FOR A WHILE, I watch the clouds. Then I watch Julie watching them. I let the surreal landscape outside the window blur and I shift my focus to the back of Julie’s head, her unwashed hair matted with oil and dirt, sweat and blood, the residues of everything she’s gone through since her last shower a week ago, that distant age of unimaginable luxuries.
Slowly, quietly, I inhale the warm air rising from her head. I don’t expect much from my numb nose. The Dead are a practical people, and the senses of smell and taste are frivolous affectations that we discard to make room for more functional tools. I have noticed a subtle shift since my return to life—my ability to detect Living flesh has dulled, and suggestions of natural aromas occasionally prickle my nose—but I am still a jammed radio, stuck on one frequency while all others drown in static.
My first sniff brings nothing but the sensation of air passing through my nostrils. I try again, and this time I get a trace of her, a distant note of that mysterious, earthy bouquet found nowhere but in a woman’s hair—she turns around.
“Did you just smell me?”
I jerk my head away and stare straight ahead. “Sorry.”
“Don’t smell me. I smell like shit.”
I glance sideways at her. “You don’t, though.”
“I can smell myself, and I smell like shit.”
“You don’t.”
“Okay, Grenouille, what do I smell like?”
“Like . . . you.” I lean in and inhale with melodramatic rapture.
She laughs and shoves me away. “You fucking creep.”
Still smiling, I look past her at the sky. It hits me again that we are flying. Perhaps for the first time in years, there are human beings above the clouds, swimming in the blue void between Heaven and Earth, taunting the gods.
Julie follows my gaze to the window. “Remember when I asked if we’d ever see jets in the sky again? When the cure was just starting and we were fantasizing about the future?”
I nod.
“You said yes.” She grabs my hand on the armrest. “I know it’s just an airplane, it’s not like this means civilization is back, but . . . I don’t know. When I look out there, it feels like a victory.”
“We’re inside the Etch A Sketch,” I say, squeezing her hand. “What should we draw?”
Her smile falters. The air between us cools, and I realize I’ve done it again. I’ve referenced a memory that isn’t mine. A moment on the stadium roof when Julie shared her dreams with a boy who wasn’t me. What I did to her childhood sweetheart isn’t news; she knows how I know what I know, but it’s a scar on the skin of our relationship that we have silently agreed not to mention.
“Get out,” she says, disengaging my hand from hers. “I have to pee.”
I step into the aisle and she brushes past me. “Julie,” I say, but she disappears into the bathroom without looking back.
I stare at the closed door. This isn’t the first time I’ve tripped over Perry’s life, but she usually lets it go with an awkward change of subject. Was there something more in that stolen memory?
“I miss airplanes,” Julie says.
“Me too,” Perry says.
“Those white lines . . . the way they made designs in the blue? My mom used to say it looked like an Etch A Sketch.”
And there it is. A wound within a wound. Her dead mother’s words pulled from her dead lover’s memory.
I close my eyes and sink low in my chair, releasing a weary sigh. I don’t have to be a monster to hurt people. I can do it gently, with a single careless breath.
Julie stays in the bathroom longer than it takes to use the bathroom. When she finally comes out, she avoids my gaze, but I still notice the wetness in her eyes.
“I’m sorry,” I say as she slides back into her chair. “I didn’t . . .”
“It’s fine.” She shakes her head and wipes her eyes on her sleeve. “I had a mom and she died. It was almost eight years ago. I can’t be falling apart every time something reminds me.”
I can hear the effort this hardness requires.