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Smell is a very peculiar sense. It doesn't work by information so much as
association. Indeed, it is often so unconscious
in its workings that one
doesn't analyze the elements of background it detects, but merely
acknowledges them.
For
Bridget, right now, the universe her sense of smell constructs is
composed of carpeted floor, overheated paper coming
from the copier, further
along the hallway, the mug of tea on her desk, and, outside, the faint smell
of moisture
and electricity, hanging in the air just before the impending
summer storm. Permeating everything is the smell of freshly
washed clothing,
of heated linen and cleaning stuff. There is also a whiff of ink, a slight
shadow of pure alcohol
from the chemistry lab upstairs, and something quite
unidentifiable cooking in the dining room. She is overwhelmed by
a sense of
protection, of home away from home, a sense that, quite frankly, she cannot
help but associate with an
entombment of sorts.
Eliza is assaulted by very different smells. First and foremost, that of
blush and acting
makeup. She can sense it all around her: her face is
covered in it. But there is also a deep and rich smell of wood, of
wet wood,
coming from the freshly cracked and opened up planks, like a fruit exhales
its sweet scent. The dampness
of the air is overwhelming in here: the hangar
that houses the television set is so tall that it is practically open air,
and the coming storm imposes its presence on each and every person inside.
There is dust, also, barely swept and continually
roused by the passing of
dozens of people, each propagating their own mixture of sweat, cologne,
animal signatures,
shampoo, intimate scents. Freshly cut cloth, paint,
glass, wiring - it all contributes to that atmosphere of newly built,
no,
made up, of something put up for the show that Eliza feels whenever she
comes here.
But smell is not an
immediate sense, either. It doesn't bother itself with
notions such as continuity, and can take you at any time, any place
it
wants, riding along the waves of your memory. You need only one smell, not
even that, a shadow, a possibility,
to be taken back into the universe you
once belonged to.
For Eliza and Bridget, quite at the same time, it is the
smell of wrought
iron and soft soldering. Coming from the radiator of Bridget's teachers'
room and from an anonymous
camera in the studio, it crept through the tracks
of their memories, drawing them back to a time and place quite particular.
It
was particular because it was intrinsically separated from the rest of
the world. Inside the back of the huge van that
transported the team on
land, like inside the belly of a great, mechanical, roaring beast, you could
be rocked to
your sleep by the irregular tremors of the machine. The light
was dim. The people were silent. Well, generally they were.
On occasions
Neil would go into great lengths to explain a theory that just sprang inside
his bizarre and twisted
mind, but either the indifferent silence of Eliza,
the pleading silence of Bridget, or the threatening silence of José
would
get him to shut up in short order. Travelling wasn't the time to speak. The
van was dry, and dusty, it was full
of tangible products of the team's work,
and it was like home. Like a home that would never hold you down. Like a
home
that took you to the places of adventure that you craved. When they
stopped at night, then they would speak, and laugh,
and work and cook and
eat and drink.
One of the recurring topics of conversation within the team, on those nights
before the mission really started, or when you had to keep the Captain's
mind anywhere but on his bottle of whisky
- pretty bad whisky, in fact, but
he kept drinking it for reasons of regional pride, since it was made in a
distillery
right up the lane where he grew up- was that of adventure. Or
rather the image people have of adventure and adventurers.
José
didn't care, really. To him, adventure was just a way of living, one
among others. You woke up in the morning, checked
the camp, packed your
things up, drove or sailed or flew a little, then you did what you had
agreed to do on that
contract, and set up your sleeping bag and went on to a
good night's sleep. That was about it, and it baffled him to see
that other
people - who never really took a look at either his life or theirs,
apparently - made such a big deal out
of it. To Neil, it was something else.
Adventure, for him, was barely different from research. It was all about
creating
an accurate and coherent - well, not always that coherent, but you
got to keep your mind open that way - model to see
the world through. It was
just that sometimes you couldn't find information in libraries or in your
teachers' mind,
and you had to drag it out of several layers of dust and
gravel to understand what happened, or what could happen later
on. Just a
puzzle to be solved, really, but to be solved in his own personal way. It
was all about getting out of
the rat-maze that conventional thinking laid
you in and tracing your own maps. And Rory never said anything much that
could lead to any idea of what he thought on the matter.
