Warning: Some content published on this website contains potentially offensive language.
By Chloe Vaughan
Marco comes undone on Tuesday afternoon, about halfway through an agonizing wait for a phone call from his doctor, when he realizes he can’t remember the second-best vintage for a Pomerol from Bordeaux. He’s been having a bit of trouble remembering anything these past few days—from what time his study group is supposed to meet tonight to why he just walked into the kitchen from the living room—but blanking on the Pomerol is the reed that really digs under his fingernails. It’s a small, inconsequential piece of information, but he’s purposefully avoided looking it up out of the stubborn belief that the answer will come to him eventually; by fixating on this trivial crumb, he’s almost managed to distract himself into forgetting the most important thing of all: that he has completely lost his sense of smell.
Marco first noticed something was wrong two days after his concussion, two days after the EMTs who arrived on the scene of the accident marveled at the protective ability of Marco’s bicycle helmet—even though it had cracked when his head bounced off the windshield of the car—and asked him if he was absolutely certain that he didn’t want to go to the hospital. Marco, no stranger to concussions after four years of college rugby, politely shook off the EMTs and went on his way, didn’t wish to make any more of a scene on that street corner or accrue an expensive hospital bill so a doctor could check his pupils and tell him to take some ibuprofen. That was Wednesday. On Friday afternoon, after nearly two full days of hazy, achy sleep in his dark bedroom, Marco met his friend Siobhan for happy hour.
“Christ,” she muttered, as they settled down at a wiry bistro table on the restaurant patio. “You’re the only person I know who can get run over by a car and be out for drinks forty-eight hours later.”
When Marco received his first glass of wine, an expensive pinot noir from Côte de Beaune, he was disappointed to find it had an unusual fault that he’d never before encountered: a scent indistinguishable from the air around him and a taste so weak it was as if someone had filled three quarters of the glass with water. He struggled to come up with an explanation for this, as wine can occasionally taste thin and diluted if the grapes were bloated by a very rainy season, but the year that this particular wine had been bottled was after a sunny stretch in Burgundy. And this fault—complete lack of aroma—was so extreme he couldn’t imagine that even the most swollen grapes could have caused it. His next glass, a cab from Napa that should have contained notes of blackberry and red pepper, was much the same, weak and odorless; just as Marco was about to call over the waitress a second time to interrogate her about where the restaurant got its wine, Siobhan took Marco’s glass and parsed a meager sip.
“Ugh,” she cringed as her throat bobbed up and down in a grudging swallow. “Tastes like wine to me.”
“Not water?” Marco asked, inhaling sharply. “Not like it’s watered down?”
“Nope,” Siobhan said, swishing her hard lemonade like mouthwash. “That shit takes me back to communion.”
After that, and after their appetizer of spicy dry-rubbed chicken wings that burned his lips but might as well have been made of flavorless rubber, Marco cut happy hour short and fled to the convenience store near his apartment. He raided the shelves—sour candies, dark chocolate, salt-and-vinegar potato chips—and didn’t even wait to get home before tearing into the packages like a wild animal. The salty, sweet, sour, and bitter tastes pressed all the buttons that were expected of them; Marco could feel the prickling sensations on the various sections of his tongue, but because he couldn’t smell anything, there was no flavor. His entire world was suddenly without smell: the food, the wine, the exhaust from passing cars, the water-filled concaves on the asphalt sidewalk that typically reeked of urine, garbage, and oil—nothing. The manifestation of this bodily change was so abrupt yet so initially unobtrusive that Marco hadn’t even realized when it happened. On Wednesday he could smell; on Friday he couldn’t. It was as if a thief had quietly made off with his bed during the night and Marco didn’t notice until he’d woken up on the floor.
By the time he made it back to his apartment that evening, his doctor’s office was already closed. Marco spent the weekend battering his nose with neti pots and saline solution, pressing himself into a state of near-continual sleep using a dicey combination of over-the-counter nighttime medications and allergy pills in the hope that his brain would magically reconfigure itself whilst turned off, like performing a hard reset on an electronic device. On Monday he forced a frantic appointment with his primary care doctor, and today, Tuesday, he waits for the specialist to call him.
