Maude is on the 10th floor of an Upper East Side building, and Dr. K. is about to fix her. To get here, she has taken the kind of elevator that doesn’t have buttons on the inside.
In Dr. K.’s waiting room, they hand Maude some forms. When was your last period? What forms of Protection do you use?
Dr. K is an Ear, Nose, and Throat specialist. Maude finds it greedy of him to ask about her other holes when he already has access to five of them. But today, Dr. K. will solve all of Maude’s problems, so Maude has to be good for Dr. K. She reads over “abstinence” and then “Coitus interruptus” with diligence and duty, even though she thinks it sounds like a phrase J.K. Rowling would have coined if she took a job at the CDC. At this thought, Maude smiles, because her daughter loves Harry Potter, and Maude thinks maybe she would’ve been proud of the joke she just thought of.
Maude has had anosmia for over a year now. This means that she can’t smell. She finds this unfair because she’s already been mostly a mouth-breather in this life. It started in elementary school, when she stepped into a school cafeteria for the first time, and she realized there were things in the world that smelled bad.
Nobody knows how Maude got anosmia. When you lose something, and people want to be helpful, they ask you where you last saw it. Dr. K. did this too. Where did you last see your sense of smell? He asked Maude on their first meeting.
Maude found this extremely unhelpful. She did not remember the last time she smelled something. She did, however, remember the first time she couldn’t smell something. It was this one man who walked onto the D train on 42nd Street. As he made his way to the middle of the car, one by one, every person he passed lifted their shirt up to their nose, until it was Maude’s turn, and she realized she was not privy to this shared ordeal of Stink that brought together her trainmates. She shot an apologetic glance towards the malodorous man and covered her nose in conformity.
Very good, Dr. K. said when Maude told him about this. But there is only so much I can do if you cannot tell me the last scent you detected. He had just performed the University of Pennsylvania Smell Identification Test (UPSIT) on her, where he held up scratch-and-sniff cards up to her nose and asked her to pick an answer listed in each multiple-choice question. Pick, even if you can’t smell anything, Dr. K. said. Maude looked him in the eyes as she leaned towards each card and inhaled. Root beer, she said. Pumpkin pie. Gasoline. Dill pickle.
Today, Dr. K. will tell Maude what he saw on her CT scan, and her nasal flora swab, and he will put an endoscope up her nose and hurt her a little bit and make her sneeze. He will speak of “turbinates” and “polyps” and refer to her snot as “discharge.” He will look her in the eyes and remind her that it is of vital importance that she remembers the last thing she smelled. He will notice the obscene amount of earwax she harbors in her ears and clean it out. The way her mother would.
Maude remembers how her mother would tell her that you can forget everything about someone, but you will never forget the way they smell. Especially if they smell bad. For example, all Maude remembers about her middle school deskmate Wesley is that his breath smelled like he’d had potato salad with hard-boiled eggs on an empty stomach. She would dread the days they had French, because Monsieur Benoît would keep making them face each other and practice conversation.
“Maude,” Dr. K calls out from the hall. Maude walks behind him into the examination room. She hopes he notices that she has worn perfume for him, as he is a man of olfactory persuasions. Her perfume has notes of honey and ylang-ylang and Tahitian Gardenia. Maude has forgotten the scent of honey; she does not know what a ylang-ylang is, or how Tahitian gardenias compare to other gardenias. She just bought it because it rolled off the sales associate’s tongue nicely.
Maude sits down. She keeps her hands on her lap and looks up at Dr. K., who, while not that much taller, now towers over her, because Maude’s torso is disproportionately shorter than her legs, and as a consequence she looks very small on chairs. “I’ve known you for a year,” Dr. K. says. Maude wants to tell him that, actually, it’s been over a year now, but she keeps quiet, for she is just glad to be known, no matter how long.
“We have done everything there is to be done. I do not believe your issue is nasal, nor is it neural, I believe rather it is what I always suspected, which is that-”
“Maybe it was the virus?” Maude asks.
During her brief stint in a sorority, Maude’s daughter caught the virus. She posted a TikTok with the caption “TFW you get covid with all the symptoms except you can still smell properly so you can’t even be skinny,” and then there was a Standards Board meeting discussing whether her statement was more immoral on the basis of fatshaming or lack of consideration towards those who have had the virus and lost their sense of smell. The video got shared everywhere and three separate people wrote op-eds for the school newspaper. Maude wonders if her daughter would’ve been jealous of her today.
“We’ve been over this,” Dr. K. says. “You could not have caught it from your daughter, and there would’ve been damage to your olfactory bulb visible in your MRIs.” Maude looks down at her hands and nods.
“Maude,” Dr. K. continues. “I wholeheartedly believe that your sense of smell was taken.”
“Somebody took it?” Maude asks.
“It was taken,” Dr. K. says, his expression grim and his chin high. “If you just told me the last thing you smelled, we could get to the bottom of this.”
Maude stares at the pit stains on Dr. K.’s nice white dress shirt. She would not have minded Dr. K.’s sweat being the last thing she smelled. She does not remember, or maybe she does. Maybe it’s her daughter’s bedsheets, or the damp sewer smell that comes out of steaming manholes. Maybe it’s the char that fills the air by the Grand Street station exit whenever the skewer cart lady is there, or maybe it’s the powdered florals of the Chanel lipstick her mother left her. She thinks of the purple hyacinths in the spring, and how they would sit there, rotting in her living room. She thinks of Big Red cinnamon gum, and a trace of coffee in someone’s breath, although she cannot, for the life of her, remember who.