I wasn’t born with an acute sense of smell.  It started when I was five.

I became so ill that I was hospitalized. My medication came as a powder that had to be mixed with liquid. My mother stirred it into a bottle of ginger ale, then snapped the cap back on so I wouldn’t suspect a thing.

It was impossibly bitter.

It also had a smell I never forgot.

After a few times, the bottle went straight to my nose instead of my mouth.

She never fooled me again, bless her soul.

Thus began my lifelong habit of interrogating the world with my nose.

Living with a nose-forward personality has been both a blessing and a curse. I loved smelling Play-Doh, mimeograph paper, and a letter before I mailed it. 

Not everything rewarded my curiosity. My fifth-grade teacher once sent me to the principal’s office because she thought I was huffing Elmer’s Glue.

That didn’t stop my fascination with all things smelly. 

A used Q-Tip. A red rubber kickball. Every Band-Aid made one last trip to my nose before it landed in the trash. There was this one candy that smelled exactly like Mr. Clean. I couldn’t stop eating it.

The air carried its own form of doom: cheap pre-school hot lunches, Dent’s Toothache Drops. But calamari cooked in red sauce carried the most dread. Christmas Eve found me with my head stuck outside our dining room window. There was something bracing about looking at the red tail lights passing in the street, breathing in the winter air, knowing that all too soon someone would yell at me to close the casement and go back inside. Probably in part for fear of letting all that good tobacco smoke escape.

My sensitivity became highly attuned to the human condition, particularly its contradictions.

For example, sweat can smell wonderful or it can smell like sour cottage cheese.

The back of my wife’s neck.

Wonderful.

Places where men congregate for sports.

Death.

Specifically high school locker rooms. They smelled exactly like the reason my mother never wanted my friends sitting on my bed.

Breath was another matter. I was shooting a commercial in Vancouver. I didn’t even know there was such a thing as salmon jerky. My producer was addicted to the stuff. He was also addicted to cheap cigars. The combination was apocalyptic. I had to check my eyebrows in the car to see if they’d been singed. I tried staying six feet away from him, but it was no use. The shoot was outdoors on a windy day.

Dating was no different. Attraction began with conversation, but it usually ended with my nose casting the deciding vote.

In my professional life, I could walk into a room and immediately know someone had forgotten deodorant. The problem was I never knew who.

There were professions I knew I’d never survive: embalmer, proctologist, urologist, gynecologist.

Then there are the people who sniff underarms for a living—usually for deodorant companies. I admire them. Not for their noses, but for their immunity to revulsion.

All throughout, I kept searching for a co-conspirator. Someone who knew what the people in church pews smelled like just by looking at them.

I never found one.

Perhaps that’s why I always identified with Jean-Baptiste Grenouille—the main character in the novel Perfume—except I wasn’t French and I wasn’t a murderer. 

My “condition” has never been confirmed. I’ve often wondered whether the part of my brain that’s supposed to filter smells simply stopped showing up for work.

I’d always had romantic visions of something called Bombay duck. I’d heard it mentioned once on an old television show. I imagined it was India’s answer to Peking duck.

I got my answer years later in a Mumbai-style restaurant. I was taking in all the heavenly aromas I adored: garam masala, hot chili peppers, the unmistakable charred scent of a tandoori oven.

Then a piercing odor descended from somewhere overhead.

Fish.

No. Much worse than fish.

It smelled like centuries of rotting sea life escaping through a bad tooth that had been marinating in a portable toilet.

The waiter smiled.

“Bombay duck,” he said. “It’s dried fish.”

This wasn’t the salmon jerky my producer devoured in Vancouver, which suddenly seemed almost benign by comparison. This was a desiccated devil-spawn of decrepitude masquerading behind one of the friendliest words in the English language.

Loitta Shutki Bhuna it was called. It’s been more than twenty years, and I still can’t shake it from my senses. Sometimes something as small as a shrimp that’s turned or a clam that’s gone bad can bring it rushing back. The flashback is so immediate, I almost black out.

For a moment, I’m no longer remembering the smell. I’m standing inside it again.

That’s when I started thinking: maybe I wasn’t remembering smells. Maybe the smells remembered me.

I still can’t explain why I keep smelling my fingers long after I’ve chopped garlic. Or why I gauge people based on how they smell. It’s like that medication is still following me around, waiting to Trojan Horse itself into me.

My nose has given me the joy of a newborn baby’s scent. It’s also given me the Dead Sea Scrolls recovered from Jonah’s long-deceased whale.

Somewhere, that medicine, cigar-soaked salmon jerky, and kickballs still lie in wait. 

Sooner or later, we’ll find each other again.