He’s wasted away the afternoon, combing the internet in an active, almost frenzied state of boredom, watching trailers for obscure independent movies he knows he’ll never watch, looking at real estate listings for houses he can’t afford, and scouring Craigslist for random items he has no use for and no desire to own, such as antique lamps and bonsai trees and a fifty-gallon fish tank. When Dr. Lin finally calls at quarter to four, Marco throws himself onto the phone.
“So we don’t know for certain what’s causing your anosmia,” her steely voice is compromised by an unsettling perplexity. “But this phenomenon can be common after the type of posterior brain injury that you experienced last week.”
Despite the fact that he feels like he’s tumbling to the bottom of a very deep pit, Marco brings himself to ask the necessary questions, Do you have any idea how long it will last and Is there anything I can do for treatment, but her answers sound vague and deflective, hollow, or maybe he’s just imagining them to sound so; the words funnel through his ears and wind themselves into a knot in Marco’s chest, growing larger and more complicated with every syllable.
By the time he gets off the phone call, a profound panic has set in, like a clawed hand clutching Marco’s insides and squeezing hard, so hard that he isn’t sure whether to go lie down or to rip open his cupboards and press his nose into every spice jar on the rack, forcing the scents of cardamom and coriander and cumin into nostrils that won’t acknowledge them.
The exam is in three weeks. The exam that’s already taken years from Marco’s life—thousands of hours spent studying, turning down birthday parties and brunches, locking himself away in his apartment with nothing but notecards and bottles, packing his brain with more wine knowledge than any regular person would need in a dozen lifetimes. Taking the Master Sommelier exam without smell—the most important of the senses when it comes to tasting wine—is a non-starter. Someone would have better luck winning a triathlon with no limbs. Every day with no sense of smell is a lost day of studying for the blind-tasting portion of the test, causing irreparable damage to the intricate network of skills that Marco has painstakingly cobbled over the past several years. He’ll have to request a medical deferment and then expend yet another year in purgatorial limbo, living and studying in this city he doesn’t like very much, picking up the odd shift at the specialty wine store and occasionally stepping in as the guest sommelier at various restaurants downtown, a job he enjoys but would enjoy much, much more if he could wear the red-and-gold pin on his lapel. And now he’ll have to wait another year, another excruciating twelve months, before his real life can begin.
Tears won’t come, only shock and frenetic anger for which he has no outlet. He feels tamped and precarious, like a cabinet holding in a stack of toppled plates that will crash to the floor if the doors are opened, and without anything else to do or say, Marco decides to get dressed and go to study group. His friends will be there, and he can explain his predicament and maybe even get some sort of moral support or—at the very least—fresh perspective after three days of neurotic insulation.
Marco takes a Lyft to Wilson’s apartment even though it’s only eight blocks away because the route is adorned with a string of restaurants and Marco has no desire to walk past the wafting aromas of sizzling meats and roasted vegetables and be pointedly reminded that he may never smell them again. In the backseat of the car, he rolls up the window and sits with his head pressed tightly against the headrest, applying a cushioned pressure to the left side of his occipital bone, still sore from the accident.
Louis, Natalie, and Wilson are not really his friends—Siobhan is his only real friend here—but he still refers to them as such because he spends so much time in their company. Since their introductory sommelier course, the four of them have been studying together relentlessly, periodically texting each other updates, questions, and general anxieties with increased frequency as their test date approaches. They’re all in the same boat—or were, up until three days ago—as they’ve endured a marathon of certification classes and passed the theory portion of the Master Sommelier exam, but then subsequently botched the practical and tasting portion. Marco was the closest one to passing but failed after making an error so egregious—mistaking an old-world Malbec for a new-world Merlot— that his groupmates, astounded, questioned whether he’d self-sabotaged. They didn’t say it to his face, of course, but Marco walked in on Louis and Natalie whispering something about how he “definitely did that on purpose,” before reddening and shushing themselves at the sight of him.
Now, after telling them about his anosmia, he again finds himself at the mercy of their silent pause.
“But it will come back, right?” Wilson is the first to speak. “Once your head is healed, you’ll be able to smell again, right?”
“They’re not sure. Hopefully soon,” Marco says, attempting a feeble smile. Out of the three of them, he likes Wilson best, who is perpetually cheerful and was the first one to invite Marco into their study group three years ago. But there’s still an inexplicable sense of reservation between them, as if they’re toeing the periphery of each other’s circle but haven’t fully stepped inside.