But for the girls. As far as Eliza could tell, Bridget
was engaged in a huge
game of Spot the Differences with the world. If it is true that some people
have an analytical
intelligence and some have a synthetic intelligence,
well, Bridget had a comparative intelligence. Her mind was a huge
cross-referencing index. But it went way beyond this gift for languages she
had. Everything in her mind had equivalencies
and homologies in the world.
Even the Grip.
What's the Grip? Well, you see, it's the dark part of adventuring.
One could
say it's humanity's mortal enemy, and that we huddle together and live with
each other and choose a place
to live only to avoid it. It's the cold and
deadly hand that caresses every fibre of your being, when you're lost all
alone in the night, and that there's absolutely no way you'll get out of
this alive. It's what takes you when you're
far away from home, and you know
that if suddenly some cosmic bastard decided you didn't exist anymore, there
is nothing
you could point to to say: See? This is mine, this is what makes
me me. The Grip is half fear, half anguish, with a good
measure of despair,
because the Grip feeds on everything you didn't resolve that keeps haunting
your life, even after
you did enough wishful thinking to convince yourself
that it never happened. It feels like a never-ending dive into a
very fast
current of sea water, populated with sharks all around, and you are afraid
to open your eyes, that you might
see them eat out of you, and you are
afraid of closing them, that you might sleep and never wake up. Everyone
knows
the Grip, but it takes a special way of mind to deal with it as a part
of your everyday life. That's what happens when
you devote your life to
going out and see what's Out There, what's beyond your life, where you have
nothing to help
you and might possibly be totally defenceless against
whatever awaits you there - or even worse, what you brought with
you.
Bridget dealt with it. Bridget considered that the Grip was the verso of the
thrill you get by seeing those
astoundingly beautiful places, and those
oh-so-perfect people and civilizations, and the joy you can share with your
team-mates
when you finally uncovered that damn artefact you spent months
chasing in impossibly hostile deserts and sickening swamps.
Of course,
sometimes everything didn't go the way she thought, and she din't get what
she expected in return for what
she gave. This frustrated her, because she
couldn't do anything about it, and got her mad as hell. That only fed the
Grip,
of course. Still, she wouldn't have wanted it any other way. If it
wasn't for the Grip, the rest of her life would have
lost a lot of its
value, it would just have been. too easy.
Eliza had another relationship with the Grip. Yes,
relationship, because
when something accompanies you every day of your life, as the Grip had
accompanied Eliza, you
practically considered it like a person. Oh, the Grip
had hovered around Eliza way before she took up exploring for the
Society.
It seemed to Bridget that Eliza was like a kid given an assault rifle for
the weekly rumble after football.
What the heck did you do with a gift like
the one Eliza had when you don't want to hurt anybody? Oh, because Eliza was
gifted, gifted without a doubt. People often said she could lie almost
supernaturally. But that was, to a certain
extent, wrong. As all great
actors, she didn't pretend: she became. When she said something, whether
true or false,
it became rock-hard truth to her. And then she had to say
something else, and her world changed once more. She could have
become quite
mad before she was eighteen, what with her not knowing what was true or
false anymore. Then the Grip
had begun to make itself felt everyday. At
first she believed that it would be the door through which madness would
come,
but then, somehow, it became something else. It became something
constant, in her ever-changing world. It became something
she could sink her
teeth and nails in, and not let go.
They had talked often about the Grip, and they had exchanged
many looks in
those moments where somehow, in the contrasted light, in the dry and dusty
air of the van, they knew
they were crossing a border, going out into the
unknown, and the Grip caught everyone. Bridget got calm, accepting, almost
accounting, measuring what would come after by the meter provided by the
Grip. Eliza smiled, and took a deep breath,
like swallowing sea water to see
just how bitter it was. But always, always, they smiled to each other.
Because
they never forgot that after the Grip came the passage into the
realm of divine beauty that, in fact, was what they all
reached out for in
their expeditions, their own private infinite paradise, the Release.
But they never talked about
that.
The classroom bells rang. Someone clapped for the beginning of a scene.
Coming back to their senses, they
both turned their thoughts away form that
part of their past, but could not chase away the shadow of the Grip, and as
the storm broke out, somewhere out there was the dream of sleeping with
sharks.
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