“I think,” he said after a moment, “it is not a question of can’t.”
“There’s nothing I can—”
“It is a question of must,” he said. “You have no choice. We make him. We make Radar. We did what we did. What is done is done. But he is there, in that room. There. He must go and live tomorrow and tomorrow. So you must go and live tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow after this.”
She stared at her husband. Her eyes welled up. “I ruined him.”
“No,” he said. “There is not just you. There is you and me and him.”
She nodded.
“There is us,” he said.
“Okay,” she said. “Okay. What do I do? Tell me what to do, Kerm. Tell me.”
“I cannot tell you. Be the person. Love him like always. It is not hard. He is Radar. He is love.”
• • •
THE NEXT MORNING, she got up and cooked pancakes. Mediocre pancakes — misshapen, singed pancakes — but pancakes nonetheless. There were no complaints. She went over and held Radar so tightly that he complained, “Mommy, you’re breaking me!”
That afternoon, she opened up the hole in the bedroom floor. A scent of stillness when the boards came up. A life left behind. She pulled out a folder from the stack and fingered the classified ad for the flavorist job at IFAC.
She sat down and wrote a letter. “I know you’ve probably already filled this position long ago but I wanted to offer myself as a possible candidate as I suffer from an extraordinary sensitivity to certain smells.” She crossed out “suffer from” and wrote “possess.” Underlined it.
To her surprise, she received a phone call barely a week later. They were interested. She went to an interview in the International Flavor and Aroma Corporation headquarters, a giant glass-and-steel monstrosity in an anonymous office park off the turnpike. They had her sniff a series of white strips. She closed her eyes and inhaled. Then she used as many big words as she could think of to tell them what she smelled. Her answers astonished them.
“There are only two people in this building right now who could do that, and one of them is you,” said a man in a lab coat.
They offered her the job on the spot.
“Apparently they call you a nose,” she said to Kermin that evening.
“A nose?”
“That’s the job. You’re a professional nose,” she said. “We’re supposed to make perfumes, or to describe perfumes. Or. . I don’t know. I’ve never been very good at making things.”
“Charlene,” he said, coming to her, embracing her. “You are smartest person I know.”
“No, I’m not.”
“You can make whatever you want. You know this, right?”
“Really?”
“Tell me, what are you waiting for?”
“But—”
“It is time to wake up. Wake up and become the nose.”
She became the nose.
It was not an instant transformation. The job offer was conditionaclass="underline" she had to go back to school. Two courses at Rutgers, her old haunt, in organic chemistry and molecular biology, and then a six-week perfumery intensive in Manhattan. She had to learn the names for everything: the pantheon of citric notes, the coarse parade of musks, the natural accordion florals and the synthetic aldehydes, ketones, and terpenes that silently mimicked the sensory world around us. She had to unlace complex bouquets of scents with just her nose and then measure her precision against a gas chromatograph. But she could do what the chromatograph could never do: compose an exact recipe for the smell using fifty words or fewer. Thus, the early draft of a perfume, zingiberene — pentyl butyrate — thioterpineol — ethyl acetate–2-ethyl–3-methoxypyrazine, became:
A tender bed of hawthorn, supporting a high trio of grapefruit, Asian pear, and elderberry, with lingering undercurrents of hazelnut and a single, faint note of ginger. A late-summer fragrance, perfect for outdoor events.
She could do this. She could dip her hand into the night-pit of the imagination. She knew all the right words from her previous, foiled career. Life had filled her quiver with the right arrows, even when the target itself had been too far away to see.
• • •
GIVEN HER EXTENSIVE BACKGROUND in librarianship, it remains surprising that Charlene never performed a standard literature search on “Kirkenesferda.” If she had, she would’ve discovered that by 1979, there were almost two hundred articles, essays, monographs, or book-length projects that referenced the “experimental puppet troupe,” though the vast majority of these were enfolded within a longstanding (and antagonistic) call-and-response between only two authors: Brusa Tofte-Jebsen and Per Røed-Larsen.
After 1979, there was a mysterious, nearly eighteen-year gap in the literature before Per Røed-Larsen published his comprehensive Spesielle Partikler: Kirkenesferda 1944–1995 (Oslo: J. W. Cappelens). Spesielle Partikler is a fifteen-hundred-page monstrosity that details the troupe’s four major bevegelser, or “movements”: the Poselok nuclear fission installation, outside Murmansk, in 1944; the Gåselandet Island Tsar Bomba show on fusion, in 1961, staged during the middle of the largest hydrogen bomb detonation in history; the disastrous Cambodian performance, in 1979; and the abbreviated Sarajevo show on superstring theory, in the ruins of the National Library of Bosnia in 1995.
The book is not easy to get ahold of. Spesielle Partikler has been out of print for more than ten years and can be found only with some luck, in certain catalogs and rare Norwegian bookshops, where its list price is often well over 3,500 Norwegian kroner. The sole library copy at the Nasjonalbiblioteket, in Oslo, has been listed as “missing and/or damaged” for years, with no apparent attempt to replace and/or repair the inventory.
Fig. 1.5. “Gåselandet/Novaja Zemlya Kart Series #4”
From Røed-Larsen, P., Spesielle Partikler, p. 221
If one is lucky enough to track down a copy, Spesielle Partikler quickly reveals itself to be a most beguiling piece of scholarship. The rise and fall of the Kirkenesferda puppet troupe is documented in detail, obsessively so, with exhaustive accounts of each bevegelse, including intricate analyses of the scientific concepts involved in the performance; charts and maps documenting the means of transport utilized to move equipment to these remote locations; blueprints and an inventory of materials involved in constructing the troupe’s mobile “theater wagon”; and even tables showing the kilowatts used by each electronic puppet-object.
At the end of chapter 18, before turning his attention to the buildup of Kirkenesferda Fire in Sarajevo, Røed-Larsen meticulously describes how the December 1979 Cambodia show — performed for the exiled Khmer Rouge leadership in their mountain hideaway north of Anlong Veng — ended in catastrophe, as nearly all of the troupe’s members were shot and killed in the middle of the night, including its founder, Dr. Leif Christian-Holtsmark. After this tragedy, Røed-Larsen claims, the Bjørnens Hule was abandoned. The camp was destroyed in a fire in 1982, and its Wardenclyffe tower was dismantled and removed “for international safety reasons,” presumably because of its proximity to the Russian frontier, although, according to Røed-Larsen, its circle of concrete feet (with their wires extending deep into the earth) are still visible “somewhere near the Finnish/Norwegian border zone” (295). When Kirkenesferda miraculously resurfaced fifteen years later for Kirkenesferda Fire, it would keep its name but no longer be run out of Norway. Its base of operations was now split between Belgrade and New Jersey.