PRINC ESSE LAVAN DE NUMÉRO UN BY Olympe Scherer ILLUSTRATION XIngXing Shou DESIGN Anna Brinkhuis
It’s 2041, spring. Pollution at an all-time high, and air quality at an all-time low. People walk around Paris with gas masks on, the way soldiers did at Verdun. Nothing to smell except indoors, with an air filter, or online, with a VR headset. I’m a perfume designer. I’m thirty, and I’m thinking about the two smells: rose and lavender. Rose won’t do is what I think these days. Rose says mother’s-bathroom-Yankee-Candle. Rose says bad experimental food. Lavender, on the other hand, says good experimental food. But it also says cheap souvenirs from the French Riviera. Rose can be elevated, maybe, and lavender recontextualized, but if it were up to me, we’d go with mint, mint and jasmine. Refined, unoppressive. But the princess wants rose or lavender, and I’m not one to rock the boat. I’m just thinking about it. “The royal wedding is in three months, Clare,” says Clark. The 30-year-old tech speaks with his lips barely moving, to hide the places where his teeth have fallen out. “The event planner wants a demo, yesterday. Just come up with something, it can’t be that hard.” I clench my fists, then unclench them, because he’s right. It isn’t that hard. A team of wide-eyed interns sends me samples every week in pretty glass vials, which I smell with one nostril and send back with a disapproving note. It’s been like this since January. It’s now May. “It is hard. I can’t put my name on just any smell,” I say, half-believing it. “Well, it’s time to set a hard deadline,” speaks Michael, the toadlike CTO, in a BBC accent. “The party planner is furious. She picked the flowers out 11 months ago, and the 3-D graphics team has already rendered them. What am I going to tell her when it’s two months before the wedding and we haven’t got a damn scent?” The conference call is taking place, seemingly, at the highest floor of a tower in Dubai. Twelve of us are sitting in gaudy white leather chairs around an egg-shaped glass table. The simulations are getting better every day, but when you look closely—out the window, for example—some parts of the decor are either static or looping tightly. I spot, in the distance, the same Turkish Airlines plane landing over and over. “Clare? Do you have anything to say for yourself?” says Clark. I spot one of his missing teeth. He hasn’t gotten around to buying an avatar, unlike the rest of the meeting’s attendants. There’s a slight glitch in Michael’s immaculate hair, where a receding hairline used to be. “If we need to find another designer—” starts Michael. “I’m going for lavender, without my team this time,” I say. “I’ll have a sample ready by Sunday.” This is the first deadline I’ve set in weeks. Call
11
LIT
it a rut or depression, it’s all the same. I watch the plane land again, this time against a technicolor sunset, then I exit the call just as Clark sits back and sighs in relief. The Dubai conference room vanishes, and I’m back in my apartment in Paris, slumped on the couch. The smell of lemon on the floors tells me that the cleaning lady just left. “Poor Clark,” I reflect. Clark is the VR project manager. He’s going to turn my finished scent into a few lines of code, so that everyone can whiff something pleasant while they attend, virtually, the royal wedding of Princess Margot to her beloved… Kendall? Kenneth? Anyways, Clark’s been taking a lot of heat from the suits on my behalf. One wonders how he survives. It’s noon and the sky is dark like gray cotton fabric. I see it through my white paned window, in my apartment where the ceilings are high, ornate, and the floors are wooden, splintering, how the French like them. The clean air filter, a big dumb box, is humming softly. I check my messages. BELLA HADID IS FOLLOWING YOU!! says a text from my older sister. Bella Hadid… the model? I vaguely remember her “snatched” waist being all-important to my seventeen-year-old self, even as her modeling career was winding down. When I got into the perfume business in the early 2030s, it was a respected but little-known industry. I did well for myself thanks to custom orders, but neither I nor any other perfumer was a public figure the way a clothing designer could be. Ten years later, the VR companies released “5-D” simulations—the “5” referring to the five senses. At first, the scent algorithms were rudimentary, simple as a scratch-and-sniff card, and it would take a few months before virtual scents actually wafted through space, as opposed to hanging statically in the nostril like white noise. In early 2032, my cousin Vick, a coder, asked me to design a fragrance for the first virtual nightclub ever, Flux. Eau d’Extase was born. My first perfume “hit,” so to speak. It’s a very plain apple scent that smells just like sin. I became a rockstar overnight. Famous the way famous DJs used to be famous. The audio-visual era was over: now, people wanted to smell and taste. +++ My bones hurt from the blow I did yesterday. It’s not a great idea to destroy my nose––it’d be like if a long-distance runner smoked cigarettes. I like to believe that a little bit of debauchery helps my image, like it did Jim Morrison’s. I drag myself to the bathroom and throw cold water on my face. It’s Thursday, I think. In the mirror, my eyes are bloodshot, my eyelids caked in purple eyeshadow. I’m pale and so is my hair, though my dark roots are starting to show, a black tide in a platinum bob. I smile. I now have three teeth missing, two molars and a front tooth. I remember wearing purple braces that broke once when I bit into an apple. Now I can’t remember the last time I had an apple. Fruit and vegetable production has all but disappeared nowadays because of disease and clean water shortages, so
06 NOV 2020
