Dear Other People…

I don’t know whether you have ever been anaesthetised against your will at seven o’clock in the morning. If you have, sit down beside me; we shall say nothing, and understand one another completely. If you have not, I must ask you to attend, because the public record is thin on this subject and I intend to correct it.

I should say at once that the “anesthesiologist” is not the subject of this essay. He is merely the match. The subject is the fire, which has been smouldering in me for a good long while, and which concerns the fact that this entire city — its car parks, its motorways, its summoned vehicles, its pavements, its very air — has been placed under a single, continuous, unbroken cloud, and nobody will say so out loud. I shall say so. That is what I am for.

But let us begin with the match, because it is a good match, and because it explains how I came to be sitting at this desk in a state of cold fury on a Tuesday.

The sports club, of which I am a member, you will recall, is the expensive one — the one with the towels that have ambitions, the eucalyptus, the general atmosphere of a Swiss clinic in which one is briefly persuaded that civilisation may yet pull through. I arrived punctual and laundered, mounted my treadmill in the crowded morning ranks — the place was full, every belt humming, the whole room at its business — and for some minutes I ran among my fellow club members in that state of mutual, well-groomed indifference which is the entire point of the subscription, and was, I confess it freely, happy.

Then I became aware of the gentleman directly ahead of me.

I knew him, I am sorry to say, with the nose before the eye. He had the appearance of a man who had not woken so much as resurfaced — hair in open rebellion, sweatpants and a hoodie of the kind one wears when the distinction between sleeping and waking has been allowed to lapse entirely, and the pink, damp, faintly startled eyes of a rabbit that has been given difficult news. He had plainly spent the weekend at what the young people call wake and bake, a term I had until recently assumed belonged to the sourdough community. And he ran, serenely, trailing his atmosphere behind him as a duchess trails a fur, while the machine’s little courtesy fan gathered up his emanation and conveyed it to me with the silent efficiency of a butler serving the one dish I had specifically declined.

I must attempt to describe the emanation, though language buckles. It was not a smell. A smell has edges; a smell arrives, states its business, and departs. This was a front — a low-pressure system with a skunk at the centre of it, moving south at four miles per hour, replenished by exertion, issuing continuously for as long as I could bear to take the readings. There came a point — I place it near minute four — when I began to entertain a sincere administrative concern about drug testing. I am subject to none. But a man likes to know that if he were, he could face the tribunal with a clear head, and I no longer had one, the head having been requisitioned. By minute six I had gone a delicate shade of green, gathered my towel, and withdrawn — I, the paid-up, the punctual, the showered — to whatever downwind corner the crowded room could spare me, in the manner of a household evacuated by a gas leak.

And it was there, jogging in exile, that the thinking began. Because the Skunk — I had christened him by then; a man who makes that sort of entrance earns a title — the Skunk was not an anomaly. That was the thought that arrived somewhere around minute nine and refused to leave. He was not a freak weather event. He was the climate.

Consider, as I did, the evidence.

There was a time, not long ago, when the aroma in question was a furtive thing. It skulked. It kept to alleyways and dormitories, and one caught it in passing the way one catches a distant landfill on a turning wind, and life went on. Then the state, in its wisdom — and I hold no brief against the wisdom itself, I want that clearly minuted — declared the substance legal, and something curious happened. It did not merely become permitted. It became announced. It ceased to be a habit and became a banner, carried at the head of a parade that never disperses.

One cannot now cross a parking structure without passing the devotees gathered at the open tailgates of their vehicles, censing the faithful and the unfaithful alike. One summons a car and it arrives with the substance pre-installed in the upholstery, the driver regarding one in the mirror with the serenity of a man who believes he has provided an amenity. One takes the motorway with the windows down on a fine evening and receives, from the adjacent lane, at sixty miles an hour, a dispatch — which raises, incidentally, the question of who precisely is piloting the adjacent lane, and from what altitude.

And I say — I have always said — let a man do as he pleases behind his own front door. Consume the entire harvest. Ascend. I ask only two things of him, and I regard them as the whole of my demands upon the modern age: that he not do it while operating a ton and a half of moving steel, and that he not enlist my respiratory system in the celebration. These seemed to me modest terms. I have since learned that there is no term so modest that the age will not decline it.

And now the part that curdles the blood.

No one in this parade has broken a rule. The substance: legal. The pavement, the car park, the motorway, the treadmill: open to all comers. There is no sign on any wall addressing the question of arriving in public pre-fumigated, because the persons who draft the signs never conceived that the question could arise. Were I to complain — at the club desk, to the driver, to the man at the tailgate — I should become in that instant the villain of the piece: the Continental snob demanding that the public be inspected for bouquet. And he would have a case. That is the maddening part. Rules tell a man what he may do, and manners told him what he may not, and only one of these two documents has survived into the present age. The gap between them — the vast, breezy acreage between permitted and decent — is where I now spend the greater part of my waking life, downwind.

Here, then, is my thesis, since I owe you one. Every other imposition of this age admits of refusal. Music may be walked away from. Opinions may be nodded at while one drifts toward the sandwiches. A man filming himself may be circumnavigated. But a smell is not an opinion. It cannot be declined, returned, or folded up and handed back. It comes in at the front door of the face, proceeds directly to the department of nausea, and takes rooms there for the remainder of the morning, rent-free. The nose has no eyelid. It is the one organ that cannot refuse a delivery — and the age has discovered this, and broadcasts on it, at volume, from every tailgate in the county.

I gave the Skunk the Look, naturally, before I withdrew. You will remember the Look — the Look that silenced a sommelier, the Look that ended a dinner party in three languages. I delivered it to the back of his hood at a range of six feet, and it disappeared into his slipstream and was carried off by the fan with everything else. One cannot give the Look to a man’s back. One certainly cannot give it to a smell. It joins the great archive of correspondence that has never once been delivered.

So the Skunk runs on, somewhere, serene and replenishing, having the single finest morning of his life, entirely unaware that he has been anthologised. I bear him, individually, almost no malice. He is not the disease; he is the symptom presented at close range, the specimen that finally made its way under the microscope, and I am obliged to him, in a way, for clarifying my views.

But I should like it noted, formally and for the record, that I did not agree to any of this. I signed nothing. Somewhere between the ballot box and the treadmill, an entire city resolved to conduct its recreation through my nostrils, and no one thought to send round the paperwork.

I am told the substance brings serenity. I believe it. I can testify that it is a serenity of the exporting kind — manufactured in one man, at his leisure, and paid for by everyone standing behind him.