Belonging? The compound for group warmth, for we-are-together-in-this-room-and-that-matters? I’m not sure. I might be confusing it with Base Two.

Base Seven. Gone.

The specialist — Dr. Lindqvist, at the municipal otological clinic — had explained his condition in words three years ago. She’d used words because she’d read his intake form, which he’d filled out in words because the chemical-response version was useless to him. The act of submitting a verbal intake form at an adult medical clinic was itself a diagnostic indicator so conspicuous that it hardly required the subsequent examination.

“The receptor cells in your vomeronasal epithelium are degrading,” she’d said. “The secretory glands are unaffected. Production remains normal.” She glanced at a chart. “Your output tested within standard parameters.”

Standard parameters. He was producing normal chemical speech. Fluent, grammatically correct, semantically coherent chemical speech that he could neither hear nor edit. He was a man dictating letters in a language he’d forgotten, and the letters were apparently well-written.

“Is there treatment?”

She listed approaches. Gene therapy for the receptor cells. Synthetic receptor implants. Chemical-to-visual translation devices — still experimental, the resolution too low to capture the nuance of adult chemical speech. Like translating poetry through a dictionary that only contained the hundred most common words.

None of these had materialized. Felslukt affected one in eleven thousand adults, a number too small to generate public urgency and too large to dismiss. Elis received a quarterly newsletter — printed, in words — updating him on the research’s glacial progress. He kept the newsletters in a kitchen drawer. He did not read them anymore.

A former colleague, Ren Halvorsen, had been diagnosed with stumsekret four years ago — the mirror condition. Ren could receive perfectly. Every chemical conversation in his range landed with full fidelity. He simply could not respond. His glands produced nothing.

Elis had visited him once, before his own condition had fully manifested. Ren’s office had been reorganized. His colleagues had learned a rudimentary sign language — not verbal speech, which would have been infantilizing, but a gestural system, a workaround. People brought him food. His supervisor had arranged accommodations. There was a support group.

Elis had no support group. The accommodations for felslukt were silence — the polite, terrible silence of people who could hear everything you said and chose not to react to any of it, in case reacting drew attention to the fact that what you’d said was chemical nonsense.

He sometimes imagined what he might be secreting. In the meeting today, for instance, when Bram had directed a question at him and he’d leaned forward and produced — what? His glands might have been emitting the compound for sexual invitation, or for grief, or for the specific chemical idiom that meant your mother’s cooking has always been mediocre. There was no way to know. He composed chemical sentences the way a child composes letters by tracing shapes without understanding the alphabet: the form was approximately right, but the content was random.

Or worse: the content was not random. The content was the chemical residue of emotion — his actual emotional state, secreted rawly, without the modulating intelligence of conscious intent. A person who could hear him might detect, beneath the garbled syntax, a sustained low-frequency broadcast of fear. Of loneliness. Of the particular compound — and he remembered this one, remembered it with the aching precision of a man remembering the face of someone he’d loved — that meant I know you can hear me and I know you are choosing not to answer and I know this is kindness and I know that knowing this does not help.

He saw Petra on the Klementsgatan, near the old concert hall that had been converted to municipal offices. She was carrying a canvas bag of groceries and she was wearing a coat he didn’t recognize and she was — he could see by the shimmer at her temples, by the minute movements of her jaw — she was speaking. Not to him. To the air, to the chemical commons, the ambient conversational hum that filled public spaces the way background music fills a department store. Low-stakes, reflexive, the constant social secretion that meant I am here, I am a person moving through public space, I acknowledge the chemical presence of others.

He hadn’t seen her in nine months. She turned and saw him and her face did something — but faces were unreliable, faces were the crude approximation, and he couldn’t tell if the expression was surprise, or warmth, or discomfort, or the studied neutrality people used when they had already said everything they needed to say in the chemical channel and the face was just the residual twitch of muscles that had once, in the evolutionary past, carried meaning.

She secreted something at him. He watched it happen: the slight intensification of the shimmer, the unconscious tilt of her chin that directed the chemical output toward him specifically, a private statement in a public space. Brief.

He had nothing to offer in return that he could trust. He could secrete — his glands responded to her proximity with their own logic, their own chemical memory — but he would be secreting blindly, broadcasting whatever his body produced without editorial oversight, and what his body produced in her presence might be anything. Longing. Resentment. The chemical phrase for I miss the sound of your voice, except that in this language the phrase carried seventeen connotations he could no longer track and at least three of them were probably wrong.

He lifted his hand. A wave. A gesture. A child’s greeting.

She watched his hand go up and come down and something crossed her face — that unreliable, vestigial instrument — and then she was past him, the canvas bag knocking against her leg as she walked, her chemical signature dispersing into the late-afternoon air where it joined the thousands of other signatures composing the city’s ambient hum, the great ongoing conversation in which he could no longer participate.

He stood on the Klementsgatan for several minutes after she disappeared around the corner. A man walked past and the man’s glands were active — a shimmer, a jaw movement — and the man glanced at Elis and the man’s eyes narrowed slightly and the man walked on. What had Elis secreted? What chemical sentence had his glands composed in response to seeing Petra and then losing her again? Something unmodulated. The chemical equivalent of weeping in public — the kind of thing a perceptive passerby would notice and look away from, the way one looks away from a person talking to himself on a park bench.

He went home. He made tea. The tea tasted the way tea tastes: of nothing that mattered, of flavor without meaning, of the physical world stripped of its semantic layer.

That night he opened the notebook. The most recent entry was from two weeks ago and said only:

I tried to remember the compound for reluctant acquiescence today. The one that carries the connotation of I-agree-but-I-want-you-to-know-this-agreement-costs-me-something. I know it was beautiful. I know it was one of the language’s great achievements — a single chemical compound that contained an entire emotional negotiation. I know I used to be fluent in it.

I cannot remember what it felt like.

I can remember that I used to know.

He read this entry and felt — not loss. Something past loss. The compacted residue of loss after the loss itself has been processed and what remains is the knowledge that something was processed. Like finding a receipt for an item you no longer own and cannot remember purchasing.

He picked up the pen.

Base Three, he wrote. And stopped. He could not remember if he’d already written about Base Three. He flipped backward through the notebook. He found an entry from fourteen months ago:

Base Three is the one I’ll miss most. It was the chemical ground note for — for what? For presence. For the bare fact of being perceived by another conscious organism. Not judged, not evaluated. Perceived. The way a warm room perceives you when you enter it. The way a lake perceives the sky. Base Three was the compound that said: you exist, and I know it, and this knowing is its own content.

He read this and could not tell whether the description was accurate. The referent was gone. The description survived like a plaster cast of a face — preserving the contours of something no longer alive, useful for identification purposes but cold to the touch, incapable of expression, a crude approximation of the thing it stood for.

He closed the notebook. He sat at the kitchen table. Through the floor, faintly, the vibration of the Petrakis family’s washing machine — or maybe their dishwasher, or maybe a child running down the hall. Mechanical noise. The kind of signal that needed no translation.

He picked the pen up again and wrote:

I ran into Petra today. She said something to me. I don’t know what.

He put the pen down. The entry was complete, and it was useless, and it was the most accurate thing he’d written in three years.