“You can still taste though?” Natalie asks, peering at Marco with cautious fascination like he’s some kind of medical oddity enclosed in a glass case.
“Faintly,” Marco says. “But not flavors. Like I can tell when something is sweet, but I can’t tell the difference between strawberries and raspberries.”
They sit quietly for a moment, digesting the information, and then Louis shakes his head.
“That really sucks, man. I’m sorry,” he says, but there’s something about his tone—or his expression—that rubs Marco the wrong way. There’s an underlying buoyancy to it, as if his grimness is a put-on. Or maybe it’s just Louis in general. Marco has been wary of Louis, who works full-time at a wine store, ever since he made some comment last year about how Marco is so, so lucky to have a mother who’s “footing the bill” while he studies.
“Jeez,” Louis had said, right to Marco’s face. “I wish my parents would pay my rent so I could just worry about studying.” Marco managed to brush it off, but he still thinks about the words every time he opens up the mail to find a check from his mother.
When the topic of Marco’s anosmia starts to wear itself out, it becomes apparent that the others still want to do some blind tasting. Marco bids them goodnight, realizing he’s no longer a member of the group but a distraction, a breakdown at the side of the road that they’ll glance at but ultimately forget about as they keep moving, mindlessly adding him into an arsenal of unimportant conversational snippets to divulge during wine-related small talk. He leaves Wilson’s apartment feeling much worse than he did before, and he is aware of himself sinking into something, depression maybe, a hole to which he’s well acquainted, something he knows will be harder and harder to climb out of with each insipid breath.
His whole life has been fragrances and odors, a patchwork of memories strung together by the thread that connects Marco’s nostrils to his brain, and by losing the ability to smell, he fears he’ll forget the memories altogether. What did the plum tree blossoms behind his grandmother’s house in Coahuila smell like? How sharp and cloying were the lilies at his father’s funeral? Or the saccharine froth of his first-ever wine, a four-dollar bottle of some blackberry-flavored nonsense that was more corn syrup than grape? He remembers the way his roommate’s girlfriend eyed him after he first sipped it, a resentful last resort on his part because his roommates had polished off all the beer that afternoon.
“You’re gonna be a wine guy,” the girlfriend had said, with a serene nod and a voice that sounded far away, at the time and now. “I know it.”
Marco rolled his eyes and gulped the dark liquid straight from the bottle until his post-rugby thirst was sated. But behind the initial sugar rush was something else, a suggestion at something deeper, as if the sweetness of the artificial blackberry briefly flashed open the door. For a fraction of an instant, Marco glimpsed a hidden world of complexity on the other side. The following weekend, he took the bus to the specialty liquor store and allowed himself to be subsumed into the rows of varietals and vintages, skating from France to Italy to California to Australia, visiting dozens of vineyards with his feet planted firmly on linoleum tile. He was in that store for nearly two hours, and when the cashier persuaded him to splurge on a pinot noir from Burgundy rather than Sonoma, Marco realized he’d found a hobby. The hobby later expanded into dream, then career, after he managed to convince his mother to help cover living expenses during his years of study.
“Wine is for drinking, nothing more,” she originally snipped when Marco had first broached the subject all those years ago. He could still hear her accent rolling through his head. She’d spoken English solely for the benefit of Marco’s stepfather, who was idling in the living room with a newspaper, feet up in the recliner.
Marco sighs heavily, keeping his eyes downcast on the way back to his apartment to avoid the barrage of traffic lights and neon signs. Everything is too bright, too loud, too humid, too saturated with all the senses except the one he so desperately wants—needs—his life blood, the way he survives in the world. Without that vital connection, he’s a fugue wanderer, untethered and floating, with neither an axis to revolve around nor a clear place to land. When Marco gets home, he watches mindless television until his eyes have glazed over and the chirping infomercials meld into waking dreams.
Early the next morning, the manager of La Villa Restaurant calls to ask Marco if he’ll be a guest sommelier for an event they’re hosting in the afternoon.
“Sorry for the late notice,” Marco can hear the clang of a busy kitchen behind the manager’s voice. “Our somm missed his flight last night. It’ll be super low-pressure, just a lunch for some finance guys. Most of them will drink scotch, I’m sure.”
