The Man Who Could Not Smell...

The Price of Invisibility:

Curtan Yurdock got out of bed in the usual way. He went to the bathroom of his mass produced apartment in his mass produced house in the usual way. He even started started to brush his teeth in the usual way….but, today, something was different.

He was quite sure that somehow something was different.

He could sense it. But he couldn’t put his finger on exactly what it was that was different. And that troubled Curtan. Maybe it was his imagination. He had had a very active imagination and more times than not, it was not only the cause of his travail with the Bureau it was also a problem with Helene who hated his forays off into the wildness of his mind and she told him about it, warning him that if he didn’t get his act together immediately, she was history.

Curtain didn’t take Helene very seriously. What did women know? They were always subject to their hormones. And they were always unhappy with whatever he did so he learned not to take them too seriously.

Nevertheless,Curtain was not your average toady. He was not the inevitable digit. He was not simply a number on some ledger; but a flesh and blood human being with human needs and wants. In that Curtan Yurdock was a man who was different, who had a vision that seemed to begin where everyone else’s thinking left off. He was the body’s verifax appendage, the missing link to the twenty sixth power. He was the unknowable or so he believed in the flights of his mind. Perhaps it was a way of dealing with the tedium of a life that seemed to be going nowhere, where every day was quite like the next—a way to deal with one’s mortality in a world where everything was gray. It was the slender thread that held Curtain Yurdock together and kept him from losing his mind.

But today seemed to start off differently. He wondered about that. Was he just feeling guilty for stealing that extra ration of bread from the old lady?….or was it because he had sneaked into the bathroom, disconnected the camera and read from the censored data track? He didn’t know. But it was showing upon his personal radar and he knew he had to do something about it before it was picked up on the scanners.

The scanners saw everything. They were ubiquitous. They had started off quite innocuously and were touted along with everything else as promoting man’s freedom as every bit of technology was before the take-over, but the truth was that it was simply another way to downsize, to monitor and control.

He had to give them that. They were much smarter than the others…
They knew how to do it—how to manipulate the masses so that they didn’t know or didn’t care.

And they managed “the word…” So everything you heard was government speak—all designed to manipulate and control.

Curtan hadn’t noticed it at all until Vartan, the Union Delegate had seemed to grow smaller before his eyes. He didn’t know why that was. Then he noticed that whenever he called the Union, he got a tape recorded message. “Ms. Gorlich is not here!” “Mr. Migot has retired and will not be accepting calls in the future.” Stuff like that. And at the last Union meeting, half the chairs were empty. He also noticed the blank stares in the eyes of the delegates. What did it all mean?

He didn’t know. But he had a feeling that it couldn’t be good. He mentioned it once to Helene and she stared at him as if he were crazed. He was no longer sure about her loyalties but he had to remain careful. He ddn’t want to do anything rash, say, to alienate her so that she would run back and fill out a report… But he became definitely more wary about who he talked to and about what.


It was all coming to some kind of head. He knew that. But that was all he could see in his personal crystal ball. Kempke was dead. He knew that now. One day, he was sitting across from him in the park making jokes as Kempke used to do. And the next day he was dead. Curtan knew that the National Board of Concern didn’t have much of a sense of humor. He told Kempke not to go to them; but he didn’t listen. And that was that.

Where did he go now?

It was hard to know. His supervisor, M. Vlong, hated him. He knew that. And it was simply a matter of time. He would fall behind on his counts and that would be it. Or maybe it would be something more prosaic, he would slouch too often, fail to smile at the appropriate times, miss out on an exercise class for no apparent reason, it didn’t take much. Norda had simply missed two exercise segments and hadn’t smiled during the smile sessions and the next thing he knew, her hours were changed. At least, that’s what we were told. But nobody believed that was the case. Everyone knew that we would not be seeing Norda around the gray building belching the gray smoke.
Norda’s name one day was simply erased from her parking spot. A shiver went through
Vartan at the time. A person without a parking spot was a person who did not exist.

Curtan hadn’t been feeling himself all day. He was worried that one of the cameras would pick up on it. So he tried masking it. He didn’t know what was wrong but it was as if he wasn’t there. Why did he feel that way. He didn’t know and couldn’t even begin to answer his own question but he knew that something was not right with him.

He had gone over quota just to get a few extra minutes in the toilet. He disconnected the camera in his stall which was one of many stalls that seemed to disappear at the horizon, the bathrooms were that big—all white, all sterile to the extent they looked like their own geography, a zone of whiteness that seemed to embrace everything were it not for the continual flushing that went on and the coughing, the ceaseless coughing.
Was it any wonder considering the blanket of haze that enveloped everything in the New World Order….

What was it, he wondered. “Why am I feeling so strange…” He looked into his pocket reflector at himself. His teeth looked okay even if they were yellowing with darkish hints of future torture where the professionals will be able to dig in and have their fun…
It was always a profession of the sadists he thought, what the Nazi’s must have been like in his great grandfather’s time…It was the only thing he could think of…His eyes were bloodshot but they were always like that after a night of drinking that drink made with cherries that seemed to take your mind of things…and the little actual sleep he enjoyed.
And there was always the sound of the monitors, low and insistent to remind you that you’d better not talk in your sleep—because they were out there waiting for the slightest slip….

