Smell

By Andrew Spoleti    

“Do you smell that?” I asked Riley, my roommate. We wandered around our tiny apartment searching for the source of this smell. It was faint but consistent. Hanging in the air like a ringing in your ears that only you hear. We checked our various smoke and carbon monoxide alarms and nothing came up. We would have loved to follow the thread of this elusive mysterious smell, but we were college students. We had things to do.

I continued with my daily routine by hopping in the shower only to find there was no hot water. Now, you need to understand, I thought that this was probably the worst discovery I could have made that day. I am a hot shower man. I love my hot showers. When the water is cold it feels like a million tiny needles, poking but not piercing my skin. I feel the water pulling me down and tightening my chest.

After my brave confrontation with the icy tundra, I opened the bathroom door to a haze. I was looking at my apartment with the glossy blurry haze of someone who had just woken up. BEEP. BEEP. BEEP.

Now this was novel. Using my powerful skills of deduction, I had determined that maybe something was wrong. “Hey Riley,” I called downstairs, while being interrupted, “Not sure if you-” BEEP. BEEP. “-hear that, but I think something-” BEEP. “-might be beeping.” BEEP.

I walked down the stairs to be washed in a wave of this familiar smell. It would appear that it was upset that Riley and I chose not to give it the attention it demanded earlier, so decided to act out and get much stronger and ruminate throughout the apartment even more. Real mature, smell. Real mature.

The air was thick and overwhelming. It felt like moving through molasses, breathing through a scarf. Something in the air is eating at me, not just the smell but I was overcome with some kind of opportunistic airborne swarm of thoughts that was normally kept away by the stink of booze or the hollow cocoon of disingenuous love.

*****

I remember waking up on Sunday morning in my childhood bedroom. I would get out of bed wearing two sweatshirts and two pairs of pajama bottoms. I would walk into the kitchen before my father woke up, after putting on my sneakers because the chill of the dirty white tiles could eat right through my socks biting my feet like a million tiny needles. My mother is standing at the counter wearing an orange and blue Mets winter jacket. Total silence except for the sounds of three pots of water boiling on the stove top and the hum coming from the oven with the door hanging open. The smell of the dirty oven radiated throughout the house.

My mother would be standing over two trays of cookies and one tray of brownies. She didn’t want any of them, she just wanted to use the oven. I couldn’t smell any of it through the noxious gaseous aroma. Thank God for that smell, it’s like a perfect bookmark. It transports me right back there.

I remember my mother’s fixed, tired look on the counter, not even realizing I was in the room with her. I remember rubbing my eyes over and over again to get the sleepy fog in my eyes to go away. I remember the trembling sensation on the back of my neck when I heard my father’s bedroom door open. I did what I would always do, retreat back into my bedroom where I could smother myself with blankets like armor from the cold.

I could stay in those blankets forever. My family would love that. They love me low maintenance. They love me quiet. They love nothing. I can be nothing.

She would come into my room and tell me she has to go to work. “You want any cookies?” She asked.

“That’s okay.” I said

“You got any plans today?” She asked.

“No.” I said, feeling like her question was some twisting of a knife, but maybe it was just her trying to care. She would complain about something my father had done, and then she would apologize. “I shouldn’t say that.” She would say, everytime. As if it would bother me that my divorced parents didn’t get along. As if they stopped getting along because they got divorced. What came first, the chicken or the egg? The egg. Obviously.

Why is he still here? It's been a year. Choking on the thought, I was unable to get it out, like ashes filling my mouth. Of course I couldn’t ask her. We couldn’t even ask each other ‘How was your day?’

She would go to one of her three jobs, and I would live in my bedroom. Hiding from the childish behemoth in the living room, whose job was watching fox news on the couch. The smell would trickle under my door and I wouldn’t feel as cold.

*****

BEEEEP. BEEEEP. BEEEEP. Riley was holding our carbon monoxide detector in her hands, which we bought a few days before because our landlord refused to supply us with it, or a smoke alarm, or a fire extinguisher. My theory is that our carbon monoxide detector was taking a break of some kind when we initially noticed the smell. Maybe it was just relaxing and didn’t notice the fumes in the air. Like a sleeping lifeguard on a beach with someone flailing in the water a hundred feet away.

We opened the door to our storage closet and saw our boiler shooting a consistent stream of black soot into the air. The walls and floor were covered with a black blanket. The boiler was an artist that only painted in black, and our home was its canvas. “Well, this is fun.” I said as I switched the emergency shut off switch on our wall.

Riley and I covered our mouths and ran to our bedrooms. She had to get her pet Gecko. I had to get my ex-girlfriend’s pet parakeets that have been living in my room for a year. Why are they still here? I look at their panic as I cover and pick up their cage. I feel bad for them. We put them in the backseat of Riley’s car and we sat in the front seat, facing our apartment's open front door.

“The number you are trying to reach has been disconnected.” Said the robotic voice when we tried to call the fire department. I laughed. We looked up the number for the second nearest fire department and after a few hollow rings it went to voicemail. We called again, maybe it was a fluke. Voicemail.

You can’t make this stuff up.

After a few more attempts and a few more phone numbers, we finally got a person to answer. My eyes were fixed on the dense yellow smoke spewing from our chimney into the air as he spoke. “Are you feeling any symptoms or effects from the fumes at all?” He asked. Riley and I both, lying for no reason, said “We don’t think so.” We didn’t realize we were lying. We just thought our heads hurt and we were nauseous because of stress. There was too much running around, too many different colors of smoke, too many things to take care of, to pay attention to how we were feeling.

The amount of carbon monoxide it takes to start affecting a person is around 70 ppm. At around 150 ppm is when people start getting disoriented and could possibly die. When the fire department arrived and tested the air quality in our apartment, we were told that there was 450+ ppm inside our apartment. Which I believe the technical term for those levels would be: a silly amount of carbon monoxide. The man who was testing the air laughed when he walked out of our door. When we called our landlord she told us that we must have just let the boiler run out of oil, “That’s what happens when you let it get that low,” she said through the phone, over the sounds of the industrial fans blowing the little heat left in our apartment out of the door with the fumes. “I'll have someone there in the morning to look at it.” She said. She lied.

We didn't have heat for a week and a half. After about ten days, someone came and told us it would be fine now. When we turned the boiler back on, it set on fire. “That happens when you let it run out of oil.” our landlord said again. “This is one of the most hazardous furnaces I’ve worked on in 24 years of doing this.” The repairman said.

So, we sat in the living room for another week without heat. I put on my winter jacket, my two layers of pants, and got under my armor of blankets, waiting for someone to come and give us our heat back.