Marco is opening his mouth to refuse—he has to refuse, there’s no way he could perform under these circumstances—but in the brief, ten-second window of time while the manager steps away from the phone to admonish a busboy for something or another, Marco reconsiders. He could pick up one lunch shift. After all, with his advanced knowledge of wine types, vintages, and food pairings, he is still very much an authority on the subject. He’ll make some suggestions to a bunch of clueless corporate douchebags, earn a few tips, and reaffirm the fact—to himself and everyone else—that his future is still in wine. When the manager comes back to the phone, Marco agrees to get there at eleven o’clock.
La Villa is downtown, so Marco showers, dresses, and gets an early Lyft to avoid the lunch rush traffic. The harried manager meets him at the maître d’ stand with the key to the restaurant’s wine stores before leaving Marco to his own devices. He skips family meal with the staff, graciously declining the plate of braised pork that the pretty server waves in his face and instead heads to the cellar to refamiliarize himself with the wine inventory. La Villa’s selection is impeccable, and the restaurant is consistently heralded for exceptional food and wine pairings. Marco often lifts entire sections of their expansive list, down to the vintages, whenever he finds himself embedded in that bucolic recurring fantasy where he runs his own wine bar. It’s a fantasy, he realizes, that now has to include a working sense of smell.
He spends the next hour going over the event menu—a smattering of upscale hors d’oeuvres and a choice between three entrees: pan-fried monkfish, beef tenderloin, and stuffed portobello mushrooms—and selects some suitable reds and whites. He’s in his element now, like a piano virtuoso about to glide his fingers across keys so familiar they might as well be an extension of his hands. He returns upstairs to decant reds and polish glasses at the sizable mahogany bar, and as the suit-clad financiers filter into the restaurant and chat over cocktails at the high-top tables, Marco sits back and waits, securely in control of his domain.
“They’re asking for you,” a busboy says as he slips past Marco with a serving tray, nodding to one of the high-tops on the other side of the bar area.
“Perfect, thank you,” Marco says, gathering himself and breezing over to the table, where an older, sharp-looking man speaks animatedly to two younger people, a man and a woman who barely look old enough to be out of undergrad, nevermind working for whatever hedge fund capitalist venture company has rented out the restaurant this afternoon. Probably interns, Marco deduces. After he’s introduced himself and gotten a feel for what everyone likes to drink, the older man smiles cordially and says, “Why don’t you surprise us?”
They’ve all selected the monkfish for their entrée, so Marco picks a creamy, oak-aged Viognier from Oregon for the older man, and a fruitier, low-tannin Marsanne for the interns, who are wine novices. He goes back to the table, pours, and dips his nose to the glasses out of sheer muscle memory, reddening when he remembers he can’t smell.
“I’ll warn you,” the older man says, now smiling in a way that makes Marco feel vaguely uncomfortable. “I’m a wine guy.”
As the man swirls, sniffs, and takes his first sip of the Viognier, Marco smiles politely to veil his frustration. After years of recommending and serving wine, he’s come to realize that his least favorite clients are those who think they know nearly as much about wine as he does. They’re always quizzing him, prodding him, getting him to slip up and using the “gotcha” moment to impress their date, or in this case, their young coworkers. It’s always better to invite people into your world, Marco has found, than to have them already there trying to push you out.
The man puts down his glass and squints, turning over the flavor and the feel in his mouth, before swallowing.
“You said your name was Marco?” he asks, and Marco nods. “Where are you from Marco?”
“The West Coast, sir.”
“Washington?”
“Oregon,” Marco says, surprised that the man’s first guess was Washington and not California, which is where most people tend to assume a skinny Mexican-American kid is from whenever he mentions that he grew up on the West Coast.
“A sommelier from Oregon, perfect,” the man says. “So you know all about the vineyards in Oregon.” He doesn’t phrase it as a question, so Marco cocks his head in a slight tilt and nods again.
“Which means,” the man continues, “surely you know that a Northwest-Oregon Viognier from this vintage,” he taps the year printed on the bottle, “would have much higher acidity than is appropriate to have with monkfish?”
Thrown, Marco expels air from his mouth, making a faint grunting noise. The man is nitpicking, as Oregon’s unseasonably cool weather that year wouldn’t have raised the Viognier’s acidity past medium-plus, and certainly not to the point where it couldn’t complement monkfish. But at the same time, Marco never would have uncorked the Viognier had he remembered that year’s weather, and he didn’t need his nose to remember it. He has no excuse other than basic, clumsy forgetfulness. The back of his head pulses, the latent, week-old pain suddenly writhing like a petulant child crying for attention.