He went back to the unapproved text but even that was not gratifying…

He needed another Yorney….and that in and of itself was pathetic. How could he be hooked on a cigarette made of cabbage; that was too much. But he couldn’t light up in the stalls without the monitors picking it up and the alarm going off and armed guards coming in to make him stand against the wall for his violation of the agreement.
What agreement, he had thought?

They were supposed to provide the benefits of the government in return for his loyalty.
Didn’t anyone realize that this arrangement was bogus? That there was no real protection—only lies to keep you anesthetized to the truth….

They were only out for themselves. He realized that when the plague came and all of the trouble makers were put into isolation; they had called it confinement to protect the parties but the truth was it was to get rid of the trouble-makers once and for all.

And now the streets were lined with Federal Guardsmen, once the province of the States but now under the control of the Federal Bureaucracy.

To think that less than fifty years ago, actual elections were held and people would go and express their preferences. The troubles had begun when they had switched to the new machines; that had changed everything.

In the early days, the Deaniacs had tried to warn them but they didn’t listen. They never did until their rights were eventually taken from them in acts of hubris that seemed insurmountable.

How did they perpetuate such a canard on the people? He knew the answer to his own question: It was fear. It was always fear. Fear was the way they controlled everyone.
This time it was fear of the terrorists as they were labeled.

But no one really knew the truth because the media was complicit in the enterprise—at least those at the very pinnacles of power. They had sold their souls for market share—it was true: There was no more honor or dignity in the world; it was all for sale to the highest bidder.

And so it was.

And the masses didn’t care. As long as they had their games, their toys, their flights of escapism, their ludes and other drugs, they could do anything. They could talk about their Clean Air Act as they managed to load the sky with toxic chemicals; they could talk about their Clean Water Act as the fish came up on the beaches and died in record numbers….

None of it was true. None of it would ever be true.

And who cared.

Who was this Mohammad Atta if he was even real?
Who were these so-called terrorists?
Were they a figment of this government’s imagination? The modus operandi? Why didn’t the government ever come clean? Didn’t they owe the rest of us at least that much?
And then the endless arrests of those who were deemed “fellow travelers” but was that not also an illusion to mask the confinement of the “truth-seeekers…”

He didn’t know. But there were always more questions than could have been answered, now or then.

What he did know was that the pundits eventually all seemed to disappear.

Even his family. When his father questioned what had happened, it was reported as simply an uptick in his bodily rhythms which didn’t fit into the normal sequence. He was eventually “gathered up” for interrogation and then he was no more….

Strange, Curtain had thought but at the time, he believd the rhetoric as so many did. That his government was for the people and they needed strong measures if they were going to continue to protect the people against the ravages of the terrorists…

He remembered his grandfather talking about these famous documents that made this country stronger and fairer than all other countries and peoples from around the world would journey here under the most hazardous of conditions to enjoy some of those freedoms.

He wasn’t sure what a Constitution was these days—ever since the original seemed to fade before our eyes. And we definitely knew little about freedoms but they seemed very tenuous in a government where by simply speaking out, one could disappear.

Odd, he thought, as if an idea was trying to protrude, he couldn’t smell himself—his pores were working overtime excreting their essences and his heart was pumping as if were on overtime, yet, there was no odor about him. He wiped his hand under his arm but there was nothing he could detect. How could that be? He had urinated sitting there on the toilet but he was unconscious of any odor of stale urine, whose usual ammonia- like essence used to assail his nostrils—now there was nothing.

What was happening to him?

He had heard about this anomaly before….

In fact, there was a special bureau formed to handle such problems, although he had heard that nobody went there of there own free will because the cases seemed to end badly. It was thought that if you had no essence, you were clearly doing something against the state and so you were in conflict with the good humors of your body as determined bythe Supreme Leader which meant that you needed to be observed. People who suffered that syndrome usually went into hospitals “for observation…” and that was the last you would see of them. That’s why anybody who suffered this syndrome never reported it. He never knew what the outcome was because nobody seemed to be around who had suffered the malady for more than a year or two.

Maybe it was all in his mind. His mind had been playing tricks on him before and it would not be unreasonable to think that’s what happened. He didn’t know. He had to leave a trail, something to prove he was alive. So he peed on the floor, peed in the sinks, and peed on the cabinets. But there was nothing. No odor. Nothing. It was happening to him….

He did know that if he stayed five more minutes, the monitors would be out looking for him. He reconnected the cameras and the sound sensors, finished his business, zipped up and headed back to the floor for another day’s check on his balance sheet.

This was only the beginning he knew.

Next, he would not be able to see all of himself. Parts would begin to fade—slowly at first. At first, only he would notice it and then people would begin to say things like “Curtan, what happened to your ear?” Or, Curtan, why are you missing a leg?”
It would bother him. Sure! But what was worse was that they would get reported back. And they would take their toll. The Bureau didn’t like workers with missing parts.
It indicated less than full support.

Curtan guessed it was some kind of supreme irony. If a person gave up on their core beliefs, why did they need their bodies. They were only superfluous. Maybe in the long term, it was some kind of Darwinian payback, although he suspected that the religious zealots would term it an act of the Divine… If you stood for nothing, you eventually became nothing. And maybe in the giant scheme of things that was a form of “Gotcha!”… In the end, it was clear that in this world of few favors, in the end, you could pay a price for being uncaring, unsympathetic and uncommitted to anything: It was called invisibility and it was contagious!.... So, if one day you can’t smell yourself or you see your bodily parts start to wither, maybe you should take stock. God may be trying to tell you something!....

Les Aaron