Literary

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 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

unless you’ve got a greenhouse on your estate, it’s not likely that you’ve consumed even a trace of Vitamin C in the past five years. The irony is that coca and marijuana plants are still being grown plentifully in secret greenhouses, due to the drugs’ profitability (nobody I know would pay $100 for an orange, but for an eighth of weed…) which certainly says something about human nature, but I’m not sure what. It reminds me of a meme I saw the other day—what we thought 2040 would be like: *flying cars* vs. what it’s actually like: *a pirate saying “scürvie.”* I probably could buy multivitamins, but it seems like a waste of money. Embrace the wasteland, that’s what I say.

My deadline is Sunday––I need to focus. I open the medicine cabinet searching for some Adderall, find the blue pills, and eat one.

The vials, pipettes, and tubes sit on a corner of my marble dining table. Never mind, she unfollowed you, says a text from my phone. I open the message, think of a clever reply, and switch to checking my email. I archive a dozen emails about press appearances, including one very threatening email from my agent. Instead, my eye is drawn to an email title written in lowercase: about your grandmother. I open it. hi, Clare. i hope you don’t mind me contacting you. your mother gave me your email. i’m Anna your cousin, i was with your grandma Chelsea when she passed. like a caretaker, wasn’t just visiting. i was cleaning out her stuff and i noticed that she had this old perfume bottle with your name written on it. it’s dried up but it smells good. smells like the eau d’extasy that your known for. was wondering if your the one who made it. love, Anna.

I archive it immediately and move on to the next email. It’s from Clark.

Can’t wait to see (I mean, smell) the scent Sunday!

I throw my phone against the wall. I pick it up and throw it harder.

I went to Chelsea’s funeral. It sucked. It was held over VR, a shitty rainy day simulation where pretty much everyone in my family had custom skins and I couldn’t recognize any of them. I took something to calm me down, and it still sucked. The worst part was probably Chelsea’s skin, actually. It looked like a teenager photoshopped a 2-D image of her when she was forty onto an old person corpse template. I know because Chelsea had a freckle on her left hand and the corpse didn’t. No, the worst part was the lack of smell. Chelsea would’ve hated that. A cloud of Shalimar followed her everywhere. But not to her grave.

“You’re my favorite because you don’t call me grandma,” Chelsea said to me once, when we were sunbathing by a pool in Santa Barbara. I was nine. “One day I’ll look really old and even your father will call me grandma. Keep calling me Chelsea.”

The plot twist is that I’m a fraud, that I didn’t invent anything so much as stumble upon Eau D’Extase with Chelsea’s amateur distillery to steady me.

It was October and crisp. I was spending a few days with Chelsea because my parents were moving out of our house and didn’t want me in the way. Chelsea owned a farming estate in Northern California with a sprawling apple orchard. She told me to go pick some apples so we could make perfume out of them. She watched with her pair of gold binoculars as I ambled from tree to tree and chose the most pungent apples, using the fold of my t-shirt to hold them. My fingers left little bruises in the soft skin of the fruit, forming yellow wrinkles at the surface.

“They’re all rotten!” said Chelsea when she looked at the armful I brought in. She wasn’t mad, just inquisitive. “Rotten!” Two worms made an appearance on a particularly mushy Gala apple. The greenish creatures danced up and down. “So what?” I said, and Chelsea laughed. She had the apples distilled, suffocating the worms. The result was an intoxicating, sour, sweet-smelling oil, tacky enough to be relatable but so sexual that it startled. It felt inappropriate for a 12-year-old to wear. I was far from knowing that some of the most sought-after perfumes are made with ambergris, a gray goop found in the sperm whale’s intestine, but then it wouldn’t surprise me. I left the Eau D’Extase prototype with Chelsea before going back to Palo Alto, to my parents.

The next year, the orchard closed after the state of California banned superfluous water use, which included all but crops considered essential. “How are apples not essential?” said Chelsea between coughs. She’d had asthma her whole life, and the bad air quality put her in agony. But she still dressed glamorous and talked shit. I thought about the worms dancing.

Chelsea hated roses and she hated lavender. I glance at my empty pipettes, the nearly opaque plastic ones that were phased out years ago. It occurred to me that what this royal fragrance needed was a little bit of grit. To re-contextualize lavender, you need to talk about the grasshoppers that cling to the plant’s reedy stems. You need to talk about the way they bob in the wind like a group of drunk friends. The scent has to mimic the way the petals fall off the stem when you rub it between your thumb and your index finger. The way they feel like dry hollow mouse poops.

People will still tap me on the shoulder in restaurants and ask me about Princesse Lavande Numéro Un. Eleven people fainted at the Royal Wedding (which is to be expected) but a great number more were close to fainting from sensory overload. A stout red-haired woman once came up to me in a hookah bar and told me that whiffing Princesse Lavande had uncovered a joyful childhood memory buried deep in her mind of “summers spent running through my home village with a pale sun hanging low.” By then, I was famous enough to get assassinated, but I didn’t mind. Chelsea was proud of me, somewhere. I know because my face made Vanity Fair, and a famous critic talked about me.

“What do we say to a fragrance that’s just too real?” the byline said.

OLYMPE SCHERER ‘21 science major. is an ex-computer