Marco apologizes and gets a different wine, this time a Grenache blanc, and notices a slight shake to his hands as he pours it, causing one drop of runoff to bounce from the bottleneck to the tablecloth. He doesn’t bother to feign smelling the wine as he hands the man the new glass. The man sniffs, sips, swallows, and Marco watches as his lips make a tight line.
“Lovely,” the man says slowly, dryly, shaking his head. “And now you’re going to give me a faulted wine.”
Marco’s face burns.
“So sorry, sir,” he says, grasping for some semblance of control, but his flushed cheeks and raised eyebrows must reveal that he’s ignorant of the fault, so the man tells him.
“Cork taint,” he says.
Marco nods apologetically. Cork taint, which makes a wine smell like wet newspaper or musty cardboard, isn’t the easiest wine fault to catch, but it is one of the most common, and Marco has never before let it go unnoticed. He wonders what kind of training this man has: perhaps he’s a sommelier himself, or perhaps he’s simply an asshole with a hobby who never misses an opportunity to embarrass an expert. Can Marco even call himself an expert anymore? The interns have been sitting silently, faces contorted in a sort of enthralled, second-hand embarrassment, as if they’re watching a petty shoplifter get arrested by mall security. Marco feels small and brittle, defenseless, an animal caught at the pointed end of the man’s impatient gaze.
“So,” the man says, rubbing his hands together and looking at Marco expectantly. “Are you going to pay for these two twelve-dollar glasses of wine, or am I?”
“Of course, those won’t be on your bill, sir,” Marco says, realizing the man must hold some kind of authority over the rest of the employees here if he’s the one paying for the event. Marco removes the glass from the table and places it back on his serving tray. “Is there anything else I can get for you—”
“Forget it,” the man says, waving his hand dismissively, and the sharp annoyance in his voice cuts into Marco’s skin like a razor. “I’ll just take a Balvenie Tun.” Then, as if it should be obvious, he adds: “Neat.”
Marco nods wordlessly and slouches toward the bar to put in the man’s scotch order. After walking away from the table, he hears the man chuckle and mutter to his interns, or whoever the hell they are: “For God’s sake, it feels like I’m getting steak recommendations from a vegan.”
Even though he has a text from Siobhan asking to get dinner, Marco goes home after the lunch ends, stopping only at the discount liquor store to buy a bottle of that same blackberry-flavored nonsense he hasn’t touched in nearly a decade. He briefly enters his apartment, just to collect his mangled bicycle from its sorry resting place in the front hallway, then returns outside to toss it in the dumpster at the back of the building. He goes to the courtyard and sits on a wooden bench, remaining there as the late-afternoon sun yields a film of condensation on the wine bottle and prickles his skin.
Marco was very tan when he was a boy, skin deepened from summers on the sun-washed streets of Monclova, furiously pedaling a hand-me-down fixed-gear to keep up with his cousins on their shiny ten-speeds. It stayed that way through high school and college, becoming thicker, tougher, coarse with rugby scars, stung by frost and pelting rain. Now, after years studying behind shuttered window-blinds and drinking in the Zasmidium spores of damp, wine-cellar air, it’s turned sickly pallid, so pale his cousins call him güero and joke that the American police can’t pull them over when Marco is in the car.
Tomorrow, Marco decides, he’ll call to request his medical deferment. He unscrews the cap from the blackberry wine and puts the bottle to his lips. A gnat buzzes in his ear, but he doesn’t move to swat it. He drinks until he feels fogged and slow and drunk, letting the syrupy mixture coat his throat and stain his teeth purple. He stays on the bench for a long time after the wine is gone and the heat of the afternoon has burned off, listening to the tinny clash of music float down from open apartment windows, underlaid by the breeze whistling through the courtyard’s sodded grass. He soaks in the last bit of sun. It seems to warm him from the inside as he takes stock of what remains. Sound, color, touch.
Chloe Vaughan is a copy editor and recent MFA graduate out of Western Massachusetts. Her previous works have been published in The Forge, Smokelong Quarterly, and Flash Fiction Magazine.